Quality Television': 'The Sopranos is the best television drama ever
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chap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 58
‘Quality Television’: ‘The Sopranos
is the best television drama ever …
in my humble opinion …’
Robin Nelson
When a respected colleague recently remarked in conversation that The Sopranos
(Chase Films/HBO, 1999– ) is the best television drama ever, my antenna imme-
diately detected a value claim and led me to question the assertion. It is not that I
don’t admire The Sopranos: far from it. But that being amongst the few in the past
decade to address questions of quality in television – and occasionally being
misunderstood in consequence – my reflexes are honed.1 By what criteria might
such a judgement be made? The cinematic production values? Commercial success
on a niche, subscription channel? The distinctive use of the medium of television’s
narrative modes? The cultural value of the series? Responding to my querying of
her judgement – no doubt more sharply uttered than is polite – my colleague qual-
ified her observation to say, ‘well, in my humble opinion it is . . .’
What might helpfully be unpacked from this dialogue? First, statements are
made about quality all the time, often with the enthusiasm of conviction: they are
deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life. Secondly, that where people on the
street may be more confident about their choices, media academics, lacking secure
ground on which to stand to justify value assertions, feel uneasy when confronted.
This is in part because, both on the streets and in the academy, tastes and values
increasingly have personal implications. But, whilst people on the streets have their
confidence in their ‘personal choice’ consumer individualism reaffirmed daily,
academics sustain a sense that value-judgements require some measure of objec-
tivity, and their awareness that personal feeling and identity are in play is what
makes them sometimes feel even more uncomfortable. Television studies
academics properly aim to stand at a critical distance and to encourage students to
become aware of value-positions. But assuming a critical standpoint can be in
tension with their emotional commitment to a text. Thirdly, the dialogue perhaps
indicates shifting discursive fashions, evidencing a breaking of the academic eval-
uative silence. It has recently been asserted with confidence, for example, that
‘American fictional television is now better than the movies!’2 I will return, directly
or indirectly, to all these points in what follows.chap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 59
‘Quality Television’ 59
Focusing mainly upon the British context but with an eye to US and global tele-
vision, this article will historically review aspects of the quality debate, particularly
as it pertains to fictions for the small screen. The aim is not to posit values or even
call others’ specific judgements into question. The task is to bring out how the
complexities of evaluation have informed the effacement for more than a decade
of explicit value assertions in the academy, the emphasis being placed instead on
deconstructing former sites of esteem. Welcoming the recent openness of evalua-
tive remarks such as those above, the article will ultimately urge reflective contex-
tualisation of such remarks. But, as Charlotte Brunsdon pithily puts it:‘Judgements
are being made all the time, so let’s talk about them.’3
In competitive, capitalist cultures, life indeed revolves around implicit and
explicit claims that some things are better than others. If this were not the case, Sex
and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) would not drool over Manolo
Blahnik shoes, and designer labels (and their simulations) would not adorn most
people’s bodies. Iconic statements about the worth of things have in contemporary
culture become a very significant part of individual identity. This may well account
for my colleague’s demurral when challenged on her claim about The Sopranos
though she would want to stand by it. On the one hand, there is a sense that indi-
viduals have the right to make their own judgements but, on the other hand, the
basis on which value-judgements are made in the academy has become problem-
atic. Television affords a good site for focusing the academic quality debate in
which ‘quality TV drama’ is a particularly contested term.
Why is quality television problematic?
Television shares all the problems of contemporary evaluation in the academy and
some others peculiar to the medium and to small screen fictions within it. It is
scarcely possible to sustain today a belief in absolute or universal values. Post-
modern times are noted for the extremity of their cultural relativism and, in a
recent review of aesthetic estimation entitled, What Good Are The Arts? John Carey,
Oxford Professor of Literature, observes that there is no rational basis for
consensus on what such a work is, let alone what value it might have. He concludes
that ‘a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though
it may be a work of art only for that one person.’4 In such circumstances, estima-
tions are contested at all levels of the cultural-aesthetic, and consensus would seem
impossible. Ironically, however, where few doubt that art in abstract is of value,
there is a long-standing prejudice – particularly in educated British circles – against
the medium of television (see below).
Overviews such as Carey’s may be superficially attractive in that they appear to
be part of a democratising impetus that renders the tastes and opinions of all indi-
viduals of equal validity. And it is worth noting in this context that the most
common defence today against a value challenge is that it is a matter of ‘personal
choice,’ as if that ended the matter. The weakness of such accounts is that they do
not concur with everyday life experience, in which all kinds of inequities are mani-
festly felt. To put it in academic terms, they efface the power relations sustaining
culture’s endemic, though not immutable, hierarchies of taste. Furthermore, achap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 60
60 Critical Studies in Television 1/1
critical commentator is entitled to ask why more value should be placed on
personal choice than on shared values within a community.
