Book excerpt: TV Drama in Transition reflects upon changing dramatic forms on television in the context of broad cultural shifts over the past two decades. Analyses of a wide range of series (from Heartbeat to Middlemarch and Our Friends in the North; from NYPD Blue to Twin Peaks to The X-Files) are interspersed with accounts of new technologies, viewing dispositions and the political economy of culture. This book is generally concerned as much with the condition of culture in the 1980s and 1990s, as specifically with TV drama.