Prestige Television: Cultural and Artistic Value in Twenty-First-Century America

By Seth Friedman, David R. Coon, Murray Leeder and 6 more

Prestige Television explores how a growing array of 21st century US programming is produced and received in ways that elevate select series above the competition in a saturated market. Contributing authors demonstrate that these shows are positioned and understood as comprising an increasingly recognizable genre characterized by familiar markers of distinction. In contrast to most accounts of elite categorizations of contemporary US television programming that center on HBO and its primary streaming rivals, these essays examine how efforts to imbue series with prestigious or elevated status now permeate the rest of the medium, including network as well as basic and undervalued premium cable channels. Case study chapters focusing on diverse series, ranging from widely recognized examples such as The Americans (2013-2018) and The Knick (2014-15) to contested examples like Queen of the South (2016-2021) and How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014), highlight how contributing authors extend conceptions of the genre beyond expected parameters.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978818286

Book preview

Introduction

SETH FRIEDMAN AND AMANDA KEELER

There may be no consensus about the artistic or cultural merits of the recent influx of television programming often deemed superior to alternatives, or which term best describes the trend. However, there is little doubt about what kind of series is now most likely to be elevated above the competition. Since at least the release of The Sopranos (1999–2007) and HBO’s concurrent It’s Not TV. It’s HBO. branding campaign, a spate of copycat dramas primarily available on subscription venues have become critical darlings and dominated award shows. GQ’s Eric Thurm epitomizes the ambivalence tied to this development by noting that although ‘Prestige TV’ as a label is meant to denote quality and accrue critical acclaim, its properties become both set in stone and increasingly easy to imitate—and the art becomes stale.¹ Four years earlier, Vulture’s Logan Hill proved the point by sketching these attributes in his aptly titled The 13 Rules for Creating a Prestige TV Drama, which include focusing on a flawed White, male protagonist in a profession that is a microcosm of the American Dream, prominent displays of lurid content inappropriate for the networks, and pervasive literary allusions.² Vulture repeated the exercise years later, as Kathryn VanArendonk, who claimed to be tired of prestige getting in the way of good TV, published her thirteen rules, such as exceedingly dark cinematography, unnecessarily convoluted narratives, as well as the inclusion of Hollywood film stars and auteurs.³ Many scholars echo these reviewers. In his analysis of HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019), for example, Dan Hassler-Forest contends that the term ‘Quality’ is not an actual qualitative distinction because it instead refers to how the repetition of conventions has made such programs generic.⁴ Despite the lack of unanimity about what to call constituent shows or how to account for their worth, critics clearly cluster them together as a discrete unit.

Naming Matters: The Prestige TV Genre and the Discourses of Distinction

These utterances highlight why we argue that such programs comprise the prestige TV genre. The approach that we and our contributing authors implement is thus underscored by Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic/pragmatic theory of film genre. Specifically, Altman examines how genres are characterized by recurrent textual elements (semantics), the way that the repeated deployment of those core attributes renders them culturally meaningful (syntax), and how they are constructed by the multiple groups who, by helping to define the genre, may be said to ‘speak’ the genre (pragmatics).⁵ Jason Mittell influentially built on this foundation by stressing pragmatics to a greater degree than Altman to foster his notion of television genres as cultural products, constituted by media practices and subject to ongoing change and redefinition.⁶ In a telling example of pragmatics in action, for instance, Mittell maps how the same animated short films that were once part of Hollywood’s theatrical exhibition program for all ages transformed into children’s cartoons after being repurposed accordingly for television.⁷ For proponents of this discursive approach to genre, a television show’s potential classifications are always in flux. This is the case because a program’s conceivable groupings are contingent on shifting contexts that range from technological innovations that result in novel production and reception possibilities to the creation of new labels that can lead to enduring recategorizations. Although the aforementioned anecdotes about the prestige TV genre reveal how critics still rely on semantics (e.g., dark cinematography) and syntax (e.g., protagonist arcs expressing the American dream) to identify its textual properties, the monikers they employ pragmatically to sort shows (e.g., prestige TV, Quality TV, etc.) can influence how they are differentiated from other television fare.

