US television’s expanding modes of industrial practice

Abstract

The multifaceted change in series production and distribution since the turn of the century has diversified industrial structures and, correspondingly, expanded the scope of commercially viable storytelling. This expansion has introduced variation that has made it difficult to make claims of television series to the extent once possible. This article identifies ‘modes of industrial practice’ as a heuristic for subcategorizing series based on differentiated industrial conditions that better enables the identification of consistent subfields of series.

Television, globally, has experienced extraordinary change over the last quarter century. Expansion in business models and distribution technologies has altered the mechanisms of making television at nearly every level and also changed the nature of what appears on screens, which has grown more varied. Change in the sector has been so profound as to even call into question the category ‘television’ as a result of the pluriformity (Uricchio, 2009) now common in the daily use of an array of video by many globally.

Tracing the industrial changes and assessing their implications has required extensive investigation and analysis but may be easier work than developing sustainable arguments about the implications for the content the sector now creates. It has become impossible to make consistent and widely encompassing claims of ‘television’s’ textual output. I focus only on scripted series here, but even with that narrowing, it still is difficult to talk about scripted fiction series (hereafter series), as even the subcategory has considerably diminished in its internal consistency. A category such as ‘television’ or ‘television fiction/series/drama’ is only useful if there is enough consistency within the category to assert claims that are reliably true. Of course claims about television in the twenty-first century abound: it’s innovative, it’s derivative, it’s middlebrow, it costs too much, but these claims inevitably speak only of an unclearly defined segment of television and rarely explore the basis of inclusion or exclusion to that segment. Very little now can be claimed of ‘television’, ‘television series’, or ‘television drama’. Even invoking ‘television’ requires clarification, particularly, how is television defined: distribution technology, screen used for viewing, ongoing narrative structured in episodes, other cultural expectations? ¹

The categories television and television series were already losing explanatory value at the end of the twentieth century and well before the widely acknowledged challenges introduced by streaming in the 2010s. Many industrial changes developed around the turn of the century that were difficult to isolate and understand. The business grew increasingly international and conglomerated while audiences fragmented across an array of new channels, then with DVD viewing, and eventually by title through on-demand access from legacy services and streamers. ² Budgets in major markets grew steadily and exponentially in some cases, and a quantifiable phenomenon of ‘peak TV’ could be traced in US production through the early part of the century.

The changed industrial context made it increasingly difficult to make claims of television, of scripted television series, or even to talk generally of trends and patterns. The cross-national reach of television criticism allowed for awareness of differences in norms by country, as well as distinctions between commercial and public service; however, the largely one-way flows of content restricted broad familiarity with different nations’ norms. With growing variation in series, some turned to categories of genre to make claims of kinds of television series, although here too, significant internal variation made claims difficult to sustain. At first it seemed distribution technology might be a useful category; US cable series initially exhibited narrative features that distinguished them from US broadcast series. But the growth in cable series strategies by 2010 eroded the preliminary consistency and the ample variation within the category ‘streaming series’ quickly eliminated the viability of distribution technology or service as a meaningful way to organize texts. It was also difficult to keep titles tied to their commissioning context as they circulated outside their country of origin (e.g. early 2000s HBO series that derived from pure subscriber funding once they circulated on services including advertising).

In large part, the increasing weakness of ‘television series’ as a meaningful category owes to the emergence and growth of streaming, particularly for scripted series, but much contemporary perception forgets decades of adjustment preceded the strong turn to streaming that is just a decade old. The differences in streaming’s business model – reliant for more than a decade on subscriber payment and built on offering library access rather than compelling a mass of viewers to a schedule – enabled new priorities and measures of success (Lotz, 2017, 2018). Streamers may offer series that look much like those of ‘television’, but their revenue model and distribution technology led to a distinctive business (Lotz, 2022).

Variation in what ‘television’ could entail can be traced earlier, although it was not widely considered beyond the ‘commercial’ model established most clearly in the US and the government-funded PSB model originated in the UK. The introduction of private providers in systems founded on public broadcasting in the late twentieth century and the fragmenting of the US system from the 1990s that was driven by the introduction of consumer payment in part (basic cable) or whole (premium services such as HBO) should have led us to introduce more industrial categories before the end of the twentieth century. Differences between ‘network’ and ‘cable’ dramas were clear to US viewers in the early 2000s, but scholarship generally failed to tie adjustments in industrial conditions with shifts in textual characteristics, and the disparate industrial origins often disappeared as these titles travelled abroad so that it seemed ‘American’ television was changing or expanding. Of course, series commissioned by broadcasters as well as cable channels were ‘television’, but the common failure to acknowledge the fundamental variation in the industrial dynamics of their creation began to trouble the category ‘television’ in a way soon exacerbated by streaming.

