Edited by: Dawid Junke (University of Wrocław)

The 2010s have been a period of groundbreaking changes within television industry. Following the so-called New Golden Age of the 2000s (fueled by the success of prestige cable dramas in the vein of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad), the second decade of the 21st century has transitioned into the “peak TV” period. The process in question was then amplified by disruptive practices of Netflix and other “portals”, to use the term coined by Amanda D. Lotz (2017). The most recent developments suggest that “we are only in the middle of the disruption of television” (Lotz 2021), but many fascinating trends can already be observed and described. In the forthcoming issue of “Prace Kulturoznawcze” we would like to focus on some of those trends and examine them through the lens of critical production studies and critical media industry studies, as introduced by John Thornton Caldwell (2008), John Hartley (2005) as well as Daniel Herbert, Amanda D. Lotz and Aswin Punathambekar (2020).

Examples of thematic areas:

• Disney+, HBO Max/Discovery, Peacock, Paramount+ and others – digital comeback of legacy media businesses
• amplification of global production practices connected with the affordances brought by the internet distribution model and international success stories of non-American productions (e.g. Money Heist, Squid Game, Dark)
• television showrunners, actors, writers and “below the line” workers – the question of television authorship
• TV co-productions in the digital era
• “streaming wars”, “peak TV” and the pandemic disruption of content distribution

Deadline for the submission of original articles: May 30th, 2024.