A focus on pragmatics accentuates the potential power that those not officially inside the media industries can have on the inception and persistence of genres. Film noir is a prime historical example of this phenomenon, as it is a category that was initially coined and popularized by French film critics rather than by U.S. creatives or producers. These cinephiles noticed distinct and previously unidentified patterns in Hollywood output from the World War II period largely because they uncharacteristically watched so many films that had been banned during the German occupation belatedly and in succession. Although no one in Hollywood formally set out to make a film noir in the 1940s since the term was not yet familiar to Americans, these French critics ultimately had significant influence on the genre’s subsequent growth in Hollywood and beyond. In fact, by the 1970s, neo-noirs, such as The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974), were explicitly evoking what had become well-established semantic and syntactic elements of the genre thanks to those original critical interventions. Such historical developments inspired James Naremore to conceive of film noir as a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies.⁸ Naremore’s definition is thus driven by pragmatics and underlines how groups of people not often readily perceived as having agency to determine actual production decisions can construct and reformat generic classifications. This anthology also has the potential to change prevailing understandings of prestige television by expanding and nuancing often narrow journalistic and industrial comprehensions of the category, which is a key reason why we embrace the discursive approach to genre now backed by many media scholars.

Pragmatics is also valuable because it reveals the considerable rhetorical impact that a chosen name may have on a genre’s cultural and artistic status. Although prestige TV has recently entered the lexicon as a favored term to describe revered programming, Quality TV has long been the dominant label for constituent series. Quality TV began to calcify after Robert Thompson used it in 1996 in his Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER. Coincidentally, that is the same year that HBO launched its Not TV promotional gambit to describe shows that Thompson similarly claimed are not ‘regular’ TV.⁹ As the subtitle of Thompson’s book implies, Quality TV was first linked to select network dramas from the 1980s and early 1990s at a time when their supremacy was not yet seriously threatened by original, scripted programming on cable or the web.¹⁰ A central impetus driving the increasing employment of the term prestige TV of late by critics and in the industry itself, then, might be that Quality TV anachronistically references an earlier period in the medium’s history. Quality TV is also troublesome because, as Thompson’s contrast with ‘regular’ TV exemplifies, the term itself bespeaks a random value judgment that segregates shows into groupings considered worthy of or unfit for the capricious distinction. Although the same critiques about subjectivity and arbitrariness can apply to prestige TV, that alternative label has other historically relevant connotations that make it appropriate. As Geoff King recaps, the notion of prestige in the studio era signified what Hollywood invested in a particular production—in terms of budget, profile and spending on promotions—either as well as, or instead of, prestige in the sense of aspirations to a higher cultural status.¹¹ Consequently, prestige TV captures how producers and creatives align select shows with familiar cultural and artistic traditions (e.g., literary allusions) to enhance their pedigree and infuse them with textual (e.g., high production values) and extratextual (e.g., costly marketing campaigns) facets to establish their vaunted standing.

The growing ubiquity of the term prestige TV and the varied programming that has become associated with it further showcase why it is now often a preferred label. As Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey write in support of including CBS’s The Good Wife (TGW; 2009–2016) in elite categorizations, Discourses of quality delimit a specific definition of quality TV that continues to legitimate only certain corners of the medium.¹² In particular, they argue that TGW and network shows like it are unjustly marginalized from Quality TV classifications because the term is now synonymous with HBO and the fictional dramatic programming it has influenced: heavily serialized, high production value programs with narratively complex stories, most often centered on a male anti-hero and targeting niche audiences.¹³ The inaccurate conflation of Quality TV with a limited brand of masculinist shows that cater to affluent, White viewers has two major drawbacks. First, it has prompted disproportionate attention on HBO and its new streaming rivals, especially Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, in accounts that chart television’s changing cultural and artistic value. Uncritical adoptions of this approach thus risk taking industrial constructions of prestige TV at face value. Indeed, even Netflix execs haven’t been shy about declaring their intent to follow the prestige playbook HBO has used in their efforts to compete for genre market share.¹⁴ The case studies in ensuing chapters offset this tendency by analyzing series only on other channels to illuminate how tactics to imbue programs with prestige have become widespread across U.S. television. Second, by decentering HBO and its top competitors, we emphasize prestige TV’s increasing affiliation with more diverse shows and audiences. In short, Prestige Television aligns with Nygaard and Lagerwey’s challenge to notions of Quality TV that reiterate broader cultural stratifications, including hierarchies that suggest women, their interests, and their stories lack importance.¹⁵