It has grown impossible to make sustainable claims of fictional television series, even those produced in a specific country and under a specific mandate (commercial, public service). To be fair, all-encompassing claims of television content have long been dubious, but within particular systems – the US network era, the UK public service system – there was a time when general norms could be observed, and aberrations identified. The norms of television content (even just scripted) have become considerably more varied. In response, this article explains and argues for using ‘modes of industrial practice’ as a conceptual tool for subcategorizing scripted series into stratifications with enough internal consistency to make valid and meaningful claims. This conceptual tool is introduced in Lotz (2025) in order to explain the shifting norms identifiable in series in the early twenty-first century and to address how and why the range of commercially viable storytelling expands. ³ The idea is not fully articulated in that publication and this article provides explanation of and justification for using modes of industrial practices to organize the textual range enabled by adjustments in underlying economic, technological, and regulatory conditions in recent decades. It attends with greater depth to establishing how and why television scholarship overlooked modes of industrial practice as a result of the comparative national consistency of operation in the twentieth century.

To be clear, the intervention here is to redevelop categories that allow for meaningful analysis, conversation, and assessment of series more than it is to advance modes of industrial practice as a sole explanatory framework. Other grounds for categorization may be found and advanced by others. Recognizing that the textual and formal breadth of contemporary series can be tied to the coexistence of multiple commercial modes of industrial practice valuably connects underlying structures and functions of ‘encoding’ machinery with the texts that circulate in culture. Developing critical practices attuned to identifying modes of industrial practice also aids the project of dewesternizing scholarship and understanding as it denaturalizes industrial practices, often particular to the US and UK, that go unreflected upon as contextually specific rather than norms of the medium. Historically, scholars writing outside these dominant contexts have been expected to situate practices relative to these norms. The variation common today places that requirement on all scholarship, as no conditions can be assumed ‘normal’. This account writes foremost of the US context.

Modes of industrial practice

Identifying modes of industrial practice is a conceptual move that acknowledges the greater diversity of coexisting industrial norms and practices – often within a single national sector – and ties that diversity to a similarly expanded range of textual possibilities. Put another way, the business of television has grown more varied and more types of series have become commercially viable as a result. Where most national television systems were dominated by a singular mode of industrial practice throughout the twentieth century, a greater multiplicity of modes became feasible because of the expansion in business models and the affordances of different distribution technologies. These changes have not, at this point (2025), resulted in the replacement of one norm with another, but with a shift to multiple, coexisting modes. But still, this diversity of mechanisms for being commercially viable is difficult for systems built on more singular norms to comprehend. Identifying multiple modes of industrial practice supports different logics for making and circulating television and evaluating its ‘success’, which in turn enables a greater range of commercially viable texts than feasible under a single mode.

Conceptualizing series diversity ⁴ as tied to a multiplicity of modes of industrial practice builds on scholarship by David Bordwell, Justin Wyatt, and John Caldwell, who use a blend of terminology including ‘mode of production’ and ‘mode of practice’ to identify coherent industrial logics in screen industries and connect those logics with particular textual phenomena. Their work provides the conceptual foundation for my extension of their classifications to identify a range of modes of industrial practice recognizable in early twenty-first century US series production. Bordwell (1979) uses modes of production to distinguish between classical Hollywood production logics and movies from those of art cinema, Wyatt (1994) to further subclassify the classical Hollywood mode into those industrial logics tied to a ‘high concept’ mode and corresponding movies, and Caldwell (1995) to the industrial conditions that support televisuality in the early 1990s to enable textual difference (boutique television) from the norms previously in place.

Of crucial value to this approach to categorization is the conceptualization of connected industrial practices and textual outcomes. These modes do not derive from looking at texts and identifying distinction based on textual features, but from tracing distinctive textual characteristics to an underlying industrial logic. Organizing the landscape of television series based on variation in their modes of industrial practice addresses the textual diversity enabled by industrial pluriformity that has created subsets of ‘television’ that can be understood as having a common industrial foundation. In other words, it allows us to consider ‘apples with apples’ given the much greater variety of industrial conditions supporting the production of series in the early twenty-first century.

That we have only recently come to identify and require multiple modes of industrial practice results from the homogeneity of industrial practice throughout the twentieth century. This homogeneity did not require distinguishing modes of industrial practice because most countries featured just one mode and it was regarded as how ‘TV’ was. I (2025) have identified the pervasive twentieth-century mode in the US as an ‘industrial-grade’ mode of practice. This mode was in place by the mid-1960s and derived from the unfettered commercial motives of the system, its reliance on advertiser funding, and the opportunities inherent to the economies of scale that could be achieved in such a large and wealthy market as available in the US. The industrial-grade mode was refined over decades as more secondary markets for US series emerged. Industrial-grade US television took on characteristics tied to the priority of making titles that would attract as many viewers as possible (Klein’s ‘least objectionable programming’, 1971), produced many episodes to create schedule stability and minimize the need to market new shows, and prioritized storytelling contexts able to generate hundreds of hours of stories. Indeed, there were often exceptions that are well covered in the scholarship, but the industrial-grade mode was powerfully hegemonic and for many, came to define what ‘television’ was and could be.

