I Can't Believe It's Not TV!

Ten signs you’re watching a “prestige” show.

- Kathryn VanArendonk

DO YOU NEED help recognizing whether the show you’re watching is prestige television?

Are you worried the program you’ve fallen in love with isn’t high-quality entertainment but actually just cheap trash? Are you a showrunner who needs to make sure everyone understands that you’re not just sending random episodic pabulum out into the universe—you’re making art? In 2017, there are several surefire ways a show can signal its importance. Here, we look at ten of them.

1. “It’s like a novel.”

This is possibly the oldest, most reliable way to tell us that your show is of far higher quality than regular, dumb, mass-market TV. It’s not TV—it’s literature! This trope dates back all the way to the mid-’90s, if you can believe it, when it was applied to shows like Homicide: Life on the Streets and ER, but The Wire and The Sopranos are probably the shows that really anchored this idea in our conversation.

2. “It’s like a movie.”

See No. 1, except this includes even more pointed implications of cinematographic sophistication, narrative complexity, and high production values. It also implies the ability to swear and depict (usually female) nudity. The most egregious current example is Game of Thrones, which its creators recently described as “like a 73-hour movie.” More broadly, the impulse to describe TV as “cinematic” covers everything from Mr. Robot to Transparent to Big Little Lies to Fargo and is regularly used without much precision about what, precisely, it means.

3. They’re not episodes, they’re “chapters.”