Marion McCutcheon

This book explores the impacts of digitisation and sector internationalisation on national drama production, and their consequences for industry, audiences, and domestic storytelling. Using Australia as a case study, it provides a systematic evaluation of the efficacy of cultural policy intended to support the production and circulation of national drama from 2001-23. During the first two decades of the 21st century, new digital distribution technologies transformed the business of television worldwide, bringing conditions of abundance that ended mass media logics grounded in scarcity of content and providers. In doing so digitisation upended longstanding norms around the funding, production, and circulation of national television drama. In this period, the conditions for which cultural policy was first created changed radically due to digital distribution and sector internationalisation. This book’s analyses of the responses of policy makers, broadcasters, production companies and screen agencies to television’s distribution revolution evaluates their collective impacts on Australian television drama. It explains how 21st century dynamics undermined cultural policy supporting the production of Australian drama with cultural value, leading to a catastrophic fall in hours made. This book argues that the scale of disruption digitisation causes to television in the transnational and national space requires a bold re-imagining of cultural policy instruments intended to support Australian drama. This account will be of interest to screen industry practitioners, policy makers and scholars, and, more generally, to anyone wondering whatever happened to Australian drama.

This book offers an account of how the global popularity of the Nordic Noir wave of television crime drama such as? The Killing/Forbrydelsen and The Bridge/Broen/Bron?had a profound impact on the production of television crime drama in Australia. Through a series of case studies including Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, The Kettering Incident, Secret City and Mystery Road, the authors explore how the Australian television industry responded to the new streaming environment by producing shows with international reach and appeal. Central to this analysis is the concept of 'total value' which expands the notions of cultural and economic value to account for how these crime dramas generate value for the Australian screen industry in general, their creators in particular, as well as the social and financial benefits that may ensue for the communities in which they took place and audiences across the world.