Notably, industrial-grade modes of practice take different shape in different national contexts. In many countries, what Americans regard as daytime soap operas operate as a primetime, industrial-grade mode. The similarity lies in the production practices that find economic efficiency in establishing sets and production facilities amortized over many years (or scores of episodes in the case of telenovelas) and narrative concepts that can be repeated with slight variation or meted out with slow pacing or extensive use of commercial breaks to achieve the scale of content and efficiency required.

The mode of industrial practice derives from several factors: the mandate of the provider/system, economic features, and technological conditions (Figure 1). Variation among these factors leads to the prioritization of different textual features that often result from different mandate aims. Crucially, all these factors operate in a context, which at this point is mostly national or regional, and encompasses the historical, regulatory, social, and cultural factors that create the expectations and understandings of viewers. ⁵ Context sets the playing field of possibility – both industrially and textually.

Figure 1.

Diagram of components of a mode of industrial practice (Lotz, 2025).

Mandate describes the television provider’s reason for being – the corporate mission or objective (Havens and Lotz, 2016). Commercial and public service are the most pervasive mandates, although in a few cases globally a governmental mandate operates. The mandate structures the priority of what is created, although both economic features and technological conditions introduce variation as there is not a single route of textual or programming strategy to achieving a mandate.

The US system has been resolutely commercial, and its public service broadcaster too weakly funded to commission much fictional scripted content at all. In contrast a very different mode of industrial practice took root in the UK that was based on the public service charter of the BBC. The core of this mode was in public service, although how that was imagined by decision makers shifted over time and in response to pressures on the organization, more often than not tied to budget. A public service mandate will lead to a quite different mode – or modes – of industrial practice. Much depends on how the mandate to ‘serve’ the public is interpreted: feature Reithian uplift, deliver for different populations within the nation, provide a contrast to the television that emerges from an industrial-grade mode, and often is a mix of all of these aims. To be clear, modes of industrial practice do not map purely onto mandate or business model. It is possible that some titles commissioned by a PSB evince characteristics more suggestive of other modes, for instance, in the case of titles aimed at delivering significant commercial return through international sales (BBC’s coproduction of The Serpent (2021), for instance), or different modes of practice might be identified within the UK’s public service mandate as a result of the different funding pressures of the government-funded BBC and advertiser-funded Channel 4.

Economic features include considerations such as source of revenue, mechanism of financing, and business model. Returning to the historical contrast of the US and UK, both systems initially relied on a single source of revenue (advertisers in the US; license fees in the UK for the BBC) that was related to the different mandates of the system. As the late-century UK system illustrates with the PSB mandate applied to advertiser-funded Channel 4, 5, and ITV, mandate and revenue model are not reliably paired, and a scholar more expert in that system might argue that the reliance on advertiser funding by non-BBC channels resulted in a different mode of industrial practice emerging from the commissioning of those channels. Source of revenue captures the implications of money coming into the system while mechanism of financing recognizes different approaches to funding production. Again, key differences can be illustrated between twentieth-century US and UK norms. By the late 1960s, a system of deficit financing became pervasive in the United States and resulted from ownership separation of the broadcast networks and studios/production companies that were commissioned to make titles. The interests of these entities were not wholly aligned, as the substantive commercial value of a title came from a studio’s ability to license it in secondary markets – although that capacity was largely dependent on achieving a reasonable level of success for the commissioning network. In contrast in the UK, the BBC acted as producer and distributor throughout much of the twentieth century, creating aligned interests but narrowing the field of creatives – and possibly ideas – that could access the system. What has been regarded as differences tied to the different mandates that organize the US and UK systems could have been more specifically understood as the result of distinct modes of industrial practice that incorporated variation in economic features as well. Such a conceptualization might have better explained differences among the outcomes of the government-funded BBC and the programming typical of public service systems reliant on advertiser funding that were typical in other parts of Europe.