HBO’s original, scripted series that feature troubled White, male protagonists and are juxtaposed with purportedly ordinary television have become the gold standard in most assessments of Quality TV partly because such programming explicitly counters the medium’s persistent affiliations with women. For Amanda Lotz, the proliferation over the past couple of decades of cable programs about complicated male characters was part of a strategy to increase male viewership—which always has been less substantial than that of female counterparts and showed signs of further losses at the time.¹⁶ Michael Newman and Elana Levine concur in Legitimating Television by documenting how television has been classified as feminine, and thereby as a less worthy, significant, and serious medium throughout its history.¹⁷ They also note, however, that recent strategies to fragment the mass audience, new television technologies promising viewers greater interactivity and mastery, and new modes of textuality and experience represent as much a masculinization as they do a refinement of the medium’s class status.¹⁸ Many of the markers of legitimation that Newman and Levine identify, such as the augmentation of the showrunner’s standing to a level akin to that of the film auteur and the associated transfer of renowned Hollywood directors into that position of creative authority, are entangled with hegemonic masculinity. After all, Hollywood directors were almost exclusively male during the studio era, and women only fill a distressingly small percentage of director’s chairs to this day. Even though recent conceptions of prestige programming embody how TV becomes respectable through the elevation of one concept of the medium at the expense of another, like Newman and Levine, we interrogate such legitimation efforts by enlarging the boundaries of the genre itself beyond the channels, series, and homogeneously White, privileged audiences typically tied to it.¹⁹

Despite our intention to expand comprehensions of what can be considered prestige TV, we ultimately restrict our objects of study in crucial ways to amplify our focus on a certain type of programing that has become most linked to the genre. For starters, we actually ignore most of the rest of television by concentrating only on original, scripted series. Newman and Levine correctly observe that it is not incidental that the recent upcropping of prestige TV coincides with the explosion of reality TV because it has been positioned as antithetical to that supposedly low cultural genre.²⁰ Of course, irrespective of its debased reputation, some reality TV series, such as Queer Eye (2003–2007; 2018–), Survivor (2000–), and Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019), are occasionally hailed as culturally or artistically innovative. The same is true of other unscripted content. Travis Vogan demonstrates, for instance, how producers of 30 for 30 (2009–) leverage documentary’s relative symbolic capital to drive a shrewd effort to distinguish ESPN from other sports media outlets, compete for market share, expand its demographic reach, promote its content, and even cut costs.²¹ In addition to exploring only scripted, original programming because of its inextricable links to the prestige TV genre, we solely examine series initially distributed at least partly on platforms for U.S. audiences. Digital technologies and multinational corporate consolidation have helped transform television from its local origins into a transnational medium, which helps explain some generic trends, such as an uptick of graphic content once difficult to monetize on U.S. syndication that now garners global aftermarket revenues. However, analyses of how prestige TV is manifest in national contexts outside of the United States or on how constituent U.S. shows impact or are influenced by the genre elsewhere are beyond our purview. Finally, although some of the following case studies grapple with streaming platforms, especially in relation to narrative complexity and fan engagement, we mainly emphasize legacy venues to reveal how the broader medium shapes and has been shaped by recent prestige programming.

Prestige TV’s growing penetration into network and basic cable programming illustrates that some of the genre’s traditional elitist attributes have shifted. This development complicates the positioning of those shows in the genre, though, because it is still predicated on exclusivity. Although narrowly distributed premium cable series, like The Sopranos, were cultural sensations that became virtually inescapable when they were hits, prestige TV is not always interchangeable with popularity. In particular, many of the programs that win coveted prizes at premier U.S. award shows are chastised for being too esoteric or obscure. Brian Lowry pithily exclaims, for example, that when HBO’s 108 Emmy nominations more than doubled that of its closest competitor in 2013, the channel’s Enlightened (2011–2013) earned two noms even though it was one of those shows almost nobody beyond TV critics made time to watch and was canceled that year in spite of the accolades.²² As King and others speculate by mobilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work on taste, certain genres, like prestige TV, are situated in a middlebrow milieu because they are at once exclusive and accessible. According to Bourdieu, the middlebrow opposes intellectual art by garnering investment profitability that arises from popular culture appropriations of ostensibly high art innovations.²³ King posits that the middlebrow’s consequent collapse of high and low cultures threatens the status quo by unsettling a clear sense of ideological distinction between the popular and the artistic, and of all the broader social distinctions that follow.²⁴ Rather than reinforce the kind of cultural policing that buttresses Bourdieu’s claim that taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier because it is interwoven with socioeconomic stratifications stemming from aspects of identity like race, gender, and class that underscore an individual’s cultural capital, this anthology’s case studies embrace the porous boundary between the popular and the elite by focusing on programs and venues typically elided in most descriptions of prestige TV.²⁵

