Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies

This article presents results from a production study on how the on-air schedule is changing in the digital era at the Danish public service broadcaster, TV 2. TV 2’s multichannel and increasingly non-linear television portfolio has a profound impact on the production practices involved in order to meet the public service obligations. The analysis shows that the producers develop new ways to secure an audience of scale under these conditions. So far three lessons are learned: First, the workflow of promoting content and the demands on the qualities of the promotional material have changed. Second, an understanding of the interplay between flow and subscribtion-video-on-demand (SVOD) scheduling is emerging. And third, a renewed focus is put on branding the viewer–provider relationship. The article concludes that the production of on-air scheduling makes the contours of what can be termed ‘a third television paradigm’ visible in which a distinction between linear and non-linear television does not apply.

While the international flows of media content and the emergence of global media giants have gained extensive scholarly attention, their implications for national television production remain understudied. The article addresses the question of how the concentration of ownership and transnational flows involved in global media industries determine television production in a small national market. By analysing the structures, practices and agencies involved in programme format import and adaptation in Finland, the article introduces the format catalogue as the main vehicle of distributing and establishing the structuring properties of global formats in local television production.

As television production becomes increasingly global, television studies must advance its understanding of how the global and the local intersect and impact upon the cultures of production. Drawing on original comparative research of three small European nations – Denmark, Ireland and Wales – this article offers empirical insights into the distinct challenges and opportunities for non-Anglophone producers and public service broadcasters (PSBs). The concept of small nations is employed critically to reveal how distinctions of scale and power make a tangible difference to how television is produced and distributed, and to how smaller, national PSBs are trying to secure a sustainable future.

At the time of its conception, the producers of Stromberg, the German adaptation of the British situation comedy The Office, were accused of copyright infringement. Based on exclusive data from qualitative interviews with the creative personnel, this article contributes to the previously under-theorised field of television comedy production studies in non-Anglophone contexts. Exploring the clash of standardised procedures on the global television market with traditional practices and a distinct production culture in Germany, it challenges established theorisations of television ‘format’ and argues for a more nuanced and case-specific understanding of how adaptation processes facilitate and stimulate creativity across borders.

This article focuses on a profession of key importance for understanding today’s screen industries in Central-Eastern Europe: the independent producer. Using the approach of critical production studies, the article focuses on producers’ ‘reflexivity’ to reveal how their professional identity is being constructed and how they are positioning themselves within the broader ecology of the media industry. By analysing a set of semi-structured interviews with Czech producers of all kinds, this article identifies five recurrent tropes related to their ‘self-conceptions’. The tropes demonstrate how the producers perform their identities differently from their UK or US counterparts: as largely disempowered, dependent on public support and on the powerful public service broadcaster, desperately looking for more stability, autonomy and recognition.

This article discusses the regulatory framework within which the television documentary production industry operates in France, and how public policies have created and then adapted a support system in response to the active agency of professionals. I give particular attention to the reform of the support system implemented between 2014 and 2017, which has privileged certain categories of non-fiction programmes and affected the patterns of production. I will look at the definition of quality criteria in documentary funding, focusing on the pivotal, though controversial, notion of ‘creative documentary’, and on the diverse approaches that inform French audiovisual policy. By focusing on policy interventions, the article will address the economic and political history of television documentary in France between 1986 and 2017.