“Paradoxically, the very
serial elements that have
been so long reviled in
soaps, pulps, and other
‘low’ genres are now used
to increase connotations
of ‘quality’ . . . In
television drama.”
From Jeff Sconce, “What
If? Charting Television’s
New Textual Boundaries”
“U. S. television has
devoted increased
attention in the past two
decades to crafting and
maintaining ever more
complex narratives, a
form of ‘world building’
that has allowed for
wholly new modes of
narration and that
suggests new forms of
audience engagement.”
Jason Mittell detects evidence in the sort of
narrative moves Lost makes—he speaks of
“narrative pyrotechnics” and “the narrative
special effect”—of a growing tendency to “push
the operational aesthetic to the foreground,
calling attention to the constructed nature of
the narration and asking us to marvel at how
the writers pulled it off; often these instances
forgo realism in exchange for a formally aware
baroque quality in which we watch the process
of narration as a machine rather than
engaging in its diegesis” (Mittell 35).
“Certainly, chief among Lost’s pleasures is the
show’s ability to create sincere emotional
connections to characters who are immersed in
an outlandish situation that, as of this writing,
is unclassifiable as science fiction, paranormal
mystery, or religious allegory, all constructed
by an elaborate narrational structure far more
complex than anything seen before in
American television.”
Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”
U. S. television has devoted increased
attention in the past two decades to crafting
and maintaining ever more complex
narratives, a form of “world building” that has
allowed for wholly new modes of narration and
that suggests new forms of audience
engagement.
Jeff Sconce, “What If?” (95)
“Thus, in the span of a decade between the late
1980s and late 1980s, the preferred model [of
television drama] had been inverted from one of a
stable text fixing the subjectivity of passive spectators
to one of active readers negotiating their own
meanings and pleasures in play with a slippery text”
(Nelson in Creeber 9).
Steven Johnson. Everything
Bad is Good for You: How
Today’s Popular Culture is
Actually Making Us Smarter.
New York: Riverhead Books,
2005.
Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011
Dallas
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24
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”To follow the narrative” of a contemporary
television series, Johnson argues, “you aren't just
asked to remember. You're asked to analyze. This
is the difference between intelligent shows, and
shows that force you to be intelligent.”
Now “another kind of televised intelligence” is on
the rise, demanding the same kind of “mental
faculties normally associated with reading:
“attention, patience, retention, the parsing of
narrative threads.”
“[F]ilm has historically confronted a ceiling that has reined in its
complexity, because its narratives are limited to two to three hours.
The television dramas we examined tell stories that unfold over
multiple seasons, each with more than a dozen episodes. The
temporal scale for a successful television drama can be more than a
hundred hours, which gives the storylines time to complexify, and
gives the audience time to become familiar with the many
characters and their multiple interactions. Similarly, the average
video game takes about forty hours to play, the complexity of the
puzzles and objectives growing steadily over time as the game
progresses. By this standard, "our average two-hour Hollywood film
is the equivalent of a television pilot or the opening training
sequence of a video game: there are only so many threads and
subtleties you can introduce in that time frame. It's no accident that
the most complex blockbuster of our era--the Lord of the Rings
trilogy-lasts more than ten hours in its uncut DVD yersion. In the
recipe for the Sleeper Curve, the most crucial ingredient is also the
simplest one: time” (Johnson 131)
With many television classics that we associate with "quality"
entertainment—Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, Frasier—the
intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the
characters onscreen. They say witty things to each other, and
avoid lapsing into tired sitcom clichés, and we smile along in
our living room, enjoying the company of these smart people.
But assuming we're bright enough to understand the sentences
they're saying—few of which are rocket science, mind you, or
any kind of science, for that matter—there's no intellectual
labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. There's no
filling in, because the intellectual achievement exists entirely
on the other side of the screen. You no more challenge your
mind by watching these intelligent shows than you challenge
your body watching Monday Night Football. The intellectual
work is happening onscreen, not off.--Steven Johnson
“Viewers of The West Wing or Lost or The Sopranos no longer
require those training wheels, because twenty-five years of
increasingly complex television has honed their analytic skills.
