Are television series art?

Abstract

Since the boom of television series started, intellectual efforts of critics and experts focused on legitimizing visual contents showed in a medium regarded as low-brow as is the television. As philosopher Jose Luis Pardo has explained, this process happens when products of popular culture surpass their socially assigned space. The television series have been the object of two processes that attempted to ennoble them. On the one hand, aesthetic legitimacy was bestowed upon them by applying highbrow standards to them. Thus, series started to be compared to literature, serialized novels or art. On the other hand, they were given moral legitimacy by being regarded as social protest, criticism or testimony works. Javier Marías, Marta Sanz or Vicente Luis Mora have criticized the new high cultural status they have achieved because of their popularity. The latter, for example, questioned that television series could be considered art because they do not foster a deep aesthetic experience but a kind of substitute, an ersatz that needs little intellectual effort. Although it was necessary to burst this cultural bubble of series, criticism of their artist status is too essentialist in its attempt to separate or differentiate what is art from what belongs to the field of culture and entertainment.