Dossier: Sites of struggle: Television’s cultural and economic value

Abstract

In the age of the Anthropocene, television can play a key role in shifting ideologies. However, achieving this is difficult when television continues to operate as a ‘site struggle’ – pulled between complex negotiations of capital and culture. If in the 20th century, scholars were interested in teasing out the value(s) of television to argue for its potential contribution to socio-cultural transformation, in the 21st century, questions of television’s value(s) and potentialities have become even more critical – and vexing. This dossier brings together the research and reflections of scholars variously tackling questions of television’s value in the contemporary moment.

Introduction

Amy Boyle

As a popular and commercial medium, television has often been deemed a pre-eminent ‘site of struggle’. Influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams, communications and media scholars since the 1980s have used this term to describe the complex role that popular culture has within the status quo (see Fiske, [1987] 2011, [1989] 2010; Hall, 1981; Gamman and Marshment, 1988). In his 1981 essay ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”’, Stuart Hall writes that ‘popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged’ (1981: 239). Hall recognises that while popular culture is sometimes weighted towards hegemonic or dominant ideologies and groups, it is not necessarily beholden to them. Instead, popular culture is a site of ‘negotiation’, characterised by a ‘double movement of containment and resistance’ (1981: 228). John Fiske’s book Understanding Popular Culture also names it as a ‘site of struggle’ ([1989] 2010: 81). Echoing Hall, Fiske writes that ‘popular culture always is part of power relations; it always bears traces of the constant struggle between domination and subordination, between power and various forms of resistance to it’ ([1989] 2010: 80).

Both of these works evolved from these scholars’ interest in television. It was in television where Hall found the potential for ‘negotiated’ meanings and readings in his essay on the ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ of media messages (which, often shortened to ‘Encoding/Decoding’, was originally titled ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’; [1973] 1993). It was in television where Fiske found ‘polysemy’ as an intrinsic quality for the popularity of culture (1986). These scholars were writing in a context where television was largely undervalued. In the US, for example, it was labelled a ‘vast wasteland’ ¹ and thought to be a tasteless medium that pandered to the masses, and all for the benefit of commercial and conservative interests. In the UK, where Hall and Fiske were originally based, the disdain for television was perhaps less overt but there nevertheless operated value systems that relegated most television to the bottom of the cultural hierarchy (particularly where it was less evidently educational or informational). There was a politics, then, to identifying television’s opportunities for openness and resistance but underlying all of this work was a determination for television to be recognised as something of value.

In the network era, particularly in the US, television was often thought to be more of a commercial than a cultural medium. Because of its reliance on commercial sponsors and broadcast audiences, television was assumed to be weighted towards financial considerations and therefore less valuable as a medium and public good. In Television Culture, however, Fiske concluded that television actually circulates in ‘two economies’ ([1987] 2011: 311–3). Recalling Adam Smith’s dual conceptualisations of ‘exchange’ and ‘use’ value, Fiske wrote that ‘the cultural commodity cannot be adequately described in financial terms only: the circulation that is crucial to its popularity occurs in the parallel economy – the cultural’ (Fiske, 1987 [2011]: 311). Nowadays, it wouldn’t be controversial to suggest that there are, as John Hartley put it in his 1999 book, ‘uses of television’.

For many, it would seem obvious to suggest that as well as having commercial and exchange value, television is worthy as a medium and artform, as a tool for entertainment and education, as a critical and cultural forum (Gray, 2008; Hartley, 1999). These changes in valuation have come about due to shifting scholarly and critical discourses (see Newman and Levine, 2012), as well as shifts in television production and consumption. In the proliferating digital and post-network landscape, television’s decreased reliance on commercial sponsors and increased reliance on subscribers is sometimes held to mean that television is now less of a commercial and more of a cultural medium: one that is able to better cater to niche and progressive interests (see Lotz, [2007] 2014; Napoli, 2011; Robinson, 2017). If, in the past, television was argued to ‘err on the side of the status quo’, if not ‘toeing the line of the status quo’ (Gray, 2008: 138) with ideologically ‘polysemic’ programming (Condit, 1989; Fiske, 1989), nowadays it is often assumed to be inclined towards more specific and explicit social and political commentary.

On the face of it, contemporary television appears to be more critical, politicised and diverse. For example, in the past decade, Australian screens have seen a marked increase in queer representations (O’Meara and Monaghan, 2024), and US television has exhibited a new willingness to incorporate feminist discourses and activisms (Boyle, 2020). If the ideological power in earlier television was its being open to resistant readings, television in the 21^st century seems to have what HBO’s Chris Albrecht once termed a ‘point of view’ (in Johnson, 2003), and one that is critically, if not politically aware. However, as Kristen J. Warner argues, many of these changes are ‘plastic’, operating only on the ‘veneer of difference’ (2017, 2021). In her work on race and representation, Warner finds that while there are more people of colour appearing onscreen, the politics of this shift often begins and ends at the level of casting, the storylines usually lacking in ‘cultural specificity’ (2015). Any claims to progress are then ‘artificial’ (Warner, 2017: 33) and similar observations have been made of other groups and storylines that might challenge the status quo (Boyle, 2024; O’Meara and Monaghan, 2024).

