Max Sexton and Dominic Lees discuss how complex production histories lie behind the rise of the US high-end series, a form that reflects industrial changes and the renegotiation of formal strategies. They reveal how the involvement of many different people in the production process, based on new relationships of creative authority, complicates our understanding of 'original content'. This affects the construction of stylistics and the viewing strategies required by different shows. The cultural, as well as industrial, strategies of recent television drama are explored in , and