The uniformity of technological conditions under broadcasting illustrates well why there was limited need for a concept such as mode of industrial practice. For much of the twentieth century, the affordances and limitations of broadcast distribution, as well as national regulatory approaches to managing the technology, shaped the functioning of television so that the capacity of television and broadcasting seemed to directly correspond – although different mandates and economic features supported variation. The affordances of broadcasting as a distribution technology significantly structured the operation of television with the transmission of linear schedules enforcing a timeliness to viewing. The ephemerality of pre-VCR broadcasting led to scheduling considerations and content characteristic of the industrial-grade mode that are decreasingly evident today. The likelihood that viewers would miss episodes of long-running series in the US supported commissioning logics that prioritized episodically structured series, illustrating the connection between mode of practice and textual outcome. In other cases, programmers relied on the affordance of broadcast television’s nonexcludable reach to make an event of a title as when scheduled over subsequent nights rather than the more common airing of new episodes weekly.

Economic and technological features often intertwine: in most markets the ‘pay-TV’ delivered by cable or satellite was marked as different because of its distribution technology with different affordances, in particular the excludability of non-paying households. In contrast to broadcasting’s non-excludability that suited it well to advertiser reach and public service, the different distribution technology enabled revenue models that blended advertising and consumer payment, which in turn shifted measures of success and the textual strategies available to achieve them. ⁶ Original scripted series commissioning by these channels was unusual until the 2000s, and we can now see how these series often derived from a mode of industrial practice different from broadcast predecessors but perhaps not as differentiated as the modes evident from roughly 2010. Within the peculiar dynamics of US cable economics, titles that attracted a lot of attention and increased the perceived value of a channel could be leveraged to increase channel license fees even if the title attracted an audience considerably smaller than broadcast norms (Lotz, 2018). The ability to develop programming for smaller and specific sets of viewers, often described as ‘niche’, derived from economic and technological features that differed from those that pushed broadcasters toward ‘least objectionable’ features characteristic of the industrial-grade mode. ‘Niche’ was rarely defined in its early century use and often attributed as a textual characteristic, but there is reason to regard many titles categorized as ‘niche’ as emanating from a ‘niche mode of industrial practice’ that derived from the dual funding for pay-TV among other differences.

Technological conditions become more variable in the late century. Recording technologies introduced control for a subset of motivated viewers although had limited effect on broader industrial practice until watching on-demand became readily available. As the first commissioner to approach development without being rooted in linear logics, Netflix prioritized story features that were suboptimal to the US industrial-grade mode of practice. For instance, many of the titles Netflix commissioned and licensed featured shorter series runs and greater seriality than common of the industrial-grade mode norms prioritized by broadcasters. Even aside from streaming services, the expansion in linear viewing options and related fragmentation of viewers encouraged the development of alternatives to the hegemonic industrial-grade mode, at least in the US.

It is difficult to extricate economic features and technological conditions in practice; for instance, the technological affordances of internet-distribution considerably enable the expansion in subscriber funding. And likewise mandate also does not operate in isolation. Rather, identifying distinctive developments among economic and technological features aids in the sophistication with which we can conceptualize how and why television’s industrial norms grow pluriform at the turn of the century.

Each of these components – mandate, economic features, and textual conditions – is now more multifaceted within many national television economies as a result of the pluriformity of coexisting services. The hegemonic norms of a single mode of industrial practice in the twentieth century encouraged us to imagine only a single measure of success, which led us to perceive singularity in industrial operation as a ‘normal’ condition. In the case of the US industrial-grade mode, the aim of series was to attract the most attention. This aim strongly disciplined understandings of what ‘could’ be on television. The range of ideas and concepts imagined as commercially viable was narrowly circumscribed by the need for each title to be broadly acceptable. In television’s earlier decades, series reached multigenerational audiences and were commonly shared as part of family viewing (even well after homes had multiple sets), which structured the stories and content characteristics perceived as commercially viable. Technological advances such as time-shifted viewing on VHS tapes and specialized cable/satellite channels fractured the broadcasting norm of expansive ‘mass’ audiences and more range in series gradually became perceived as feasible. For instance, dramas staring women exploded on US screens with unprecedented success in the late 1990s as programmers came to realize they could target female viewers separately from their partners and families (Lotz, 2006). This was tied to the audience fragmentation driven by increasing channel options and the decrease in the number of viewers required to be a ‘hit’. Many of the dramas commissioned by US cable channels then defied notions of what could be done on television in the 2000s as the possibility of reaching a mass, heterogenous family audience dwindled and some channels deliberately sought to stand out with boundary-defying content (Lotz, 2018). Fewer viewers might diminish ad reach but the distinctive content attracted viewers valued by advertisers and those difficult to reach, and as noted above, the peculiar economics of US cable could enrich substantially the license fees earned by the commissioning channel. Each of these developments illustrates an expansion in the textual characteristics regarded as commercially viable. In the US, it was largely possible to identify a mere bifurcation between ‘broadcast’ and ‘niche’ series through to 2010, one that largely corresponded to distribution technology. But prioritized textual features expanded considerably in the wake of the further fragmentation that resulted from the business models and on-demand distribution offered by streaming.

