The current transformation of television could be regarded both ways, as a crisis or as the complete opposite of a crisis. The transformations of television are often referred to, using terms coined by John Ellis, as the three ages of television: scarcity, availability and plenty (see Ellis 2000). It is accompanied by a shift of emphasis in television studies ‘from the TV I ‘consensus narratives’ with its casual viewer, through the target programming and ‘avid fanship’ that defined TV II and on to consumer satisfaction and consumer demand, which increasingly shapes contemporary TV landscape’ (Akass and McCabe 2004: 3). Television is in crisis as the result of a reconfiguration of its audiences. The crisis would be due to the fact that television no longer addresses and unites a vast audience and loses its capacity to provide a cultural forum in the sense of Newcomb and Hirsch (2000). But it is also the opposite of a crisis because television has finally left behind its infancy. TV III age series like The Sopranos or The West Wing are assigned to the genre of the ‘mature quality television’ (Rushton and Chamberlain 2007: 15). The genre produces complex serial narratives, finds adult audiences no longer ashamed of watching television and receives critical and scholarly attention, best epitomized in the successful book series Reading Contemporary Television edited by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe and a myriad of other publications. This transformation caused by narrowcasting and the production of customized programmes addressing a specific populace, often via premium cable subscription channels like HBO or in the form of DVD-editions of a programme's seasons, diminishes our capacity to find something that arises out of the ordinariness of television as a medium embedded within the everyday. The obvious narrative and aesthetic complexity of quality television comes at the price of a cultural void and the loss of a specific form of televisual complexity that finds its grounds in the volatile and everyday nature of television.