Highbrow media doesn’t exist, embrace the middlebrow!

why prestige television doesn't actually mean anything

Sunday night, I found myself distractedly watching the 77th Emmys with my laptop balanced on my knees, halfway through writing an article. Thoughts: I loved Nate Bargatze’s opening sketch, I loved Hannah Einbinder’s speech, and I felt strange about them pretending to donate less money to charity the longer people’s acceptance speeches were.

Honestly, most of it didn’t matter to me. I think award shows should be fun, unserious watches, where you just enjoy the experience and laugh at the occasional good joke. I realized a long time ago that my tastes and opinions weren’t always going to line up with what the academy thinks and that’s perfectly fine.

But, of course, there’s going to be people who take these shows much more seriously than the average viewer. Like any media-centered award show, there’s an underlying tension as celebrities and fans battle for cultural authority.

With The Pitt winning Best Drama Series over Severance, discourse prevailed over the alleged snub. There was an outrage from self-appointed elites who felt their “prestige” show was not being acknowledged as they felt it should have been (even though Severance won eight other awards that night, while The Pitt won five).

Coincidentally, I’d already been working on an essay about “brow culture” and the middlebrows changing function in modern culture when this discourse was occurring. And the conversations surrounding “prestige” television are, to me, perfect examples of the shadow highbrow elitism continues to cast over the average cultural consumer.

Prestige television is a category of highbrow-leaning media that’s supposed to separate sophisticated shows from the plebeian ones. Shows like The Wire, Succession, and Mad Men are considered prestige, while Grey’s Anatomy, Suits, and Riverdale are seen as their embarrassing cousins. A defining characteristic of prestige TV is their “cinematic quality”, how much they feel like a “film experience”. It’s those shows that want to be more elevated than an episodic, 20-minute comedy, so every season is essentially a long movie split into eight, one-hour parts.

But the truth is that prestige television, the media people elevate to highbrow status, isn’t technically highbrow at all. This media falls squarely in the middle of culture.