Research like this has raised questions as to how ‘post-network’ television actually is (Levine, 2011). As with the cable ‘revolution’ (Streeter, 1997), the advent of streaming and sharper turn towards a subscription environment was supposed to realise the promise that more television would equal more diversity. However, in his manifesto for Open TV (2018), Aymar Jean Christian finds that 21^st Century television is less a case of diversification than integration, the promises for openness swallowed up by ‘legacy television’ companies (such as Disney and WarnerMedia), among other conglomerates (such as Amazon and Apple). Even if there is something to celebrate in this (artificial) progress, the increased (plastic) representations of queer people, racial and ethnic minorities has been met in equal parts with a problematic dramedy trend that Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerway term ‘horrible white people’ (2020) – both of these things trading as part of ‘woke TV’ culture.

Television, then, continues to constitute a ‘site of struggle’. While they may take different forms, its production and consumption are still subject to phenomena of negotiation. These are observable across broadcast, cable and streaming television, and often arise because of tensions or contradictions in cultural and economic value, real and perceived. Where Fiske and Hall were optimistic about this ‘struggle’, 40 years later, we are concerned, not only because television is often marketed and understood to be more progressive but because the transformative value of television is often strategically compromised. Consequently, inspired by a panel formed for IAMCR’s (International Association for Media and Communication Research) Conference, ‘Communicating Environmental Justice: Many Voices, One Planet’, this dossier tackles the tensions of cultural and/or/versus economic value in contemporary television, and how these are negotiated at different levels (industry, services, producers, series, audience). Combing television, industry and production studies, cultural and economic theory, this dossier builds on the authors’ existing research on the value of television, and its limits and possibilities as a medium for socio-cultural transformation.

In the age of the Anthropocene where we are facing numerous social and ecological crises, television and popular culture can play a key role in influencing world politics and shifting cultural ideologies. Television’s long-form and multiply-authored storytelling offers opportunities for fostering understanding of complex social, economic and environmental issues, and that television still functions as a civic tool and ‘cultural forum’ (Newcomb and Hirsch, 1983) became evident in the years of the COVID-19 pandemic (Horeck, 2021). However, for television to be used in a meaningful way requires a robust stock-taking and acceptance of responsibility at all levels from production to consumption. This process begins with a better understanding of what Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon call the ‘total value’ of television (2019, 2024), and ends with an assessment of the value/s along the various strands (and offshoots) of television’s value chain. By bringing together different television studies and approaches, we hope to tackle questions of television’s value/s and how it might become more valuable in future.

Valuing television: The total value framework

Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon

The concept of ‘total value’ emerged as a result of a series of conversations about ‘quality television’ sparked by Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey’s speech at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013, where he had ruefully recounted to the audience that his agent once advised him to never demean himself by working in television (Turnbull and McCutcheon, 2019). Quality television had evolved as a term used by scholars, critics and industry advocates to differentiate programming that had the look and feel of cinema, made possible as first cable television providers and then digital technology companies began to plough profits into content to attract audiences to subscription services (McCabe and Akass, 2007). As we interrogated the concept of ‘quality’, and how we might use it to understand how television was evolving as digitisation and globalisation disrupted the global television ecosystem during the first decades of the 2000s, we came to the conclusion that it was not helpful. Instead, we wanted to find a way to talk about what was important about television content – its value to its viewers, to the creative people that bring stories to life onscreen, to the industry that enables the production and distribution of screen stories, and to the communities whose stories are being told. Above all, we wanted something that spoke to a sense of the public good.

A key part of the challenge for us was that we were concerned with a broader concept than that of quality television – we were grappling with how to account for the value of culture. Cultural value is a slippery concept, intertwined with economic value. Observing cultural value requires multiple evidence points, including both quantifiable measures, such as financial returns and audience numbers, and non-quantifiable characteristics, including the impact of peer recognition and the value of exposure to a diversity of cultures and stories onscreen. It wasn’t long before we realised that we could draw on a long tradition of thinkers who had been wrestling with these questions of value well before we came to them. The first perhaps was the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (although we don’t want to rule out anyone earlier!) whose ideas were adopted by the esteemed economic theorists Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes, in their arguments that public decision making must be managed for the common good.

