The German-speaking television market is considered the third largest in the world, after the US and China. It has 72 million viewers, 37 million television households and 22 trillion euros in annual revenue (Eichner and Esser 2020, 190). As in other areas of society, a radical transformation has been unfolding across this television market for some years. However, in recent media, television and screenwriting studies, the current changes in the German television industry have been explored in only rudimentary form (see e.g. Eichner 2021; Krauß 2020a). A systematic investigation is needed. Such an analysis—one exploring the transformation processes and the media professionals affected by them—is also relevant and informative for more fundamental perspectives on today’s societies. How so? Firstly, the working practices of television and screenwriting professionals are representative of many contemporary working practices in general: these industry workers are organised in project networks (see Sydow and Windeler 2001) and they must constantly confront creativity imperatives in the “creativity dispositif” (Reckwitz 2017, 9) as well as the digitalisation of media forms. Secondly, these practitioners contribute to the production and expansion of cultural formats with a special narrative, aesthetic, creative, ludic and moral-ethical quality, as Andreas Reckwitz (2018, 227; 2020, 146) attests is common among today’s cultural objects. Amid a digital media environment, the television industry and its personnel strive for aesthetic “singular goods […] that contain the promise of something authentic and non-interchangeable” (Reckwitz 2020, 158)—and, importantly, that attract viewers’ attention. The notion of “quality” is a central motif in this desire and an ever-present topic in the associated industry debates.

1.1 Previously On …

“Quality. That was my keyword in the spring of 2004. We would sift through and evaluate all new ideas from this point of view”. In the anecdotal retrospective Die TV-Falle (The TV Trap) on his time as managing director of the German private broadcaster Sat.1, Roger Schawinski (2006, 96, my translation) clearly and repeatedly highlights quality. He talks especially about the impact that US TV dramas have had on the German television landscape. During 2003–2006, the period he worked at Sat.1, US-made series garnered attention in terms of narration arguably because of their quality. These US imports were “better, more cleverly written and more elaborately produced than anything we had to offer from our own kitchen”. Schawinski thus asks: “What else could we do but try for a much higher quality than before in our new series?” (2008, 97–98, my translation). Schawinski’s view of commercial television in the noughties is certainly subjective, concerned with presenting himself as a champion of “quality” and thus with putting himself—and notions of quality television—in a positive light. However, beyond the familiar self-promotion common to public statements by film and television producers, the example proves that so-called quality TV, mostly associated with US drama serials, was already resonating as an important factor in German television production in the early 2000s.

Schawinski also explains the difficulty of achieving “quality” and the barriers to the realisation of a quality TV serial in Germany. One of Sat.1’s own attempts, which he particularly emphasises, was the thriller Blackout – Die Erinnerung ist tödlich / Blackout – Remembering Is Lethal (Sat.1, 2006) about a corrupt, drug-addicted policeman who can no longer remember the past. It achieved disastrous ratings for an original fictional series at the time, with a market share of around 6% (Schawinski 2008, 114). This led Sat.1’s commissioning editors—and probably the German television industry in general, with its long-standing focus on the purely quantitative aspect of audience figures as a central criterion for success (Eichner 2021, 197)—to come to various conclusions. In particular, there arose convictions that productions could work for a broad audience only if the protagonists had a clear moral assignment (which was not the case with Blackout’s disoriented police-officer-turned-criminal) and that both complex, convoluted narrative structures and overly “dark” content and tonalities should be avoided (Schawinski 2008, 115–116).

Similarly, in the early 2000s, an “optimisation paper” (Optimierungspapier) by the public-service broadcasting network ARD—Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten (Consortium of the Public-Law Broadcasting Institutions), had called for as simple a narrative as possible (Bergmann 2012) and an emotive, cheerful-comic direction (Heinz 2012, 299) for prime-time television films. In the following “sweetener debate” (Süßstoffdebatte) around 2001 (Volker 2009, 11), television critics vehemently condemned the corresponding narrowed programming at ARD and at the country’s other major public broadcaster, ZDF—Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Second German Television). In this context, critics problematised the increased orientation towards audience ratings measured solely in quantitative terms and identified it as a central cause for quality deficits in German and especially public-service television fiction (see Kammann et al. 2007, 16).

Since the Süßstoffdebatte on ARD’s and ZDF’s allegedly shallow and kitschy fiction and the short-lived quality TV ambitions at the commercial station Sat.1, which along with Blackout included the dramedy Bis in die Spitzen/To the Tips (2005, based on the British series Cutting It, BBC One, 2002–2005), the television landscape in Germany—as in other countries—has undergone considerable structural change and expansion in recent years. This change has been accompanied by a change in the field of so-called quality drama, its writing and its narrative styles.