It is necessary by way of back-story to recall here only some of the key estab-
lished terms of the familiar, informing debate about evaluation in aesthetics and
culture. The modern Western tradition, derived from Emmanuel Kant,5 which
privileges disinterested-ness in the making of aesthetic judgements has largely
been displaced by a recognition that all discourse is coloured by passions and inter-
ests. Nevertheless, within the Arts and Humanities academy, pedagogy has typi-
cally discouraged subjective accounts, with argument and analysis serving to justify
– if not quite objectify – any critical judgements made. Though Roland Barthes,
amongst others, has long since advocated ‘the pleasure of the text,’6 a heritage of
academic reluctance to ascribe value simply in terms of the pleasure generated by
engagement with texts remains. Texts may engage us intellectually as well as
emotionally, and Barthes himself affirms a value hierarchy of pleasures in distin-
guishing between mere ‘plaisir’7 and ‘jouissance.’8 As we shall see, however, shifting
social formations in the academy, particularly through feminist influences, have
called into question the notional ‘masculine-objective’ discursive position, to allow
feelings and pleasures a place in critical accounts, if not quite yet a secure one.
Raymond Williams famously established the ‘anthropological’ conception of
‘culture’ as ‘a whole way of life’9 in contrast with its formerly dominant usage to
denote ‘arts and learning’10 muddying the waters of evaluation in the process11.
Williams sought to break down the traditional binary between ‘high’ culture and
‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture aiming to find a means to value the worthwhile wherever
it might be found. This move has been taken up in postmodernism’s collapse of
hierarchies, however, in ways Williams did not envisage. In respect of television, he
sustained a category of the ‘serious’ whereas the utter relativism of postmodernism
refuses all hierarchical distinctions. Williams defined ‘serious television’ in terms
of ‘programmes that looked as if someone had successfully meant something in
making them, rather than simply slotted them into a market,’ but he applied his
criteria to all kinds of programming. Thus he challenged entrenched canonical
assumptions and instigated the idea that popular programmes with mass appeal
might be adjudged ‘good.’12
Where Williams struggled to equate his own middle-class tastes with those of his
working-class family origins,13 Pierre Bourdieu’s account of taste formations
reaffirms on the basis of class the high/low culture binary that Williams had tried
to blur. Though it has been subject to question in terms of its methodology,14 and
is now dated, Bourdieu’s substantial sociological analysis of taste in 1960s-1970s
France, translated in book form as Distinction,15 remains seminal in the aesthetic
and cultural value debate. Bourdieu’s findings suggest taste formation is a systemic
cultural matter, based in cultural capital, or the lack of it, which in turn relates
to economic capital and therefore class position. Thus, contrary to the contempo-
rary privileging of a de-contextualised ‘personal’ choice,’ values for Bourdieu
are locked into the social structure. They are a political issue since the value
hierarchy is determined through political power with the tastes of the dominantchap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 61
‘Quality Television’ 61
class being attributed the greatest value. In his address to the Edinburgh Television
Festival in 1990, Rupert Murdoch adopted the Bourdieu discourse when he argued
that:
Much of what passes for quality on British television really is no more than a reflec-
tion of the values of a narrow elite which controls it and which has always thought its
tastes are synonymous with quality – a view incidentally, that is natural to all governing
classes.16
When value-assertions are made, it is always worth asking what is the discursive
position. Murdoch was undoubtedly making an intervention on behalf of free
market economics, and against the perceived central authority of the BBC at an
important moment in the history of British television institutions (see below). But
before turning to particularities, it may be useful to bring out the general aspects
of the debate that have resonated – and continue to resonate – in matters of judge-
ment about television.
Though it is possible to establish by way of description and analysis the aesthetic
qualities of any given text, it is not possible directly to infer its value from that
account (as philosophers put it, values cannot be derived from facts). Those ‘high
cultural’ qualities which appeal to an educated, sophisticated audience – the kind
of programming advocated by Lord Reith, for example – can be called into ques-
tion by a Bourdieu or Murdoch as representing only the taste of a dominant class
fraction. It is not unquestionably accepted that such programming is ‘good for’
everyone in the longer term, even though access to education may change taste (as,
perhaps, in the case of Williams). Today’s apparently democratising political
impetus prefers to valorise ‘the widely popular,’ frequently defined as those
programmes watched and enjoyed by the largest number of viewers. These two
contrasting formulations rarely map on to each other in terms of any specific
programme: hence the ‘poorly-rated’ though ‘critically-acclaimed’ dichotomy of a
TV drama such as The West Wing (John Wells Production/NBC, 1999– ).17 As is
evident, questions of aesthetic value slip quite quickly into questions of cultural
value. In the hinterland of this arena for conflict lie the opposing forces of Public
Service, championing the ‘common good,’ and free-market commercialism, cham-
pioning the individual as consumer.