Our solution to this challenge was what we called the ‘total value’ framework (Turnbull and McCutcheon, 2019, 2024). We drew on two important sources to construct this framework. Our first discovery was that cultural economists were already adapting the work of environmental economists to define the different types of value that accrue to society from environment protections, including indirect benefits that may not necessarily be enjoyed by all people but had been put in place for future generations, as well as unexpected economic spillovers. For example, in a 2013 project for the Aotearoa New Zealand Ministry for Culture & Heritage, consultants Corey Allan, Arthur Grimes and Suzi Kerr drew on environmental economics to propose a model of the total economic value of culture. Here, they identified components including:

The non-monetary return to producers – benefits that don’t translate into income but enhance skills and reputations

Market use value – where money is made from selling content

Non-market use value – value gained from free access to content

Non-use value – includes the option of having access, simply knowing that it exists or that it is available for future generations, and

Instrumental value, or externalities – incidental and unexpected benefits

To this model we added a value chain for screen content, taking inspiration from Peter Bloore’s, 2013 depiction of the value chain for an independent film project, to unpack the market use and non-market use components of Allan et al.’s (2013) total economic value model. This left us with the total value framework that we presented in our 2024 book Transnational TV Crime: From Scandinavia to the Outback. The total value framework as applied to the television drama recognises that its value accrues right through the production value chain, from the initiation of an original idea, through development, production and distribution. It continues to build as audiences watch the production on a variety of possible platforms, and through economic spillovers that might occur as a result of production activity or through audience behaviour, and may even eventually lead to long-lasting cultural impacts. Through the total value lens, these sources of value are evidenced using available data, drawing on the disciplines of economics and the social sciences. Again, the Ancient Greeks had been here before us, and we leant into their concept of phronesis, practical wisdom for the greater good, to build into a balanced mixed-methods narrative to reveal the contributing components of the value of a television series.

As the topics covered in this dossier reveal, at the very least, the value of television to its creators, users and even its non-users is complex. Different kinds of television produced in different contexts can be expected to generate a variety of types of value, but none are guaranteed. Interrogating value of a television production, therefore, requires taking a careful investigative eye to the detail of how a project is instigated, the work that occurs along the production journey, its distribution and reception and its ultimate cultural impacts. Contrary to the old accusations of the narcotic power of the medium, this approach shows how television of every sort can be a powerful provocation to thought, holding a mirror to the cultures and societies that shape it.

‘Authentic’ TV: Negotiating queer production and publicity

Damien John O’Meara

When the comedy series Outland aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2012, it was the first fully queer storyworld to appear in Australian television drama. It followed other public service broadcasters (PSBs) commissioning centrally queer stories, such as Queer as Folk (1999–2000) in the UK. Outland is a series that helps reveal the ways television production processes are sites of constant negotiation between creative ideas and executive expectations and anxieties. A fully queer storyworld – where non-queer characters are peripheral – created by two out gay men was a perceived risk to broad audience appeal. However, through the combination of co-creator Adam Richard’s celebrity as a nationally recognised comedian and radio host, and the success of a proof-of-concept short film on the festival circuit, the series provided guarantees against this anxiety through its demonstration of value.

For queer televisual representations, negotiations between progressive cultural aspirations and the economic functions and interests of television remain a vital site of struggle for seeing these stories appear onscreen. At the centre of such negotiations are assumptions about what appeals to audiences. Those driving the inclusion of queer stories must provide guarantees – often focused on publicity drawcards – against the perceived economic risk of putting forward marginalised stories for mainstream distribution. Even Australian PSBs must think commercially, and consider audiences and ratings in commissioning decisions, particularly with the rise of streaming (Turner, 2016). Within these processes are examples of specific ‘queer labour’ to work within the systems to realise more, longer running and complex queer stories (O’Meara, 2025). Such labour includes ‘diversity work’ to enact systemic transformation for those identities that do not fit the current structures (Ahmed, 2017: 91; Tan, 2025: 353). Reflective of this work, in Australia, there are growing perceptions that audiences expect to see these representations, and that they need to be authentically authored through the positionalities of key creatives involved.

In my work on Australian queer television, I first turned to industry research because I could see a missing link at the intersection of television industry studies and queer screen studies: there were studies on reception and representation but not on behind-the-scenes processes. Analysis of mainstream queer representations could be limited, and with good reason: there are real risks to those undertaking queer labour and diversity work within these systems, and to reporting on the reality of these efforts (Himberg, 2017: 104). Even in the 2000s, Australian television executives held concerns that queer representations ‘would cause massive, cataclysmic dips in your ratings’ (Michael Lucas quoted in O’Meara, 2025: 11), which presents a difficult environment for industry interviews to take place. However, Australia’s television industry in the 2010s shifted in ways that opened up examination of these processes. There was a significant increase in queer representations, both for single episode and limited story arcs, and for the emergence of long-running stories and centrally queer storyworlds (O’Meara and Monaghan, 2024). Australia’s PSBs used new drama funding, which was provided to undergird local drama in the face of digital disruption (see Potter and Lotz, 2021), to lead the market in telling the most, and most thematically complex queer stories across the breadth of broadcast channels and streamers available. Importantly, with these observable textual shifts, prominent, openly queer industry figures were advocating these stories in more public settings. In Australia, at least, I could see how seniority and positionality could address concerns about speaking to industry.

