Complex TV

This page intentionally left blank

Complex TV
The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling

Jason Mittell

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2015 by Jason Mittell
All rights reserved
A previous version of this material was published online by MediaCommons
Press in 2012 – 2013.
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mittell, Jason.
Complex TV : the poetics of contemporary television storytelling /
Jason Mittell.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-7135-8 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-6960-7 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Television authorship. I. Title.
PN1992.7.M58 2015
808.2'25 — dc23 2014040997
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Complexity in Context 17
2. Beginnings 55
3. Authorship 86
4. Characters 118
5. Comprehension 164
6. Evaluation 206
7. Serial Melodrama 233
8. Orienting Paratexts 261
9. Transmedia Storytelling 292
10. Ends 319
Notes 355
Index 381
About the Author 391

v
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

As befits a book about long-form serial storytelling, this book took

many years to produce, encountered numerous gaps, and often felt like
it would never end. Unlike serial television, there is a singular author
noted on the cover, but nonetheless many others contributed ideas,
feedback, and support in the metaphorical writers’ room I lived in
throughout the long process it took to write this book.
I first presented early versions of the ideas explored in this book in
2005, at a departmental colloquium at Middlebury College. Two of my
colleagues in attendance had a profound impact shaping what was to
come: Michael Newbury, who vitally pointed me toward Neil Harris
and the operational aesthetic, and Christian Keathley, who has been
my invaluable sounding board for more than a decade. Another col-
league joined Middlebury years later, and since then Louisa Stein has
been an essential reader of my work, helping me nuance my ideas and
argumentation. Beyond those three friends, countless other colleagues
and students at Middlebury have provided feedback, encouragement,
and support throughout the process of writing this book. Special thanks
to Jim Ralph, Middlebury’s Dean of Faculty Research and Develop-
ment, for providing vital funding to support my research and publica-
tion process.
Most of the book was first drafted during my 2011 – 2012 academic
leave in Germany, supported by the DFG in the framework of the
Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. The
staff and fellows at Lichtenberg provided the perfect environment for
focused work on this project, and I learned from them all. My time in
Germany was in collaboration with the Research Unit on Popular Seri-
ality, where I benefited from excellent collegiality and conversations
from many members of the group, including Regina Bendix, Shane
Denson, Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, Kathleen Loock, Ruth Mayer, Alexan-
der Starre, Daniel Stein, and Baerbel Tischleder. Most importantly, my

vii
viii | Acknowledgments

year in Germany connected me with Frank Kelleter, whose intellectual

contributions to and support of my work was unsurpassed; along with
Susanne Krugmann, their familial friendship and hospitality was truly
life changing.
The book was written serially, with the many drafts of ideas presented
at conferences and lectures, posted on my blog, excerpted in chapters,
and prepublished on MediaCommons. I have lost track of everyone who
provided vital feedback at those presentations and online publications,
but the following people all offered meaningful thoughts, comments,
and support, and hopefully they can hear their voices reflected in this
final version: Christine Becker, Robert Blanchet, Brett Boessen, Paul
Booth, David Bordwell, Jens Eder, Sam Ford, Christine Geraghty, Lau-
ren Goodlad, Jonathan Gray, Stacy Hartman, Scott Higgins, Matt Hills,
Jason Jacobs, Henry Jenkins, Michael Kackman, Miklós Kiss, Ioana
Literat, Geoff Long, Amanda Lotz, Myles McNutt, Caryn Murphy, Sean
O’Sullivan, Steven Peacock, Roberta Pearson, Marie-Laure Ryan, Aaron
Smith, Anthony Smith, Greg Smith, Murray Smith, Michael Suen, Ethan
Thompson, Jan-Nöel Thon, Elizabeth Traube, Margrethe Bruun Vaage,
Robyn Warhol, and James Zborowski.
I conducted interviews with numerous people working in the media
industries as part of my research process. Special thanks to Carlton Cuse,
Nick Fortugno, Bryan Fuller, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Damon Lindelof,
Gregg Nations, Shawn Ryan, and Owen Shiflett for taking time to share
your experiences with me.
This book went through two stages of publication. The first was
the online serialized version via CommentPress on MediaCommons
Press — thanks to Avi Santo, Monica McCormick, Bob Stein, and my
other MediaCommons colleagues for building and maintaining the
site and its community. But most of all, thanks to Kathleen Fitzpatrick
for inspiring this new model of scholarly communication, providing
the expertise and energy that keeps the site running, and being a great
friend throughout the decade of this book’s gestation.
The second publication stage results in the book you are reading now,
on page or screen, which is due to the supportive staff at NYU Press,
especially Alicia Nadkarni, who handled countless logistical issues in
getting the book to press. Eric Zinner has been an endless source of
support for this project, offering forgiveness and flexibility to an author
 Acknowledgments | ix

who takes too long to write too much — and insists on posting it all
online. Eric’s support for innovative forms of publication and making
scholarship as accessible and affordable as possible is refreshing in an
era when the academic publishing industry seems to be moving in the
other direction.
Finally and most importantly, I want to thank my family for being my
overriding A plot throughout the long runner of Complex TV. Greta,
Anya, and Walter have grown up while I worked on this book, almost
old enough to watch some of the series I discuss herein — I look forward
to rewatching some of these series through their eyes. Ruth was usu-
ally the first person to talk through my thoughts on contemporary tele-
vision, typically in postepisode couch conversations. Without her love
and support in all ways, this book would never have been written.

Many sections and ideas in this book were published in earlier versions.
Beyond the full draft on MediaCommons Press and posts on my blog,
JustTV, I would like to thank and acknowledge the editors and publish-
ers of the following articles and chapters:
“Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” Vel-
vet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 29 – 40.
“Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption, and
Rethinking Textuality,” coauthored with Jonathan Gray, Particip@tions 4,
no. 1 (May 2007), http://www.participations.org/Volume%204/Issue%
201/4_01_graymittell.htm.
“All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic,”
in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, edited by
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 429 – 438 (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2009).
“Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia,”
Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (Fall 2009), http://journal
.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/118/117.
“Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Tele-
vision Studies),” in Reading “Lost,” edited by Roberta Pearson, 119 – 138
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2009).
“Previously On: Prime Time Serials and the Mechanics of Memory,”
in Intermediality and Storytelling, edited by Marina Grishakova and
Marie-Laure Ryan, 78 – 98 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010).
x | Acknowledgments

“The Ties between Daytime and Primetime Serials,” interview in The

Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era, edited by
Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik, and C. Lee Harrington, 133 – 139 (Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 2010).
“Serial Boxes: DVD-Editionen und der kulturelle Wert amerika-
nischer Fernsehserie,” in Serielle Formen: Von den frühen Film-Serials zu
aktuellen Quality-TV- und Onlineserien, edited by Robert Blanchet, Kris-
tina Köhler, Tereza Smid, and Julia Zutavern, 133 – 152 (Marburg, Ger-
many: Schüren, 2011). (Translated into German from English original.)
“Serial Orientations: Paratexts and Contemporary Complex Tele-
vision,” in (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia
Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 165 –
182 (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript-Verlag, 2013).
“The Qualities of Complexity: Vast versus Dense Seriality in Contem-
porary Television,” in Television Aesthetics and Style, edited by Steven
Peacock and Jason Jacobs, 45 – 56 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
“Strategies of Storytelling on Transmedia Television,” in Storyworlds
across Media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noel Thon, 253 – 277
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
“The Ends of Serial Criticism,” Media of Serial Narrative, edited
by Frank Kelleter (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, forthcom-
ing 2015).
Introduction