The interventions of cultural theorists have thus opened up and illuminated a
value debate which is personal-political (in that people’s tastes are imbricated
within their identity and they are consequently sensitive about what they like);
public-political (in that class, or other social sub-culture, taste formations may be
pitted against one another and, at times, national identity itself is in play); aesthetic
(in that different principles of composition are at issue in terms of what they repre-
sent and how they represent it, and in terms of the kinds of experience they offer,
and to whom). In the historical present at least, however, there is no apparent
means clearly to arbitrate between one position and another. Meanwhile institu-
tional policy is being made.chap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 62
62 Critical Studies in Television 1/1
Institutions and policy issues
Whatever emphasis may be placed on personal choice in contemporary culture, the
major institutions of broadcast television systems, themselves related (mostly by
regulation rather than direct interference) to government, have a major influence
on what appears on people’s screens and, by implication, on the quality of
programming. TV drama is itself considered worthy in the television industry and
certain ‘high end’ products are thought to tap into high cultural values. To illus-
trate how evaluation has worked in practice, four significant moments will be
identified. First, the ‘network era’ in the US, in contrast with today’s circumstances,
affords insights into perceptions of the medium of television at a broad institu-
tional level. Secondly, two moments in British institutional history will offer
additional background.
Despite its evident popularity on a very wide scale more or less since its incep-
tion, the medium of television was for many years dismissed by intellectuals as not
worthy of consideration. Part of its lack of a claim to distinction lay in the
medium’s perceived need to appeal to broad audiences in order to make a profit.
The negative value placed on commercial, popular work stems specifically from the
post-war, post-Hitler fears of critics such as Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt
School about the potential for manipulation of the masses by the culture indus-
tries.18 More generally they stem from what Bourdieu might see as the elitism of the
dominant class fraction, educated East-coasters, perhaps. The American concept
of LOP (Least Objectionable Programming) neatly sums up the strategy in the
‘network era’ of making bland programmes which would build and sustain audi-
ences not by directly attracting them but by offending the fewest. ‘Quality TV,’ the
occasional exception to the norm, was characterised in contrast with LOP. As
Robert Thompson has pointed out, ‘quality TV is best defined by what it is not. It
is not ‘regular’ TV.’19
Reflecting the high/low culture distinctions noted above, the kind of program-
ming which counted as ‘quality’ in the ‘network era’ had qualities affirming
educated taste. With regard to textual composition, Thompson suggests that
‘quality TV’ ‘creates a new genre by mixing old ones. . . tends to be literary and
writer-based [and]. . .. is self-conscious.20 ‘The subject matter of quality TV tends
towards the controversial [and] . . . it aspires toward ‘realism’ and ‘quality shows
must often undergo a noble struggle against profit-mongering networks.’21 Thus,
the institutional conception of ‘quality’ in the US bears out the privileging of
aesthetic preferences associated with educated taste at the expense of denigration
of popular taste and its preference for fantasy, glamour and the spectacular. Histor-
ically, ‘quality TV’ has been designed to attract a blue-chip demographic.
In the current era of extended targeting of specific niche audiences, as distinct
from building a mass audience, HBO has taken this idea one step further. Defining
itself by its tag-line, ‘It’s Not TV. It’s HBO,’ it aligns itself instead with cinema. First,
HBO aspires to high production values with lavish budgets to sustain expensive
shooting procedures and post-production editing. But located as it is at the ‘highchap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 63
‘Quality Television’ 63
end’ of Time-Warner’s portfolio, HBO aligns itself, as Jane Feuer argues,22 with the
Modernist, rather than popular, cinematic tradition, branding itself as a mode of
art. And that this aspiration is not exclusively American is demonstrable in the
latest HBO original series Rome (2005–), co-produced with the BBC. Though
watching programmes like The Sopranos may seem simply a matter of personal
choice, established hierarchies remain in place to situate the viewing practice. It
may be, however, that the taste formation of the new petite bourgeoisie, as opposed
to the traditional bourgeoisie itself, in Bourdieu’s terms23 has risen to dominance.
