Quality Is Just Another Word

One spring afternoon while in quarantine, I ended up watching NBC's Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-87) on Hulu. I watched because of the mythical status of Hill Street Blues in the history of television.1

It was, so the story goes, the first of its kind. Critics of the 1980s routinely praised Hill Street Blues for its formal innovations, always with the claim that the series was unlike any program on television at the time. Joyce Carol Oates's celebration of Hill Street Blues in a cover story for TV Guide is exemplary (Fig. 1). Ushering it — and television with it — into highbrow culture, she famously wrote, "[it] is as intellectually and emotionally provocative as a good book. In fact, from the very first Hill Street Blues struck me as Dickensian in its superb character studies, its energy, its variety: above all; its audacity."2 The series also entered academic discussion while still at its peak ratings in the 1980s. In the middle of the series' run in 1984 the influential television scholar Jane Feuer wrote, "Anyone writing about Hill Street Blues has to confront the idea that the series is 'different.'"3 The idea that a television show is "different," not to mention Dickensian, persists to this day in accounts of Game of Thrones, The Wire, Mad Men, and many others. It's as if we all keep forgetting that what feels different — often a synonym for new or complex or good or quality — has a history.

I am as guilty of forgetting this as anyone. It overwhelmed me when I first watched recent series such as Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects. When I first saw Big Little Lies, it felt different to me because of its visual richness, in particular the expansion of serial elements beyond the narrative and into the imagery, creating an aesthetics of interiority and trauma unlike anything I had previously seen, at least on television. And Sharp Objects seized me because of its sonic qualities — how, for example, aural forms give dimension and affect to personal and familial histories, as well provide tone to the story's Southern gothic roots.

We might read this feeling of difference as characteristic of capitalist culture, in which the novelty of a commodity often pivots on minor updates to a product line. What we call quality television is actually not so current or contemporary; it is not a product line that emerged with the rise of cable or HBO or streaming TV and their affordances. It emerged out of competition among NBC, ABC, and CBS in the 1980s, over and against what the television industry was manufacturing in what is often called "The Sitcom Factory" of the 1970s.

I have watched hours and hours of what came out of that factory, from Mary Tyler Moore, to Maude, to One Day at a Time. In returning to Hill Street Blues, I discovered that the feelings of difference that Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects give me now in fact emerged then, that this feeling is, to evoke Sianne Ngai, a tone that each series gives off. That tone beckons me as an aesthetic subject — one who ultimately is also a neoliberal subject, rewarded by series for my ability to navigate their cognitive complexity like a rational actor in the marketplace, maximizing my potential as a worker, much as the working family is central to quality TV.

All of this begins with Hill Street Blues.

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When MTM Enterprises developed Hill Street Blues, the production company introduced television viewers of the 1980s to a new tone and a new aesthetic, which were functions of a new relationship to visual form and televisual storytelling for primetime audiences. Given television's entrenchment in consumer culture and the stiff competition among the networks — CBS, ABC, and NBC — the objective in creating this new form are obvious enough: profit. Anyone who has written about television from the 1980s has encountered NBC President Grant Tinker's method of turning "quality into profits."4 Although Tinker did not actually utter these words himself, the "quality to profits" mode, carried over from his tenure at MTM Enterprises and its flagship series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, would define the new strategy of sidestepping formulaic approaches to television narrative, the aesthetic of the Sitcom Factory of the 1970s, in favor of the novelty, complexity, and seriality of the '80s.5 This turn to quality set the stage for the cult followings of niche, auteur-style programs such as David Lynch's Twin Peaks, where viewers' narrative expectations are challenged, even thwarted, rather than soothed with the then-expected televisual form of episodic closure.

In a 1983 American Film interview, Tinker, nicknamed "Mr. Quality TV" described the struggle of digging NBC out of third place in the networks' ratings race, where it trailed behind CBS and ABC. As the network president, Tinker attributes NBC's upward climb to investing in programs that were more conceptual, and thus more prone to ambivalent ratings from audiences, but also more likely to garner a loyal following, relying on viewer's affective investments. Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere are the prototypes for this model. To justify such an investment, Tinker relied on the intuition that audiences actually desired more conceptual programs — to be challenged rather than anaesthetized with reoccurring narrative patterns and motifs. He ends his interview in American Film with a call to "wake audiences up":