In the fall of 2001, three espionage-themed dramas debuted on Amer-

ican network television: The Agency, Alias, and 24. Notably, all three
survived low ratings in their first season to make it to a second, a fairly
rare accomplishment for a new series.1 Surprisingly, the highest rated
of the three, CBS’s The Agency, was canceled after its second season in
2003, while ABC’s Alias garnered a respectable five-season run and Fox’s
24, which had the least successful first season of the three, lasted for
much of the decade as one of television’s most prominent scripted pro-
grams. The fate of these three series is an instructive window into the
changes in television storytelling emerging in the 2000s, the topic of
this book.
The Agency was by far the most conventional of the three programs,
following an episodic procedural model that CBS had successfully rid-
den to ratings success with the growing CSI franchise and the hit JAG,
followed by future hit crime procedurals in the 2000s, such as NCIS,
Without a Trace, and Cold Case. Long-held assumptions about what
makes for successful television would suggest that The Agency’s formu-
laic approach and noncontroversial take on contemporary issues would
resonate with audiences (or at least generate high ratings), but the oppo-
site proved to be the case — the CBS series’s viewership declined in its
second season to the point that the network canceled it with little fanfare
or protest.
The other two spy programs were far more innovative in their nar-
rative approach and, despite the conventional wisdom that popular
television must be formulaic, generated sufficient audience interest to
justify their longer runs. Alias was one of the flashiest programs yet
to appear on network television, with high-style visual and sonic flair,
elaborate plotting, and a complex mythological backstory that attracted
a small but dedicated audience that embraced the series as an heir to the
cult phenomenon Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While Alias’s ratings never

1
2 | Introduction

matched ABC’s hopes for the high-budget program, the program’s criti-
cal praise and high-profile stardom of Jennifer Garner led the struggling
network to continue it for five seasons until it found greater success with
hits such as Desperate Housewives and Lost in 2004.
24’s run was even more surprising, given its highly unusual narrative
format: each episode features an hour of story time told in “real time”
(minus commercial breaks) via split screens, counting clocks, and other
self-conscious devices atypical of conventional television. Even the pro-
gram’s title refers to how the story will be told — in 24 hour-long install-
ments constituting a single day in the life of hero Jack Bauer — rather
than anything notable about the story itself. 24’s popularity grew from
a weakly rated first season and slowly developed a strong enough fol-
lowing to last eight seasons (and even return to the air in 2014) and
consistently rank in the top 30 yearly ratings for much of the decade.
24 particularly benefited from DVD sales and rentals, a relatively new
phenomenon for television series in the early 2000s, as viewers who
caught up with the first season on home video helped increase second-
season ratings by a rare 25%.2 Taken together, the story of these three
spy programs points to a changing landscape of American television,
where complex and innovative storytelling can succeed both creatively
and economically, while a series with a safe, conventional approach can
become a commercial failure.
Complex TV is about this shift, exploring how television storytelling
has changed and what cultural practices within television technology,
industry, and viewership have enabled and encouraged these transfor-
mations. Often these changes are framed as television becoming more
“literary” or “cinematic,” drawing both prestige and formal vocabulary
from these older, more culturally distinguished media; however, we
can better understand this shift through careful analysis of television
itself rather than holding onto cross-media metaphors of aspiration and
legitimation. In the past 15 years, television’s storytelling possibilities and
practices have undergone drastic shifts specific to the medium. What
was once a risky innovative device, such as subjective narration or jum-
bled chronology, is now almost a cliché. Where the lines between serial
and episode narratives used to be firmly drawn, today such boundaries
are blurred. The idea that viewers would want to watch — and rewatch —
a television series in strict chronology and collectively document their
 Introduction | 3

discoveries with a group of strangers was once laughable but is now

mainstream. Expectations for how viewers watch television, how pro-
ducers create stories, and how series are distributed have all shifted,
leading to a new mode of television storytelling that I term complex
TV — this book tells the story of this narrative mode.
The book also chronicles a shift within the field of television studies.
Back in 2001, when I first experienced this trio of espionage programs as
a viewer, the field was not particularly interested in exploring television’s
narrative form. Back then (and still today), the key questions that these
three programs would have raised for television scholars concerned
issues of cultural representation — after all, these programs appeared
at a transformative moment in American history and were perfectly
poised to tackle current events. All three series were created, scheduled
by their networks, and well into production at the time of the September
11 terrorist attacks, but critics and pundits framed the programs, which
debuted in October and November as part of a delayed television sea-
son, as direct responses to America’s proclamation of a “War on Terror”
following the attacks. One useful line of inquiry would be for television
scholars to explore the meanings circulated by these programs, espe-
cially in how they articulate norms of American cultural identity, the
role of the state, and perceptions of foreign threats in the reconfigured
cultural landscape.3
Likewise, these series all offer interesting possibilities for the repre-
sentational analysis of identity, arguably the most active research area
within the field of television scholarship in the 1990s. Alias presents a
particularly evocative vision of gender politics, with a nearly omnipo-
tent lead heroine, Sydney Bristow, globetrotting and kicking ass in high
style while negotiating her strained relationships with male father fig-
ures, potential romantic partners, and a succession of villainous female
friends, rivals, and an evil mother returned from her presumed grave. 24
also foregrounds gender norms, although in a more conventional form,
with a hypermasculine hero working in the first season to rescue his
wife and daughter in jeopardy from what turns out to be a treasonous
former lover, a conventional example of a sexualized demonic woman.
Both programs also portray a range of ethnic and racial others defined
in opposition to their white heroes, charting an array of representational
strategies for 21st-century television.4
4 | Introduction

While I would never suggest that scholars should ignore such ques-
tions of representation or nation, this book is not focused on analyzing
meanings as conveyed by television narratives. Instead, I aim to explore
how such meanings are given expressive possibility through the form of
televised stories, analyzing how such content is conveyed via storytell-
ing. One reason why television’s formal narrative properties have been
so ignored is the assumption that television storytelling is simplistic.
Previous accounts of the medium’s narrative tendencies tend to focus
on the centrality of genre formulas, repetitive situations, redundant
exposition suited for surfing viewers, and structural constraints based
around commercial breaks and rigid schedules. While many contempo-
rary television programs follow such patterns, albeit with more nuance
and subtlety than dismissive critiques admit, new developments over the
past two decades have led to the rise of a particular model of narrative
complexity on mainstream commercial American television, one that
is unique to the medium and thus must be examined on its own terms.
As a television scholar in 2001, I felt that the field was not equipped to
answer my questions about the successful narrative innovations featured
in Alias and 24 and the comparative failure of The Agency’s conven-
tions.5 However, in the years since such programs debuted — arguably
motivated in large part by earlier examples of complex television series
from the 1990s, including Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, The X-Files, Babylon 5,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, and The Sopranos — television
studies has broadened its account of the formal and aesthetic dimen-
sions of television storytelling.6 This book, along with numerous pieces
I have written over the past decade both in formal academic publica-
tions and informally on various websites, represents my own attempt
to engage with television’s formal dimensions in concert with a broader
approach to television as a cultural phenomenon, where form is always
in dialogue with cultural contexts, historical formations, and modes of
practice. This book strives to offer a model of formal analysis that is
not divorced from issues of content, context, and culture but rather is a
vital component of those concerns that are more central to media and
cultural studies.
The guiding concept for my approach is poetics, building on a model
that has emerged within literary and film studies. Poetics can be defined
 Introduction | 5

