law to sociology to film studies. Views of scholars and authors Robert Thompson says quality television has the following characteristics: It must break the established rules of television and be like nothing that has come before. It is produced by people of quality aesthetic ancestry, who have honed their skills in other areas, particularly film. It attracts a quality audience. It succeeds against the odds, after initial struggles. It has large ensemble cast which allows for multiple plot lines. It has memory, referring back to previous episodes and seasons in the development of plot. It defies genre classification. It tends to be literary. It contains sharp social and cultural criticisms with cultural references and allusions to popular culture. It tends toward the controversial. It aspires toward realism. Finally, it is recognized and appreciated by critics, with awards and critical acclaim. Paul Buhle's review of Quality Popular Television states that "high-culture critics almost uniformly considered films to be dreck until television—when they enshrined the cinema auteur. At the next stage...some television... [programs were] accorded the status of "art." Some British professors and television writers argue that US television programming includes a number of quality shows. In April 2004, Janet McCabe (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Kim Akass (Manchester Metropolitan University) organized a conference on "American Quality Television" to examine the "particular strand of American television known as Quality TV" (e.g., St Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, thirtysomething, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ER, The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Six Feet Under). The BBC’s television listings magazine, Radio Times had an article in 2002 which asked "Why can't Britain's long-running dramas be more like America's?". David Gritten argued that the "...cream of American TV now stands for real quality", because US television dramas have "...the edge in portraying a broad gamut of human experience" and they are "...fast-paced, complex, smart and beautifully written." Kristin Thompson, in Storytelling in Film and Television, argues that US television shows such as David Lynch's Twin Peaks series have "...a loosening of causality, a greater emphasis on psychological or anecdotal realism, violations of classical clarity of space and time, explicit authorial comment, and ambiguity." Thompson claims that series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, and The Simpsons "...have altered long-standing notions of closure and single authorship", which means that "...television has wrought its own changes in traditional narrative form." Other television shows