1.2 The Quality Drama as a Current Industry Discourse: An Introduction

The current “post-network era” (Lotz 2009), with many different programme providers instead of a few broadcasters, has seen an obvious increase in what Amanda D. Lotz (2017) calls “internet-distributed television” in her book Portals. It’s the same phenomenon that cultural researcher Ramon Lobato (2018, 4) summarises as heterogeneous, “professionally produced content circulated and consumed through websites, online services, platforms, and apps, rather than through broadcast, cable, or satellite system”. The transformations in content, aesthetic, reception, distribution and financing associated with online offerings are particularly visible in those television serials categorised as “quality TV” (Thompson 1996), “high-profile drama” (Redvall 2013, 131), “premium” (Barra and Scaglioni 2021a, 1) or “high-end” (Dunleavy 2009). Such serials are the focus of this study. The term “quality TV (drama)”, which is the term I use throughout this book, needs to be critically reflected upon. To a great extent, it is a concept from the US television industry. Particularly, the well-known pay TV provider HBO used “quality TV” as a marketing tool from the 1990s onwards (McCabe and Akass 2007b). From the 2010s at the latest, the Anglicism “quality TV” found its way into German-language media studies (see e.g. Blanchet 2011). Many academic discussions of quality TV have uncritically adopted marketing narratives and have hardly reflected on the elitist and inevitably judgemental tendencies connected to the quality TV concept as well as its economic origins (see e.g. Dasgupta 2012). Amid the great enthusiasm for sophisticated and complex narrative structures in serials whose dramaturgy develops over a sequence of episodes instead of within each individual episode (see e.g. Rothemund 2011), few have noticed that the label “quality TV” originated in the US television economy. In that context, it referred to a particular, difficult-to-reach, wealthy and therefore commercially extremely valuable audience segment (Feuer 2007, 147). The expression “quality TV” was, therefore, initially based on an economic consideration and categorisation of people, which we certainly have to view critically. In this study, I take the term “quality TV (drama)” back to its commercial roots in the television industry. From the perspective of critical media industry studies, I consider it less in terms of particularly “good” programmes that have high aesthetic or content-based value. Rather, I explore quality TV drama as an industry discourse around serials and their narrative styles as well as their production and screenwriting cultures. And instead of contemporary US television since the 1980s—which the majority of especially German-speaking analyses of quality TV have so far examined in a one-sided way (e.g. Schlütz 2016)—I take a look at the television (drama) landscape in Germany. In this specific context, the motif of the quality series has played a major role for several years, starting with the previously mentioned Sat.1 production Blackout – Die Erinnerung ist tödlich from 2006 and up to the current thriller drama Blackout (2021), which, despite its shared name, is rather about the momentous effects of a Europe-wide power blackout. In 2023, this serial found its way into Sat.1’s linear programme, but the primary distributor and client is now Joyn Plus+, a subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) service by ProSiebenSat.1 Media (in temporary cooperation with the US media company Discovery). Joyn Plus+ is one of the many current “internet-distributed television services” (Lotz et al. 2018, 42) in the diversified and digitalised German television market.

How have television professionals in Germany negotiated the so-called quality TV drama from 2015 to the present? The central hypothesis is that practitioners have adapted quality TV, most strongly associated with serial drama from the US, into a national context and, at the same time, through this concept have dealt with recent broader transformations of television and the local television industry. Alongside changes in the content and form of TV series, transformations in production practices, structures and organisations play an important role for producers of TV. Both aspects—the text and the production—are closely connected in their discourse. Again and again, they argue that modes and cultures of production, including screenwriting, contribute to the pre-structuring and shaping of televisual texts.

Following this basic assumption, for a long-time television professionals in Germany focused on processes that they considered to be the cause of the perceived quality deficit in German television fiction, and especially serial drama (see e.g. DJ Frederiksson [Anonymous] 2014). For years, then, their discourse on fictional quality TV was primarily problem-oriented—with accusations and complaints. Practitioners criticised a lack of willingness in German television fiction to innovate and take risks. Often, they decried a lack of originality, surprise and novelty, characteristics repeatedly called for in the “creativity dispositif” (Reckwitz 2017, 9) of current (Western) society, which they linked to a potential “international appeal” (Eichner 2021, 191) of German TV fiction. Other countries—first and foremost the US and Denmark, which made a name for itself beyond Scandinavia in the 2010s with “Nordic noir” drama (e.g. Waade, Redvall and Jensen 2020)—were considered by television producers to be more courageous and progressive in terms of production methods and content (e.g. Zarges 2015a). Similar views and diagnoses of a lack of German quality drama also burgeoned in television criticism and the feature pages of German newspapers, where serial quality TV was intensively negotiated into the 2010s (Koepsel 2015). In 2013, for example, the TV critics Georg Diez and Thomas Hüetlin (2013, 131, my translation) asked in the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel: “Why are the Germans, of all people in the world, sleeping through TV’s future?” Meanwhile in the US and Scandinavia, according to Diez and Hüetlin, dramas such as Homeland (Showtime, 2011–2020) and Borgen (DR1, 2010–2013; Netflix/DR, 2022) had “revolutionised” television. Such voices had an impact on the television and film industry in Germany.

The problem-oriented, negative voices that long dominated the discourse on German quality drama have been joined by increasingly positive ones, which have predicted—or at least hoped for—a “new German series wave” (Lückerath 2014, my translation) or “German TV renaissance” (Hughes 2016). The year 2015, which marks the beginning of this production study, can be considered a “pivot point for quality drama” (Eichner 2021, 205) in German television, after which both perceptions of local series and the production landscape and its output changed considerably. Increasingly, pay TV broadcasters also began to commission German-language fiction, and Deutschland 83 (RTL, 2015) became the first German TV series to run on a US channel, albeit only on the niche pay channel SundanceTV. At least for “high-end” miniseries such as Deutschland 83 and its sequels, Deutschland 86 and Deutschland 89 (Amazon Prime Video, 2018/2020), transnational distribution has been increasingly pursued since then. Opportunities for transnational distribution have also multiplied due to online distribution and the content demands of the numerous streaming platforms worldwide. In view of foreign sales, increased investment in “high-end” dramas from Germany and the diversification of commissioners and distributors, some observers have detected a “gold rush mood” in the German television and film industry (e.g. Lückerath 2019). This very positive market sentiment has been relativised by the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting production restrictions and economic gloom (Krauß 2023a), as well as by subsequent rising energy costs and high inflation (see Gangloff 2022). The announcement by Sky Deutschland in the summer of 2023 that it would no longer commission fictional productions marked a turning point (see Krei 2023b), as the increasing reluctance of pay TV and SVoD companies to fund expensive serials, as well as their lack of reliability for practitioners and production companies, became apparent. However, the way things stand at the moment (in 2024), the volume of drama productions and variety of commissioners is still very high in Germany.

Despite many platforms’ and pay TV operators’ reluctance to invest in drama productions as quickly and as comprehensively as they did a few years ago, serial drama is often still considered to be both artistically promising and prestigious, as well as financially more lucrative, than the single feature film. This is because for many years it has been relatively easy for producers to find commissioners and financiers, and likely also audiences. The shift in values in favour of the serial thus has been evident not only in the feature-page debates but also in economic terms. Christopher Meir (2019) has both economic and artistic perspectives in mind when he describes the current European television sector as the “leading industry in terms of prestige and earnings power” (213): “If there was once a fear that television’s involvement in film financing would dampen the artistry of cineastes, now television is becoming the medium that is most associated with artistic freedom and ample financial resources” (7). This perspective on artistic content and economic potential is clearly reflected in the industry discourse on the German quality drama under investigation. In my study, I therefore examine questions of economics as well as those of aesthetic and creativity, following the correspondingly broad perspective of media industry studies (e.g. Herbert et al. 2020). The particular focus is on screenwriting, which has likewise been accentuated in media, academic and industry discussions on quality TV drama (e.g. Jost 2021, 130) and is a field that poses artistic-creative as well as economic and organisational challenges in existing production structures.

