1 Published in: Television & New Media, 20(2019):3, 257–274. DOI: 10.1177/1527476417743574 Cultural Mediators Seduced by Mad Men: How cultural journalists legitimized a quality TV series in the Nordic Region Nete Nørgaard Kristensen, University of Copenhagen Heikki Hellman, University of Tampere Kristina Riegert, Stockholm University Abstract Based on theories about the role of cultural mediators in cultural production and using the TV se- ries Mad Men as a case, this article investigates how cultural journalists in the Nordic countries have contributed to legitimizing “quality TV series” as a worthy field of aesthetic consumption. Key analytical points are: 1) cultural journalists legitimize Mad Men’s quality by addressing aspects in- ternal (aesthetic markers) and aspects external (culture industry markers) to the series, as well as the series’ broader social and historical anchoring; 2) Nordic cultural journalists position them- selves positively towards the TV series based on their professional expertise and their personal taste preferences and predilections; 3) these legitimation processes take place across journalistic genres, pointing to the importance not only of TV criticism, epitomized by the review, but of cultural journalism more broadly in constructing affirmative attitudes towards popular culture phenomena such as TV series. Keywords critique, cultural journalism, cultural mediation, Mad Men, Nordic countries, reviews, TV series, quality TV Introduction This article analyses how mainstream media’s cultural journalists and critics in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden covered, critiqued and legitimized, not only the internationally recognized TV series Mad Men (2007–2015), but by extension the notion of “quality TV series” during the 2000s. Even if “quality TV” is considered a genre designation indicating specific narrative structures and style universes in recent TV fiction, rather than a specific quality evaluation, we argue that the cultural journalists’ mainly positive discourses contribute to positioning Mad Men as “good quality” in a crowded field of cultural consumption. The cultural journalistic perspective is significant since the news media, and the press in particular, constitute an important institutional framework for cultural legitimation processes and crit- ical work, with reasonably well-defined norms and practices for the assessment of cultural quality.1 These norms and practices increasingly also apply to television journalism and criticism (Bielby, Moloney and Ngo 2005, 9; Rixon 2017). The review is naturally a central example of this, since it is through this genre the cultural journalists contribute to highlighting the qualities of the works reviewed (e.g. Shrum 1996). However, as this article will show, also other genres are important to the journal- ists’ construction of Mad Men’s qualities. Cultural journalists are often assigned great significance to This is the accepted manuscript of the article, which has been published in Television & New Media. 2019, 20(3), 257-274. http://doi.org/10.1177/1527476417743574