'Quality TV Series' as Discourse and Practice: Self-Theorizing in the German TV Series Industry

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The research project plans to investigate contemporary transformations and tendencies of serial television fiction from Germany in particular from the viewpoint of producers and with emphasis on so-called quality series respectively Quality TV. It aims at analysing, how various series makers lead a discourse on quality series through self-theorizing in form of different, frequently informal practices and through their series productions. The focus is on the phase of story development that constitutes both a crucial context and object of the internal quality discourse. Especially writers, producers and television editors take centre stage. As an important hypothesis states, these actors adapt the so-called quality series in a specific national context and use it to negotiate broader transformations of the medium television and changing production processes and structures. The project fills elemental research gaps in television and series studies: first the general recess of German and European series und their production contexts in academic analysis on quality TV. Most works in this field concentrate on productions from the USA, their development, their framework conditions and on a few supposed prototypes. In addition, the project updates and expands studies on fictional series from Germany by unrolling the contemporary, hardly further explored time of change in the local series industry and a possibly important phase in German television history. The current changes in respect of content, narration, broadcasters and commissioners are closely linked to broader European and global or at least Western transformations of television. Furthermore, the project fills the academic void of production studies in the German-speaking world and applies them to the television and film industries there. A corresponding approach leads to new perspectives in television and series studies: Aspects that cannot be covered by mere textual analysis, such as economic conditions or projects in development, are observed more easily. Additionally, by the positioning in production studies and the recourse to media ethnographic instruments the analysis of German series studies is broadened methodically. The project wants to concretely draft how production can be examined as another level besides the medial representation and its reception, and how cooperation, negotiations and hierarchies might be covered on this side.