Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 19 September
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
From the old days of The Brady Bunch and Bewitched to today’s ‘golden age of television’, where screenwriters and show-runners like Joss Whedon and Matthew Weiner have become household names – American television has long colonised our hearts and minds.
Vanity Fair recently declared television to have taken over from film as the place ‘where the action is, the addictions forged’. This century’s water-cooler viewing doubles as narrative art: The Wire, Breaking Bad, Girls, Game of Thrones.
What makes American television so good? Our qualified couch potatoes have the answers: producer Amanda Higgs, critic Debi Enker and commentator Jess McGuire.
Chaired by Michael Williams.
Featuring
Jess McGuire
Jess McGuire is a writer and broadcaster based in central west NSW, and hosts breakfast radio each weekday morning on on ABC Western Plains. She previously appeared regularly as a reviewer and cultural commentator ...
Amanda Higgs
Amanda Higgs is an independent TV producer with a 13-part series in production with the ABC. Amanda co-created and produced the first three series of the television drama The Secret Life of Us.
The series won three Logies for Most Outstanding Drama Series, was nominated for a number of AFI and AWGIE Awards and received a Bronze Medal at the NY Festival Awards for Best Television Program.
In 2007 Amanda worked at ABC TV Drama as an executive producer, and as acting head of drama in late 2009. In the past two years, Amanda also script edited The Slap and executive produced SLiDE for Fox8. She is on the board of AACTA (formerly the AFI) and ScreenWest.
Debi Enker
Debi Enker has been writing about film and television for more than 20 years – long enough to have written reviews of Mad Max 3 and Far East for the late and lamented film magazine, Cinema Papers.
She writes regularly about TV for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and is the television columnist for the Age Green Guide and the TV critic for Jon Faine’s Morning Show on ABC Radio 774 in Melbourne.
She has contributed to a number of books about film and television and at recent Screen Producers’ Association of Australia conferences and has hosted sessions with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and Downton Abbey executive producer Gareth Neame.