Part of it, I think, is a kind of lessening interest in the medium on the part of the audience. [ . . . ] I think we've bored audiences, and we have got to wake them up and get them back. When you do get them back — and 'Hill Street' is an example — they can really like a program. But I think you have to hit them with a two-by-four these days, and I'm not sure you had to before. There was a period in television when just the very fact of having the picture in your living room was enough to make you pay attention. Now the picture is there, but you're not necessarily looking at it.6

By evoking a picture that is there, but not necessarily being looked at, Tinker suggests that, in 1983, television is at a turning point. Visual attention wanes in the desire for something else, and that something — in this case a new form of narrative, in the form of Hill Street Blues — is marketed as "quality television." Tinker embraced an aesthetic of ambivalence, uncertainty, and irresolution — bursting the classical television form of the stand-alone episode, smearing stories across multi-episode arcs. Hill Street Blues not only adopts narrative ambivalence as a formal mode; the aesthetics and content of the program equally coalesce around uncertainty and irresolution. To the contemporary eye, these characteristics in a program are a given; but to an industry like television in 1981 — built upon the reliability of characters, settings, and stories week after week — a move toward narrative uncertainty marked a huge risk.

In the 1970s, episodic programs such as the sitcom had been attractive to networks because viewers were not required to have previous knowledge of the characters or story to tune in on any given week. Ideologically, the sitcom reinforces cultural values and norms: a return to order, closure, certainty, and predictability. Serial storytelling risked being associated with soap opera.7 Prime time serial storytelling was on the record as economically risky. The 1960s series Peyton Place, often considered the first prime-time serial, illustrates the risk. While the show was successful during its initial run, it did not perform well in syndication, and network executives attributed this failure to the building of a given plot across multiple episodes and the evolving nature of characters across time.8 So why should seriality succeed now, in 1981? Why did the formal uncertainty of Hill Street Blues become so appealing? How was Tinker able to capitalize upon qualities that had not long before been deemed undesirable by network executives?

To be sure, Hill Street Blues reflected the experiences of many Americans in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the perceived dissolution of the nuclear family, rising divorce rates, increased labor force participation by women, and declining birth rates, conditions that neoliberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker complained were byproducts of the welfare state.9 As the series coalesces around police captain Frank Furillo, his ex-wife, and the officers in his urban precinct, Hill Street Blues is marked by these anxieties — exemplified by the social issues that erupt from the cases at hand in a given episode, or even an entire season.

The television industry was tuned in to these shifting social structures, and therefore made its business by speaking to social issues, rather than pushing back against them. Independent production companies of the 1970s such as MTM Enterprises and Tandem Productions (Norman Lear's company) drew in "quality" viewers — that is, the demographic of viewers who are anywhere from the ages of 18-49, with disposable incomes, university educations, and living mostly in cities — through an appeal to the "work family." MTM Enterprises most famously introduced this prototype of the "work family" with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In the sitcom, Mary moves to Minneapolis to begin a new life as a newly single, working woman, a story line that implies Mary's choice to relegate motherhood and family life behind her aspirations for a career. What viewers soon realize is that Mary, in her role as one of the only women at the news station where she works, begins to take on a maternal role, as she mediates the predicaments and quandaries of her coworkers, as well as her friends, Rhoda and Phyllis. With these character dynamics, The Mary Tyler Moore became a blueprint for the work family — coworkers-as-family — on narrative television, a composite figure now recognizable to anyone living under neoliberalism.10

The figure of the work family became a successful model in 1970s sitcoms, as it allowed networks to maximize an appeal to progressive politics — in the case of Mary Tyler Moore, the second-wave feminist figure of the single, working woman — while still valorizing the traditional familial structures that a figure like Mary would seem to threaten.11 While Mary may have left the home, she did not escape her maternal destiny; in the end, she still had to care for her coworkers. In perfecting this formula, MTM programs created a figure to serve as a common denominator for every type of viewer, the one aligned with "mass" culture — the middle class, rural American — as well as the one aligned with "quality" — the urban, entrepreneurial worker. The type of visual and narrative pleasure derived from the work family persists to this day. It is a type of pleasure that, as Feuer writes, "can encompass both progressive longings for an alternative to the nuclear family, and 'reactionary' longings for a return to the presumed ideal family structures of the past. The liberal, quality structure of the programs permits and encourages both kinds of pleasure."12

As the networks were invested in appealing to the largest swath of demographics possible, the work family was appealing subject matter for prime-time sitcoms in the early 1970s. But, once the appeal of MTM's formula — both the sitcom itself and the use of the work family — wore off, networks sought new ways to engage audiences.

