Success and the TV industry: how practitioners apprehend the notion(s) of success in their discourses within the Anglophone Transatlantic Television Industry

This thesis explores the discourses of success within the Anglophone transatlantic television industry through the semi-structured interviews of sixteen industry practitioners. The TV industry has long been studied in media studies, its working conditions discussed in production studies, its texts scrutinised in TV studies; but what drives the TV industry? What is ‘success’ to television industry practitioners? How do they apprehend it and discuss it? Looking at this key element through those at the heart of it is this research’s purpose, and a necessary step for cultural, production and television studies to better comprehend the industry and what drives it and its members. After discussing the methods selected for this research and bringing forth a new, sevenfold taskbased industry categorisation, my research will tackle its subject of enquiry through three main topics: •the perception of decision-makers by industry practitioners •the industrial executive discourses of success among the different industry constituents (networks/cable/premium/public channels/studios); •the personal definitions of success of all practitioners (and their link to industrial/professional success). This research will engage with many academic fields: from discourse analysis and industrial sociology to organisational research and management psychology, through production studies, cultural studies and film/television/media studies, giving it a clearly multidisciplinary scope. With this thesis, I also wish to further help bridge the gap between academic and industrial expertise. By doing so, and making sense of industrial and personal ideas of success, my research aims at developing a new framework for it, thereby proposing to academics a first approach to the notion of success in this industry