Streaming adjusted industrial parameters far more than cable/satellite had. It significantly expanded the range of services reliant only on subscriber payment, which, in connection with on-demand access, enabled much different programming priorities and strategies than had defined television for decades – at least in the US. Again, more kinds of stories and textual features became commercially viable as the sector and its measures of ‘success’ expanded. Admittedly, even in 2025 it is unclear how extensively streaming services understand how to align programming strategies with their business models to strengthen their financial position. A lot of the last decade was undoubtedly experimentation, and it is difficult to surmise the lessons learned to the extent needed to identify intentional and patterned behaviour as was possible in television’s network era configuration. Thus, the focus now shifts from explaining the industrial changes that eroded the value of the hegemonic industrial-grade mode to further examine the evidence of other modes of industrial practice and the conceptual value of using them to categorize texts.

Other modes

In recent work (2025), I identify international, spectacular, and character study modes of industrial practice that come to coexist with the industrial-grade mode in the US and enable the creation of series strongly differentiated from those typical of the industrial-grade mode, and even from the nascent niche mode of industrial practice that developed in the early part of the century. ⁷ Those modes resulted from a need to organize the expanded ‘field’ of series evident by the 2020s that was supported by divergent business models and distribution technologies. This made it difficult to make claims of all ‘series’, given the new range of industrial logics supporting them and the range of strategies even within a single service such as Netflix. These industrial components did not consistently determine the textual features of the series commissioned and considerable variation existed within a category such as ‘streaming series’, although patterns and tendencies can be identified across the broad field of titles. These modes also helped conceptualize how and why continuity persisted in the form of titles that continued to be developed in an industrial-grade mode of practice. To be clear, the argument is not that these are the only modes in evidence; rather, as I considered how the business of series had changed, I identified these three modes as relating to either profound adjustments in norms or useful for explaining a significant category of contemporary series.

The first realization I had while trying to understand why it had become so difficult to make a claim about ‘series’ in the early 2020s was that the ‘normal’ expectation, at least of the US industry, was no longer that a title would reach a ‘mass’ audience. Examining audience ratings data made clear that the ‘most watched’ series were viewed by far, far, fewer than the ‘hits’ of the past. Titles continue to be called ‘hits’, but they reach a scale of viewers much smaller than was once the case. Of course, ‘nobody knows’ and the industry remains always on the verge of the next surprise ‘hit’ – but even the titles talked about as though they are like hits of the mass era rarely come close. ⁸

The erosion of typical drama/comedy audiences during the 2000s consequently adjusted the realm of imagined possibility and supported the development of new modes of industrial practice. When several dramas commonly achieved audiences greater than ten million households it made sense to commission with that aim. But once only one or two titles regularly attracted more than two million, it became foolish to continue to limit development to ideas designed to reach the larger audience; instead, even services like broadcast channels began narrowing the aim of their commissions.

There is not well tested evidence on this point, but there is a theory from media economists that I have understood as a conceptual basis for ‘niche’ programming strategies: ‘t[T]he production of mass media messages involves a trade-off between the savings from shared consumption of a common commodity and the loss of consumer satisfaction that occurs when messages are not tailored to individual and local tastes’ (Owen and Wildman, 1992: 151). Instead of ‘least objectionable programming’ for a mass audience, from roughly 2000, US series came to normally attract ‘microaudiences’ relative to previous norms. During the early 2000s, broadcast channels gradually included more titles that deviated from industrial-grade logics, while most cable series strategically aimed to distinguish their offering by pursuing what Curtin and Streeter (2001) term ‘edge’ as evidenced in the preliminary niche mode of industrial practice. These experiments offered early seeds of alternative modes of industrial practice.

To be clear, series continue to be produced under the logics of an industrial-grade mode even today. Many originated in a previous era – Grey’s Anatomy (2005-), The Simpsons (1989-) – or various procedurals producing 20+ episodes a season. ⁹ Part of the utility of a framework built on modes of industrial practice is that they are not chronologically exclusive; conceptualizing modes of industrial practice strategically pivots from ‘phases’ or ‘eras’ defined by a pervasive norm to enable pluriform coexistence of multiple modes. Contrary to the claims of critics and those that opine on social media that the sector is poorer for the rarity of industrial-grade practice (‘See, everyone wants more series like Suits’), the industrial-grade mode is not dead; it has just grown very difficult to achieve the audience scale needed to sustain the costs of the production machine such titles require even if they occasionally come to rank highly in metrics wholly unrelated to those of the past. ¹⁰

The second realization I had about what had changed to make it so difficult to speak about series generally in the 2020s, was the shift in what we’d called international ‘flows’ of content and the expansion of series made principally for a transnational viewership. It was not the case that a different norm was in place – as was the case of the shift from mass to microaudience expectation just discussed – but that a category of ‘international series’ could be identified, series designed foremost for international distribution, with foremost carrying a lot of definitional weight. Series have, of course, long circulated beyond the boundaries of the countries of their commissioning services, but these series were financed with an expectation of first serving a domestic market (or markets in the case of coproductions). The international mode of industrial practice imagines no initial ‘domestic’ viewer; these are titles made in the first instance for the ‘world’.