broadly as a focus on the specific ways that texts make meaning, con-
cerned with formal aspects of media more than issues of content or
broader cultural forces — in short, the guiding question for poetics look-
ing at a cultural text such as a television series is “how does this text
work?” This focus on poetics is different from more common questions
of interpretation, which seek to answer “what does this mean?” or of
cultural power, asking “how does this impact society?” As suggested
earlier, questions about meaning and power are not off-limits within a
poetic analysis but rather operate on a different analytic level. Through-
out the book, I point to ways that poetics might lead to more nuanced
understandings of broader social issues that often concern cultural
scholars, but the focus of my analysis is understanding the way tele-
vision tells stories, not the cultural impact or interpretation of those sto-
ries. Looking at storytelling from a poetic approach can be quite similar
to narratology, as developed by literary scholars, but I prefer labeling
my approach as poetics to distance myself from the structuralist and
strictly textual model often found in narratology — although certainly
many narratologists and their analytic work has shaped my own think-
ing, and like poetics, narratology can encompass a wide range of issues
and methods. My own approach to poetics is influenced by a model of
cultural circulation, in which practices of the television industry, audi-
ences, critics, and creators all work to shape storytelling practices, and
thus questions about form are not restricted to the realm of the text but
deeply connected to contexts.7
The poetic approach has been adopted and adapted by scholars in
three crucial ways that have inspired my work. First and foremost, the
concept of historical poetics developed by film scholar David Bordwell
provides an essential contextual anchor for the study of narrative form.
Historical poetics situates formal developments within specific contexts
of production, circulation, and reception, where innovations are viewed
not as creative breakthroughs by visionary artists but at the nexus of
numerous historical forces that work to transform norms and possi-
bilities. Such an analysis examines the formal elements of any medium
alongside the historical contexts that helped shape innovations and per-
petuate particular norms. If we are to understand how complex tele-
vision works today, we need to contextualize its development within the
6 | Introduction

technological, industrial, and reception shifts of the 1990s and 2000s,

functioning not as straightforward causes of these formal innovations
but certainly as essential factors to allow particular creative strategies to
flourish. Throughout the book, I connect creative choices to these cru-
cial contexts both to account for how complex television emerged and
to suggest why it may have developed as it has.8
Bordwell’s model of historical poetics focuses primarily on the inter-
play among industry, technology, and the creative choices of filmmak-
ers, downplaying the reception contexts of cinema; instead, he models
an approach that others have more broadly termed cognitive poetics to
account for how viewers engage with texts.9 According to this model,
we can best understand the process of viewing (or reading literature) by
drawing on our knowledge of cognition and perception and then pos-
iting how the formal elements in a text might be experienced by such
a viewer — while viewers are not reduced to their mental mechanics,
the insights of cognitive psychology inform how we imagine the pos-
sible ways that viewers engage with film or television. For some facets
of viewing practice, such as processes of comprehension and memory,
a cognitive poetic approach is well suited to understand how viewers
might engage with television serials.
We can complement a cognitive approach by studying actual viewing
practices of ongoing serial television consumption, especially for cases
that are not easily explicable by cognitive norms, such as fans consum-
ing narrative spoilers or contributing to fan wikis. Thus I draw on Rob-
ert Allen’s notion of reader-oriented poetics that fuses literary reader-
response criticism with close analysis of televisual form in his landmark
study of daytime soap operas; Allen explores the genre’s formal elements
as creating potential pleasures, interpretations, and modes of engage-
ment for its viewers, and he cross-references that analysis with a history
of the genre’s reception.10 In looking at the texts of contemporary com-
plex prime time serials, I try to connect their narrative strategies with
the broadly circulating reception practices of these popular programs.
One of the chief reasons that complex television has become a main-
stream trend is the broad availability of online fan sites to facilitate col-
lective discussions and decoding practices among fans, so these sites can
provide research resources for accessing and understanding consump-
tion practices among a program’s dedicated and engaged viewership.
 Introduction | 7

Typically, poetics are a form of textual analysis, where the primary (or
sometimes sole) object of analysis is the bounded creative work, whether
a poem, a film, a novel, or a television program. But as my three modi-
fiers to poetics suggest, we cannot isolate a text from its historical con-
texts of production and consumption — but also we cannot treat a text
as a bounded, clearly defined, stable object of study. Especially (though
not exclusively) in the digital era, a television program is suffused within
and constituted by an intertextual web that pushes textual boundaries
outward, blurring the experiential borders between watching a program
and engaging with its paratexts. Similarly, the serial text itself is less of
a linear storytelling object than a sprawling library of narrative content
that might be consumed via a wide range of practices, sequences, frag-
ments, moments, choices, and repetitions. Media scholars have explored
a range of terms and concepts to iterate these fluid and changing modes
of textual engagement, including “convergence,” “overflow,” “paratextu-
ality,” and “televisual moments,” all of which have challenged traditional
notions of bounded, self-contained texts.11 Although I refer to such con-
cepts throughout the book, I consider all of these elements of variable
engagement as part of serial television textuality itself — texts only come
to matter in their consumption, circulation, and proliferation, and thus
when I discuss the forms and structures of complex television programs,
I treat them as part of a lived cultural practice, not a static, bounded,
and fixed creative work. To understand television textuality, we must
look beyond what appears on a single screen to explore the range of
sites where such texts are constituted, and serially reconstituted, through
practices of cultural engagement.12
My research within these sites warrants a bit of methodological
discussion — I have spent the past decade as a participant-observer
among various television-viewing communities centered around com-
plex television series. I have avidly read (and written) episode-by-
episode television criticism, read (and written) comments on blogs
and discussion forums, referenced (and edited) fan wikis about ongo-
ing series, read (and written) academic analyses of serial narrative, read
(and conducted) interviews with television producers, and watched (and
rewatched) over a thousand hours of television programming and asso-
ciated paratexts. I bring this immersive experience as viewer and fan
to my analysis and hope to accurately represent experiences that many
8 | Introduction

others have in watching these programs and engaging with their para-
texts. Although much of the research material I have gathered was pub-
licly available online or in television programs, I have not documented
every single example with a citation to a fan forum or specific moment
in a program. I have made the choice to be less citational than much
scholarship to emphasize readability and flow; hopefully the account of
television textuality and viewer practices that emerge from this account
is sufficiently convincing not to require hundreds of links to now-
defunct fan forums or specific episodes of television programming.
When doing such research with online fans, it is vital to remember
that the type of die-hard fan who participates in forums, creates remix
videos, or seeks out spoilers is not a typical television viewer. But the
rise of online fandom has made a fan who does embrace such prac-
tices less of a fringe outlier and more one who resides on one end of
a spectrum of engagement. We have little concrete information about
how representative fan practices might be, but one example is instruc-
tive: the active fan wiki Lostpedia reports that since it was set up on
the wikia.com server in 2008, more than 28,000 registered users have
edited the site at least once.13 This is obviously a small portion of the
millions of viewers who watched Lost every week and the uncounted
more who caught up on DVD or downloads. However, factoring in the
large size of Lostpedia’s assumed nonediting readership, following the
typical pattern of high reader-to-editor ratios at most wikis, plus the
active traffic on numerous other Lost fan sites, it seems fair to imagine
that the practices of this comparatively small number of participatory
viewers represent broader interests that matter to a significant segment
of the program’s viewership.14 Moreover, it is a highly influential minor-
ity, as reader-oriented poetics can highlight how series address such
participatory viewers directly, which I discuss in depth in chapters 8
and 9. Throughout the book, I assume that the behaviors exhibited by
small groups of active online fans are indicative of broader tendencies
among many less participatory television viewers, on the basis of how
they fit with poetic textual strategies and broader cultural trends, mak-
ing such fans an important and influential minority viewership. There
are certainly many other viewing practices for such programming, and
I do not explore those that I do as a prescriptive norm to be followed — I
hope other critics build on this foundation to offer accounts of other
 Introduction | 9