1.3 Screenwriting in Focus

The focus on the processes and actors of screenwriting is justified, in the first, for reasons of research economics, as it is important to limit the field under investigation. Above all, though, I am trying to do justice to the special significance that academics (e.g. Davies 2007) as well as members of the industry in Germany have attributed to this phase as a foundational stone. “Now is the hour of the writers, the storytellers”, emphasised, for example, the well-known screenwriter Annette Hess (2019) with regard to the changing German television industry. The practitioners whose discourses I examine in this study have repeatedly argued that the serials included under quality TV, with their cross-episode, nested storylines, require particularly intensive and elaborate development work—much more than is afforded by the well-rehearsed development methods for procedurals, with one case per episode, which dominated large swaths of German TV fiction for years. However, screenwriting is not only a frequent subject but also a central context of the industry discourse on quality drama in Germany: the conversations around script development include discussion of how quality drama can be generated. In general, questions of quality and value always permeate the early phase of screenwriting and lead to foundational decisions.

Last but not least, I have made script development the focus of my study because it is precisely in this phase that current transformations of television and its modes of production manifest themselves. “[I]t is an interesting time for studying television writing since the status, production and distribution of television are changing so fast, with screenwriters and the process of screenwriting being important elements of this change”, Eva Novrup Redvall and John R. Cook (2015, 131–132) point out, noting that television is increasingly perceived as the “medium of the writer, the writer-producer or the showrunner”. There are also clear signs of the heightened importance and agency of screenwriters in Germany—such as the widely followed workers’ initiative Kontrakt ‘18 (Zahn 2018), through which screenwriters demanded more say in filmmaking processes and which was mentioned in several responses to my surveys. However, this book refrains from a naive “auteur” approach, which characterises some studies on television series (e.g. Dreher 2010), by reflecting that the emphasis on individual writers and their supposed creative freedom has served as branding and marketing for providers such as Netflix and HBO (see Wayne 2018, 729) and by explicitly addressing economic aspects and the collaborative nature of screenwriting.

This study examines script development and the industry discourse on the state and quality of German TV drama in relation to the roles, but also the perspectives, of the different, interconnected actors involved, or potentially involved, in the screenwriting process: screenwriters, producers, commissioning editors and directors. The analysis’s central bases are participant observation at industry workshops on producing TV series and about 40 interviews with practitioners involved in TV fiction production. These “exclusive informants” (Bruun 2016, 139) were primarily selected via 13 case studies, ranging from expensive prestige projects such as Babylon Berlin (ARD/Sky Deutschland, 2017–) to low-budget and up-and-coming productions such as the political satire Eichwald, MdB (ZDF, 2014–2019) and the transmedia teen drama DRUCK/SKAM Germany (Funk/ZDF, 2018–).1 The case studies cover very different approaches to the quality drama and its various production contexts, screenwriting practices, content and genres. A central goal in the selection of experts was to capture as many facets as possible of the discourse on quality drama, its screenwriting and the transformed television (series) landscape in Germany. Various positions and perspectives were deliberately taken into account. Attempts to give quality drama greater visibility and prestige in Germany and more space in production reflect, in some respects, the wishes and hopes of numerous television professionals. At the same time, however, quite a few practitioners might perceive such plans and desires in the industry as pressure or even a threat. After all, most in the industry earn their living on productions outside prestige projects such as Babylon Berlin, whose high budget in turn requires cuts elsewhere. Working on a quality drama can also function as cultural and symbolic capital (see Bourdieu 2010, first 1979), especially for creatives such as screenwriters and directors. In the television and film industry, such symbolic capital is often used to demand a high level of commitment or gloss over problematic working conditions, as shown in multiple production and media industry studies (e.g. Caldwell 2008, 331).

The present book is situated in this field of media industry studies (e.g. Havens, Lotz and Tinic 2009) and in the area of screenwriting research (e.g. Macdonald 2013) and builds on these two (often related) perspectives to analyse the changing production cultures and narrative styles in TV drama in Germany. Internationally, media industry studies and screenwriting research have been extremely productive for some years. However, in German-language media studies and in relation to the German television industry, media industry and screenwriting studies are only gradually becoming more widely practised and discussed (e.g. Krauß and Loist 2018b; Udelhofen et al. 2023; Henschen et al. 2022; Knöhr 2018). A more detailed disciplinary classification in the following section further contours the specific research interest of this volume.

1.4 Media Industry Studies and Screenwriting Research

Media industry studies can hardly be understood as a new discipline in its own right; rather, it is an interdisciplinary research area with diverse characteristics and multiple traditions (see e.g. Powdermaker 1951; Rosten 1941). Paul McDonald (cited in Freeman 2016, 9) has described “media industry studies” as a blanket term for research and teaching that critically examines processes, procedures, structures, policies, mechanisms, professional ideologies and historical developments in the work of media industries. The debate about what exactly constitutes this field is ongoing (e.g. Holt and Perren 2019, 31). In this study, I follow a broad understanding of an interdisciplinary field dealing with very different facets of media industries, across different media sectors and beyond individual media (Krauß and Loist 2018a, 8). With such a broad view, I avoid premature exclusions and consider works of varying natures relevant to the explored industry discourse on German quality TV and its screenwriting.