Aesthetic values, though structured in societies, are subject to change as shifts in
the social formation impact upon the taste formation. Hence ‘American Quality
TV’ drama is favoured today where an authored literary drama with a theatrical
heritage was valorised in the early to middle years of British TV drama.24 So how
have things played out in Britain?
The history of British television culture, as distinct from the American context
sketched above, is also shot through with a set of values beyond commercialism,
namely ‘Public Service.’ Though it is not alone in the world in having a public
service dimension, British television has, since its inception, been strongly
coloured by the terms of the founding charter of the BBC, requiring it to ‘inform
and educate’ as well as to ‘entertain.’ Since the introduction of a commercial dimen-
sion (with ITV in 1955) funded through advertising, however, television in the UK
has functioned in a mixed economy. But the established public service ethos has
remained stronger than elsewhere and is indeed part of the remit of commercial
channels. Lord Reith, the founding Director General of the BBC, is famous for his
policy of bringing ‘high culture’ and ‘serious’ programming to the masses. In what
has subsequently been seen as an unacceptably patrician means of imposing the
values of his class on a broader culture with different, but equally valid, taste forma-
tions, Lord Reith’s strategy nevertheless mobilised a set of resonant values. Even in
the early ‘noughties,’ British television regulatory bodies strive still to sustain a
balance between commercialism and public service against the drift of contempo-
rary television worldwide.25
A key moment in the dislocation of the established UK television ecology was
the Broadcasting Act of 1990. Since the details of Prime Minster, Margaret
Thatcher’s, determination to break the ‘last bastion of restrictive practices’ is well-
known, only those aspects which pertain to institutional values need be brought
out here. The consequences of deregulation to free up the market were feared
within the industry. As Corner, Sylvia Harvey and Karen Lury summarise:
It was widely believed, at least by broadcasting professionals, that two key factors were
responsible for the maintenance of high standards: wealth and tough public regula-
tion in the commercial sector, combined with the high cultural standards set by a BBC
not subject to the normal imperatives of profitability.’26
These benchmarks, overtly denigrating the products of commercialism, would
come to be significantly unsettled by the 1990 Broadcasting Act. Though it had
moved way beyond Lord Reith’s prescriptions through Hugh Carleton Greene’schap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 64
64 Critical Studies in Television 1/1
reformulation of BBC policy that it should ‘make the popular good and the good
popular,’27 the BBC still occupied the cultural high-ground within the industry in
the 1980s. Williams’s sense, noted above, that good programming might be found
in all televisual modes had, however, become currency, as borne out by the ITC,
which found itself required to define the ‘quality threshold’ relating to the sale of
Independent Television licences:
The ITC considers that the categorisation of programmes as of high quality is a matter
which cannot be reduced to a single formula. They may be programmes which have a
special one-off character or programmes of marked creative originality, or
programmes, from any category, of exceptionally high production standards, or any
combination of these factors. Programmes of high quality may not be regarded as
mainly or exclusively of minority appeal, and it is important that programmes of wide
audience appeal should also be of high quality.28
Particularly in the light of the back-story above on the culture debate, the disposi-
tion to say something, but nothing too definite, about quality, and the wish to avoid
being accused of cultural elitism in support of the taste formation of the dominant
fraction of society may be clearly heard in this legislative wriggling. Echoes of old
standards of ‘creative originality’ are evident, and the worth of the craft of televi-
sion, usually termed ‘production values,’ is reiterated. How one might relate to the
other, however, is not resolved. Thus, in a debate where accusations of ‘junk
television’ and ‘peddling trash’29 had been levelled against the deregulators, it was
recognised that quality was important, though nobody could be quite clear what it
was.
The current facilitation through deregulation in the 2003 Broadcasting Act is
intended to create a British commercial enterprise sufficiently large to interest one
of the global media conglomerates, and by this means to afford entry into inter-
national markets. To those who believe media regulation should remain that ‘force
for national cultural cohesion’ as articulated in the 1977 Annan Report, the recent
move is seen as a threat to British programming and a fortiori to British culture. In
the context of media globalisation, however, the capacity of television regulation
to sustain a national culture, desirable or not, may be a thing of the past.
