What is prestige television?
I read an article today that referred to Foundation as "prestige television," and my first reaction was, "idk man, I didn't think it was all that great." This got me thinking, though, and I'm going down two separate paths here.
First, prestige television is a category that gets thrown about more as a marker of social context than of the quality of the show. Today, at least, these shows are typically big budget, highly marketed (specifically marketed as high quality), and likened to each other. Foundation was really hyped up in the runup to its release. There was a whole slew of articles calling it Apple TV's sci-fi Game of Thrones. More or less the same thing happened with The Rings of Power. Basically, "prestige television" feels like a term that was coopted by television studios in a landscape that has trended towards putting all their eggs into one basket. This only covers the studios' use of the term, though.
Second is the audience's use of the term. There remains the obvious question of if we're going to ward off the tv studios' coopting of the term, how are we going to use it? It really came out of a specific era of television, and regardless of anyone's assessment of relative quality, shows like that aren't really getting made anymore.
Personally, though? I wonder if we even need the term. My sort of emotional reaction to the conversation about prestige television is that it reminds me of the debate around "literature." It's not a debate I want to get into, but it's another label that has unclear boundaries and a tendency towards the old. In practice, it just gets used to snub certain books (e.g. "Dune is good, but it's not literature"). With television, I'm not saying we need to do away with the concept of prestige television, but if we do want to keep using it (and again, studios will even if we don't),
a) What should it mean?
b) How should we use it (i.e. for good, not for snobbery)?
Unlike a lot of bullshit network shows, prestige television plays out like a novel, each episode being a chapter of a larger story. The general feel is like a film ---- compare The Young Pope to Criminal Minds, for instance.
Proper prestige television has a feel to it. Shows that rely on cheap drama (like the last half of Big Love) are not prestige.
I wish for the comeback of quality, largely episodic series with enough episodes in a season to allow for whimsical fillers, experimentation, and goofing off. And I'm not talking about anthologies such as Black Mirror.
Strange New Worlds is pleasantly episodic imo, but not as much as some other Star Trek series. Worth checking out if you have access and like Star Trek.
I like that show, the only thing missing for me is the amount of episodes. There's only so much you can do with 10 episodes per season.
I don't think Black Mirror can really do more than a dozen really good episodes. Did you watch Years and Years by chance? That is what BM would devolve into if they tried to do an actual series.
Anyway, I know what you mean. I want a good series like X-Files where they have the clear 'Monster of the Weak' episodes but then also have the mythology ones. Give us not one but TWO backdoor pilots!
I'm not even a massive X-Files fan, but it really captured the best of all worlds (at least for me.)
I love The X-files but I'm not even thinking about stuff like that, but rather low brow stuff like Psych, Early Edition, TNG, Monk, House MD, The Pretender, etc.
I'm excited for Doctor Who's new phase.
House is perfect. I'm not a 'put on a show in the background' type, but if I were, House would be it.
So like a renaming of mini-series from the 80s and 90s like "The Thorn Birds" or "North and South" but with better effects/cinematics due to modern technology?
I haven't seen either, but its neat to see Barbara Stanwyck's name pop up in a mini-series.
Well, what we use to call it before it was known as "prestige TV" was "HBO". But eventually other production companies starting making high budget TV shows as well.
In the end, it's important as a TV show weight class. Prestige TV shows have big budgets and big ambitions; what's a failure for them may be a success for a regular TV show. It's not reasonable to expect a random episode of Friends to have the cinematography of a Game of Thrones episode.
There is another thing I cannot put properly into words that prestige television also encompasses.
Wheel of Time is my example of a show with big ambitions and a big budget that fails somehow on even a visual level to meet that "prestige tv" qualifier.
Venkatesh Rao calls it premium mediocre.
It's a little outdated as a term IMO. When it first started being used, shows like The Sopranos & Boardwalk Empire were still anomalies. These days a lot of what made "prestige television" prestigious is just de rigueur production -- the budgets, the sprawling scripts, the high-profile casting. Like another commenter said, in 2023 I hear it as "the studio wants this to be award bait."
When I think of 'Prestige', I think of expensive watches. Maybe not as technically good as something a tenth of it's price, but it's very shiny and has connotations of wealth, etc.
So maybe not 'good', just fancy.
I agree with this. I've not watched either Game of Thrones or Westworld myself, but from the people I know who did, their later seasons were not 'good' (in the sense that they as viewers did not enjoy it) and the consensus on the internet is the same, but they're unarguably 'prestige dramas' at the same time. The term doesn't provide a useful indicator of narrative quality.
Unfortunately it's only the first and second seasons that lay the landscape for a show to be called Prestige. A lot of shows have an epic first season, maybe with a great follow up season and that sets up the marketing bullshit. Then they fall over, usually epically. The stories are crud as they pad them out to fill a void, because they have to expand on characters and introduce new ones that make no sense, etc. We've all watched these shows and grimaced.
I work in the TV industry (IT, thankfully), so I hear all the good, the bad, the marketing and PR strategies, the works. A good show will sell itself, sometimes a little too late (hello Firefly). These days, it's a big studio shot show with mega cash flow that gets the fancy-pants badge but it doesn't mean it's audience good, it was just executive sign off good, and those coked up assholes make a lot of stupid mistakes and sign off many a faltering show. They don't care as long as it brings in the money. With the right advertising they can make them look like they should and then it's back to PR to get that pilot number pull.
I won't rant anymore, its safe to say I've had enough of the industry. Prestige just means big budget, named editors and awesome graders.
I think the way it's used is similar to "Oscar bait." They're slickly made shows, with certain characteristics, designed to get both awards attention and online attention. Something like The Last of Us falls under that category.
I don't necessarily think "prestige" is any marker of whether the show is good, or in your example "real tv" in the way one would discuss literature. It's usually just tv that appeals to media people, or to upper middle class people.
But then there's stuff like Yellowstone. Is that prestige TV? It's not very well revered by the media people and it has yet to be nominated at the Emmy's. It's more of a populist TV show with an atypical demographic from shows like Succession (which have pretty low viewership all things considered).
By default, it's a marketing term first, and marketing will throw any term anywhere if they think it'll sell more (or if they think they'll get to cash their check and dip).
With that said, I mentally reserve the term for shows that are ambitious, unique, well paced, well executed and the like.
My personal list is roughly
There's a few you could argue off that list and a few more that I think are stellar that maybe deserve to be on, but ultimately it's also heavily influenced by personal preference.
Interesting that you have multiple animated shows on that list. By your definition of "prestige tv" their presence makes sense, but I wouldn't have thought to include them myself.
Yeah, to me narrative is narrative. Obviously a lot of animation isn't even trying to be "prestige" tv, but I do think that several qualify, and there's a few more that I could have considered adding.
Personally, I've always thought of it as TV that didn't make excuses for itself. Someone correct me if I'm wrong because I wasn't alive before the Sopranos, but it feels like nearly every series I've seen before it had a kind of built in apology for itself. They were hokey, they looked cheap, there wasn't much to them beyond the surface, but that's TV y'know? I've always thought of prestige TV as a term for shows that refused to submit to that idea, and demanded to be taken completely seriously, and to be considered and compared to any other medium in artistic depth and merit.
All of this to say, it's pretty meaningless in the modern context. TV has long become a "serious" art form, even surpassing film in many people's eyes (including creators).
Sopranos was certainly important, but before that we had David Lynch's Twin Peaks and The X-Files.
On the importance of The X-Files.