Through my interviews with Australian television creatives and executives, I found that at the centre of shifts towards more queer stories were key guarantees emerging in the hidden processes of production (see Caldwell, 2008: 4). These shifts often involved queer labour to identify and present such guarantees and address anxieties about perceived value deficits. Series such as Outland and Starting From…Now (2014–6), led by out queer creatives, used proofs of concept to demonstrate the potential audience for centrally queer storyworlds. The Family Law (2016–9), The Slap (2011), and Barracuda (2016), which include complex queer stories intersecting specific cultural diasporas, used existing intellectual property from popular queer-authored Australian novels as a drawcard for audiences. Writer and Executive Producer David Hannam shared that casting cis Australian soap opera star Jessica Marais in the titular role of the trans icon, Carol Byron in Carlotta (2014) was ‘a factor in getting the project commissioned’ (O’Meara, 2025: 8). Celebrity was also a factor through authorship such as Please Like Me (2013-6), Outland and The Family Law being created by, and in the case of the first two starring Australian national celebrities. These examples shifted industrial expectations around value and authorship, and empowered out queer creatives working behind the scenes to expand their advocacy of stories.

The queer labour taking place in these examples contributes to diversity work. As prominent examples of queer authorship emerge, there are also more embedded cultural shifts that can emerge as publicly disclosed policy. In 2021, Screen Australia’s policy website was updated to require key creatives on a project to have ‘lived experience’ when featuring underrepresented communities (Screen Australia, 2025). This statement has been removed with funding updates in August 2025 to a more generalised ‘specific requirements may apply’ (Screen Australia, 2025). Despite the 2021 statement appearing to follow industry perceptions that audiences expected authentic authorship of underrepresented stories, the publicity approaches have not consistently followed. While there is limited evidence of publicity to highlight the authentic positionalities of out gay celebrity authorship behind gay stories, such as Josh Thomas, Adam Richard and Benjamin Law, there are not many examples when celebrity is absent. Out queer writers are rarely put forward for media interviews to prove the authentic value of a story. While the press release for the recent Stan Original series Invisible Boys (2025) noted ‘written for screen by a team of queer writers’ (Stan, 2025), this is a rare exception. It raises questions about the barriers that remain for queer stories to be seen as valuable to Australian audiences.

While PSBs have been vital for the inclusion of queer stories in Australia, as in other markets such as the UK (see Chivers and Allan, 2024: 210), streaming services are often viewed as key drivers of onscreen diversity. However, for markets with prominent and culturally significant PSBs, these legacy public broadcasters remain a key site for seeing local queer stories appear onscreen. The disruption of streaming can arguably be credited with catalysing the government and policy responses seeking to uphold local drama, which drives these shifts. PSBs are not immune from cultural-economic tensions, but their charters support a willingness to lean into niches, into perceived risks to value, and in this case that means commissioning queer stories that may be dampened by this site of struggle in other distribution formats.

Supportive streaming: Apple TV and new programming logics

Alexander Beare

In recent years, scholars have pushed back against over-simplified notions of Subscription Video-on-Demand (SVOD) competition (Budzinski et al., 2021; Crawford, 2024; Lobato and Lotz, 2021; Telkmann, 2024). Metaphors such as ‘streaming wars’ or ‘battle royale’ present us with ‘caricatures of competition’ that can be misleading and unhelpful (Lobato and Lotz, 2021). While services may vie for viewers’ time, attention and payment, Lobato and Lotz (2021) argue that the ‘metrics that really count’ for each service are distinct. For instance, some platforms are,

not centrally focused on payment (Apple, Amazon), or might be using SVOD as a way to more directly monetize libraries of intellectual properties (Disney+), while others yet are built around providing a video service distinct and valuable enough to warrant payment (Netflix, Stan). (Lobato and Lotz, 2021: 97)

Indeed, services such as Apple TV (formerly Apple TV+) and Amazon Prime Video are not vying for payment and profitability to nearly the same degree as Netflix or Stan. These services belong to a distinct corporate structure – one in which entertainment media is not the primary source of revenue. This then raises the question: what are the ‘metrics that count’ for services like Apple TV or Amazon Prime Video? And, perhaps more importantly, how does this influence programming logic and textual meaning?

This contribution builds from an ongoing research collaboration investigating Apple TV by myself and Robert Boucaut (Beare and Boucaut, 2025) and introduces a concept we term as ‘Supportive Streaming’. In our definition, supportive streaming services are Subscription Video-on-Demand (SVOD) platforms (such as Apple TV or Amazon Prime Video) that fit into larger, pre-existing corporate structures and support broader corporate agendas. These might include, but are by no means limited to, hardware sales, data-collection or brand promotion. We propose it as a flexible analytical category that is considerate of different corporate contexts. This way Supportive Streaming can nuance our understanding of the distinct ideological implications and concerns that arise from such programming logics.