With its focus on screenwriting practitioners and processes, the present book could at first glance fall under production studies, which is decidedly oriented towards the production phase. Yet, this study tends to go beyond such a prioritisation. On the one hand, it takes up the crucial assumption of production studies to consider production as a cultural field in its own right (see Caldwell 2008, 14) and as a process in which social, technical and material factors interact (Vonderau 2013, 13), but, on the other, my investigation also follows the broader scope of media industry studies by including the other end of the industrial chain: distribution (see, among others, Lobato and Meese 2018). Distribution is highly relevant in the industry discourse on quality drama explored here, since it is closely interwoven with production in contemporary, digitised television. Today’s convergent and digital media environment makes it harder and harder to determine where exactly the production process begins and ends. “When a book may become a movie that becomes a television series that becomes a theme park ride that becomes a video game that becomes a line of toys, production researchers find themselves involved with new sets of issues”, noted Horace Newcomb and Amanda Lotz (2002, 77) as early as 2002, several years before the current expansions and transformations of the television drama.

With its focus on script development, my study is specifically located in screenwriting research (e.g. Conor 2014; Batty and Baker 2018) and benefits from its multi-layered approaches to the screenplay and its genesis. For the following analysis of TV drama writing and production in Germany, the model of the “screen idea work group” (e.g. Macdonald 2010, 2013) forms a particularly important basis: this cluster is flexibly located around the development and production of a film or television idea. In television drama, such screen idea work groups usually consist of mostly freelance creatives alongside institutionally integrated actors. In analyses of these practitioners’ interplay and division of labour, the boundaries between media industry and screenwriting studies become blurred.

Research on collaborative screenwriting, on the other hand, focuses on the specific nature of the work done in this stage. David Hesmondhalgh (2010, 6) cites this focus as one of the three main areas of media industry studies, with the other two being, according to him, the ownership and size of media companies as well as the organisation of production and distribution. All three aspects play a role in this study, albeit to varying degrees. Especially structural–functional variants of the sociology of production, with an interest in the role of the subject within an institution (Hesmondhalgh 2010, 5), led to relevant perspectives and methods for my research. Works on the “project network” as the predominant organisational form in the production of television drama in Germany (e.g. Sydow and Windeler 2001) provided important findings, and thus points of departure, for the analyses of the current television fiction landscape in Germany. In contrast to these organisational-sociological studies, however, my work goes further, firstly by addressing content-related and artistic aspects, with recourse to the screen idea work group, and, secondly, by taking up the critical impetus of production and media industry studies as well as the underlying influence of cultural studies, according to which hierarchies and precarisation are to be taken into account. For this study is not least about such tensions, which arise when practitioners negotiate the production cultures under which quality TV dramas are (not) created.

1.5 Cultural Studies and Television Industry Research

Among the various strands of media industry studies, this book is, of course, located in the television-specific approaches (e.g. Gray and Lotz 2019, 116). Works in this field have successively expanded the concept of television by understanding the television industry as closely related to the film industry and as part of a “multiplatform digital landscape” (Bennett 2016, 124). Amanda Lotz, Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas (2018, 36) make a corresponding argument in a special issue of Media Industries on “internet-distributed television services”: “Clearly, there is no singular internet-distributed television ‘industry’ distinct from established film and television industries”. The fact that established television broadcasters, as they diagnose, make use of various distribution channels, including internet-based ones, and that different productions of television, film and online industries, and even sometimes user-generated content, are distributed on online platforms, is equally evident in the context of Germany. The complex interweaving and fluid boundaries between these areas, which Lotz, Lobato and Thomas emphasise, become even clearer in Chapter 4 through a detailed look at Germany’s hybrid, network-like television fiction landscape.

Especially in the case of television-specific media industry studies, it is instructive to consider the relationship with cultural studies, which is highly interdisciplinary, since numerous important television theories and analyses come from this academic field of British origin (e.g. Hall 2006, first 1973) or have been—in the German context—strongly influenced by it (e.g. Hickethier 1995). Several scholars have emphasised the connection between cultural studies and media industry and production studies. Chris Paterson, David Lee, Anamik Saha and Anna Zoellner (2016b, 8), for example, speak of the “cultural studies of media production” in the preface to their anthology Advancing Media Production Research. Another anthology, Production Studies (Mayer et al. 2009b), offers the subtitle Cultural Studies of Media Industries, and John Thornton Caldwell (2008, 7) states at the beginning of his influential monograph Production Culture: “My research in this book can be described as a cultural studies of both industrial film / video theorising (a cognitive and social activity) and production (a cultural practice)”.

In central communication models from cultural studies, the level of production was established many years ago: first and foremost, in Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding” approach (2006, first 1973) and in the later “circuit of culture” model (e.g. Du Gay 1997), which other scholars have repeatedly further developed, and which various researchers from media industry studies (e.g. Banks 2009) have also taken up. Attempts in German-speaking media studies to tie in with such theories and to research media from multiple perspectives also include production as a level of analysis (e.g. Mikos and Prommer 2005). In Knut Hickethier’s concept “Dispositiv Fernsehen” (“dispositif television”), which has been influential for German-speaking television studies, media institutions—or the “media-industrial complex” (1995, 69, my translation)—form a central element alongside the programme, the image, the viewer’s position and the spatial context of television reception. In many studies that refer to such theories, however, the reception and the television programme receive significantly more attention than the production. In this respect, an analysis focused on the television industry and its actors—such as the present book—can complement and amend many works of cultural studies and television studies.

1.6 Production Cultures

Media studies is increasingly foregrounding economic factors through research streams that focus on media industries. At the same time, scholars have repeatedly emphasised the particular concern that cultural aspects should not become lost from view. “[M]oving once and for all beyond the long-standing ‘political economy vs. cultural studies’ (or political economy and cultural studies) debates” is how Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (2019, 31, emphasis in original) describe the central intention of media industry studies, which is also formative for the present book, with its interest in economic and cultural-aesthetic aspects.

