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This article seeks to extend the debate about evaluating television by focusing specifically on television drama. It reviews some of the reasons why such evaluation has been difficult in cultural studies but suggests that by refusing evaluation in relation to television cultural studies academics are opting out of a key debate in broadcasting and failing students who in their own viewing and practical work are making evaluative judgements. The article suggests that rather than looking for one set of television aesthetics, as Williams, Ellis and others have done, a more precise approach might attend to particular television categories, in this case television drama. The article compares the position in film and in television, suggesting that one of the problems is that television lacks a critical culture in which evaluation is openly discussed. It offers a framework for assessing individual programmes and, through an analysis of some textbooks on teaching television, indicates how this tactic would open up the rather narrow approaches to evaluation that currently concentrate mainly on ideological questions of representation.

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This article examines changes in casting practices which have begun to put black, Asian, and minority ethnic actors more regularly on British screens and in more significant parts. In the context of calls for improving BAME involvement at all levels of the film and television industry, I look in particular at how colour-blind casting has begun to have an impact on British cinema. The article looks initially at how calls for the campaign for changes entwine with the British tradition of public service broadcasting and examines the socially conscious criteria for casting introduced by the BBC and the BFI in 2016. I suggest that some of the ambiguous expectations of audiences in relation to colour-blind casting are similar to the potentially contradictory aspirations placed on institutions which receive public funding. In order to examine these issues in some detail, I draw on textual and paratextual analysis to demonstrate how frames of reference for understanding new approaches to casting can be found in recent period adaptations, a British genre strongly associated with whiteness by actors and critics. The examples discussed span the decade: Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011), Lady Macbeth (Oldroyd, 2016), and Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). The analysis demonstrates that while casting for the public good is becoming more common it nevertheless remains a complicated and controversial strategy.