What makes a Quality Television?

PART I

Since my teen years I’ve seen many series, that I liked a lot. With How I met your mother, I had a  serious connection with the characters, I enjoy seeing the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite in Gossip Girl. Maybe my favorite one was Veronica Mars a teen detective drama with highly realistic and fun and exciting content and also amazing shootings that even give me an aesthetic satisfaction from the contrasts between black, green and red colors dominantly used in the series. And I still remember it more than the occasions within the series.

However I would never consider them as a Quality Television. Maybe its because, I compare them todays shows and it might seem unfair to some. But if its the quality that we are comparing there shouldn't be an age or time for that. Maybe there shouldn’t even be a form difference, since we even start comparing some good series with the best movies of our time.

So its not necessarily true that good production and technical facilities produces high quality and vice versa. This makes me believe that technology used is not as important as content. I believe whats important about technique is how its in harmony with the rest of the plot, sounds and environment tried to be created. All in all, what kind of taste it gives to the audience and what thoughts and emotions it provokes.

When we compare the some old series and with new, form seems important but also tricky. All in all, we all love seeing scenes that seem impossible to produce or scenes that take place almost in our living room because of the high definition or camera used. Its tricky, because it reflects another kind of quality that technology brought to us more than aesthetics and far more than art.

The legendary TV drama, Twin Peaks directed by David Lynch that has started to air back again recently is a solid example for that. To fit the environment and time span told in the story, director adopts an older technique, a lower resolution even the credits has a sense of nostalgia. This increases the sense of reality and harmony of the show and makes it even more successful rather than decreasing the quality.

But harmony is not the thing that makes some shows better than the other. And also its not always a necessary criteria to be met considering the shows like Game of Thrones. I start to believe more as I move further in this topic that Quality Show is a combination of different assets in different shows that is unique to that show.

Obviously harmony is not the most important asset of Twin Peaks and many other great shows like Game of Thrones, Lost and some shows that does not perceived great by many but I personally like and put in the classification of Quality TV.

In the second part of my post, I will focus more on the assets those shows have their contents and what specifically makes them Quality Television.