Popular ‘Series’ Drama in Tv's Multichannel Age

Abstract

Devised to introduce the themed section of this MIA issue and the ‘popular’ area of TV drama that is its focus, this paper examines the contemporary drama series form and outlines some key institutional and cultural conditions for its production in non-American countries.¹ Interested in the commercial pressures being brought to bear on drama by intensifying prime-time competition and increasing audience fragmentation, the paper looks at how the series, in particular, has adapted to these. It assesses the contribution of three pervasive approaches to this area of drama: ‘recombination’ (Gitlin, 1994), ‘flexi-narrative’ (Nelson, 1997) and ‘must see-TV’ (Jankovich and Lyons, 2003). To foreground some specific challenges for locally produced drama in the emerging era of television ‘plenty’, a case study of New Zealand TV drama follows. Although its domestic TV drama has a 40-year tradition, New Zealand's efforts to maintain profile and diversity in this meta-genre have been frustrated by its position as a small, English-speaking country for whom leading American and British imports have been popular, affordable and available. Risky and commercially fragile in comparison with these imports, the position of New Zealand TV drama has never been guaranteed to the extent that it is reliant on the support and supply of public funding. Since the mid-1990s, these problems have combined with the challenges of multi-channel competition in television. While the resulting pressures have left some forms of local TV drama as ‘endangered species’, it is the popular, long-form genres — the drama series, soaps and sitcoms — that have shown the greatest resilience.