To add clarity through example, Radio Times editor Robin Parker suggests the textual differences at stake by distinguishing between ‘British stories’ such as It’s a Sin (2021), All Creatures Great and Small (2020) and ‘international stories’ such as Around the World in 80 Days (2021-2), The Serpent (2021), and Vigil (2021-), despite all those titles being UK productions (TellyCast, 2021). The ‘British stories’ exhibit features of British cultural specificity that reflect deeply on British culture and experience rather than just being banal signifiers of landmarks and accents (‘place-based’ as opposed to ‘placed’ per Lotz and Potter, 2022).

This expectation of international reach is comparable to a change in mandate by profoundly altering who is expected to view, and this warrants a different mode of industrial practice from a series designed to deliver a broad mix of viewers from within a single nation or territory. The international mode is aided greatly by the steady waves of internationalization of the television sector since the 1990s that have diminished the previous national structure of the sector. Many factors play a role: licensing of programmes to foreign audiences expanded earlier through international joint ventures and coproductions, and the opportunities provided by satellite-distributed channels and widespread acquisition of ‘foreign’ production companies (mostly by European and US companies) in the twentieth century added further transnational interconnection. The sector was far more transnational by the 2000s than typical of its twentieth-century configuration, but the emergence of streaming services with multi-territory reach in the 2010s exponentially accelerated the de-domestication of series already well underway. By 2016, Netflix was experimenting with development strategies designed to establish it as global service; others have also launched to multi-territory reach, but to date Netflix best illustrates programme logics that suggest a non-North American specificity.

An international mode of industrial practice enables far greater potential audience reach. Notably, Netflix reaches twice as many subscribers globally than possible for a US broadcaster. And by delivering a library of some 5000+ titles, the service is able to address many viewer interests and sensibilities that transcend national borders. The key difference of the international mode is this transnational reach and how it affects the stories prioritized and how they are told. At this point, scholars can identify textual tendencies suggestive of the logics of that transnational reach; it remains difficult to discern the difference between successful strategies and persistent industry lore about what textual features best ‘travel’ without more detailed viewing data.

The pivot from domestic-first to international in the first instance adjusts textual priorities. Placeless series, as offered by fantasy and much science fiction, appear to have features that serve well the aim of transnational reach, also those with globetrotting narratives and adventures. In many ways the international series extend the logics that often shaped coproductions.

The point here is not to get lost in creating rules to distinguish what is and is not an international series, but to create a category with industrial consistency that can be used to understand more deeply texts and patterns across them. My sense is that international series are not yet the norm of new commissions, but that threshold will soon be reached. It is possible to apply techniques of content analysis to lists of annual productions or titles of extraordinary performance (where available) to better empiricize the scale of the phenomenon. Examination of different variables might also be explored: to what extent do transnational streamers commission/license international series; what kinds of international series tend to be found on particular services/types of services; in what cases do series that seem uncharacteristic of an international mode achieve a substantial transnational viewership; are there subcategories of international series that allow even more precise categorization of strategies and storytelling?

A spectacular mode of industrial practice overlaps significantly with the international mode but derives from different core industrial features. Spectacular series defy the aims of efficiency that organize industrial-grade mode practices. Series derived from a spectacular mode of industrial practice are designed to stand out in the now crowded field of textual options and are commonly supported by production and promotion budgets many times greater than historical norms. These budgets seem impossible to recoup through conventional metrics and instead attribute value to commissioning services by simultaneously promoting the service whether through paid promotion (billboards) or unpaid buzz (journalism; social media).

Although series budgets have generally increased quite significantly since the turn of the century, the spectacular series exhibit spending many times greater than those increases. Notably a spectacular mode of industrial practice is largely exclusive to subscriber-funded services – which makes sense, both in terms of the need to provide titles of distinction that compel viewer payment but also in order to have a business model that can afford spending richly on a few titles rather than being concerned to have a schedule of programming attracting viewer attention throughout the day. The spectacular mode suits the reliance on exclusivity that has been normal for subscriber-funded services (although there are always exceptions), as they can continue to derive value from titles over time and across markets. Inaugurated by HBO at a time when it was fully subscriber funded but relied on linear distribution, streamers’ commissioning of spectacular series keeps their titles tied closely to the commissioning service instead of the industrial-grade mode norm of licensing to others. The costs of spectacular series demand transnational amortization, especially given the rarity that streaming titles achieve ‘mass’ reach in a single national context.