Academic insecurities
Beyond the industry and institutional context, the academy has also gone through
a range of twists and turns in wrestling with questions of the value of television as
a medium, types of programming and specific programmes within a genre. Though
unsurprisingly, debates in the academy reflect parallel issues in broader culture,
some aspects are more specifically academic. As Glen Creeber notes in his article on
textual analysis in this issue, the emergence of the quasi-scientific approaches of
structuralism and semiotics in the late-1960s and 1970s seemed neatly to sidestep
some of the questions of value which were beginning to challenge the HE estab-
lishment. Formerly, traditionalists in English Studies, had championed the canon,chap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 65
‘Quality Television’ 65
in the wake of Matthew Arnold, and more latterly F.R. Leavis, as self-evidently the
best that has been thought and said. The wish of some radicals to introduce popular
literature such as crime fiction and romance into the syllabus, let alone the popular
mediums of film and television, saw value battle-lines drawn. For a time at least,
structuralism and semiotic approaches were able to maintain that their ‘scientific’
analyses of how texts worked could be applied (pace Barthes30) to any artefact, and
by-pass a head-on collision about the legitimacy of taste formations.31 However,
other factors came into play.
With an opening up of the British higher education sector in the 1970s and the
inclusion of a broader social range of tutors as well as students, the taste formation
shifted over time, and approaches to study and its objects changed. The rise of
cultural studies, and feminist studies in particular, fundamentally undermined any
claim to innocent, let alone universal, evaluations by bringing out the discursive
position of such assertions. Theorists such as Michel Foucault brought out the
power relations underlying values in practices such as medicine, sexuality and
social control.32 Nothing was free from regimes of power which, though (as in the
arts) they purported to be value-free and representative merely of the truth of
things, were shown to be partial. Feminists, for example, saw traditional ‘objective’
judgements to be shot through with patriarchal discourse and the masculine values
underlying it. As cultural studies broadened, the discourses of ethnicity, sexual
preference, age and so on were similarly unpacked, manipulated and re-orientated.
The breakdown – or fragmentation, as the times would construct it – of any
common culture is evident in the approaches taken in academic study. Post-struc-
turalism, having established the multi-vocality,33 or slipperiness34 of the sign and
the process of signification, was broadly disseminated in television studies through
John Fiske’s Television Culture.35 The idea of the ‘polysemic’ text gave full rein to a
range of readings from a variety of reading positions. The findings of 1980s audi-
ence research36 into how people actually read television seemed to confirm recep-
tion theory’s emphasis on a lack of textual fixity. In Kim Christian Schrøder’s
summary formulation:
The text itself has no existence, no life, and therefore no quality until it is deciphered
by an individual and triggers the meaning potential carried by this individual. What-
ever criteria one wishes to set up for quality, therefore, must be applied not to the text
itself, but to the readings actualised by the text in the audience members.37
The combined forces of deconstruction and ethnographic audience study thus
produced the conditions of academic hesitancy to justify (apparently universal)
value assertions noted at the outset, though such evaluations are again being made,
as noted, in the early ‘noughties.’
Few people tread through a minefield with confidence. Though one strategy
to deal with relativism is to be self-reflective and announce where you are
coming from, this merely clarifies the partiality of your judgements as distinct
from addressing the broader questions of quality. And, somehow, through all
the complexities, people seem to want to say more than ‘I like it (from thischap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 66
66 Critical Studies in Television 1/1
perspective)’ when making claims about quality television. Value is not just a
personal matter. If Carrie Bradshaw alone favoured Manolo Blahniks, then their
value would indeed be personal to her. But implicit is a broader, communal desir-
ability of Blahnik shoes and other expensive fashion items. Thus a broader socio-
political context is evoked. An exchange of goods known colloquially as shopping
can be unpacked to reveal today’s cycle of desire creation and short-term satisfac-
tions through consumption known, by commentators such as Frederic Jameson,38
as late capitalism.
Conclusion: What is to be done?
Though my sub-title echoes Vladimir I. Lenin,39 there is no need to be unduly
centrist or prescriptive in outlining the areas pertaining to those aspects of schol-
arly study of small screen fictions in need of attention. Whilst I propose to make
some positive assertions, self-reflection is ultimately the keynote.
First, given that television remains – despite a small decline in viewing figures –
a primary agent of the public sphere of national and international, political life
and, given that fictions are a key dimension of television production and reception,
academics should be engaged in debates about the quality of the medium of tele-
vision and TV drama specifically. They should aim to undertake the ‘difficult task
of thinking seriously about an everyday and ephemeral medium,’40 and to intervene
in the institutional policy debate. The specificity of the medium is worth pursuing
– for example, in respect of television’s distinctive narrative forms – but since its
small screen fictions increasingly aspire to cinema as noted, intermedial influences
cannot be ignored in this context.