ways that viewers (and nonviewers) engage with complex television to

broaden our understanding of reception practices.
With these poetic approaches as my guide, this book explores the
formal dimensions and cultural practices of contemporary television
serial storytelling. I do not claim to be comprehensive in my analytic
scope, as there are far more programs that I do not consider that might
support or contradict some of my claims. I focus exclusively on prime
time television, operating on the model of weekly episodes aired on net-
works or cable channels in seasonal units typically ranging between 10
and 24 episodes — certainly there are newer forms of online serials that
might be relevant to the programs I explore here, and the older tradi-
tion of daytime soap operas is a major site of television seriality that
I discuss in chapter 7. However, I am limiting my focus to the prime
time serial because I believe its weekly installments constitute a distinc-
tive narrative mode worth considering in depth, and the wide reach of
both prime time cable and network programming still makes it the most
culturally prominent form of television. I focus almost exclusively on
American television, as I believe its unique industrial norms need to be
understood on their own terms; additionally, the global circulation of
American television has made many of these programs highly popular
and influential around the world, even in the form of American remakes
of foreign originals such as The Office, Ugly Betty, In Treatment, and
Homeland. I do consider a range of examples spanning comedies and
dramas, but only scripted programming —while the simultaneous rise of
reality television alongside this form of complex television is an interest-
ing and probably related phenomenon, the role of storytelling on reality
programming is outside my purview here.
In choosing the programs to analyze, I have decided to focus in depth
on a few key texts while referencing a broad corpus, rather than trying
to cover every series that might be relevant. This is in large part due to
the challenges of studying long-form serial texts — a successful series can
run for over 100 hours of programming, and such analysis can require
multiple viewings, as well as immersing in broader paratextual circula-
tion and reception practices. Thus much of my analytic focus is aimed
at the three series I know best, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Lost, with
more compact analyses of other programs including Veronica Mars, The
Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development, Dexter, Six Feet
10 | Introduction

Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mad Men, and Homeland, among many
more. To help understand the examples explored throughout the book,
readers can access a library of video clips and images at the NYU Press
website for the book. There are numerous other series that might be
understood as key examples of complex television or that might counter
some of my analytic claims. I hope that some readers use this book to
launch their own analyses of such examples to strengthen our under-
standing of the poetics of contemporary television storytelling, as I
believe the concepts and claims I develop here are broadly applicable to
a wide range of programs and genres.
My narrative analyses consider the storytelling process whereby a
storyworld is conveyed by a television text and constituted in the minds
of its viewers. A basic definition of television serial storytelling charts
out this terrain: a television serial creates a sustained narrative world,
populated by a consistent set of characters who experience a chain of
events over time. I am most interested in exploring how this fictional
world is told via serial television, highlighting the distinction between
the fictional story and its telling via narrative discourse, a core difference
established by narrative theorists across media. The book considers dif-
ferent storytelling strategies used by serial television to create engag-
ing storyworlds through a range of complex techniques of narrative
discourse, including playing with temporality, constructing ongoing
characters, and incorporating transmedia. While the use of visual and
aural techniques to convey narrative is an essential part of television,
with many complex television programs embracing a broader palette
of stylistic techniques to help make them distinctive innovators, I only
consider such elements in service of other storytelling goals such as
atemporality or character development.15
What I try to do in this book is tell the story of television’s chang-
ing narrative paradigms. In 2011, one of the year’s most popular new
network programs, Revenge, opened its pilot with a party scene that cli-
maxes with a murder. It then flashed back five months to chart how the
narrative arrived at this climactic point, a major event that would only
be reached in the season’s 15th episode, with the rest of the pilot incor-
porating voice-over narration and multiple flashbacks to various time
frames. What was most remarkable about this pilot was how unremark-
 Introduction | 11

able it was — critics and fans found this style of complex storytelling
commonplace and undistinguished, generally classifying the series as a
decent “prime time soap” or belittling it as a “guilty pleasure.” But prime
time soaps of previous decades, such as Melrose Place, were much more
conventional in their narrative techniques, and such complex chronol-
ogy was reserved for more “prestigious” niche programs such as Six Feet
Under or Alias. This device of starting a narrative at a moment of climax
and flashing back was fairly uncommon a decade ago — as discussed
in chapter 2, it features prominently in the pilots for Alias in 2001 and
Veronica Mars in 2004. The first instance that I remember seeing was
in 2000, when The West Wing opened its episode “What Kind of Day
Has It Been” with a hard-to-comprehend scene that concludes with a
moment of tension, with the rest of the episode flashing back to lead
up to and explain that climactic moment — I remember being struck by
how atypical the device was, especially for such a fairly “realistic” series,
but today such a device is practically a cliché.16 Narrative complexity has
suffused television to the degree that Revenge’s temporally fractured nar-
rative technique can go unnoticed; the rest of this book aims to explain
how and why.

How to Read This Book

This book was written and published serially. We normally think of a
scholarly manuscript as emerging as a singular, bound statement all
at once, but most humanities research is a long-term, ongoing process
in which pieces emerge first in conversations, classrooms, conference
presentations, blog postings, and stand-alone articles or book chap-
ters. Seeds of this project were planted in my first book, especially in
discussing how Soap reworked narrative form as an innovative serial
sitcom of the 1970s.17 Some core ideas of Complex TV first got public
airing in 2004 at a small colloquium presentation at Middlebury Col-
lege, where feedback from colleagues transformed it significantly. Since
that time, I have presented and published versions of these ideas numer-
ous times, each time gathering feedback to (hopefully) strengthen and
nuance my arguments; additionally, a few of my terms and analyses have
been picked up by other scholars, making “narrative complexity” and
12 | Introduction

