State of Play

Robin Nelson’s State of Play updates and develops the arguments of his influential TV drama In Transition (1997). It is equally distinctive in setting analysis of the aesethetics and compositional principles of texts within a broad conceptual framework (technologies, institutions, economics, cultural trends). Tracing “the great value shift from conduit to content” (Todreas, 1999), Nelson is relatively optimistic about the future quality of TV drama in a global market-place. But, characteristically taking up questions of worth where others have avoided them, Nelson recognizes that certain types of “quality” are privileged for viewers able to pay, possibly at the expense of viewer preference worldwide for “local” resonances in television.

Robin Nelson is Professor of Theatre and TV Drama in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.

“In State of Play, Robin Nelson carefully analyses the “qualities” of high-end TV drama rather than pursuing one limiting version of “quality”. A colourful contribution to debates in Television and Cultural Studies, and a vibrant comparison of American and British TV traditions, this book makes a passionate and, yes, shameless case for viewing much contemporary Television drama as part of a new “Golden Age.””–Matthew Hills, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University.

Mapping the territory; blurring the boundaries * Distinctive product: three kinds of quality: The Sopranos, Shooting the Past, Shameless * State of Play: the TV drama industry – new rules of the game * Pushing the envelope: ‘edgy’ TV drama, Sex and The City, Queer as Folk, Carnivàle * Techniques, technologies and cultural form * Between global and national: 24 and Spooks; Oz and Buried * ‘Quality TV’ in context * Singularity sustained: Casanova, Blackpool, State of Play