What is 'American Quality TV'? And why is it better than ordinary TV? A recent conference sought the answers, writes Karen Fricker.

It sounds like a scene from The Simpsons: a bunch of intellectuals spending a whole weekend shouting at each other about what defines quality on television. "Is network versus HBO a false dichotomy?" wonders one participant.

"The structured ambiguity of Six Feet Under self-identifies with modernist art and literature," opines another. Still another: "Is 24 an anti-feminist text of male resentment and/or a rebellion against female emancipation?"

A lot of big words, and, in a few cases, some fairly over-inflated and surprisingly defensive arguments. But by and large, the recent conference at Trinity College Dublin achieved its aims of advancing understanding of its subject - "American Quality TV" - within television and media studies, and certainly provided a fascinating vantage point for this outsider into the internal dialogue in a fast-advancing and contentious field of study.

The conference was organised by lecturers Janet McCabe, of Trinity College, and Kim Akass, of London Metropolitan Unversity, under the auspices of their two institutions and the Department of Foreign Affairs. Some 75 participants from eight countries came together to debate one of the hotter questions in contemporary media studies - what actually defines the field now known as "American Quality TV"?

The term came into circulation after the publication of American academic Robert Thompson's 1996 volume Television's Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, in which he laid down 12 criteria for inclusion in the field, among them that American Quality TV" breaks the rules of established television; it is produced by people of "quality aesthetic ancestry" outside the field of television; it attracts a blue-chip audience; uses ensemble casts and multiple, overlapping plot lines that indicate literary values; includes social and cultural criticism; and creates a new genre by combining old ones.

In other words, "American Quality TV" is better than crappy old ordinary TV? There is certainly more than a whiff of élitism and dismissal around Thompson's criteria ­ it could be argued (and was, vehemently, all weekend) that in Thompson's terms, "American Quality TV" is TV that wishes it weren't television at all, but something "better" and more artistically worthy.

Part of the problem is that Thompson chose a word to describe the field that seems to contain a value judgment, when in fact the best way to use the term "quality" may be simply as the delineator of a certain kind of television programme that is currently in vogue.

If we are to understand "American Quality TV" as a genre, then, the most useful short definition of it came from American freelance writer and conference participant Ashley Nelson: "politically engaged, often independent TV that aims to enlighten, as well as to entertain." The golden children of this "new golden age"? Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, The West Wing, ER ­ and, to the surprise of many, 24, which was the subject of more papers - seven - than any other programme.

What was perhaps most troubling about the conference to me was the emphasis in many papers on the aesthetic and formal qualities of the programmes discussed, often at the expense of any consideration of their content, and the ways they might play into real-life relations of power and politics.

Television is, after all, a vastly influential medium, and the conference was convened to discuss programmes created by the world's most powerful nation. As Rod Stoneman, former CEO of the Irish Film Board and now director of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at NUI Galway pointed out in one of the weekend's most politically engaged (and, sadly, shortest) contributions, American television is one of "the most important sites of contestation in today's world . . . there is a lot at stake".

Television disperses images and ideas that affect and shape how billions of people see themselves and each other; one of the weekend's more eye-opening contributions was that of Barbara Villez from the Université de Paris, who argued that watching Ally McBeal has shaped her students' understanding of not just the American, but the French legal system - that is, her French students regularly seem surprised when it's revealed to them that their own legal system differs radically from the fictionalised American one they see on their TV screens. Scary - but, sadly, believable.

Given this, papers on topics like "Genre Hybridity in Angel" had the smack of frivolousness about them, and the assertion by keynote speaker Jane Feuer, of the University of Pittsburgh, that her discussion about how cinema and theatre use their formal qualities to "deflate" television was "political", felt downright risible.

However, according to many at the conference, this a necessary phase in the intellectual field of television studies, which started out as a discussion mainly of ideology and is now moving through a necessary phase of aestheticism.

Because we live in a time in which all the master systems of understanding have broken down, in which ideas like "meaning," "reality," and "value" have been called into question, with what set of criteria do we start to reassemble a language with which to evaluate how a book, play, or indeed television series creates meaning?

The answer of Roberta Pearson, from Cardiff University, and Máire Messenger Davies, the incoming chair of Media Studies at the University Of Ulster, is head-wreckingly simple: talk to the people who make the shows themselves.

For their forthcoming book about Star Trek, Pearson and Davies interviewed many of the creative personnel behind the highly successful science-fiction franchise - a Trekkie's wildest fantasy, to be sure, but also a way of working towards an understanding of the television industry's internal value systems.

On the same panel, Robin Nelson of Manchester Metropolitan University offered useful insight in the evolution from the big-three networks' insistence on "least objectionable programming" to the cable and digital era, in which the focus has shifted from distribution to production and to membership channels which need appeal only to their subscribers.

The weekend's best papers - as with any good scholarship - offered specific and focused arguments that referenced established critical theory and made tangible connections between the programmes they were discussing and the ways in which we, as viewers, see the world.

Conference organisers McCabe and Akass offered a subtly argued paper about the "problematic" mother-daughter relationship in Six Feet Under, a programme whose starting point was literally the death of the patriarchy in the form of father Nathan's unexpected contact with a fast-moving bus.

On the same panel, Ashley Nelson provided useful background about the "older sisters" of today's "Quality heroines", arguing that Mary Tyler Moore, Maude, Murphy Brown, and even Wonder Woman reflected the changing circumstances of women's place in American society and at some times helped to advance that status. Trinity's Eric Weitz delivered a fabulously entertaining paper which attempted a definition of "Quality humour" through a discussion of, and well-chosen clips from, The Simpsons.

My world was perhaps most rocked by the argument of Paul Woolf from the University of Birmingham about the sponsorship of 24 by the Ford Motor Company: what happens to the series' putatively anti-war status, wondered Woolf, given its rampant product placement of gas-guzzling Ford Sports Utility Vehicles, which have been controversially pinpointed as contributing to the War on Terror by a centre-right-wing American lobby group?

On its final panel, elegantly chaired by a real-life television personality - The Late Review's Mark Lawson - the conference's focus shifted to the local with an impressive and surprising paper from RTÉ's director of broadcasting and acquisitions, Dermot Horan. The American programmes that had provoked so much critical energy all weekend are actually of waning interest in Ireland and across Europe, revealed Horan; the current trend internationally is towards local programming, and local remakes of international "brands" such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Pop Idol and Big Brother.

And so, shouldn't we really be talking about the "other" major television trend, the spectre of which hung thunderously over the conference all weekend - reality TV? After all, as Jane Feuer now had the chance to argue, reality programmes are "radically new, for better or worse, and more in touch with the cultural moment".

Doesn't The Bachelor, in its way, really have more to say about "the horror of modern life" than Sex and the City? Oh God. I feel a conference coming on.