The German-speaking television market is considered the third largest in the world, after the US and China. It has 72 million viewers, 37 million television households and 22 trillion euros in annual revenue (Eichner and Esser 2020, 190). As in other areas of society, a radical transformation has been unfolding across this television market for some years. However, in recent media, television and screenwriting studies, the current changes in the German television industry have been explored in only rudimentary form (see e.g. Eichner 2021; Krauß 2020a). A systematic investigation is needed. Such an analysis—one exploring the transformation processes and the media professionals affected by them—is also relevant and infor-mative for more fundamental perspectives on today’s societies. How so? Firstly, the working practices of television and screenwriting professionals are representative of many contemporary working practices in general: these industry workers are organised in project networks (see Sydow and Windeler 2001) and they must constantly confront creativity imperatives in the “creativity dispositif” (Reckwitz 2017, 9) as well as the digital-isation of media forms. Secondly, these practitioners contribute to the production and expansion of cultural formats with a special narrative, aesthetic, creative, ludic and moral-ethical quality, as Andreas Reck-witz (2018, 227; 2020, 146) attests is common among today’s cultural objects. Amid a digital media environment, the television industry and its personnel strive for aesthetic “singular goods [...] that contain the promise of something authentic and non-interchangeable” (Reckwitz 2020, 158)—and, importantly, that attract viewers’ attention. The notion of “quality” is a central motif in this desire and an ever-present topic in the associated industry debates.