It will be evident from the account above that institutionally empowered voices
may dominate if unchallenged, and thus it is regrettable that media academics,
whose voices should at least be open and informed, have typically been reluctant
to engage in questions of quality. As Brunsdon observes following her survey of
‘problems with quality’:
The proper place for notions such as ‘All judgements are subjective’ is not as the justi-
fication for abandoning attempts to differentiate between programmes but as a reason
why there should be a wide variety of different types of programme to choose from.41
In relativist times in which the grounding of any evaluation seems insecure, it may
even be that academics should posit value (pace Richard Rorty’s pragmatism42) but
not, as hitherto, in an unreconstructed, attempt to impose their values as the values,
but in full, self-reflective awareness of the values espoused by an educated social
fraction. Such values will themselves inform the important and inevitable process
of evaluation. Given the widening of educational participation, the debates should
also avoid the narrowness of the taste formation of earlier class fractions.
The work to support judgements might include aesthetic analysis of specific
programmes, and there is recent evidence that scholars are engaging increasingly
in this kind of activity. However, self-reflection is appropriate in all aspects (thoughchap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 67
‘Quality Television’ 67
not necessarily in all academic outputs) of television study. The renewal of interest
in aesthetics has both a general cultural context in the academy and a specific
resonance in television where ‘production values’ are undoubtedly better than
they were. The much improved, digital image (capable of special effects) and
wide-screen monitors with high quality surround sound perhaps invite aesthetic
considerations echoing those of film studies. We have seen that HBO tries to distin-
guish its output in cinematic terms. Based on analysis of specific programmes or
categories of programmes (‘genre’ may be a less appropriate term in the light of the
contemporary preference for hybrids), the ‘quality’ tag might well be attached. But
the history of institutional usage of value terms should not be forgotten. Even the
unquestionably improved ‘production values’ do not necessarily equate with
‘quality television’: there is much to be said, for example, for atmospheric black and
white formats. The current advocacy of ‘American Quality TV’ needs unpacking
just as George Brandt’s celebration and mourning of the ‘Golden Age’ of British
‘serious’ television drama needs unpacking in a political and cultural context to
avoid aesthetic reification.
Understanding of how preferences, and hence values, are constructed in culture
needs promotion. Ethnographic audience studies, noted above, have made a signif-
icant contribution to understanding what people do with television, and offered in
the 1980s a useful corrective to unreflective institutional assumptions about textual
and cultural value. But, again a step back might be taken when reflecting upon crit-
ical practice. As Corner has noted in his insightful exploration of a ‘quality-
inequality’ play:
[‘Bottom] up’ accounts . . . too often . . .get trapped in a kind of populist descriptivism
in which detailed documentation of popular experience takes on an affirmatory self-
sufficiency unrelated to any general political or social theory.43
An understanding of institutional history informs the quality debate. In the
historic tension between commercial television (funded through advertising and
increasingly product placement and sponsorship) and publicly funded PSB chan-
nels working for the ‘common good,’ commercialism is undoubtedly in the ascen-
dant worldwide. This tension can no longer be seen, however, as a simple binary
opposition, and it cannot be assumed that an increasingly commercial television
will necessarily be for the worse (though it will no doubt have its downside). A
cursory look at the history of television confirms that as many programmes
adjudged (by various standards) to be ‘quality’ have emerged in the commercial as
in the PSB sector. In celebrating its fifty-year history, ITV in Britain has reviewed
– and to some extent reconstructed in the light of new circumstances – the ‘quality
popular’ tag tied to a significant part of its output (see Melvyn Bragg/C444 and John
Finch45). However, a current trend to internationalise and narrow the range of
possible programming remains a tendency of a commercial sector which justifies
its programming primarily on what people want to watch.
Though the situation has changed since ‘quality’ was equated with what was
widely popular (as in the LOP network era), niche marketing still draws onchap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 68
68 Critical Studies in Television 1/1
personal consumer choice. Thus the multi-channel environment appears to have
produced a market democracy offering ‘quality’ programmes tailored to micro-
cultures. To cite Corner again:
This tendency has worked to displace the essentially critical notion of cultural
inequality and to substitute the potentially complacent notions of cultural ‘difference’
and of cultural ‘choice.’46
This critique returns us to the heart of the historic British television debate.
Though the issues surrounding national cultures in plural societies are complex
and the issues surrounding aesthetic judgements seem to set a minefield, easy
celebrations of ‘quality TV’ or dismissals of television as ‘ junk’ or, indeed, evasion
of engagement in the debates, have consequences. Academics can best lend a seri-
ousness to debate by unpacking and contextualising the various modes of judge-
ment in a plural context. In militating against sedimentation of the most powerful
agents of value construction, they may make the case for sustaining a place for
those programmes which ‘market failure’ (see Patrick Barwise47) will not produce.