Media industry studies differs from the pure media economics research conducted in economics and communication studies through not only its consideration of cultural issues but also its interest in individual cases and its (at least ideally) critical approach (see e.g. Havens et al. 2009, 236). Instead of merely economic aspects and superordinate structures, media industry studies is also about individuals’ precariousness, employment relationships and practitioners “below the line” (e.g. Mayer 2011), that is, those working outside the better-known trades associated with creativity. In this context, “invisible” (Banks 2009, 91) and “unpaid” labour (e.g. Siebert and Wilson 2013) as well as inequalities of gender, class, disability, age and race or ethnicity are also explored (e.g. Conor et al. 2015). At first glance, the present book, with its focus on screenwriting and its participants—who are mostly classified as “above the line”—and its emphasis on the discourse on quality dramas, which is strongly influenced by aesthetic questions, hardly deals with such hierarchies. However, precarious employment relationships and “invisible labour” (Mayer 2011, 3) can indeed be observed in the different steps of screenwriting. Some of the practitioners interviewed and observed for this study, such as dramaturges and commissioning editors, are hardly visible in official media representations or “publicly disclosed deep texts” (Caldwell 2008, 357). Moreover, in their negotiations regarding quality, television professionals address not only questions of content and aesthetic but also the conditions and cultures of production.

In this book, “production culture” refers to a key concept of media industry and production studies that reflects a broad understanding of culture, taken from cultural studies, that includes, for instance, everyday routines (e.g. Du Gay 1997). Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks and John Thornton Caldwell describe their interest in viewing production as culture in this way:

[W]e are interested in how media producers make culture, and, in the process, make themselves into particular kinds of workers in modern, mediated societies. We want to look up and down the food chains of production hierarchies, to understand how people work through professional organizations and informal networks to form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world. (2009a, 2)

What this summary suggests—in addition to the interest in informal and marginal areas of production—is a qualitative look at individual media practitioners: those “particular kinds of workers in modern, mediated societies” and, as these scholars describe elsewhere, their “experiences, observations, conversations, and interactions” (Banks et al. 2016a, x). Still, in the opening panel of the Media Industries Conference at King’s College London in 2018, participants made calls to analyse micro and macro levels, from individual practitioners and productions to broader industry structures, in tandem (Lotz et al. 2018). The present book remains committed to a qualitative orientation but draws on broader media economic study results to contextualise the findings and describe the television series landscape in Germany. Thus, this book also addresses institutional, bureaucratic and regulatory contexts under which television professionals operate in screenwriting and as they have been addressed by various media industry researchers (e.g. Born 2005). By considering these contexts, my book brings to light fundamental production cultures in German TV fiction production without neglecting the heterogeneity of this local industry. After all, what Caldwell (2008, 36) has stated also applies here: “Production cultures are far too messy, vast, and contested to provide a unified code—to either job aspirants or scholars—for breaching its walls”.

Caldwell has been instrumental in shaping contemporary production and media industry studies as well as the term “production culture”. Many of his fundamental ideas and concepts are relevant to my work, in particular his framing of media practitioners as critical and interpretative actors in the making of cultural media products. Caldwell (2008, 5–7) attributes “critical industrial practices” to film and television workers, by which he means interpretative measures that contain a critical dimension despite their embedding in institutional contexts and relationships. In this context, he also questions the common (especially in Germany) strict separation of film theory and practice. The industry and its practitioners, Caldwell argues, continually engage, often informally and in various forms, with issues that are usually considered part of film (and television) studies. He writes:

This form of embedded theoretical “discussion” in the work world takes place in and through the tools, machines, artifacts, iconographies, working methods, professional rituals, and narratives that film practitioners circulate and enact in film/video trade cultures and subcultures. (26)

In his 2008 monograph Production Culture, Caldwell develops the concept of “self-theorising”, which usually takes place in informal, and by no means always written, ways and often outside the public sphere (15–26). According to him, the practices of theorising are sometimes so strongly integrated into production departments and contexts that they are perceived much more as “common sense” than as theory—for example, in the conventions and rules for screenwriting and dramaturgy. Dramaturgical rules and issues also shape the industry discourse on German quality drama. In general, this localised discourse displays several of the characteristics that Caldwell attributes to self-theorisation in the film and television industry, such as a one-sided focus on the present and the future as well as personalisation in the talk of media professionals and in production reports, through which the many below-the-line practitioners tend to be forgotten. Following Caldwell, the quality TV drama negotiated in the German industry can be understood as a kind of theory with which its producers abstract and generalise current transformations of the television industry. However, it is not always the case that a theory is actually formed via the negotiations described throughout this book. Oftentimes, it seems more appropriate to speak of an “industrial reflexivity”, as Caldwell also calls it in the subtitle of his influential book Production Culture.

If we follow Caldwell, what the television industry and its representatives reveal to researchers can be considered a performative production of the industry. This idea is central to the interpretation of the different materials available to researchers—the “deep texts and rituals” (Caldwell 2008, 347)—and is taken up in Chapter 3 in the section on the study’s methodology. Researchers’ varying degrees of closeness to industry also need to be reflected in the evaluation of surveys. Caldwell and other media industry scholars have critically addressed such questions of “industry proximity”, finding that, on the one hand, locating researchers in the media industry can promote a well-founded analysis and sometimes represents the only possibility to look behind the official organisational charts (Hammett-Jamart et al. 2018, 7). On the other hand, some media industry studies run the risk of focusing too much on an (alleged) “insider position” and naively celebrating this access. The view from the outside can also be instructive.

The present study strives for a balance between an informed, questioning perspective, which is only made possible by a certain knowledge of the industry, and a critical, outside perspective. An analysis of the industry and an exchange with it are in principle productive and perspective expanding, since in addition to the media texts and products, this study also takes into account their genesis and distribution. The corresponding attention to production contexts can stimulate and expand research on quality TV in particular, as textual analyses on such valorised series currently predominate in German-speaking academia. An investigation of the television industry and an exchange with it can also help keep pace with the rapid, ongoing developments in the hybrid television market. This work analyses the specific temporal and local context of German television fiction and thus captures a hitherto insufficiently studied but crucial phase of the current upheaval.

1.7 Temporal and Geographical Context

Digitisation will lead to pluralisation not only in the technological media used but also in how production is organised for TV series in Germany, Jörg Sydow and Arnold Windeler (2004, 3) predicted as early as the first half of the 2000s. Indeed, we have seen the rise of new production companies and programme providers (especially streaming services), and established institutions are also changing their production methods. In this context, transnationally oriented drama serials with German participation are also becoming more prevalent, as Arnold Windeler, Anja Lutz and Carsten Wirth (2001, 120) theorised may happen back in 2001.

