Television Drama in the Age of Streaming

“Brilliantly combining production studies with fan studies, Television Drama in the Age of Streaming is state-of-the-art scholarship. Vilde Schanke Sundet has interviewed an array of industry insiders, expertly analysing executives’ strategies, digital flagship productions, and new paradoxes of audience making. Streaming may have shifted contemporary TV drama into a “world championship” of globalised brands, but Sundet reminds us of the need to focus on national and cultural contexts. There’s so much great content in this book, I binged it in one sitting. And now you can too.”

Matt Hills, Professor, University of Huddersfield, UK

“This excellent book engagingly explores why the television industries are changing in the age of streaming and how to think of the implications from a specific national and cultural perspective as well as from an international and transnational point of view. The book is an important contribution to media industry and television studies (or should one now say streaming studies?).”

Eva Novrup Redvall, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

This book examines television drama in the age of streaming—a time when television has been reshaped for national and international consumption via both linear ‘flow’ and on-demand user modes. It builds on an in-depth study of the Norwegian public service broadcaster (NRK) and some of its game-changing drama productions (Lilyhammer, SKAM, blank). The book portrays the formative first decade of television streaming, how streaming services and incumbent television providers intersect and act in a new drama landscape, and how streaming impacts production cultures, publishing models and industry-audience relations. The analysis draws on insight gained through more than a hundred interviews with television experts and fans, hundreds of hours of observations, and unique access to industry conferences,meetings, working documents, and ratings. It combines perspectives from production studies, media industry studies, and fan studies.

Vilde Schanke Sundet (PhD) is a researcher in media and communication at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has published extensively on topics of television production, media industries, media policy, and audiences/fans.