Quality television (or quality TV) is a term used by television scholars, television critics, and broadcasting advocacy groups to describe a genre or style of television programming that they argue is of higher quality, due to its subject matter, style, or content. For several decades after World War II, television that was deemed to be "quality television" was mostly associated with government-funded public television networks; however, with the development of cable TV network specialty channels in the 1980s and 1990s, US cable channels such as HBO made a number of television shows that some television critics argued were "quality television", such as The Sopranos.
Claims that some television programs are of higher quality include a number of subjective evaluations and value judgements. For example, Kristin Thompson's claim that "quality television" programs include "...a quality pedigree, a large ensemble cast, a series memory, creation of a new genre through recombination of older ones, self-consciousness, and pronounced tendencies toward the controversial and the realistic" includes a number of subjective evaluations. The criteria for "quality television" set out by the US group Viewers For Quality Television ("A quality show is something we anticipate... focuses more on relationships... explores character, it enlightens, challenges, involves and confronts the viewer; it provokes thought...") also require a number of subjective evaluations.
Read more about Quality Television: Fictional and Non-fictional "quality Television", UK "quality Television", Canadian "quality Television", Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words quality and/or television:
“Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women—the quality of shifting from child to woman, the seeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, “What does a woman want?””
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)