These specific features – long-term exclusive access and transnational reach – alter industrial-grade norms to perhaps create conditions by which such spectacular spending can be justified. Titles produced in this mode have received outsized attention in recent decades, as is their purpose, but it is a mistake to regard them as the convention or normal operation of any service. Spectacular series have the highest awareness, but services blend their pricey homerun swings with many less costly shots at singles and doubles that are also important to the value delivered to viewers. The reward of spectacular series requires complicated accounting and the scale of spending layers them in significant risk.

The spectacular mode of industrial practice has more in common with Hollywood studio film production than has been the case of series previously, especially those films characteristic of what Wyatt (1994) explores as ‘high concept’. Crucially, a spectacular mode remains exceptional and may prove to be a fleeting strategy tied to the particular experimental dynamics of the early years of streaming.

The third distinctive mode of industrial practice diversifying early 2020s series production enables character study stories. In contrast to the spectacular mode that delivers features of Hollywood-blockbuster making to series, the character study mode illustrates an expansion in the range of storytelling enabled by the diminished need to produce for mass audiences. Character study stories were largely too specific, or not plotted in accordance with the demands of the industrial-grade mode. These stories existed, although more likely in art film than in television series or perhaps offered by a PSB-based mode of industrial practice. Many are difficult to describe beyond being ‘about’ the life of the protagonist.

The character study mode is enabled by the lack of need for endless storytelling, and in many cases, the ability to produce with much lower budgets. In the industrial-grade mode, the need to attract a mass, heterogenous audience diminished the capacity to commission titles fewer might watch even if they could be produced far more cheaply – as in the way a low-budget film might out-perform a blockbuster by earning back costs even if fewer people see it. Similarly, the care needed for character construction poorly suited the desire for efficient production of many hours annually, and the inability to easily access missed episodes could deter audiences from continuing. Character study stories are not meant to carry on for hours over decades. Rather they are more like a literary memoir than an autobiography – they explore an event or phase of life in great detail. Most centre a single character but also develop characters around the protagonist, or as in the case of Reservation Dogs, explore a group of friends responding the death of another mate. The character study mode produces far fewer episodes than is typical of industrial-grade ensemble series that similarly place emphasis on characters’ existence and relationships (Brothers & Sisters (2006-11); Six Feet Under (2001-5)). The depth of character development is key to these stories; but different from ‘complex’ characters in series based on niche or industrial-grade modes (The Sopranos (1999-2007); Breaking Bad (2008-13)) as these series are designed to be contained narratives, small stories.

Evidence of a character study mode began to appear in US cable commissions, particularly those of FX: Louie (2010-15), Better Things (2016-22), Atlanta (2016-22), and Reservation Dogs (2021-23) (although it might have been normal in other countries with different components driving common modes). Netflix then expanded possibility given its transnational audience reach and ability to simultaneously benefit from multiple modes of industrial practice: the character study of Master of None (2015-21) alongside the spectacular aims of House of Cards (2013-18). HBO, too, may have been better known for spectacular titles such as Game of Thrones (2011-19) and House of the Dragon (2022-), but also offered Insecure (2016-21), Mrs. Fletcher (2019), and Somebody Somewhere (2022-24) that were characteristic of a very different mode of industrial practice. Given current data, it is difficult to know how they perform transnationally, although they are likely more widely available than they would have been in an era where international reach required broadcasters – driven to reach large audiences – to license.

Without internal budget and viewing data it is difficult to assess whether the character study mode might also be a fleeting industrial practice tied to the disruption and experimentation of the early century. It is entirely possible that they add significant value to streamer libraries by delivering high levels of satisfaction to viewers (Lotz, 2022), even if they are not among the most viewed. Indeed, the capacity for transnational reach that streaming services enable provides important accessibility to this mode. The character study series would likely have had limited second market value under past norms of secondary markets dominated by national broadcasters purchasing titles selected to attract broad national audiences. These titles don’t show up in streamers’ Top 10 lists, though this is unsurprising given their defiance of textual features likely to drive wide viewing. But these titles still add value to streaming libraries by providing distinctive stories that may rate among those most loved by subscribers and are suited to an environment of series promotion capable of personalized recommendation.

