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What’s So Great About American TV?

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From the old days of The Brady Bunch and Bewitched to today’s ‘golden age of television’, where screenwriters and show-runners like Joss Whedon and Matthew Weiner have become household names – American television has long colonised our hearts and minds.

Vanity Fair recently declared television to have taken over from film as the place ‘where the action is, the addictions forged’. This century’s water-cooler viewing doubles as narrative art: The Wire, Breaking Bad, Girls, Game of Thrones.

What makes American television so good? Our qualified couch potatoes have the answers: producer Amanda Higgs, critic Debi Enker and commentator Jess McGuire.

Chaired by Michael Williams.

Featuring

Jess McGuire

Jess McGuire is a writer and broadcaster based in central west NSW, and hosts breakfast radio each weekday morning on on ABC Western Plains. She previously appeared regularly as a reviewer and cultural commentator on Double J and ABC Local Radio stations across the country, and for many years she wa... Read more

Amanda Higgs

Amanda Higgs is an independent TV producer with a 13-part series in production with the ABC. Amanda co-created and produced the first three series of the television drama The Secret Life of Us. The series won three Logies for Most Outstanding Drama Series, was nominated for a number of AFI and AWGIE... Read more

Debi Enker

Debi Enker has been writing about film and television for more than 20 years – long enough to have written reviews of Mad Max 3 and Far East for the late and lamented film magazine, Cinema Papers. She writes regularly about TV for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and is the television columni... Read more

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