Quantifying Quality: PBS and Taste

As other posters have mentioned, it’s remarkable how much British television informs PBS and its cultural branding, particularly through such widely sought out programs as Downton Abbey and Sherlock. On the one hand, this is a somewhat unsurprising development if one considers the tremendous strength that the public broadcasting ethos of ‘informing, educating, and entertaining’ has possessed in shaping British television history itself; public broadcasting there has undoubtedly influenced the forms of public broadcasting in the US. On the other hand, it is astounding how much British culture continues to be associated with conceptions of taste and high class in the US, and how minimally ‘chav culture’ and lower British class representations have been disseminated outside of the UK in contrast. British programming broadcast on PBS draws extensively on pre-established, literary material – executing a ‘high class’ connection to literature – that is proudly linked to British national heritage. This can be seen, for instance, in Sherlock’s privileging of its London setting, or in Downton Abbey’s foregrounding of class conflicts and dynamics in its central thematics, as well as its concrete ties to the seminal British drama Upstairs/Downstairs.

Bourdieu has outlined how taste is determined by class and education, and constructs itself primarily as a matter of differentiation and rejection of other tastes. In this sense, PBS constructs itself in this instance as not low class, as not based on commercial or popular appeal necessarily, but rather as a designator of what ‘quality’ television is. The audience it addresses is nowhere as plainly detected as in the commercials that accompany online streaming of its Masterpiece program series. An ad for a luxurious cruise around Europe, emphasizing the beautiful landscapes and lavish museums, clearly courts a slightly more mature, affluent, educated audience that has the means and desire to travel in order to experience the ‘legacy’ of Europe’s history and art. This is a distinguished audience that has chosen PBS over other stations, making its preferences clear.

What can be a productive comparison is turning to the notion of ‘quality television’. Though it is a slippery term at best, its associations in different contexts seem fascinating to me. On the one hand, PBS presents itself as a distinguished marker of ‘quality’ programs that emphasize education, history, art, and literary adaptations. On the other hand, cable channels like HBO – which itself proclaims, ‘it’s not TV, it’s HBO – court the term in order to emphasize a notion of ‘quality’ that privileges groundbreaking televisual storytelling, writer-driven shows, and content which embraces the taboo and would certainly fall far from PBS’s goals of courting wider audiences, preferring to tap into niche tastes. Both channels draw heavily on notions of branding differentiation, unique programming, and high production values to offer their viewers guidelines for taste and taste molding. Even so, PBS purports to educate its viewer and provides its own ‘service’ in doing so, preferring a (somewhat more) generalized address while HBO draws on the discourse of quality for a different agenda, and its viewers are drawn into a subscription service that clearly demarcates a higher class, affluent audience. In this sense, PBS offers itself up to a broadcast audience, though its content clearly demarcates the boundaries of this in emphasizing British content focused on white upper class lives and relying heavily on literary heritage. Ultimately, other British classes and content are not the only casualties; in addressing such a specialized audience in disguise under the presentation of a broadcast, general address, PBS risks alienating large sectors of its audience that may mistakenly be perceived as part of the ‘margins’.