ABC, thanks to network executive Fred Silverman, was thriving with programs far outside the MTM wheelhouse: selling sex. Elana Levine notes in her book-length study of sexual culture and television of the 1970s that, "[I]n the Silverman years, the network came to specialize in sexually suggestive teases, what Silverman called 'the heat.' As the ABC promo writer Larry Sullivan described the formula, 'We sell the possibility of tits and ass and the possibility of violence. We present the stimuli and the response.'"13 While "the heat" is one strategy for drawing viewers, an appeal to sex and violence is hardly innovative, let alone sustainable in building a reliable audience base. Not to mention, such programs lost the appeal of the most desirable demographic: "quality."

The networks were all searching for a type of programming that would guarantee viewers. As MTM continued to use the figure of the work family, notably with the CBS sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati as late as 1978, the production company turned to experiments in form — particularly serial prime-time programming — while retaining reliable modes of content and character.

Thus, the appeal to the work family of which Feuer speaks is embedded in Hill Street Blues at the level of both form and content. The subject matter was known to appeal both to mass culture and the quality demographic. But the mode of storytelling was what MTM transformed. The most obvious example is the character of Frank Furillo. As the police captain, Furillo serves as a patriarchal figure anchoring the show's numerous, interweaving narrative threads. Furillo's character operates something like a point of view on each episode's events. Narrative attention is split between different characters (a given episode might contain at least half a dozen plot points) and yet the story circles back to Furillo, without fail. Furillo is both a traditional father figure — made clear in a heated encounter between his ex-wife and a bounced child support check in the series' very first episode — as well as a father to the officers in the station, who not only seek his approval at the level of bureaucracy, but at the level of morals. He is undoubtedly the moral compass of the series Hill Street Blues and of the Hill Street station, even with his shortcomings as an actual father to his son.

The series' impulse to anchor its serial narratives with the patriarchal figure of Captain Furillo recalls feminist media theorist Tania Modleski's characterization of the soap opera cast as a dysfunctional family, and the viewer of soap operas as the fretting mother, eager to workshop and fix her children's interpersonal conflicts and personal shortcomings that are, much like the narrative form of the soap opera itself, "never-ending."14 In other words, the soap opera form figures the housewife viewer as engaging in the same act of social reproduction that she is also engaged in at home. If Captain Furillo now takes on this role of social reproduction, what is notably different — and neoliberal — about his labor is that the work of social reproduction is on the clock. That is, the point of view of Frank Furillo is more akin to the experience of a neoliberal subject. Rather than a subject constructed by the rhythms of domestic or familial life imagined by traditional soap operas, here the viewer, via Furillo, is trained to do the emotional labor of managing a workplace as if it were also a domestic space, making the workplace and domestic space nearly interchangeable.

It is, therefore, not just the representation of the work family that hails the viewer of quality television as a neoliberal subject but also the transformation of television-viewing into an act of active knowledge management. The emphasis on the work family is one way quality television is neoliberal. It represents a world in which family figures, interpersonal relationships, and even a relation to one's self become economized. But what is more important, or more diffuse in the form itself, is what a quality television program, then and now, asks the viewer to do. Offering an unexpected example of the "economization of everything" that Wendy Brown discusses, quality television of the 1980s makes the television viewer increasingly responsible for managing the complexity of the narrative threads she is consuming, turning the consumption of quality television into a type of investment.15 A specific example from Hill Street Blues will illustrate this point.

One of the series' main characters, Detective John (J.D.) LaRue, has a long arc in the first season. Each episode provides an opportunity to show LaRue's descent into alcoholism — whether disappointing his work partner or letting down Furillo. With each successive episode, his problems worsen, and the effects of his drinking have graver consequences for those around him. His issues with alcohol climax when, after stealing his girlfriend's jewelry and selling it to a pawn shop to pay off thousands of dollars of debt, he botches an undercover operation and embarks on a binge drinking spree. Furillo threatens to fire him and warns him to get his life together. The final episode of season 1 (and part two of a two-part episode) ends with LaRue attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. After introducing himself to the group, a voice answers out, "How are you doing J.D.?" and the camera pans to show the viewer Frank Furillo among the group. The twist, unbeknownst to the viewer until that moment, is that Furillo himself has a history of drinking problems. There is a huge payoff from the viewer's investment with this revelation: knowledge that was previously concealed not only colors past experiences of the series but draws the viewer into the present and future.