The ways in which a streaming service is supportive will always be dependent on the needs of its parent organisation. For example, Amazon Prime Video can be viewed as a continuation of Amazon’s ‘everything, everywhere’ style marketplace. Prime Video’s homepage features originals, licenced content from other networks and paid new releases all at once. The platform is also included in a standard Amazon Prime membership. As noted by Michael L. Wayne (2018), Amazon allows the brand identities of existing TV networks to sit alongside each other within the same service. Take the way in which Amazon features ‘channels’ (micro-streaming services within Prime that cost an additional fee) such as MGM+, AMC+ or BritBox on the homepage. In this regard, Prime Video and Prime work in tandem – each driving users and generating revenue in the process.

In the case of Apple TV, we might see a much more curated offering that supports a different agenda. Since the platform was launched in 2019, Apple has spent a reported US$20bil on original programming (Shaw, 2024). Series like The Studio (2025-present), The Morning Show (2019-present), and Severance (2022-presenet) will typically feature big-budgets and A-list casts. The platform has always run at a deficit (estimated US$1bil annually) and, as of 2025, only holds a small share of the global streaming market (Heritage, 2025). In the face of such losses, Apple has remained undeterred, continuing to greenlight expensive projects and keep the service cheap – even offering free 3-month subscriptions with the purchase of new Apple devices. But, as Colin Crawford (2024) argues, we should not take the view that Apple TV is simply a loss leader for iPhone sales. The service supports Apple in a variety of other ways: be that access to behavioural data, brand extension or a general strengthening of the company’s tech ecosystem (Crawford, 2024). Sometimes, this dynamic is painfully obvious. Apple TV originals have become well-known for their unsubtle placement of Apple products. The Wall Street Journal reported that in just 10 episodes of The Morning Show there were 250 shots of Apple products (Wassus, 2021). Actors from Apple shows will also appear in iPhone ads, and CEO Tim Cook has taken part in promotional photo shoots with the costumed cast of Ted Lasso (2020-present). But, as Boucaut will soon argue, the supportive nature of Apple TV extends beyond industry-standard product placement. Rather, there is an ideological ‘sameness’ to Apple originals that bring with them much more concerning implications.

Often, Apple originals will clearly reflect Apple’s broader corporate ideology and desire for ‘good capitalism’ (Beare and Boucaut, 2025; Streeter, 2015). Throughout its existence, Apple has worked to curate a public image that emphasises virtues of ‘individuality’, ‘disruption’ and ‘thinking different’ for the (supposed) betterment of society. The story that Apple tells us about itself, and late CEO Steve Jobs,

invites us to imagine a good capitalism, a utopian form in symbolic contrast to the rapacious, speculative, financialised capitalism behind the 2008 economic crash… An optimistic vision of a one-percenter who deserved what he had. (Streeter, 2015: 3108)

This identity is also tied up with gestures towards social justice and change. For example, the infamous Think Different campaign explicitly aligned the company with public figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. In our analysis of a corpus of Apple originals (expanded upon in the next contribution), we found an overwhelming focus on similar narratives of eccentric individuals finding success through challenging the status quo and promoting an idea of ‘good capitalism’. The branding traits of Apple are often intrinsic to the characters, themes and cultural messaging of the shows. If they existed in the real world, it is easy to imagine characters like Ted Lasso, Molly Novac, Poppy Li or Ian Grimm appearing in Apple’s infamous ‘Think Different’ campaign. This is particularly troubling as Apple TV originals are often engaged with real-world issues – including climate change, wealth inequality, and gender inequality – that are deeply intertwined with capitalistic exploitation.

While television has always been a commercialised medium, it has typically allowed for a degree of ideological diversity. It is an important public site in which social issues and cultural meanings have been historically navigated, negotiated and contested. But, in the case of Apple TV, ideological diversity can be sublimated to suit broader corporate needs. Such logics of Supportive Streaming present us with a new programming dynamic and politic. As an analytical category, it allows us to consider distinct textual and ideological implications that might arise from such an industrial paradigm.

Apple TV’s social justice narratives: Textual and ideological limitations

Robert Boucaut

Building on our previous conception of Supportive Streaming, we now draw attention to the textual and narrative implications of televisual storytelling beholden to an overarching brand and ideology. Apple TV found quick success with their original comedy output, with the feel-good dramedy Ted Lasso a hit with audiences, critics and awards (Beare and Boucaut, 2025). A suite of series would follow similar ‘kind TV’ conventions (Horeck, 2021) in which protagonists’ antisocial behaviours are positioned as affable quirks but belying some internal trauma the series charts a course to overcome. Shows like Mythic Quest (2020-5), Loot (2022-present), Shrinking (2023-present) and Stick (2025-present) derive light comedy based in darker real-world themes to provide an affirming gratification. In an era of ‘plastic representation’ (Warner, 2017), we consider what tropes become embedded in these storytelling formulas and question their ideological implications. We argue that Apple original comedies situate comforting story arcs within shallow veneers of social justice, gesturing to broadly agreeable notions of progress without imagining any meaningful interventions.

