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:
“One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner—in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
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—Marya McLaughlin, U.S. television newswoman. As quoted in Women in Television News, ch. 3, by Judith S. Gelfman (1976)