Cultural value is a matter of shared values and citizenship albeit that its consti-
tutional hierarchies are informed by power-plays in the social formation. Though
what is culturally valued in any given society thus remains in contest, simply to
reduce evaluation to a matter of consumer individualism – the tendency of late
capitalism and frequently its attendant cultural and aesthetic theory – leaves reflec-
tive people uncomfortable because it involves an inherent contradiction. Though
there is no doubt an element of personal taste and personal estimation in choices,
evaluation sits on a sound basis only when there is a broader agreement on the
worth of the object or practice in question. Overall consensus within any given
society is impossible to achieve, particularly where different taste formations are
matters not only of class fractions but also of micro-cultures. But the current
emphasis on micro-cultures is in no small part constructed by the marketeers. If
fashions can be deeply imbricated within the identities of target market groups,
advertisers can readily serve late capitalism’s constant need to differentiate and
circulate goods by design (see David Harvey48). The importance of voices prepared
to challenge powerful influences is thus evident. The fact alone that television audi-
ences worldwide (given the choice) prefer the local product suggests that ‘common
cultures,’ however defined, remain broadly valued and may be in need of defence
(see Jeanette Steemers49). ‘Quality TV’ poses cultural, political and ethical, as well
as aesthetic, questions.
The medium of television and its products have only occasionally been seen
historically to merit a place in the critical genealogies of a ‘high culture.’ The
academic study of TV drama has been – and in some quarters still is – deemed
equally unworthy. But, it is well worth remembering that, until relatively recently,
literature, particularly the novel as championed by Leavis, would not have been a
candidate for esteem either. Fiction, in the form of the novel, was seen at the time
of its emergence as a pastime for leisured bourgeois women and discredited
accordingly (see Ian Watt50). Literary fiction became a candidate for esteem onlychap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 69
‘Quality Television’ 69
when, following Victorian loss of faith in Christianity and the scriptures, commen-
tators such as Matthew Arnold pointed to its potential to offset ‘the scientific
passion for pure knowledge’ by carrying and disseminating spiritual and ethical
values, ‘the moral and social passion for doing good.’51
There is thus no intrinsic reason why at least some products of the television
medium should not become valued even in terms of ‘high culture’ (as HBO is
attempting) and certainly in a range of other factors of esteem. With a changing
social formation, some commentators have indeed placed high value upon them.
The inclusion in the university sector in Britain of tutors and students who are not
hide-bound by old, established values and who are able to articulate a wide range
of discursive positions and their powerplays opens up many possibilities. With an
aesthetically improved, digital medium capable of creative innovations and preser-
vation through time (on DVD and other durable recording formats), there has
never been a better moment for serious engagement in debates about quality
television and TV drama. In conclusion, I invite the making of judgements but, in
the light of all the above circumstances, we should be self-reflective about our
judgements in terms of aesthetics, ethics, politics and cultural value.
Notes
1 Charlotte Brunsdon and John Corner have sustained questions of quality in respect of
television, and I am indebted to their work; see, Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Problems with
Quality,’ Screen, 31:1, Spring, 1990, 67–91; John Corner, ‘Debating Culture: Quality and
Inequality,’ Media, Culture & Society, 16, 1994, 141–148; and Robin Nelson, TV Drama
in Transition, Macmillan, 1997.
2 Peter Krämer, cited in Mark Jancovich and James Lyons,‘Introduction,’ in Jancovich and
Lyons, eds, Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans, bfi Publishing,
2003, p. 1.
3 Brunsdon, ‘Problems with Quality,’ p. 90.
4 John Carey, What Good Are The Arts?’ Faber & Faber, 2005, p. 29.
5 Though Kant is highly influential in establishing this tradition in respect of aesthetic
judgements (see Salim Kemal), there is a longer tradition in Western culture dating back
at least to Plato in privileging the mind over the body, the intellect over the emotions;
Salim Kemal, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, Macmillan, 1992.
6 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana Press, 1977, p. 163.
7 Ibid., p. 9.
8 Ibid., pp. 163–164.
9 Raymond Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary, 1958,’ in Williams, Resources of Hope, Verso,
1989.
10 See, Matthew Arnold,‘Culture and Anarchy (1860),’ in Noel Annan, ed, Matthew Arnold:
Selected Essays, Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 233–319; and F.R. Leavis, The Great
Tradition, Pelican, 1972.