This book’s goal to explore current TV fiction production in Germany and its transformation is of interest not only because of the resurgence of European co-productions (see Hammett-Jamart 2018) but also because of the size of the market beyond national borders. In the European context, the German television and film industry leads in terms of the number of fictional productions (Fontaine 2017, 11; Fontaine and Pumares 2018, 19). However, many studies on German television in media studies and media economics are now outdated and refer to a television landscape that is completely different from today’s (e.g. Zabel 2009; Hickethier 1998). The need for a study like the present one is particularly striking when one considers how other European markets have been studied more closely or systematically, especially the British (e.g. Born 2005, 2003) and the Scandinavian (e.g. Philipsen and Hochscherf 2016). An analysis of the reasons for the comparatively weak state of research on recent television drama from Germany would also certainly be worthwhile. It is conceivable that many researchers, as representatives of an academic milieu with a certain taste, simply had no interest in previous German television drama, which for years was geared towards mass appeal (Eschke and Bohne 2010, 15) and was considered very conservative. In addition, a “national bias”—referring to a more critical and also more emotional look at German series as compared to US ones—may be decisive, as Tanja Weber (2019, 243) suspects might be the case when it comes to the discourse on so-called quality TV in Germany. An exception to the widespread ignorance of German-speaking research on current German television drama is the crime genre (Simon 2023), and especially the film-series hybrid Tatort/Crime Scene (ARD/ORF/SRF, 1970–), which is popular among a wide variety of milieus and which has been the subject of several analyses, primarily in terms of content (e.g. Eichner and Waade 2015) and to some extent regarding its production (e.g. Bendix and Hämmerling 2014). Tatort, clearly, plays a key role in German TV drama—or is “our quality TV”, as producer Ulrike Leibfried (2016) stated. Like her, other practitioners also frequently brought up this show in the interviews.

By focusing on Germany, this book transfers approaches of recent television, media industry and screenwriting studies into a specific national context. This focus is due, on the one hand, to the need for media industry and production studies that relate to contexts other than the Anglo-American one and, on the other hand, to the continuing relevance of the national and the local, which, in addition to television practitioners (e.g. Tereszkiewicz 2020), various scholars point out: “National institutions do not disappear”, emphasises, for example, Giselinde Kuipers (2011, 555). In her study Transnational Television and National Media Landscapes, on the four European countries France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland, Kuipers shows how national fields developed their own dynamics and remained relatively autonomous even when they were integrated into the “transnational arena” from the 1990s onwards. Nina Vindum Rasmussen (2018, 106) highlights the importance of national borders especially in the European context: “national contexts continue to define cultural policy and industry practice in Europe”.

However, this relevance of the national does not at all mean it’s possible to maintain the idea of a clearly delimitable German national culture and a purely German television industry. Germany’s television market has been transnationally shaped for years due to the global trade in formats (Chalaby 2012), transnational media groups and the importance of transnational production companies such as Fremantle, a subsidiary of the RTL Group based in London. The present book takes into account transnational and transcultural dimensions of television in Germany and at the same time national and local particularities, such as the federalism of the public broadcaster ARD, which is inscribed in its programmes (such as Tatort) and continues in other production companies and funding agencies. Especially in the industry discourse on the German quality drama researched in this book, all sides—the local and the national, the transnational and the global—are relevant and interwoven. We will see how the interviewed and observed television practitioners, especially in the face of an international market, repeatedly make national attributions, thus reproducing an alleged “Germanness” in television. At the same time, they compare German drama with productions and production methods from other countries. Several times, the analysed television professionals raised questions about “German content” or a “local colour” (e.g. Eichner and Waade 2015), on the basis of which series produced and financed in Germany can possibly circulate beyond national borders. “There’s this famous saying” (Hackfort): “the more local, the more global” (Konrad)—so said the “HaRiBo” writer trio (Hackfort, Konrad and Kropf 2018), behind the gangster drama 4 Blocks (2017–2019) and the Netflix action thriller Kleo (2022), with an ironic undertone while pleading for specific, local settings in German TV dramas for a transnational market.

The simultaneity and interconnectedness of globalisation and localisation processes have been framed as “glocalisation” (Robertson 2014) and have already been observed in quite a few academic studies of television. In a longitudinal study of national fictional television productions in Germany, Italy, Spain, France and the UK, Gerd Hallenberger (e.g. 1998, 2002, 2010) has shown how a genre canon of its own developed in each country. Those genre canons emerged simultaneously in the confrontation with US television and against the background of the respective country’s media and television history, shaped to a large extent by national influences. From early on in West Germany television history, the presentation of US series parallel to domestic ones played an important role (Hickethier 1998, 356–363). A look at West German television history underscores how local series repeatedly took up and reshaped US-American patterns (Schneider and Zimmermann 1992, 7). In the GDR, as in other Eastern European countries of “real socialism”, such links to US television hardly existed, at least officially. Television series in these places took more influence from theatre and radio dramas and radio adaptations of literary material than from Western “soap opera genres” (Bílek 2013, 1). Still, “glocal” dimensions can be identified in GDR television history, namely in relation to the “ambiguous media communication” (“doppelbödige Medienkommunikation”) that Peter Hoff (in Hickethier 1998, 182) attributes to the country’s television: GDR citizens accessed, on the one hand, the state-run media programmes aimed at legitimising state actions and, on the other, the Western, border-crossing programmes that offered satisfaction of individual needs.

Transnational or glocal features have also shaped German television drama at large, in that it usually addresses a larger German-speaking region and frequently develops from cooperation between Germany, Austria, Switzerland and, to some extent, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. The German-speaking TV market is an example of a region that ranks above the nation, according to Victor Roudometof’s scalar model of glocalisation (2016) as well as the later conceptualisation by Kim T. Hansen (2020, 87). The fact that German television series and film are often created and broadcast only in this German-speaking region proves that, while there is cross-national action here, it is rarely truly global.

