With overt influences from recent developments of semi-documentary narration in international – foremost British – TV-drama, Swedish public service TV Sveriges Radio radically changed the drama production policies in the late 1960s. In august 1967 head of drama department, Henrik Dyfverman, officially declared the direction of the new policy: the repertoire of the forthcoming season 1967/1968 would be “considerably Swedish” and “oriented towards society” (Dagens Nyheter, August 24, 1967)

This new Swedish TV-drama of social commitment was not emerging in a void. Severe critique of the contemporary Swedish welfare state was already at hand in public debate spread over press, radio, debate books and TV. The new TV-drama was intertwined with a number of other genres in different media. Novels and theatre plays were adapted to TV, film directors switched between the two media, and in the press TV-drama came to be a recurrent topic for new stories on the shortcoming of welfare institutions.   

Especially after the introduction of the second channel in December 1969, the domestic TV-drama received a privileged place in the press. Almost each new social oriented series or film caused a heavy debate. Primarily it was subject matter that was discussed, but also aesthetic questions were sometimes in focus. Debates were spontaneous as well as arranged by entangled media. A usual setup was an aired TV-play, followed by a studio debate where experts as well as concerned citizens participated. In the daily press, such a setup was usually followed with both articles by experts and public opinions. Sometimes journalists constituted panels of farmers, nurses, teachers, pupils or athletes, i.e. the group concerned by the societal problem the film/series in question concerned, to get their judgements of how well the fiction resembled their reality. The paper will be centred round couple of case studies on such collaboration between media.