Following the viewers: Investigating television drama engagement through skin conductance measurements

•Television viewer arousal can be measured through consumer EDA products.•Viewer arousal can be operationalized as real-time measures of both average arousal and average number of arousing events.•Viewer arousal seems to be evenly distributed across a television episode with a slight ramping up over time.•Existing hypotheses about television dramaturgy as a rising curve with a climax are minimally supported. This article describes an empirical study of viewer emotional engagement with the first episode of the television fiction series Follow the Money (DR, 2015), a crime melodrama. The study combines applied and academic audience research and investigates real-time viewer responses by measuring and analysing skin conductance (SC) responses as an indicator of emotional arousal. The article outlines a framework for analysing emotion and arousal in television viewer engagement. It then describes SC measurements and the difference between tonic and phasic measurements. Two primary SC measures that indicate emotional engagement are derived, i.e. average phasic skin conductance response and the average number of emotionally arousing events pr. second. In our findings, both of these measures indicate a slight linear upwards trend and qualitative data is brought in to contextualize the quantitative findings. The study demonstrates how SC measures, formal analysis, and qualitative methods can be combined and the article ends with an outline of how future studies might adopt parts of the research design to further integrate applied audience research, audience research in media psychology, and cognitive film theory.