A defining feature of these texts is their narrative priority of taking their character’s mental health ‘seriously’ – the cast of Ted Lasso even met with US President Joe Biden to promote ‘mental health awareness’ (White, 2023). For television storytelling, mental health thematically manifests as a defining personal trauma – a clearly articulated reason that characters who otherwise wholly mean good act out in antisocial ways. Jamie (Ted Lasso), Santi (Stick), and Ian (Mythic Quest) are profoundly arrogant because their fathers were abusive; Jimmy (Shrinking) and Pryce (Stick) are a mess because of a loved one’s passing; Rebecca and Keeley (Ted Lasso), Molly (Loot), Elena (Stick), and Gaby (Shrinking) feel disempowered as women because of toxic ex-partners. In this formula, trauma presents as an explanatory force – the backdrop for a neoliberal fantasy of self-actualisation.

By setting their narratives against vocational backdrops, each series also reflects workplace conditions and challenges as sources of comedy and drama. Jan Švelch (2021) has analysed Mythic Quest as producing a ‘shadow academy’ in its depictions of video game production, whereby real-world critical discourses about the industry (e.g. workplace hierarchies or toxic player communities) are deployed for satirical narratives yet resolved to favour the status quo. In other words, the series' satire of an industry invokes real-world challenges but inoculates it from an expectation to meaningfully imagine solutions. Perhaps more insidious, the earnest Loot and Shrinking contrastingly are promoted as comedy series about their respective workplace settings, yet operate through storyworlds which undermine the significance of their narrative challenges. Loot is set within a charity organisation, founded by a naïve billionaire charting a course of learning philanthropy and embracing generosity, and Shrinking takes place in a therapy office while exploring the mental health of its central characters. While unassumingly progressive narrative tensions on the surface, we raise two key shortcomings of both series as exemplary of Apple’s progressive capacities.

Firstly, these workplace comedies are insistent upon constructing networks of colleagues and minor circulating characters within a pseudo-family structure. Placing meaningful significance on the many passing interactions that occur in a workplace setting can work to undermine a series' thematic enquiry. Shrinking, for instance, casts its protagonist Jimmy (Jason Segel) as a radical thinker in the therapy space, cutting through inane psycho-babble by speaking to clients in direct, ‘honest’ terms to offer actual solutions. To support Jimmy’s central position and growth, the series deploys his daughter, co-workers, friends, neighbours and therapy clients as supporting characters, who all develop profound bonds with one another in the orbit of Jimmy’s therapy mission. These relationships then impede into flippant scenes depicting what therapy is or should be: Jimmy cares so deeply about his clients he resists adhering to professional boundaries, while also allowing sessions with his clients to be continuously interrupted by the likes of his teenage daughter, lawyer best friend, or romantically involved co-worker. When a workplace operates a pseudo-family, the overarching remit of a profession is rendered a backdrop for interpersonal relationships. This makes Shrinking’s enquiry into mental healthcare practice remarkably insular in scope, and dismissive of therapy practice by narrative necessity.

Secondly, when series construct entire working sectors with vague boundaries they obscure responsibility for productive depictions. For example, the Molly Wells Foundation in Loot has no clear thesis statement or driving vision for ‘philanthropy’. Over the series, Molly (Maya Rudolph) as a matriarchal figurehead funding and representing her foundation works on efforts as far reaching as sheltering unhoused populations, exploring clean water solutions, and involving kids in the arts. This is further complicated by the series' contradictory critique of wealth; Molly commits to giving away her entire personal fortune, yet acts such as generous one-off monetary donations to local small businesses are celebrated in the series as ‘inspired’ and ‘genius’, suggesting social good is achieved through wealth hoarding. Philanthropy in Loot is everything and anything, concerned with ‘real issues’ as a concept rather than anything specific or tethered. It demonstrates how vague invocations of social progress disempower narratives to engage with challenges depicted in meaningful terms.

Television narratives, fictional or otherwise, are always encumbered by narrow perspectives and oversimplification as they construct coherent, gratifying story arcs. However, Apple's approach here warrants particular critique in how these series are positioned to meaningfully speak on the issues depicted. Beyond Ted Lasso’s trip to the White House for mental health advocacy, Shrinking star Jason Segel reflected on the series as asking, ‘the question of how people can make real emotional progress’ (in Longeretta, 2023) and Loot star Maya Rudolph suggested the series may have inspired more radical philanthropic efforts among real billionaires (Schneider, 2024). In their claims to addressing society’s woes, Apple's original comedy programming extends their parent company’s corporate persona through a veneer of agreeable progressivism, insofar as they thematically uphold comforting narratives whilst obscuring any meaningful intervention from Apple itself. This is but one entry-point into our (Beare and Boucaut) project into Apple TV as a supportive streaming service, and how its cultural production of content belies industrial struggles for ideological salience.