There is no denying, however, that the cultural and artistic elevation of certain television series of late is rooted to some degree in the discourses of exclusivity. The recent upgrading of the medium’s general standing intersects with broader industry trends that have raised the reputations of some of its programming. Such a rise resembles a shift in Hollywood’s status that began in earnest in the 1960s, which Shyon Baumann chronicles in Hollywood Highbrow. For Baumann, three crucial factors coalesced to buoy Hollywood’s transformation into a more venerated cultural form: the devalued position of television as a comparatively lowbrow medium as it usurped film’s popularity; the legitimation of film as art that was tied to disruptions to the industry’s dominant business model, including the replacement of the producer-centered studio system with the director-driven package unit and the growth of alternative distribution networks, like film festivals and art cinema theaters; and the strengthening of discursive formations devoted to bolstering Hollywood’s reputation, such as the codifications of auteurist criticism and the Cinema Studies academic discipline.²⁶ A similar amalgamation of circumstances has likewise reshaped television since around the turn of the millennium. To wit, new media, particularly the web and video games, have rivaled television’s place at the bottom of the respectability hierarchy. In addition, digital technologies accelerated media convergence and consolidation to create production and distribution possibilities that upended the television industry. Finally, television criticism is now a staple of university curricula and popular journalism, especially as the web has democratized television reviews and scholarship. In sum, an increasingly wide space has opened across television for prestige programming because of the medium’s transformation.

Television in the Post-network Era: Contemporary Prestige Programming in Its Industrial and Technological Contexts

The emergence of contemporary prestige TV is primarily the result of industrial and technological changes that have transpired over several decades.²⁷ Much of what is considered prestigious in the current golden age of television stems from disruptions to the programming tactics of the U.S. network era, which lasted from the early 1950s to the 1980s.²⁸ NBC, CBS, and ABC flourished in the classic network system by accumulating affiliate television stations and maximizing advertising revenues.²⁹ This financial and programming system enabled networks to afford ‘network quality’ programming with which independent and educational stations could not compete.³⁰ The three national networks thus fought mainly with each other for viewers, and programming was generally more uniform in spite of the reputations of individual shows occasionally being granted elite standing. As Lotz writes, in an era in which most households owned one television, network programmers knew that the whole family commonly viewed television together, and they consequently selected programs and designed a schedule likely to be acceptable to, although perhaps not most favored by, the widest range of viewers.³¹ These effective practices did not generate much programming variety at the time because the networks had no incentive to adapt.

A series of technological and legislative developments in the late 1960s and 1970s had the potential to inspire sweeping changes to the television industry.³² The Prime Time Access Rule and the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, both passed in 1970, were designed to break up the oligopoly’s stranglehold on the production, distribution, transmission, and ownership of programs by creating opportunities for independent producers to compete. It would take ensuing regulatory initiatives, such as the 1972 Cable Television Report and Order, and the advent of satellite television program distribution to create viable alternatives to the networks.³³ Despite the appearance of new spaces for television programming, subsequent deregulation, exemplified by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, led to escalating corporate consolidation that created a few vertically and horizontally integrated media companies that still form an oligopoly.

These shifts moved U.S. television into what Lotz calls the multi-channel transition phase, which lasted from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s.³⁴ This era was marked by new technologies, such as the VCR, that gave viewers the abilities to time-shift by recording television programming and to watch it later on their own schedules. During this period and into the post-network era, which Lotz contends began in the early 2000s, the number of cable channels expanded further, and new technologies changed many aspects of the television industry.³⁵ Specifically, the advent of digital signals and high-definition picture quality bolstered critical assessments of television aesthetics by rendering it closer to conceptions of cinema. DVD players also replaced the VCR. This technological change was transformational for viewers and producers alike because the smaller size and greater storage capacity of the DVD enabled it to thrive as a commodity, in comparison to VHS tapes that were instead mainly used for television time-shifting and Hollywood film rentals. In fact, the introduction of the DVD box set in 2000 allowed viewers to purchase entire seasons of television, freeing them from commercial interruptions and programming schedules.³⁶ Additionally, as Derek Kompare notes, DVDs provided much higher audiovisual quality than was possible with the VCR.³⁷ The television industry thus finally found a reliable way to profit directly off of niche audiences with the DVD box set, alleviating some dependence on advertising revenue for the networks and basic cable channels. In addition to providing a way for producers to sell new movies and television shows in the aftermarket, DVDs gave the industry the chance to monetize their extensive libraries. This opportunity represented a break from the persistent conception of television as ephemeral, regardless of the industry’s history of profiting from reruns and syndication.³⁸ Such technological and business changes began to shift the cultural perception of television favorably, which was soon amplified by an eruption of original, scripted series.

