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

Abstract

In this article, I explore the reception of American “quality” serial television in Sweden from 1999 to the mid-2010s. My analysis includes how cultural critics and journalists writing for Sweden's leading newspapers conceptualised American serial television as “quality TV” and as legitimate “art”, and it charts the ways in which these discourses relate to the reconfiguration of Swedish television from public service monopoly to niche-oriented multichannel system. The analysis uncovers a process of cultural consecration that was based on comparisons with already consecrated art forms, applications of authorship discourses that promote certain individuals as genius television auteurs, and deployment of critical protocols borrowed from literary criticism – all in service of pre-established cultural hierarchy and “good taste”. This article also highlights the ubiquity of American quality serial television across the Swedish television landscape, which suggests that such programmes represent both a niche product and a mass phenomenon with extensive reach and multidimensional appeal.

From the extraordinary to the everyday: discourses on American quality serial television in Sweden’s leading newspapers and the breakthrough of streaming TV

“…During much of the first decade of this millennium, the discourse on American 'quality' serial TV in Sweden's leading newspapers was dominated by a widely shared ambition to conceptualize this form of television as a legitimate art object (Frykholm 2021). 4 The key strategies that critics and journalists used for this purpose were these: (a) promotion of television series creators, writers, and showrunners as 'artists'; (b) emphasis (directly or by implication) on the affinities between prestige television and already consecrated forms of art, most notably art cinema and literature; and (c) emphasis on prestige serial TV as a conveyer of realism, complexity, and depth.…”

“…The essay represents the second step in a research project that explores the role of American 'quality' serial television in Swedish cultural life, primarily via a critical analysis of discourses in Sweden's leading newspapers from 1999 to 2018. 3 Step one involved an investigation of how critics and journalists worked in tandem with the culture industries to frame American serial television as legitimate art in a Swedish cultural context (Frykholm 2021). That study also suggested that the agenda of cultural consecration was mostly exhausted after 2012, and replaced by other ways of conceptualizing serial television and its role in Swedish television culture and industry.…”