Broke TV: Crises of critique and effect in contemporary dramedy

Amy Boyle

In 2021, The White Lotus premiered on HBO and international distribution services. The series was filmed and released during the transnational lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic and, because it was set in Hawaii, many viewers presumably tuned in hoping it would provide a kind of holiday. Instead, the series unfolded as a scathing critique of white class privilege, tourism and exploitation. Initially intended as a limited series, the first season explores the dynamics and disparities between guests and staff, tourists and locals in a luxury hotel in Maui. It begins at the end, where we learn that someone will be killed at ‘The White Lotus' hotel during the week in which it is set. The guests are horrible; the staff are exhausted, and even though most of the guests ‘have it coming’ it is a staff member who is killed in this farce. The guest who kills him isn’t held accountable, and the mostly-white guests leave happy and reaffirmed; while one staff member is dead, another in jail, one in hospital and the rest disenchanted as they receive the next load of rich white people. In the process, tourism becomes a metaphor and The White Lotus hotel a microcosm for white imperial, colonial capitalism, the associated entitlement and hypocrisy. Because television scholars usually expect to see ‘polysemic’ television with ambiguous politics (Boyle, 2024; Condit, 1989; Fiske, 1986), The White Lotus’ socio-cultural commentary was startling to me and my co-authors. The series did receive some criticism for its approach to Hawaii and Kānaka Maoli (Caillard, 2025; Townsend, 2024) but, on the whole, it seemed to be designed to evoke discomfort and critical self-reflection amongst its viewers: if not for their relative privilege then, at least, in terms of their travel and consumption plans post-pandemic.

However, instead of discouraging tourism and prompting (re)consideration of its ethics, the series inspired record tourism in its filming locations. Identified as ‘The White Lotus effect’, HBO’s series has led to a surge in internet searches and visitor numbers to Maui, Hawaii (Season 1), and then Sicily, Italy (Season 2) and Ko Samui, Thailand (Season 3; Boulter, 2022; Chapman 2023; Felix 2025). ‘Screen tourism’ or ‘set-jetting’ is a widely documented phenomenon and can be of economic and cultural value (although, uneven effects are commonly reported, see Beeton 2008; Reijnders, 2011). But, in this case, the tourist activity obfuscates the political critique of the text, and is having detrimental social and environmental impacts for the locals and locales. For example, in Hawaii, this tourism has led to water shortages, increased COVID cases, and worsened waste and housing crises; in Sicily, it has contributed to similar issues as well as increased crime and Mafia activity; and such effects were already being felt by Ko Samui and Thailand well before the production and premiere of the third season in 2025 (Felix, 2025; Latza Nadeau, 2024; Ratcliffe, 2024; Sanderson, 2024).

Consequently, for the past year and with the assistance of Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon, I have been working on a project investigating the paradox of ‘The White Lotus effect’, how and why it has come about. Informed by critical television and tourism studies, as well as critical race and economic theory, this project locates this contradictory phenomenon at the intersections of the text, its paratext and reception. First, we argue that this (in) effect has been activated by the text and its being serialised/anthologised, the series becoming far less critical of and more conducive to ‘horrible white people’ (Nygaard and Lagerway, 2020) and a ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, [1990] 2002) between its first and second seasons. Second, this (in)effect has been enabled by the series’ production cultures, its funding and marketing, and the surrounding industrial, critical and popular discourses, influenced by the movement from a mid-pandemic US to a post-pandemic international production context and the series’ becoming more popular. Third, we believe that this (in)effect is a product of reception or, to use Stuart Hall’s ([1973] 1993) terms, the ‘decoding’ of the series and its ‘meanings’ by television audiences. The last part of our study thus comprises an audience survey to explore the subject positions taken by viewers, and the varying appeals and interpretations of the series.

Together, we argue that HBO’s The White Lotus suffers a crisis in critique and effect, raising concerns about contemporary television storytelling and viewing strategies, value and ethics. The White Lotus is not unique. It follows earlier examples of popular screen culture which have led to a paradoxical (and detrimental) increase in tourism (such as The Beach, 2000, which resulted in the closure of the beach in question, see Law et al., 2007). It also circulates in an environment where we are seeing more and more series (and films) about rich white people that are apparently ironic and self-aware (to varying degrees), but often with ambiguous and counter-critical effects (such as Succession, 2018-23, which inspired a series of ‘old money’, ‘quiet luxury’ and ‘clean girl’ fashion and beauty trends, see Gaylor, 2023). However, because this series is transnational and ongoing, The White Lotus and its (in)effect is of particular concern, this case study raising interesting questions about the competing cultural and economic value/s of television, as well as the responsibilities of producers, consumers and societies.

