Title Pending 7872

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Around the globe, national television sectors have faced challenges tied to internationalization of the sector, the emergence of multi-territory services built on internet distribution, and advertisers’ diminishing support of commercial broadcasting. Despite building a robust sector in the twentieth century, policy mismanagement and slow response have devastated Australian television drama. Twentieth-century cultural policy made commercial broadcasters central to the drama sector, yet policy makers did not identify the threat a weakening ad sector posed to public service expectations of broadcasters as the implications of early twenty-first century digital change became clear. Also in the early century, screen sector policy pivoted from cultural sovereignty to industry growth priorities and failed to account for the already evident structural weakening. This article highlights how policy inaction and failure exacerbated sector change to decimate the production of Australian television drama.