The present book’s extensive focus on Germany is primarily motivated by the pragmatic need to narrow the field of research. Certainly, discourses and tendencies towards the so-called quality drama can also be found in Austria and Switzerland—see, for example, the ambitious Swiss crime drama Wilder (SRF 1, 2017–) or the various miniseries that the Austrian director and writer David Schalko has been involved with, including Braunschlag (ORF, 2012), a comedy, and M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder / M – A City Hunts a Murderer (ORF/TV Now, 2019), a serial TV adaptation of Fritz Lang’s classic film M (1931). However, to take up other German-speaking nations’ series in detail would go beyond the scope of my study. Still, this book takes into account the fluid boundaries of the German-speaking world as well as more general transnational and transcultural dimensions when it expounds upon how practitioners negotiate transformations of television and screenwriting in Germany through the issue of quality drama.

1.8 Structure of the Present Study

The two chapters that follow this introduction present some definitions and conceptual basics and explain the industry discourse on quality drama at a more abstract level. Chapter 2, titled “Quality TV Drama: Fields of Research and Practitioners’ Perspectives”, drills down into the term “quality TV (drama)” and the related field of research, dealing with the connection between television and quality. In addition to discussing the well-known quality TV criteria of Robert J. Thompson (1996), which a number of analyses use (e.g. Blanchet 2011), this chapter identifies gaps in quality TV research as well as other contexts, which have mostly arisen through single-minded attention on US series. German and public-service television fiction represent different contexts through which these gaps can be addressed. I then explain that the aesthetic evaluations that inevitably arise from the discussion of quality TV take place in specific contexts. This then opens up into an explanation of the book’s approach of considering quality TV drama as both a category and an evaluation discourse of the television industry. Quality judgements, as becomes clear, shape different phases of television production and consistently take place in project networks and screen idea work groups. The last part of Chapter 2 incorporates initial findings from the interviews and participant observations and explains which textual aspects the interviewed producers attributed to quality drama and which transnational examples they referred to. Similar to the quality TV discourses found in television criticism and television studies (e.g. Nesselhauf and Schleich 2016, 11), here we see prototypes crystallise, so to speak, in the form of repeated reference to and thematising of specific shows, such as Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013). With reference to corresponding examples, especially from the US and also from Denmark, the practitioners emphasised in particular serial storylines across several episodes and associated character development as (desirable) characteristics of quality drama.

Chapter 3, titled “Drama Production in Networks: Starting Points, Methods and First Results”, explains the two concepts of “project network” and “screen idea work group”, which form a central basis for the following investigation. The methodologies I use build on these two models, in particular because the study includes interviews with members of such screenwriting and production networks. In addition to the method of interviews with experts or “exclusive informants” (Bruun 2016, 139), that of participant observation is presented. Furthermore, Chapter 3 discusses the analysis and interpretation of the data obtained. Here, the project network and the screen idea work group (in addition to more fundamental considerations from media industry and production studies) once again represent an important basis of analysis. The aforementioned hierarchies in these networks are illustrated through an analysis of commissioning editors and their influence on screenwriting. The presumed high status of editors has met considerable criticism in recent discourse on quality TV drama from Germany, and practitioners have made repeated pleas for production cultures that allow writers to act more autonomously (Krauß 2020a, 178). Against this background, the final section discusses how editors are involved in project networks and screen idea work groups and how this aspect of their role and their hybrid profession in general is changing.

Chapter 4, “Germany’s Television Landscape: Actors and Production Areas”, begins the actual investigation of German television drama with an introduction to its structures. In doing so, the chapter also provides important information for readers less familiar with German television. I first describe production areas and central actors by focusing on programme commissioners. This role has diversified considerably since the 2010s, particularly since pay TV and SvoD operators began producing drama in the German language. Established broadcasters have also changed considerably—as can be seen with the example of Das kleine Fernsehspiel (The Little Television Play), ZDF’s traditional and influential department for “auteur” and debut films, which has now opened up to series. With regard to the different broadcasters and platforms, I describe various business models or “dispositive structures” of television in terms of production (Hickethier 1995). The second part of the chapter focuses on production companies. These companies represent a very decisive factor in Germany, since they—and not the broadcasters themselves—are who generally develop and produce series. Regarding the quality or “high-end” drama segment, this look at production companies shows that the boundaries between television and film are becoming increasingly blurred. In addition to current quality productions—which, in Germany, mostly materialise as high-budget miniseries and overlap with multi-part television films (so-called Mehrteiler)—Chapter 4 presents other series types and production areas that shape the German television series landscape. Hybrid forms of television film and series as well as broadcast slots are taken into account. Schedule placements—that is, whether a drama’s episodes are shown in a daytime programme or on Sunday night—continue to structure German series production up to the present day; despite the non-linear distribution channels enabled by the internet, they still represent an important reference point in practitioners’ negotiations.

The fifth chapter, “Financing and Distributing Television Drama: Economic Networks”, follows on from the overview of current broadcasters and platforms to explain the networks they form to finance and distribute series. The special consideration of economics is undertaken in view of the fact that practitioners repeatedly deal with economic issues in their discourses on quality drama. When US-based SvoD companies are among the funders, the economic networks bear transnational traits. The second part of Chapter 5 details such approaches to transnational co-production and co-financing, which have gained new momentum in Europe since 2015 (the start of this study), but which practitioners also regard as a challenge. This chapter also deals with opportunities and challenges by taking a closer look at the economic interplay between the commissioning broadcaster or platform and the production company. Due to the increasing number of distributors, changes have occurred in the relationships between the two sides and, linked to this, how television drama is financed and initiated. The model of “100 per cent financing by broadcaster” that has dominated for years and the associated “total buyout” model, where the broadcaster receives all rights (e.g. Fröhlich 2010, 123), is increasingly being called into question. Some cases, however, show tendencies towards the studio model, where commissioners take over large parts of the production in addition to distribution, and as such bind creators to them. The new, central player Netflix in particular relies on such practices and on “exclusive” content, which in the course of the pursued “glocal strategy” (Hansen 2020, 97) serves not only the local German-speaking market but most Netflix territories worldwide.