We don’t have the answers to these questions and anticipate that they will become complicated by the audience research, so to end this piece I list the more compelling questions/concerns that have arisen from this project: is contemporary television more of a cultural medium or is it hyper-commercialised, its series now contingent on an ever more complex global and embedded economic value network? Does this tourist ‘effect’, along with its social and environmental impacts negate The White Lotus’ value as a politicised and critical text? At what point does this self-aware television about how horrible and problematic white people are, become run-of-the-mill television about white people who just happen to be a bit problematic and horrible sometimes? At what point do we as viewers stop baulking and bristling at these people and their politics, and start laughing at (or with) them and then – with pleasure – guiltily admit and indulge our complicity (perhaps with a White Lotus-inspired trip)? When is this television no longer culturally valuable, critical and ‘woke’ but broken, compromised and in need of fixing?

Conclusions: Television, value and social change

Elke Weissmann

As the above essays indicate, two competing models of value continue to dominate discourses about television: one which is focused on ideas of public good, another based on capital(ist) value. As the contributions to this dossier also suggest, although these models imply a dichotomy, they materialise in television in complex and intersecting ways: thus, ‘authentic’ value produced within a public service context also creates monetary gain, and the capital value of branding is increasingly based around social justice issues in television productions. However, these intersections are clearly not equal.

Underlying these models are conceptualisations of society itself which do remain dichotomous: on the one hand, one that imagines society as a collective, where public good is understood as benefitting the wellbeing of all. As David Hendy (2013) reminds us, these were founding principles of public service broadcasting. This conceptualisation was and is not without its problems: it has shown evidence of elitism, assumptions of knowing what the public needs and what the public good is (Ytreberg, 2002), which is often stifled as a result of who makes the decisions (see, for example, Olusoga, 2020; Salmon, 2024). Nevertheless, as Amy Boyle argues in our introduction, even scholars who were critical of the television of their time recognised the value of public service broadcasting, as at least the best version currently available (Williams, [1961] 1989).

On the other hand sits a conceptualisation of society as made up of individuals – where public good is understood primarily in relation to the value it can bring to individuals, including, as Robert Boucaut argues above, to enable a ‘fantasy of self-actualisation’, as well as in monetary value. These are of course the narratives of capitalism and, in more apparent ways, neoliberalism. While they conceptualise a powerful audience, supposedly in charge of their own choices and, through them, able to demand change, as the above scholars and others have argued, the processes of capitalism use all means available to them to manipulate and thus disempower the audience (for more, see Benkler et al., 2018; Iordache and Van Es, 2025). Value here emerges in the number of individual audience members, countable, but hardly counting as individuals.

What this points to, and we think the examples discussed above show, is that within primarily capitalist conceptualisations of society and the media within it, the promise for a public good is constantly foregrounded but remodelled to be channelled back into capitalist value. Thus, public service broadcasting, with all its limitations, remains an important counterbalance that provides alternative value and thus reminds us of an understanding of society as collective. Public good here may not benefit each individual, but it does benefit us all.

The problem that we – and others (e.g. Lotz et al., 2022; Thomass, 2024) – have encountered, is that spaces for these counterbalances are increasingly reduced, particularly as public service broadcasters have to showcase that they provide value for money for their paying public. This often involves the collaboration with commercial companies, or the exploitation of IP for commercial purposes. At a national level, as Paul Smith (2010) has shown for sports, this means that interests of big business usually trump the interests of the public good: in the case of sports rights bidding in the UK, for example, the audiences were only conceptualised as end users but weren’t invited to the negotiation table. Here, the weaknesses of public service broadcasting – its conceptualisation of the audience as automatically less able and knowledgeable – and of commercial interests combined to create the worst outcomes for the public because the public itself wasn’t there.

It is here that Raymond Williams’ ([1961]1989) critique of public service broadcasting and his request for a more democratic system – which Nico Carpentier (2011) later described as maximalist participation – can offer a helpful alternative. Unfortunately, these examples of greater participation and co-creation that enable audiences to take charge of what is there remain rare. Carpentier et al. (2013) highlight that they often emerged with new technology and in waves, pointing to a consistent struggle by publics to create spaces for co-creation and participation. In the absence of newer media – and as digital media are increasingly monopolised by a handful of large companies – the spaces for intervention seem to operate largely at a local level. It is the local, the geographically specific, that has become suddenly visible, even conspicuous (Havens, 2018) which, in the light of the above, renders it potentially vulnerable to the colonisation by commercial interests. But it is also the local where the sense of public as a collective can be more fully experienced because it is less ‘imagined’ and more experiential than the national unit (Anderson, 2006). It is one reason why local television might survive any attempted takeover; another is the economy of scale: local TV is just not commercially viable as the example of local commercial television in the UK shows: here, local stations have increasingly merged to build financial resilience.

For these reasons, Belinda Tyrrell and I argue (2025), local television provides particularly useful opportunities for public value. This includes the making visible of local efforts to fight climate change, but also the ability to utilise different registers to address the issues that local (and actually also national) communities face. Public value is less abstract and more concrete here: we understand and can see the collective needs, and we can thus appreciate the televising of it. What all of this – and we hope this dossier – shows is that it remains paramount that we continue to ask questions about quality, about value, even when we feel that some questions have been settled.