What is the point of these modes? They break ‘television’ into manageable categories suitable for the kinds of questions we asked in the twentieth century when we took for granted that television was united by a common industrial practice. If not these, then scholars need be empowered to make categories that make sense and enable claims to be made. We weren’t actually asking questions of television, we (in the US) were asking questions of series made in an industrial-grade mode of production. Modes provide coherent production conditions that then allow us to explore questions such as: what features repeatedly lead series designed to reach international audiences to succeed? What commonalities can be identified among titles afforded the privilege of spectacular levels of support? What textual features do character study series telling richly culturally specific stories use to explain unfamiliar aspects of life to ‘foreign’ viewers?

The modes also organize series into units useful for audience studies or the mixed (industrial, audience, textual) lens of media/cultural studies approaches. How do viewers regard the modes? Do viewers exhibit strong preferences for particular modes? Do they use titles characteristic of different modes to satisfy different motivations for watching? Fans are commonly associated with spectacular texts, but is there fan fiction written of character study series? Do different modes produce different types of fandom?

And what can we learn about industrial practices? Does the personalized recommendation of more sophisticated streaming interfaces effectively elevate character study series for discovery by those who prefer them? What storytelling features lead to higher levels of ‘consumer satisfaction’, per Owen and Wildman? How do services offering libraries of titles blend titles that have high levels of shared consumption and others tailored to individual and local tastes?

To be clear, the modes are a starting point for analysis and the larger point isn’t an argument for the modes discussed here, but of the need, in the current industrial and textual pluriformity, to identify reliable categories that address the implications for textual possibilities of the industrial variation now common.

Why modes of industrial practice?

I do not argue all series can be organized within these modes (including the persisting industrial-grade) nor that the modes are mutually exclusively. Indeed, there is considerable overlap between international and spectacular modes (all spectacular series are likely international but not all international series are spectacular). The purpose of the modes is to identify categories of texts with like-enough industrial features to allow the claims we once made of ‘television series’. And at the risk of being pedantic, the reason why we could make those claims was because a singular hegemonic mode structured the sector, at least at the national level.

Although thinking in terms of modes of industrial practice is inspired by the need for reliable categories of analysis for twenty-first century television, modes also help with earlier changes that appear inadequately conceptualized retrospectively. Certainly, the implications of the emergence of multichannel television, whether delivered through cable or satellite, would have been more richly explained as involving new or different modes of industrial practice. And so too would have differences attributed to commercial versus public service mandates that have encouraged different commissioning norms and textual possibilities as a result of funding source and mandate. Perhaps we can also understand that what is now referred to as a ‘creator economy’ may also embody a distinctive mode of industrial practice that derives primarily from the ability to distribute widely without first winning the financial backing of a commission (what Idiz and Poell, 2024 term a ‘hosted’ model). A creator mode of industrial practice supports a vast range of creativity, often not commercially viable. Here too, mode of industrial practice provides tools that explain how textual possibilities tie to industrial components and allows greater flexibility than categorizing by distribution technology, business model, or textual features with great internal variety such as genre.

Modes of industrial practice provide an analytic tool for the profound pluriformity of the industry, at least as it has taken shape in a process of transition that is pushing a quarter century of adjustment. Despite this long duration of unsteady norms, it remains possible to imagine the eventual arrival of a ‘new normal’ in which variation in industrial conditions diminishes to eliminate a need to conceptualize distinct modes. Nonetheless, the lack of tools for creating reliable categories for investigating series have left the patterns of stories across the last thirty years and their industrial roots underexplored, and mode-inspired thinking might better reveal the processes of change in historical reassessment.

Conclusion

My thinking to date has focused on series, but modes of industrial practice may apply in more contexts. Many common categorizations that attempt to account for both industrial and textual features have not exhaustively considered the multiplicity of components that intersect to produce textual norms and possibilities. For instance, the ‘mid-budget movie’ may have been a reliable, intuitive categorization in the twentieth century, but might we usefully identify how components such as funding source (studio, investment, self-funding) and primary distribution technology (theatrical, made-for-television, streaming) help organize movies on offer into more multifaceted modes? Or in an era after the telefilm or made-for-TV movie, can varying modes of industrial practice help explain how some Netflix commissioned movies bear great resemblance to ‘Hallmark films’ while others can be understood as ‘Oscar-worthy’, and others yet evince similarity to blockbuster titles? Might modes of industrial practice usefully replace ‘independent’ in many cases of categorizing both series and movies, or at least enable a more comprehensive understanding of an independent mode of industrial practice to be established?

The most provocative use of modes of industrial practice may be in using them to elide the distinction between series and movies all together. Are spectacular series better conceptualized in a category alongside Marvel movies because of the resources afforded to them, while character study modes more effectively understood with art film? The book this article expands on strategically uses ‘stories’ rather than series or movies to better facilitate such a move given that so many of the industrial distinctions between movies and industrial-grade television have faded.