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Essay Of Series 'taken'

Through close textual analysis of an individual episode of an American television series of your choice, discuss how it either does, or does not, conform to the tenets of ‘Quality TV'. In addition, outline the problems/benefits that defining this series as ‘Quality TV' has, in other words, assuming your chosen series is ‘Quality TV', why is that significant?

Fig 1

For this analysis I have chosen the series of Taken to find out whether it conforms to the tenets of ‘Quality TV'. Taken chronicles 50 years of alien abduction and government conspiracies, all circling around three families. The whole saga begins during World War II. We witness a bomber go down with its crew, who then miraculously all survive. But what follows is more terrifying than the crash. Crew member Russsell Keys is plagued by nightmares of the crash and when he learns that his fellow crewmen are dying he is plagued by much more.
Meanwhile, Sally Clarke is unhappily married with kids, a lonely woman on a farm. When she gets a strange visitor things begin to change for her but these changes set into motion a chain of events that will take 50 years to culminate.
Finally, Captain Owen Crawford discovers that he has the perfect means by which to ascend to power in the military. He gets involved in the crash of an object outside of Roswell, New Mexico. The crash consumes him and drives him, his story interjecting with that of Keys and Clarke.

Quality TV
According to Robert J. Thompson (1997) the first criterion of a quality television programme is that it is not regular television and that it belongs in prime time, however low the ratings (Elsaesser, 1994, p.28). It must break the established rules of television and be like nothing that has come before it. To do this the format has to be consistently different to that of the usual four camera, studio production that is often seen within shows such as Friends or Cheers. The Taken production had close to 200 shooting locations,...