Quality TV Contemporary American Television and Beyond

In his now-seminal book, Television's Second Golden Age, Robert Thompson described quality TV as 'best defined by what it is not: it is not "regular" TV. Audacious maybe, but his statement renewed debate on the meaning of this highly contentious term. Dealing primarily with the post-1996 era shaped by digital technologies and defined by consumer choice and brand marketing, Quality TV brings together leading scholars, established journalists and experienced broadcasters working in the field of contemporary television to debate what we currently mean by quality TV.

Janet McCabe and Kim Akass are joint Series Editors of the Reading Contemporary Television series at I.B. Tauris and are founding editors of Critical Studies in Television journal. They have co-edited and contributed to Reading "Sex and the City" (2004), Reading "Six Feet Under": TV To Die For (2005), Reading "The L Word": Outing Contemporary Television (2006) and Reading "Desperate Housewives": Beyond the White Picket Fence (2006, all I.B. Tauris).