Until recently, academic research within television studies has avoided dealing with questions of quality and evaluation, or as one researcher wrote, "Quality, for some good reasons, has become a bad word". However in the last few years we can find more and more writing in the field that examines the question of quality, especially when dealing with television dramas. Research on television has nevertheless remained very cautious when applying the term. Most researchers use "quality" as a characteristic of a genre and not in an evaluative or judgmental sense. In this course we will examine the genre of the "quality drama". We will begin with the quality dramas of the 1980s, go on to the popular serials of the 1990s, critically discuss HBO's "not TV", examine queer television dramas, and look at contemporary texts.