This chapter will continue to draw on the theoretical work presented in the first half of the book in order to examine how emotion is constructed in what Robin Nelson refers to as ‘contemporary high-end TV drama’ (2007). As discussed in Chapter 5, he argues that there is a ‘“look” and “feel” of the aesthetics of much “high-end” contemporary television’ (2007: 19) that has demanded new attention to television aesthetics. This demand for an aesthetic criteria in television studies, articulated by Charlotte Brunsdon in 1990 and pursued by John Thornton Caldwell in Televisuality (1995), has been taken up recently by television academics, such as Jason Jacobs (2000, 2006), Sarah Cardwell (2005, 2006), Karen Lury (2005) and Greg M. Smith (2007). In her excellent work on ‘television aesthetics’, for instance, Sarah Cardwell demonstrates the importance of a close analysis in television studies through her attention to Stephen Poliakoff's Perfect Strangers (2001). Concentrating on specific scenes enables Cardwell to comment on the way Poliakoff's work engages the viewer emotionally. She argues that: ‘rather than a determined movement towards a moment of intense emotion, there is a continual “pulling back” from a clearly defined emotional release’ (Cardwell 2005: 184). Cardwell reaches this conclusion through her close analysis of Poliakoff's work and through her engagement with cognitive film theory, namely, through Smith's notion of ‘mood-cues’ and ‘emotional markers’ (see Chapter 5).