HBO and the Aristocracy of Contemporary TV Culture: affiliations and legitimatising television culture, post-2007

The Masks We Wear: Watchmen, Infrastructural Racism, and Anonymity

“…Beginning in the 1980s, HBO "began to experiment with the original series format" but would gain significant traction with the critical and commercial success of The Sopranos starting in 1999; other noteworthy HBO original programing of the last two decades includes Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, True Blood and Games of Thrones, which collectively constitute "adult-oriented groundbreaking dramatic series that were popular with audiences and lauded by critics as having the expansive detail and the rich characters of the greatest novels" (Gregersen 2020). As Akass and McCabe (2018) describe, "HBO has done more than most to define what 'original programing' might mean and look like in the contemporary TV age of international television flow, global media trends and filiations" (1). Watchmen aligns with HBO's goals of crafting so-called "quality television," which extends into the tactical logics of a streaming era of content and distribution (Burroughs 2017(Burroughs , 2019.…”

Renegotiating quality TV in the Swedish pressAmerican serial television and Sweden's post-monopoly television landscape

“…But how does a new, market-oriented conception of quality correspond to a specific niche in the Swedish television landscape? If there is such a niche, much of it is apparently occupied by a certain type of product -"complex" serial narratives -and a set of production companies that make up a restricted field of cultural production within the television industry (see Akass & McCabe, 2018). In Sweden as elsewhere, HBO has been the leading exponent of this subfield within television culture, a field which, as Akass and McCabe (2018) note, is largely defined by a collective belief in the HBO model of television seriality as legitimate art.…”

“…If there is such a niche, much of it is apparently occupied by a certain type of product -"complex" serial narratives -and a set of production companies that make up a restricted field of cultural production within the television industry (see Akass & McCabe, 2018). In Sweden as elsewhere, HBO has been the leading exponent of this subfield within television culture, a field which, as Akass and McCabe (2018) note, is largely defined by a collective belief in the HBO model of television seriality as legitimate art. In other words, the framing of American serial television as quality TV is intertwined with a more far-reaching legitimation discourse that conceptualises serial television as a traditional art object and that nourishes an "aesthetic disposition" (Bourdieu, 1984) toward these programmes.…”

“…From this perspective, Swedish critics make up a cultural elite engaged in the ideological construction of their own preferences as purportedly universal or natural good taste, with a reproduction of taste, rather than its reevaluation, as the primary effect. As Bury (2008: 194) notes with regard to television's cultural status, "what has shifted is the positioning of texts on the high/low binary; the binary itself remains intact but redeployed to distinguish 'quality' popular texts deserving of literary treatment from those that are not" (other scholars have made essentially the same point -see, e.g., Akass & McCabe 2018).…”

How to get away with gender : l’héroïne sans enfant pour bousculer l’approche binaire du personnage de série TV mainstream

“…Dès lors, ce contexte institutionnel impose de facto aux séries TV issues des networks de ne pas aller « aussi loin dans la transgression morale » 11 que les séries de niche, diffusées notamment sur des chaînes payantes. Ainsi, ce qui distingue essentiellement la fiction de niche et la fiction mainstream des networks, est « le principe autonome de la production restreinte, et le principe hétéronome de la production à grande échelle » 12 . Contrairement aux séries de niche, que leur autonomie rend plus promptes à proposer des personnages transgressant activement et explicitement les normes, y compris celles émanant de la conception binaire du genre 13 , les séries mainstream sont donc prises dans un cadre dominant, qui les encourage à formuler les éventuelles déstabilisations des modèles dominants sous forme de « traces », de « résistances locales » 14 , logées dans les interstices d'un discours hégémonique, qu'elles participent d'ailleurs parfois à maintenir 15 .…”