Television Drama

TRISHA DUNLEAVY is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama (2005).

• Introduction TV Drama Forms and Contexts Dominant Narrative Forms: the Series and Serial Movements in Style: Naturalism, Realism and Modernism Serial Melodrama: The Soap Opera Narrative Complexity in Post-1980s Series and Serials Tradition and Innovation in Situation Comedy Drama and 'TVIII': Innovations at the 'High-End' ConclusionNotes Bibliography Index

'Two decades ago the idea of a world television culture seemed unlikely; the medium's range, influence, and genres were largely local and national. The appearance of a book like Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation by Trisha Dunleavy, a preeminent scholar of the small screen in her native New Zealand, stands as an index of a new global unity in its examination of seminal British and American programming. In a careful, discerning, erudite but accessible study of drama in a variety of forms, Dunleavy does more than just bridge boundaries and splice key series and shows; she brings the television she knows so well to life on the page, transforming TV texts into words and ideas, giving us a book as smart and multi-faceted as the contemporary medium itself.' - David Lavery, Co-Founding Editor of Critical Studies in Television: Scholarly Studies for Small Screen Fictions