11 See, Corner, ‘Debating Culture: Quality and Inequality,’ pp. 142–143.
12 Brunsdon has noted there is a tension in Williams, between his commitment to a realist
aesthetic in making judgements on the quality of particular television programmes and
his espousal of a modernist aesthetic in his demand that quality of the medium of tele-chap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 70
70 Critical Studies in Television 1/1
vision should be judged in terms of its own specificity; see, Brunsdon, ‘Problems with
Quality,’ pp. 87–88.
13 Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary (1958),’ 1989; Corner, ‘Debating Culture: Quality and
Inequality,’ pp. 142–143.
14 See, John Frow, ‘Accounting for Taste: Some Problems in Bourdieu’s Sociology of
Culture,’ Cultural Studies, 1:1, 1987, 59–87.
15 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice, Routledge, 1992.
16 Rupert Murdoch, quoted in John Corner, Sylvia Harvey and Karen Lury, ‘Culture,
Quality and Choice: The Re-Regulation of TV 1989–91,’ in Stuart Hood, ed., Behind the
Screens: The Structure of British Broadcasting in the 1990s, Lawrence and Wishart, 1994,
p. 15.
17 Though highly acclaimed by critics in Britain, The West Wing attracts fewer than 1
million viewers.
18 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming, Verso, 1979.
19 Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER,
Continuum, 1996, p. 13.
20 Ibid., p. 15.
21 Ibid., p. 14.
22 Jane Feuer in her keynote paper delivered at the ‘American Quality Television’ confer-
ence, Trinity College, Dublin, April 2004; to be published in Janet McCabe and Kim
Akass, eds, Reading Contemporary Quality TV, I.B. Tauris, forthcoming.
23 Bourdieu, Distinction, 1992.
24 George W. Brandt, ed., British Television Drama, Cambridge University Press, 1981; and
George W. Brandt, ed., British Television Drama in the 1980s, Cambridge University
Press, 1993.
25 Jeanette Steemers, Selling Television: British Television in the Global Marketplace, bfi
Publishing, 2004.
26 Corner, Harvey and Lury, ‘Culture, Quality and Choice,’ in Hood, ed., Behind the
Screens, p. 6.
27 As Director General of the BBC from 1960, Hugh Carleton Greene considerably liber-
alised the policy of the BBC from Lord Reith’s ‘high culture’ ethos.
28 Corner, Harvey and Lury, ‘Culture, Quality and Choice,’ in Hood, ed., Behind the
Screens, p. 10.
29 Ibid., p. 8.
30 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, Paladin, 1989.
31 This quasi-scientific turn in the Arts and Humanities might itself be unpacked to reveal
the strategic value at that historical moment of putting its subjects on a more legitimate
footing since the dominant values across the academy substantially remain those of the
rational-scientific Enlightenment.
32 For an introduction to Foucauldian thinking, see Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader,
Penguin, 1984.
33 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed, Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981.
34 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans, A. Bass, Routledge, 1978
35 John Fiske, Television Culture, Methuen, 1987.
36 Dorothy Hobson, Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera, Methuen, 1982; David
Morley, The Nationwide Audience, bfi Publishing, 1980; and Ien Ang, Watching Dallas:chap8 24/4/06 6:45 am Page 71
‘Quality Television’ 71
Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, Methuen, 1985.
37 Kim Christian Schrøder, ‘Cultural Quality: Search for a Phantom? A Reception on
Judgements of Cultural Value,’ in Michael Skovmand and Kim Christian Schrøder, eds,
Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media, Routledge, 1992, p. 207.
38 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, 1993.
39 Vladimir I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, Foreign Language Press, 1972.
40 Brunsdon, ‘Problems with Quality,’ p. 89.
41 Ibid., p. 77.
42 If it is a mistake to seek any basis for solidarity in the core self of human beings, Richard
Rorty proposes that solidarity might be made rather than found by thinking ‘people
wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’; Richard Rorty, Contin-
gency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 192 ff.
43 Corner, ‘Debating Culture: Quality and Inequality,’ p. 145.
44 Melvyn Bragg/C4, The Story of ITV: The People’s Channel, Channel 4, 2005.
45 John Finch, ed., Granada Television: The First Generation, Manchester University Press,
2003.
46 Corner, ‘Debating Culture: Quality and Inequality,’ p. 145.
47 Patrick Barwise, ‘What Are The Threats to Public Service Broadcasting?,’ in Damien
Tambini and Jamie Cowling, eds, From Public Service Broadcasting to Public Service
Communications, IPPR, 2004, pp. 16–33.
48 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, 1992.
49 Steemers, Selling Television, 2004.
50 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Peregrine, 1970.
51 Arnold, ‘Culture and Anarchy’, p. 235.You can also read