Like those video games that force you to learn the rules while
playing, part of the pleasure in these modern television
narratives comes from the cognitive labor you're forced to do
filling in the details. If the writers suddenly dropped a hoard
of flashing arrows onto the set, the show would seem
plodding and simplistic. The extra information would take the
fun out of watching” (Johnson 77).
“The clarity of Hill Street comes from the show's subtle
integration of flashing arrows, while West Wing's murkiness
comes from Sorkin's cunning refusal to supply them. The roll
call sequence that began every Hill Street episode is most
famous for the catchphrase ‘Hey, let's be careful out there.’
But that opening address from Sergeant Esterhaus (and in
later seasons, Sergeant Jablonski) performed a crucial
function, introducing some of the primary threads and
providing helpful contextual explanations for them. Critics at
the time remarked on the disorienting, documentary-style
handheld camerawork used in the opening sequence, but the
roll call was ultimately a comforting device for the show,
training wheels for the new complexity of multithreading.”-Steven Johnson
Types of
Television Series
Traditional/Episodic Series.
In a traditional series each episode tells an
independent, discrete, stand alone story
that adds little or nothing to the cumulative
memory of the show over seasons/years.
Continuous Serials.
Existing contemporaneously with the episodic
series, ghettoized, however, in the very
different mediacosmos of daytime television,
continuous serials told stories that “were by
contrast, deliberately left hanging at the end of
each episode; nearly all plots initiated in a
continuous serial were designed to be infinitely
continued and extended” (Dolan 33). Linear, as
opposed to the episodic series’ inherent
circularity, the continuous serial makes
narrative change its raison d’etre.
Until the 70s, Dolan observes, “the episodic
series and the continuous serial were
almost inevitably segregated into separate
areas of viewing time, the former
dominating the prime time hours, the latter
dominating the mornings and afternoons.
This gave network television a remarkably
split personality, with happy love affairs and
marriages ruling by night, for example, and
infidelity and divorce ruling by day” (33).
Sequential Series.
Once the continuous serial broke free from
its daytime prison, migrating to prime-time
first in the form of night-time soaps like
Dallas, the sequential series was born:
television schedules were quickly populated
by shows “that, had they been made a
decade earlier, would almost certainly have
been constructed in almost purely episodic
terms,” series which “could very often not
be shown in an order other than their
original one, since events in one episode
clearly led to events in another” (Dolan).
Episodic serials.
Tulloch [left top] and Alvarez identify a closely
related narrative form which they deem the episodic
serial. Episodic serials exhibit continuity between
episodes but only for a limited and specified number
(ix). The subject of their study, Doctor Who, serves
as an example, as does another famous British
series, The Prisoner. Horace Newcomb [left middle]
uses a different designation for essentially the same
narrative manifestation: "cumulative narrative.”
Like the traditional series and unlike the traditional
"open-ended" serial, each installment of a
cumulative narrative has a distinct beginning,
middle, and end. However, unlike the traditional
series and like the traditional serial, one episode's
events can greatly affect later episodes. As
Newcomb puts it, "Each week's program is distinct,
yet each is grafted onto the body of the series, its
characters' pasts" (Reeves 30).
Flexi-Narratives.
The last two decades of television have
seen the spread of what Robin Nelson
terms “flexi-narratives,” a “hybrid mix
of serial and series forms . . . involving
the closure of one story arc within an
episode (like a series) but with other,
ongoing story arcs involving the
regular characters (like a serial)” (82).
The widespread appeal of the flexinarrative is not difficult to understand,
for it “maximises the pleasures of both
regular viewers who watch from week
to week and get hooked by the serial
narratives and the occasional viewers
who happen to tune into one episode
seeking the satisfaction of narrative
closure within that episode” (Nelson
82).