“forensic fandom” seem like less novel concepts (at least to me) than
on their first appearances. I have built on other scholars’ work on such
issues, using them to bolster my ideas and to provide additional wrin-
kles, and in some cases I leave topics to others who have covered similar
ground better than I could have. On top of this more typical model of
serial release and revision, I published a draft online in serialized install-
ments over a 15-month period in 2012 – 2013 via MediaCommons Press;
the online version serves as the penultimate draft of the final book,
which was significantly improved in reaction to readers’ commentary
and criticisms. Making the serial facets of the book’s own writing and
publication process visible calls attention to the ways that all scholarship
is written in dialogic installments over time, through multiple versions
and iterations, less like an episodic lecture than a serialized conversation.
Much like serial television itself, such ongoing scholarship is written for
a variety of readers — those who are casually dropping in on the topic,
those who have been actively participating in the conversation for years,
and a range in between. I hope there is something interesting to discover
here for every type of reader, no matter where you fall on that spectrum.
Although the print version of this book proceeds in a linear fashion,
page after page, it is not essential to read it that way. Chapter 1 should
be read next, as it outlines key ideas and terms running throughout the
book by explaining what narrative complexity is and how it fits into the
contemporary television context. However, the rest of the chapters can
be read in any order; while I have provided a sequence that can be fol-
lowed, none of the chapters depend on having read the previous chap-
ters beyond the first two. The final chapter on “ends” is in some ways
just another topic but also is the most reflexive discussion of the book
itself, making an appropriately meta-conclusion. Although together the
chapters do tell the story of complex television, they are more episodic
and self-contained than the cumulative sequential storyworlds they ana-
lyze — so feel free to chart your own path through chapters, eschewing
chronology for topicality. Each chapter is far from a definitive and com-
prehensive take on its topic, as each could easily serve as the launching
point for its own entire book; instead, treat each chapter as a probe that
opens up avenues for future exploration. The following brief recaps pre-
view each installment so you can jump ahead if you are so inclined, or
feel free to explore on your own unspoiled by what is to come.
 Introduction | 13

Beginnings
Although long-form television serials are notably marked by their
potentially eternal narrative middles, they all must start somewhere;
this chapter explores how serials are launched with television pilots,
considering the core functions of pilots as setting up the direction of
a serial’s narrative thrust, teaching viewers how to watch the ongoing
narrative, and inspiring them to commit to ongoing serialized consump-
tion. The chapter uses a detailed case study of the Veronica Mars pilot
to demonstrate how serials establish intrinsic norms for ongoing narra-
tives, with references to strategies found in pilots of Twin Peaks, Arrested
Development, Alias, Awake, How I Met Your Mother, Pushing Daisies,
and Terriers.

Authorship
Contemporary television has fostered a unique form of creative author-
ship, establishing the role of “showrunner” within its production
contexts. This chapter discusses the technologically enabled paratexts
of podcasts, making-of documentaries, DVD commentaries, Twitter
feeds, and blogs that have enabled television creators to speak directly to
viewers, and it discusses how such paratexts have helped constitute star
showrunners such as Buffy’s Joss Whedon, Community’s Dan Harmon,
and Lost’s team of Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. In exploring the
textual and paratextual presence of showrunners, I discuss theories of
authorship and posit that viewers rely on an inferred author function to
make sense of contemporary television serials.

Characters
This chapter considers how serial characters work within the constraints
of the television medium and the limits of presenting character change
over time, considering how The Sopranos, Angel, Lost, Game of Thrones,
and Dexter create compelling, complex characters. Many complex seri-
als have embraced antiheroes as lead characters, using the long-form
narrative structure to layer psychological traits and key elements of
backstory. This chapter uses the case study of Breaking Bad and its
14 | Introduction

antihero protagonist to explore how serial dramas construct changing

characters with different approaches to relationships, flashbacks, mem-
ory, narration, and performance.

Comprehension
One of the challenges of a long-form serial narrative is maintain-
ing viewer comprehension throughout a variety of viewing practices,
whether it is weekly and seasonal installments through broadcast sched-
ules or the more variable patterns afforded by DVDs, online viewing, and
DVRs. This chapter builds on cognitive theories of narrative compre-
hension to consider how television serials have created methods to both
maximize understanding and play with knowledge differentials between
characters and viewers in programs including Dexter and Veronica Mars.
I focus on issues of viewer memory as addressed both within the core
narrative text and in associated paratexts, considering the varying ways
programs trigger memories and exploit viewers’ fading memories to cre-
ate unusual surprises in programs such as Battlestar Galactica and Lost.
The chapter also analyzes different approaches to suspense, surprise,
anticipation, and curiosity that have emerged for long-form serial tele-
vision and how viewers thwart such narrative pleasures through spoilers.
Finally, it concludes with a detailed account of the serial viewer’s activity
in watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Evaluation
Television studies, as forged by the influence of cultural studies, has
been loath to include critical evaluation in its toolbox, as television’s
own spot on the receiving end of numerous aesthetic condemnations
has pushed evaluative criticism off the field’s agenda. In this chapter,
I explore a model of contextualized evaluation that does not re-create
universal aesthetic values but rather looks at how a series can define its
own terms and parameters of evaluation and how television scholars
might productively engage with questions of value. Using the examples
of The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, all of which have been hailed
by critics as among the greatest television series in the medium’s his-
tory, I discuss how we can enter into medium-specific debates over value
 Introduction | 15

without re-creating a canon or exclusionary critical practices, consider-

ing how complexity can function as an aesthetic asset in multiple ways.

Serial Melodrama
This chapter explores the role of melodrama within contemporary serial
narratives, starting with the soap opera’s debatable connection to this
mode of storytelling. By separating out the narrative norms of soap
operas from the emotional appeals of melodrama, I argue that soaps’
textual form is less vital to prime time serials than is the discursive his-
tory linking seriality to the soap genre for decades. Instead, I consider
how the emotional responses triggered by serial melodrama help forge
the mixed-gender appeal of narratively complex series, with programs
such as Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, Lost, The Good Wife, and
The Wire playing with such conventions to complicate well-established
assumptions about genre categories and their gendered appeals.

Orienting Paratexts
Along with shifts in the television industry and technologies, viewer
practices have adapted to the digital era with new developments in how
people consume narrative television. This chapter explores the range of
paratexts that have emerged to help viewers make sense of complex tele-
vision’s temporality, characters, plot, and spatial orientation, spanning a
wide range of programs from St. Elsewhere to Game of Thrones. Through
a detailed account of the fan wiki Lostpedia, I explore the complexity of
how people watch television and foreground notions of forensic fandom
and drillability as modes of television spectatorship.

Transmedia Storytelling
As television series have become more complex in their narrative strate-
gies, television itself has expanded its scope across a number of screens
and platforms, complicating notions of medium specificity at the very
same time that television seems to have established a clearer sense of
distinct narrative form. This chapter explores how television narra-
tives are expanded and complicated through transmedia extensions,
16 | Introduction

including videogames, novelizations, websites, online video, and alter-

nate reality games. With specific analyses of transmedia strategies for
Lost and Breaking Bad, I consider how television’s transmedia storytell-
ing is grappling with issues of canonicity and audience segmentation,
how transmedia reframes viewer expectations for the core television
serial, and what transmedia possibilities might look like going forward.

Ends
American commercial television differs from much of the world in how
it privileges a narrative model in which a successful series never ends,
with a final episode typically regarded as a sign of commercial failure
and/or creative exhaustion, and often programs end by abrupt cancella-
tion more than planned conclusion. In the past decade, more series have
planned their conclusions, creating a set of precedents for serial endings
that variously embrace ambiguity, circularity, reflexivity, and finality.
This chapter looks at the concluding seasons and episodes of Lost, The
Wire, and The Sopranos as exemplars of both narrative strategies and the
divergent viewer and critic reactions triggered by various finales. The
book concludes by discussing notions of “ends” in terms of the goals
of serial criticism using case studies from Homeland and Breaking Bad,
infusing some questions of politics back into the book’s poetic approach.
Finally, it reflects on the book’s own seriality in its online prepublication.