This type of television storytelling is taken for granted by viewers today, myself included, as quality television of the present has perfected this model — what Kathryn VanArendonk calls the "thematic episode."16 Using "Maidenform" from AMC's Mad Men to illustrate, VanArendonk notes that, "unlike a procedural House-esque television series, Mad Men's plotlines meander across episode boundaries, developing slowly over the course of several weeks, and this episode is a typical example. All of the season's plotlines are in play here — protagonist Don Draper is struggling with a failing marriage and his stolen identity, copywriter Peggy Olson is searching for professional and personal fulfillment, the ad agency Sterling Cooper is increasingly unstable — but none of these plots have come to a full boil, and none are either introduced or resolved."17 Thus, an example of a similar type of payoff in Mad Men to that of Hill Street Blues is when, in a season 2 flashback, we see Don visiting Peggy in the hospital after giving birth, a huge narrative climax and revelation at the end of season 1 and a plot point that viewers previously assumed was a secret Peggy kept from her fellow co-workers at Sterling Cooper. Similarly, the surprising revelation of Jane's rapist at the end of season one of Big Little Lies rewards of the viewers, like myself, for their narrative investment after living through Jane's painful flashbacks, episode after episode. The ending of Sharp Objects-which hinges on a revelation in the last seconds of the series and even into the end credits — represents this pay-off in an even more acute form.

What these series and Hill Street Blues have in common is their form: one that asks the viewer to invest in a narrative for a pay-off, to see serial television consumption as a form of investment, where a kind of pay-off part and parcel to the consumption of a given story. While the sitcom may have contained elements attractive to the quality demographic — particularly content dealing with liberal social issues — the sitcom's episodic form became too familiar. For this reason, the sitcom as MTM Enterprises had perfected it, was not only no longer profitable, but even syndication of Mary Tyler Moore and The Bob Newhart Show fell flat, with mediocre ratings and a lack of appeal to younger audiences.18 Hill Street Blues was NBC's attempt to regain market share. What is perhaps most surprising about NBC's gamble with Hill Street Blues was its reliance not on that which could be easily measured, but on what could not be predicted: the emotional investment of the television viewer, invited to participate in the unfolding serial storytelling of quality television. The spectator that this television form constructs — the viewer whom Tinker is "hitting . . . with a two-by-four these days" — is a specifically neoliberal viewer, who is asked time and time again to maximize their viewing investments, to show up week after week, to keep track of everyone's problems: much like Furillo, to invest emotional labor into the work family and to see the skills in managing this neoliberal workplace as an opportunity to invest in self-growth.

Beyond investment that pays off, what makes quality television appealing is the equipment it gives us: things to say at water coolers and at parties. Quality television becomes a resource of cultural capital that makes us feel ourselves to be more sophisticated, raising our self-esteem, making us fluent in the lingo of a particular class, acculturating us. It is here where the choices of consumption are less about entertainment and more about the consumption of quality; it is not only the show that is quality, but the viewer, too. In other words, you are what you watch.

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If, as Joyce Carol Oates had once claimed, watching Hill Street Blues is akin to reading Dickens, it is not just because of the television program's serial resonances with for instance The Pickwick Papers, though that is likely why she made the connection.19 Anyone who has devoured a novel or binged a television series during the current pandemic knows that a key component to the consumption (and enjoyment) of these serial media is having the time to consume them in the first place; their pleasure requires being the opposite of a precarious subject, a category that applies to fewer and fewer, as global crises become more ubiquitous and more pressing with every passing day.20

But what is equally as alarming is the ease with which our pleasures have become investments, in the literal sense of the word. When I sat down to watch Hill Street Blues during the current pandemic, it was as an investment in my career as a scholar who studies television. With every series I watch, it often becomes difficult to tell the difference between labor and leisure, between pleasure and productivity. In fact, I turned to watch Hill Street Blues because I felt as though I had not been productive enough during quarantine; I saw my consumption of the series as a shortcut to thinking through the history of quality television I had read so much about, and a way to move forward with my work when the news and social media had zapped all my energy for writing.

This is an extreme example for sure, not to mention a privileged one. The neoliberal investments of my own television watching habits become visible, and their consequences measurable, as they are related to my field of employment, and the pressures of productivity that come with it.  But what can be said for pleasure? The objects we seek out — the quality television that makes us feel different — cannot be freed from the market forces that shape them, and us.

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Madeline Ullrich is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and an Andrew W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow. Her current research focuses on the study of television aesthetics and narrative, with an emphasis in feminist and queer theory.

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