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”