While these chapters offer a broad span of topics and examples of the
complex television phenomenon, I make no claims toward comprehen-
siveness — there are many more series, historical connections, viewer
practices, and analytic angles to be explored. I hope this book offers a
solid understanding of how we might think about contemporary tele-
vision storytelling on its own terms, rather than in the language of lit-
erature or film, and provides a critical vocabulary for both television
scholars and viewers to understand the ongoing shifts in what remains
our most influential and popular storytelling medium.
1

Complexity in Context

This book’s main argument is that over the past two decades, a new
model of storytelling has emerged as an alternative to the conventional
episodic and serial forms that have typified most American television
since its inception, a mode that I call narrative complexity.1 We can see
such innovative narrative form in popular network hits from Seinfeld
to Lost, The X-Files to How I Met Your Mother, as well as in critically
beloved but ratings-challenged programs such as Arrested Development,
Veronica Mars, Boomtown, and Firefly, not to mention series that failed
both commercially and critically, such as Reunion, Day Break, Flash-
Forward, and The Event. HBO has built its reputation and subscriber
base on narratively complex series, such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under,
Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, and Game of Thrones, and cable chan-
nels Showtime (Dexter, Homeland), FX (The Shield, Justified), and AMC
(Mad Men, Breaking Bad) have followed suit. Clearly these programs
offer an alternative to conventional television narrative form — the pur-
pose of this chapter is to explain how and why. As a background for
the rest of the book’s more topically focused investigation, this chap-
ter outlines the formal attributes of this storytelling mode, explores its
unique pleasures and patterns of consumption, and suggests a range of
reasons for complex television’s emergence in the late 1990s and contin-
ued growth throughout the 21st century.
In trying to understand the storytelling practices of contemporary
American television, we might consider narrative complexity as a dis-
tinct narrational mode, as suggested by David Bordwell’s analysis of film
narrative. For Bordwell, a “narrational mode is a historically distinct
set of norms of narrational construction and comprehension,” one that
crosses genres, specific creators, and artistic movements to forge a coher-
ent category of practices.2 Bordwell outlines specific cinematic modes
such as classical Hollywood, art cinema, and historical materialism, all
of which encompass distinct storytelling strategies while still referencing

17
18 | Complexity in Context

one another and building on the foundations of other modes. Kristin

Thompson has extended Bordwell’s approach to television, suggesting
that programs such as Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective might be
usefully thought of as “art television,” importing norms from art cin-
ema onto the small screen.3 Although certainly cinema influences many
aspects of television, especially concerning visual style, I am reluctant to
map a model of storytelling tied to self-contained feature films onto the
ongoing long-form narrative structure of series television, where ongo-
ing continuity and seriality are core features, and thus I believe we can
more productively develop a vocabulary for television narrative on its
own medium terms. Likewise, contemporary complex serials are often
praised as being “novelistic” in scope and form, but I believe such cross-
media comparisons obscure rather than reveal the specificities of tele-
vision’s storytelling form. Television’s narrative complexity is predicated
on specific facets of storytelling that seem uniquely suited to the tele-
vision series structure apart from film and literature and that distinguish
it from conventional modes of episodic and serial forms.

Complex Serial Poetics

So what exactly is narrative complexity? At its most basic level, nar-
rative complexity redefines episodic forms under the influence of serial
narration — not necessarily a complete merger of episodic and serial
forms but a shifting balance. Rejecting the need for plot closure within
every episode that typifies conventional episodic form, narrative com-
plexity foregrounds ongoing stories across a range of genres. Complex
television employs a range of serial techniques, with the underlying
assumption that a series is a cumulative narrative that builds over time,
rather than resetting back to a steady-state equilibrium at the end of
every episode. While today’s complex narratives can be markedly dif-
ferent from their 20th-century predecessors, they built on numerous
innovators from the 1970s forward. This new mode is not as uniform
and convention driven as episodic or serials norms traditionally have
been —in fact, complex television’s most defining characteristic might be
its unconventionality — but it is still useful to group together a growing
number of programs that work against the conventions of episodic and
serial traditions in a range of intriguing ways.4
 Complexity in Context | 19

The key prototypes for complex television emerged in the 1990s, set-
ting precedents that more recent programs adopted and refined. The
cult hit The X-Files exemplifies what may be the hallmark of narrative
complexity: an interplay between the demands of episodic and serial
storytelling, often oscillating between long-term arcs and stand-alone
episodes. As Jeffrey Sconce discusses, any given X-Files episode might
focus on the long-term “mythology,” an ongoing, highly elaborate con-
spiracy plot that endlessly delays resolution and closure, or might offer
self-contained “monster-of-the-week” stories that generally exist outside
the arcing scope of the mythology.5 Although X-Files features an influ-
ential array of narrational innovations, the program’s eventual creative
and critical decline highlights one of the key tensions inherent in nar-
rative complexity: balancing the competing demands and pleasures of
episodic and serial norms. According to many X-Files viewers and crit-
ics, the series suffered from too great a disjunction between the overly
complex and endlessly deferred serial mythology and the detached
independence of monster-of-the-week episodes that might ignore or
even contradict the accrued knowledge of the conspiracy. For instance,
the highly regarded reflexive episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”
mocks the program’s nested conspiracies, while its events undermine
some of the revelations of the ongoing mythology concerning alien
presence on Earth. Despite viewers’ cultish devotion for unraveling the
mysteries driving Agent Mulder’s endless quest, this episode (as well as
many others) left viewers unsure as to how to consistently fit events into
the storyworld. Viewing tastes thus divided between conspiracy buffs,
who saw the sometimes reflexive and tonally divergent monster-of-the-
week episodes as distractions from the serious mythological mysteries,
and fans who grew to appreciate the coherence and range of the stand-
alone episodes in light of the increasingly inscrutable arc — personally,
I found myself in the latter camp before abandoning the series entirely.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are arguably more adept at jug-
gling the dual demands of serial and episodic pleasures. While both pro-
grams (together and separately) present a rich and ongoing mythology
of a battle between the forces of good and evil, plotlines are centered on
season-long arcs featuring a particular villain, or “big bad” in Buffy’s
parlance. Within a given season, nearly every episode advances the sea-
son’s arc while still offering episodic coherence and resolutions. Even
20 | Complexity in Context