Beyond the specific case of Netflix, the following Chapter 6, titled “Quality Drama as Transnational Expansion: Exports and Local Specifics”, analyses how the television industry in Germany is expanding transnationally. This chapter takes local aspects and particularities into account that accompany processes of transnationalisation in the sense of glocalisation. First, I describe transnational and local dimensions of the German television industry in more detail. On the one hand, trends in the transformation of television “from a national, largely broadcasting, market to a transnational multiplatform market” (Turner 2018, 137) are also evident in Germany; on the other hand, national specificities such as federalism continue to shape large parts of public-service broadcasting and media funding (which is increasingly also involved in TV drama). The chapter’s second part specifically deals with negotiations on series exports, which, in Germany, has historically been a sporadic endeavour (Krauß 2020f, 2–3). However, today a larger number of licensees in different countries and territories are available, through various “internet-distributed television services” (Lotz et al. 2018, 42), and English-speaking markets in particular are showing greater openness to non-English (i.e. also German-language) series (Redvall 2018, 138). At the same time, non-English series remain niche programmes in the Anglo-American distribution context, and mainstream SvoD players more recently seem to be refocusing once again on more predictable and mainstream content in English (see Krauß 2023e). The third and final section of Chapter 6 demonstrates how individual project networks or screen idea work groups and their practitioners are transnationalising in the context of export ambitions and the expanded television industry. The transnationality of individual players, working groups and production companies can become a decisive criterion for evaluating, selecting and finally greenlighting television dramas, alongside the transnational potential of the content, narrative style and aesthetic at the textual level.

Chapter 7, “Contents and Forms of German TV Drama: Aesthetic and Narrative Styles and Criticisms”, also addresses transnational and local aspects in describing how the interviewed and observed television professionals discussed the content and forms of German television series. The first part describes how the interviewed producers, on the basis of their attributions for transnational quality TV, debated the state of current television fiction from Germany. The comparison with productions from other countries played a decisive role. The chapter’s second part looks more closely at the practitioners’ criticism of specific quality drama projects from Germany. Finally, the last part of Chapter 7 shows how the producers dealt with German television history in this engagement with German TV fiction (see also Krauß 2021a). Their statements not only revealed the impression of a “golden age” in the present or recent past—with very different and increased distributing and licensing opportunities—but also reflected on numerous reasons why quality serials initially faced difficulty gaining ground in German television. In addition to a certain tepid perspective on serial television drama (compared to the television film, which has long been held in higher esteem), this chapter indicates how German production cultures historically evolved within institutions.

The eighth and final chapter is titled “Quality TV and Its Production Cultures: Negotiations on Writing and Producing”. It is fundamentally concerned with production cultures as a central object of the industry discourse on quality drama, and its particular focus is screenwriting. The interviewed and observed practitioners considered this early phase of script development to be a cornerstone of quality and discussed deficits and barriers in this regard. The chapter begins by describing the economic framework of screenwriting in detail, including certain payment patterns and creatives’ special commitment to quality projects, which is accompanied by the danger of self-exploitation. The second part elaborates on how producers negotiated the writers’ room—a US working group export—and, linked to it, the more generally collaborative nature of writing for television as compared to film (see Newcomb and Lotz 2002, 76). I then delineate writers’ room practices in the German industry, including looking at obstacles posed by its production cultures (first and foremost, an adherence to the work of individual authors, which dominated for years). The third part of Chapter 8 focuses on practical and discursive approaches to the “showrunner”, the leader in the series production process who is responsible for both business and creative aspects (e.g. Newman and Levine 2012, 40). The showrunner figure is closely interwoven with the writers’ room, because this person commonly leads and recruits that writing collective. The showrunner, another US export, is a particular example of changes in German series production and heavily factors into discussions about hierarchies in script development. The chapter’s fourth section dives into the industry discourse regarding the agency of screenwriters. In addition to illuminating screenwriters’ historical marginalisation, here I investigate the often complicated relationship between director and writer in project-based script work.

“To Be Continued: Conclusion and Outlook” concludes the book. This chapter highlights the broader transformation processes of television against which practitioners have negotiated quality TV drama in Germany as well as its narrative styles and production cultures. Linked to the multiplication and expansion of the television landscape (both in and outside Germany), I address changes in distribution, programmes, production methods and especially screenwriting as well as reception. Although this study focuses on the production side, the researched industry discourse frequently referred to the audience and its changes. That is, the interviewed practitioners repeatedly dealt with the socialisation of viewers in Germany, which is manifesting in increasingly specialised and diversified target groups with tastes in foreign markets, set against a transforming digital media environment. The discussions also repeatedly touched upon other criteria for and ways of evaluating viewers’ feedback besides the quantitative audience rating that has dominated for years. The German quality TV drama, as negotiated and approached by the researched practitioners, stands at the beginning of a digitalised television landscape based on data and algorithms (Holt and Perren 2019, 36), which in turn requires new conceptions of audiences. In describing the multidimensional industry discourse on quality drama, the book also maps such fundamental, ongoing changes in television at large, in Germany and beyond.

Note

  1. 1.

    The full list of German series case studies to acquire the interviewees is: Babylon Berlin (ARD/Sky Deutschland, 2017–), Club der roten Bänder/Red Band Society (Vox, 2015–2017), Dark (Netflix, 2017–2020), Deutschland 83/86/89 (RTL/Amazon Prime Video, 2015–2020), Drinnen – Im Internet sind alle gleich / Inside – On the Internet All Are Equal (ZDF, 2020), DRUCK/SKAM Germany (Funk/ZDF, 2018–), ECHT/Real (ZDF, 2021–), Eichwald, MdB (ZDF, 2014–2019), Mitten in Deutschland: NSU / NSU German History X (ARD et al., 2016), Die Stadt und die Macht/The City and the Power (ARD/NDR/Degeto, 2016), Das Verschwinden/The Disappearance (ARD et al., 2017), Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo/We Children from Zoo Station (Amazon Prime Video et al., 2021) and 4 Blocks (TNT Serie, 2017–2019). See also Krauß (2023c, 23–30).