Australian Cultural Policy Unravelled : The Digital Demise of National Television Drama

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 21^st 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.