highly experimental or atypical episodes balance between episodic and

serial demands; for instance, Buffy’s “Hush” features a literal monster-
of-the-week, known as The Gentlemen, who steal the voices of the town
of Sunnydale, leading to an impressively constructed episode told virtu-
ally without dialogue. Yet despite the episode’s one-off villain and highly
unusual speechless mode of storytelling, “Hush” still advances various
narrative arcs, as characters reveal key secrets and deepen relationships
to move the season-long plot forward; many other Buffy and Angel epi-
sodes similarly offer unique episodic elements with undercurrents of
arc narration. These programs also interweave melodramatic relation-
ship dramas and character development with story arcs — Buffy, at its
most accomplished, uses forward plot momentum to generate emo-
tional responses to characters and allows relationships to help advance
plots, as exemplified by how “Hush” simultaneously offers closure to a
monster-of-the-week, furthers the relationship between Buffy and Riley,
and adds new wrinkles to the season-long arc concerning the Initiative.
Numerous other series have found their own distinct patterns for inter-
weaving long-term story arcs within the frameworks of clearly defined
episodic parameters, such as individual character flashbacks on Lost or
Orange Is the New Black or the case-of-the-week structure of Veronica
Mars or Pushing Daisies.
But narrative complexity cannot simply be defined as prime time epi-
sodic seriality; within the broader mode of complexity, many programs
actively work against serial norms but also embrace narrative strategies
to rebel against episodic conventionality. For instance, Seinfeld has a
mixed relationship to serial plotting — some seasons feature an ongoing
situation, such as Jerry’s NBC sitcom pilot, George’s impending wed-
ding, or Elaine’s new job. These story arcs work primarily to offer back-
story for in-jokes and self-aware references, as when George suggests a
potential story for an episode of his and Jerry’s sitcom “about nothing”
based on the night they waited for a table at a Chinese restaurant, the
plot of an earlier episode. However, these arcs and ongoing plots demand
little cumulative knowledge, as actions and events rarely matter across
episodes — arguably a result of the infrequency of significant actions
and events on a series committed to chronicling insignificant minutiae.
While certainly a viewer’s appreciation of the storyworld is heightened
the more alert one is to ongoing references such as Art Vandelay or Bob
 Complexity in Context | 21

Sacamano, narrative comprehension does not require engaging in any

long-term arcs as with X-Files or Buffy. Yet Seinfeld offers a wealth of
narrative complexity, often through its refusal to conform to episodic
norms of closure, resolution, and distinct storylines. Many episodes
leave characters in an untenable situation — Kramer arrested for being
a pimp, Jerry running into the woods after becoming a “wolf-man,”
George stuck in an airplane restroom with a serial killer — that function
not as cliffhangers as in serial dramas but rather as comedic punch lines
not to be referenced again.
Seinfeld and other narratively complex comedies such as The Simp-
sons, Malcolm in the Middle, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Develop-
ment, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia use television’s episodic form
to undercut conventional assumptions of returning to equilibrium and
situational continuity, while embracing conditional seriality — some
storylines do in fact continue, while others are never referred to again.
Arrested Development, a more explicitly serialized comedy, subverts
these conventions even more, as most episodes end with a “next week on
Arrested Development” teaser, showing scenes continuing that episode’s
stories. However, regular viewers soon learn that neither will future epi-
sodes portray these scenes nor will they have actually occurred within
the ongoing storyworld (although in the third season, the series var-
ies this norm by allowing some of the teaser material to occur diegeti-
cally). Likewise, The Simpsons generally embraces an excessive and even
parodic take on episodic form, rejecting continuity between episodes by
returning to an everlasting present equilibrium state of Bart in fourth
grade, Maggie as perpetual toddler, and a dysfunctional family stasis.
However, there are exceptions to these norms: Apu gets married and has
octuplets that grow from in utero to toddlers over the course of many
seasons, suggesting that at least three years have passed in Springfield’s
life cycle, yet nobody else has aged. Often making jokes about the need
to return to equilibrium state, The Simpsons offers ambiguous expecta-
tions over which transformations are “reset” after each episode (frequent
losses of jobs, destruction of property, and damaging of relationships
that will be restored by next week’s episode) and which will be carried
over serially (such as Apu’s family, Skinner and Krabappel’s relationship,
and Maude Flanders’s death). Thus these complex comedies selectively
engage serial norms, weaving certain events into their backstories while
22 | Complexity in Context

ambiguously discarding other moments into the more commonplace

realm of forgotten episodic histories, a distinction that viewers must
either overlook as inconsistency or embrace as one of the sophisticated
traits of narrative complexity; evidence of fan practices online suggest
that the latter is more common once viewers accept the shifting rules as
one of the pleasures offered by these complex comedies.
Such examples highlight why we should conceive of contemporary
television seriality not just as a simple marker of continuity but as a
multifaceted variable, with a range of potential storytelling possibilities.
We traditionally think of television seriality as typified by the endlessly
deferred openness of soap operas, with decades of narrative accumulat-
ing within the memories of their multigenerational fan communities.
As I discuss in chapter 7, soap operas were synonymous with American
television seriality for decades, but there are different elements of serial
continuity beyond the model pioneered by daytime melodrama. In the
introduction, I suggested that serial narratives are composed of the four
main elements of storyworld, characters, events, and temporality — by
breaking down seriality into its constitutive elements, we can see that
even highly episodic programs are serialized in certain ways. Nearly
every fictional television series has a serialized storyworld and charac-
ters, meaning they are an ongoing, consistent narrative element.6 Every
episode of the classic episodic procedural Dragnet takes place in a fic-
tionalized version of Los Angeles and features the same central character
of Joe Friday, even if that episode’s events are not cumulative with previ-
ous installments. Contemporary programs regarded as highly episodic,
such as the crime procedural Law and Order or the sitcom Two and a
Half Men, still maintain consistent and persistent storyworlds and char-
acters so that viewers recognize the places and people they encounter
each week. It is rare for a program to violate such serialized characters
and world building, such that it becomes noteworthy when Louie plays
with the form by having the same actress play Louie’s date in one episode
and his mother in another episode’s flashback — a decision that creator
Louis C.K. says was motivated not for thematic commentary but just
because he liked the actress for both parts, and he treats the series more
like an anthology of short films rather than a continuing series.7
When we talk about a serialized program, we are usually referring less
to the ubiquitous persistence of storyworld and characters and more to
 Complexity in Context | 23

the ongoing accumulation of narrative events — what occurs in one epi-

sode will have happened to the characters and storyworld as portrayed
in future episodes. Most classically episodic programs are ambiguous on
this front, simply choosing to ignore previous events rather than explic-
itly to deny their existence, while more playfully reflexive series will
acknowledge this lack of event serialization, as with South Park’s weekly
death of Kenny, only to be reborn the following week. Programs whose
narrative events do accumulate serially usually articulate this buildup
through the memories of characters — people reference previous occur-
rences such as a romantic connection or personal discovery, expressing
continuity through dialogue and character actions, as discussed more in
chapter 4. Settings also have memories, where the physical evidence of
narrative events can be seen, as with the wreckage of a space battle on
Battlestar Galactica or characters moving apartments on Community.
Oftentimes, frustration with a serialized program stems from moments
when viewers’ memories are more acute than those of characters or the
storyworld, as a viewer might wonder why characters do not seem to
remember what happened previously to them and behave accordingly
or why the set does not reflect the aftermath of the last episode’s events.
A challenge for serial television is conveying consistent norms for how
much narrative continuity viewers should expect in a given program,
which is generally established by the degree to which characters refer-
ence previous events and the storyworld displays the impacts—the more
a series reminds us that narrative events have a cumulative impact, the
more we expect strict continuity and consistency. Thus when the first
season of Heroes concluded with some illogical discontinuity concerning
a character’s powers and fans critiqued this inconsistency, creator Tim
Kring commented in an interview, “theoretically you’re not supposed to
be thinking about that”; however, Kring’s statement directly overlooks
that the entire season had been focused on characters discovering and
discussing the mechanics of their powers, establishing our expectations
for consistency within the series.8
Of course, there are different types of narrative events that may or
may not be serialized. One key distinction is between major and minor
events, or what Seymour Chatman calls “kernels” and “satellites.” The
major kernels are central to the cause-and-effect chain of a plot, while
minor satellites are inessential to the plot and thus could be omitted
24 | Complexity in Context

