Walter White. Don Draper. Tony Soprano. Nate Fisher. Vic Mackey. Christian Troy. Dexter Morgan. Carrie Bradshaw. Hannah Horvath. All uncompromising examples of what quality television has given us over the past decade…
What? What’s wrong?…
What did I say?…
Oh I used that word didn’t I?

Quality. It’s a funny little word. In any other discussion we would use it to describe something as being better. In television we use it to describe a genre. And if we hadn’t had cable networks start branding themselves with this term, it might still actually mean something. On July 12th 1997, HBO was the first to kick off a new era of scripted television, for this was the day it debuted Oz. Chris Albrecht, the then president of HBO original programming said that “It was the first thing we had seen for premium television that was a true dramatic series… it was startling how much different it felt from anything else on television” (cited in Sepinwall 2012, pp.271). The word he was looking for to describe it? You guessed it ladies and gentleman, it’s ‘quality’. However, while I don’t dispute the awesomeness that is Oz, as HBO went onto forge a name for themselves as the leader of the quality pack with shows like Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, they also started a dangerous precedent. This being that while all these shows had very little in common with regards to the stories they told, they were all being labeled as the same thing. As more and more series’ started popping up like The Shield and Nip/Tuck, we were again told that this was ‘quality’ because it was something that we hadn’t had before. But now that we can stack them up against each other and ask which one was better. Which of the quality’s is of better quality? We kind of have to admit that we’ve made a horrible mistake.

People who watched HBO ten years ago were watching for series’ like Oz, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. Television that truly raised the bar for the kind of ‘quality’ stories we could see on our little black box. These were shows that had stories to tell and were allowed to do it because they didn’t have advertisers to worry about offending, and the sex and the violence was part of the package, not the premise. However, people watching HBO now are watching it for shows like True Blood, Game of Thrones and Girls. I’m not hating on this new generation, I do honestly believe that Hannah Horvath has more interesting things to say than Carrie Bradshaw, but the term quality, now synonymous with anything HBO puts out, has also become synonymous with the sex, violence and nudity that it allows. Does a nipslip mean better production values? Does a sword to the neck mean better writing? And does a close up of an “O” face mean better directing? These should be the deciding factors of quality, and not how many breasts we can fit into half an hour (sorry, Lena).

Unfortunately, it’s probably too late to take back the night and give quality its dignity back. And to even have a fair discussion about it would be unlikely because let’s face it, a discussion of quality when talking about television series is rarely a discussion among equals…

In fact, it’s usually a discussion between two high horses… that are facing opposite directions… and from different countries… oh and look, one of them just shot themselves in the foot.

References:

Sepinwall, A 2012, The Revolution was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers that changed TV drama forever, Kindle Edition, Self-published, eBook