In addition to the new technologies that partly characterized the multi-channel transition, the emergence of three new networks, Fox (1986) as well as The WB and UPN (both 1995), also played a part in challenging old network practices and dominance. Rather than compete for mass market share, these new networks worked to create programming that might be most satisfying to specific audience members.³⁹ As Catherine Johnson documents, for example, Fox was able to cultivate a pre-constituted, fan-consumer audience with The X-Files (1993–2002; 2016–2018) through the show’s generic hybridity and other textual properties characteristic of quality television as identified by Thompson.⁴⁰ This was a profitable strategy, and Fox further parlayed the broadcast success of The X-Files into the 2000 release of the show’s first season in DVD box set form, which set a standard that was quickly copied across the industry.

Much like Fox, The WB also focused its programming on underserved audiences with hit programs, such as Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003), that were tailored to the youth market. Similarly, UPN targeted African American viewers with shows like Moesha (1996–2001). At the same time, on the heels of critically acclaimed Quality TV shows of the 1980s, the traditional broadcast networks doubled down on attempts to continue capitalizing on the trend with similar programs, including Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–1999), NYPD Blue (1993–2005), and ER (1994–2009). These series pushed the well-worn forms of medical and detective series in new creative directions, which is the formula that governs many contemporary prestige TV shows.⁴¹

Cable channels also simultaneously discovered ways to shed the perception that they constituted an inferior form of television.⁴² Although cable channels catered to niche audiences from the start, most of their programming was not original because they were instead often repositories of repurposed content, such as second-run, primetime network series. Initial attempts to create original, scripted, cable produced series, such as USA’s La Femme Nikita (1997–2001), demonstrated that such shows on basic cable could draw a niche audience and be profitable.⁴³ Premium subscription cable channels like HBO also increased their scripted, original programming efforts during the same period. Although HBO had been producing a few original shows since the 1970s, the premieres of Oz (1997–2003) and The Sopranos marked, for many scholars and critics, a significant moment of change in television production toward prestige programming.⁴⁴ Thanks to the success of The Sopranos and several similar HBO series that followed, cable channels initiated a reimagining of television programming by continuing to pursue distinction as a strategy.⁴⁵ This competition only intensified when other cable channels mimicked HBO’s model by creating their own original, scripted programming.⁴⁶ With Mad Men (2007–2015), for example, AMC executives were aiming for an exceptional show that would bring prestige.⁴⁷ From this point on, the incentive to produce original, scripted shows that stood out became imperative for garnering critical acclaim and coveted award show accolades. Even if these prestige TV programs did not always net large profits directly, their elevated standing raised the channel’s brand value, often resulting in increased advertising dollars, subscription fees, and cable subscriber revenues.

This growth in programming emerged into an inexorably saturated and competitive marketplace in the post-network era. The subsequent addition of video on demand services to an already crowded network and cable television landscape as well as Netflix’s shift from a DVD delivery business to a subscription streaming platform in 2007 have greatly amplified the audience fragmentation, time-shifting, and media convergence developments that characterize twenty-first-century U.S. television. Those new market players were also joined by Amazon (2006), Hulu (2007), and other streaming services that initially served primarily as clearinghouses for existing movies and television programs. These streaming services, however, soon began to produce their own scripted, original series, such as Netflix’s House of Cards (2013–2018), Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–), and Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–), to maximize profits through program ownership rather than licensing deals with other production companies. In turn, this move to original programming also ensured that Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu would continue to have films and television shows to maintain and attract subscribers when media conglomerates inevitably pulled their libraries to create their own streaming services.

Whereas this so-called peak TV moment appears to have opened the floodgates for original, scripted programming across all sectors of the television industry, most of the consequent revenues are actually filtered back to a handful of corporate conglomerates with extensive horizontally and vertically integrated media holdings. These efforts to keep profits in house speak to a larger trend in the media industries during an era of massive corporate consolidation. Although there are drastically different revenue streams in the post-network era than there were in previous periods of television history, some key business practices persist. Growing pressure on media conglomerates to derive profit from their diverse media holdings has indeed amplified the economic incentives to converge under one corporate umbrella. For example, AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–2022) highlights how AMC Networks constructs in-house programming through AMC Productions to control its properties financially. Such a tendency, Lotz notes, illustrates how many cable channels of late have created their own studios to maintain ownership so that they could profit from the revenue that came from licensing these shows internationally and to internet distributors rather than outsource those tasks to other media companies.⁴⁸ These strategies defy the practices that the regulations of the 1970s sought to end and instead are driven by further deregulation in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications