Previously On: Prime Time Serials and the Poetics of Memory
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Previously On: Prime Time Serials & the
Poetics of Memory
Jason Mittell, Middlebury Collegejusttv.wordpress.com
Key Question:
How and why has American television storytelling transformed over past 20 years?
Historical Poetics
Previously on...
(see Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap #58, Fall 2006, 29-40)
Formal Properties of Complex Television Narratives
• Interplay between episodic & serial norms:arcs, episodic unity, storyworld consistency
• Experimental storytelling: mixed temporality & perspectives, fantasy blurs, explicit narration, reboots
• Self-conscious & explicit storytelling mechanics: intrinsic norms for programs, “operational aesthetic”
Formal Properties of Complex Television Narratives
Not an entirely new mode of storytelling...
but much more prevalent and widespread over past decade
★24★30 Rock★Alias★Angel★Arrested Development★Battlestar Galactica★The Bernie Mac Show★Boomtown★Buffy the Vampire Slayer★Curb Your Enthusiasm★Damages★Deadwood★Desperate Housewives★Dexter★Farscape★Firefly★Heroes★How I Met Your Mother★Huff★Jack & Bobby
★Joan of Arcadia★Lost★Malcolm in the Middle★My Name is Earl★The Office★Prison Break★Pushing Daisies★Rescue Me★Reunion★Roswell★Scrubs★Seinfeld★The Shield★Six Feet Under★Smallville★The Sopranos★Ugly Betty★Veronica Mars★The West Wing★The Wire
Examples of Narrative Complexity
• Viewers do not watch regularly
• Cannot assume continuity within audience
• Must be able to jump in midstream
• Syndication requires mixability
Television’s Obstacles to Narrative Comprehension
Industry’s Conventional Wisdom
• Viewers do not watch regularly
• Want to be able to jump in midstream
• No way to catch up with serial plot
• Syndication might rerun in random order
Television’s Obstacles to Narrative Comprehension
Viewers’ Conventional Wisdom
• Long-term narratives with structured delivery
• Erratic gaps between episodes, reruns
• Consumed as being produced - adjustments due to cast, unforeseen events, feedback
• Success = infinite run
Television’s Obstacles to Narrative Comprehension
Formal Elements
• Cable allows for more frequent repeats, sequenced reruns
• DVDs & downloads enable easy catching up
• Fan websites enable collaborative archiving
• Lower ratings allow cult to be mainstream
• Creative risks have proven successful - imitative logic has encouraged innovation
New Possibilities in Past Decade
Challenges for Serialized Memory
• Address both regular and erratic viewers
• Balance short-term memory (episodic) and long-term memory (serial)
• Trigger memories without spoiling suspense and surprise
Strategies for Recall:Retelling
• Soap operas offer pleasures of redundancy
All My Children (6/5/08)
Strategies for Recall:Retelling
• Soap operas offer pleasures of redundancy
• Prime-time serials highlight past events through dialogue to create comprehension...
Lost, “Cabin Fever”
Strategies for Recall:Retelling
• Soap operas offer pleasures of redundancy
• Prime-time serials highlight past events through dialogue to create comprehension...
• ... and surprise - strategic forgetting and remembering as narrative technique
Lost, “Something Nice Back Home”
Strategies for Recall:Retelling
• Soap operas offer pleasures of redundancy
• Prime-time serials highlight past events through dialogue to create comprehension...
• ... and surprise - strategic forgetting and remembering as narrative technique
• Designed confusion
The Wire, “Misgivings”
Strategies for Recall:Narration
• First person voice-over
Veronica Mars, “Silence of the Lamb”
Strategies for Recall:Narration
• First person voice-over
• First person flashback
Battlestar Galactica, “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner”
Strategies for Recall:Narration
• First person voice-over
• First person flashback
• Third person omniscient narration - with images or flashbacks
Arrested Development, “The One Where They Build a House”
Strategies for Recall:Extra-Diegetic Recaps
• “Previously On”
Battlestar Galactica, “Escape Velocity”
Strategies for Recall:Extra-Diegetic Recaps
• “Previously On”
• Video recaps (both official and fan-created)
“7 Minute Sopranos”
Strategies for Recall:Extra-Diegetic Recaps• “Previously On”
• Credit sequences - remind premise, highlight images & setting
• Video recaps (both official and fan-created)
• Websites (both official and fan-created); texts on HBO DVDs
Playing with Memory:Formal Patterns
• Intrinsic norms for episodes, arcs, series - narrative structures, storytelling rules, focalization patterns
• More possibilities for long-term formal play than short-form media, especially concerning norms, patterns, and expectations
Six Feet Under - Deaths of the Week
So What?• Cognitive: complex narratives demand active
and engaged viewers; research possibilities of how viewers build complex storyworlds; productive mental work of long-term narrative
• Poetics: possibilities of television storytelling untapped by other media
• Thematic: memory, time and comprehension have increasingly become subject of television stories
• Next time...
The West Wing, “Noël”
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