This edited collection examines a new phase in the creation of transnational high-end drama in television’s current multiplatform era. Fuelled by the wider international exposure that internet distribution has brought to TV shows, this phase for high-end drama is one of unprecedented budgets and costs, frequent transnational coproduction and increased cultural diversification. While this drama continues to be facilitated by national broadcasters, fuelling the above trio of influences upon it has been the commissioning activity of multinational subscription-video-on-demand (SVoD) providers. This book showcases leading examples of transnational TV drama, produced outside the US, yet involving collaboration with US-owned SVoDs. It foregrounds some new potentials for drama creation in the context of its strategic importance to providers as different as national broadcasters and multinational SVoDs. This book helps to explain why today’s high-end dramas are demonstrating new elements of cultural specificity despite their common objective to engage a diverse international audience.

A history of American and British television drama, this book charts how the two production systems have moved closer together since the 1970s: both observe each other to drive innovation, and both continuously turn to each other to find new markets and new production partners. Although earlier collaborations exist, this increased transnationalisation of US and UK television drama has intensified since the 1970s as the increased number of channels and new technologies such as the internet and cable and satellite have led to stronger competition. Examining genres as diverse as period drama, the mini-series, the super-soaps of Dallas and Dynasty, crime drama and the recent spout of celebrated British and American quality drama, this book investigates how marketing campaigns within the press continually return these dramas into the realm of the nations they represent.

This history of British and American television drama since 1970 charts the increased transnationalisation of the two production systems. From The Forsyte Saga to Roots to Episodes , it highlights the close relationship that drives innovation and quality on both sides of the Atlantic.

CSI is one of the most popular television crime series worldwide. Its three series set in Los Angeles, Miami and New York have attracted global audiences for ten years and have helped change perceptions about what crime drama is about. The shift towards forensic sciences so brilliantly displayed in CSI has significant effects on what knowledge is made available about crime. This book presents an examination of the whole franchise: it analyzes how the shift away from an investigation that is focused on interviews and interrogations allows for truth to be more thoroughly located in the material world, and hence for it to become more absolute. The book draws attention to the increased importance of the victim to the crime narratives and to the fact that crime has increasingly come to be perceived to be messy and complicated, rather than planned and calculated. Whilst CSI is presented here as not the first series to allow such a shift, its visual excess in the display of the gore of the body makes it a particularly notable one in that it elicits a viewer engagement that relies as much on embodied experience as it does on rational thinking.