without impacting narrative comprehension; however, satellites provide

texture, tone, and character richness.9 One of the pleasures of consuming
a serialized narrative is trying to figure out whether a given event might
be a kernel or a satellite in the larger arc of a plotline or series as a whole.
Critics, fans, and television writers frequently reference Chekhov’s Gun
as a storytelling axiom: playwright Anton Chekhov’s oft-repeated advice
that if you hang a gun over the mantle in the first act, it must be fired by
the end of the play. In Chatman’s terms, Chekhov’s Gun might be called
a kernel initially presented as a satellite; thus serial viewers can attune
themselves to look for Chekhov’s guns, searching for apparent satellites
that might eventually turn into kernels in later episodes. Sometimes sat-
ellites resolve in fairly quick succession within a given episode or in the
next, as with a seemingly inconsequential moment in Breaking Bad ’s
“End Times” when Walt spins a gun on a table; this scene first seems
to exist solely to portray Walt’s emotional state, but it is revealed in the
next episode to portray a subtle but crucial narrative event only com-
prehensible in retrospect. Other such moments can hang over the life of
a series — in the third episode of The Wire, we are told that Lieutenant
Daniels is “dirty,” with a dormant FBI file on corruption charges. This
character revelation serves as a dangling cause for years, finally trigger-
ing a power struggle that prompts Daniels’s eventual resignation late in
the fifth season, with more than 50 hours of screen time between putting
this gun on the mantle and firing it.
Major events move the narrative forward, but with differing repercus-
sions. Most kernels are straightforward occurrences that clearly change
the narrative in evident ways: Jim and Pam marry on The Office, Jason
Street gets paralyzed during a football game on Friday Night Lights,
Nathaniel is hit by a bus and dies on Six Feet Under. Such events clearly
matter to the ensemble of characters and change the status quo of the
storyworld, but the narrative questions they raise are only about future
events: what repercussions will this event have within the continuing
story? There is no real ambiguity about what happened, how it hap-
pened, or even why it happened; thus we can call such events narra-
tive statements, as they assert a story element without raising questions
about the actual event beyond the ubiquitous “what next?” In contrast,
some events function as narrative enigmas, raising uncertainty as to
what precisely happened, who was involved, why they did what they did,
 Complexity in Context | 25

how this came to be, or even whether it actually happened at all. Laura
Palmer’s body being discovered on Twin Peaks, Starbuck returning from
presumed death on Battlestar Galactica, and 24’s Jack Bauer finding evi-
dence of a mole within the Counter Terrorism Unit all function as nar-
rative enigmas about what previously happened to lead to these events
and raise mysteries concerning the details of the present narrative situa-
tion. For example, in the second season of Lost, the episode “Two for the
Road” ends with Michael shooting Ana Lucia and Libby to release the
prisoner then known as Henry Gale. Like all kernels, this event raises
questions for the future (Will Ana Lucia and Libby survive? Will their
friends discover Michael’s betrayal?) but also poses questions about the
narrative present (Why did he betray his friends? Did Michael intend to
shoot Libby?) and past (What happened to Michael while he was away
from the camp?). These questions are all answered to some degree in the
following three episodes, making them fairly small-scale enigmas within
Lost’s complex web of serialized mysteries and long-lasting ambiguities.
Many people conflate the term “highly serialized drama” with long-
form serialized mysteries innovated by Twin Peaks and The X-Files and
popularized by Lost, but most programs predicated on such central
narrative enigmas fail to live up to their concepts, as demonstrated by
the failure of numerous enigma-driven programs such as Harsh Realm,
Reunion, Harper’s Island, FlashForward, and The Event. Instead, the
majority of serial plots focus more on questions about future events trig-
gered by narrative statements rather than focusing on enigmas from the
narrative past. Even for programs in which characters’ backstories mat-
ter significantly, as with Breaking Bad and Revenge, the narrative thrust
is primarily forward moving, with minor insights and flashbacks pep-
pered throughout the series revealing key aspects of a character’s his-
tory rather than creating deep mysteries for viewers to piece together.
The most common model of event serialization found on television is
the forward-moving accumulation of narrative statements that create
triggers for future events to come in subsequent episodes — whether on
contemporary complex programs, as with Avon Barksdale putting a hit
on Omar on The Wire, or on traditional daytime or prime time soap
operas, as when Luke rapes Laura to instigate a problematic but compel-
ling romance plotline in 1980s General Hospital, these are nonenigmatic
narrative moments that keep audiences engaged in hypothesizing what
26 | Complexity in Context

will happen next, not looking backward to solve mysteries. As discussed

in chapter 5, narrative enigmas and statements lead to differing modes
of engagement for viewers, prompting various forms of suspense, sur-
prise, curiosity, and theorizing. All of these events highlight the impor-
tance of temporality in grounding seriality, as viewers and creators alike
aim to manage the multiple time frames of narrative past, present, and
future in making sense of ongoing storyworlds.
Time is an essential element of all storytelling but is even more cru-
cial for television. We might consider three different temporal streams
within all narratives. Story time is the time frame of the diegesis, how
time passes within the storyworld, and typically follows real-world con-
ventions of straightforward chronology and linear progression from
moment to moment, with exceptions such as when characters time
travel in Lost or Heroes. Discourse time is the temporal structure and
duration of the story as told within a given narrative, which almost
always differs from story time via ellipses skipping over uneventful
moments. Complex narratives often reorder events through flashbacks,
retelling past events, repeating story events from multiple perspectives,
and jumbling chronologies — these are overt manipulations of discourse
time, as we are to assume that the characters experienced the events in
a linear progression. Mystery plotlines often play with discourse time to
create suspense concerning past events, waiting until the end of the nar-
rative to reveal the inciting incident that diegetically occurred near the
beginning of the story, and many complex narratives play with chronol-
ogy to engage viewers and encourage them to try to actively parse the
story. Finally, there is narration time, the temporal framework involved
in telling and receiving the story. For literature, this is quite variable, as
everyone reads at a different pace and might read a book in installments
over a period of days or weeks or more. For film and television, narra-
tion time is strictly controlled, as a two-hour film takes the same for all
viewers, and television restricts narration time even further through its
schedule of weekly installments and commercial breaks; even with the
variability and control enabled by DVDs or online video as discussed
later, it still takes the same amount of narration time for everyone to
consume a given moving-image narrative. For film and television, screen
time is a better term for narration time, as it highlights the medium as
part of the narrative experience.
 Complexity in Context | 27

Understanding narrative time is vital to serial storytelling, because

seriality itself is defined by its use of time. The essential structure of
serial form is a temporal system with story installments parceled out
over time with gaps between entries through a strictly regimented use of
screen time. As discussed later, collecting episodes into bound volumes
of DVD box sets drastically changes the serial experience, as screen time
becomes far more controllable and variable for viewers, as well as elimi-
nating the cultural experience of simultaneously watching an episode
with millions of other viewers. But television series in their original
broadcast form alternate between episodic installments and manda-
tory temporal gaps between episodes — it is these gaps that define the
serial experience.10 Serial temporality is thus lodged primarily within
the realm of screen time through the material reception contexts of tele-
vision broadcasting, which enables the regular and ritualistic consump-
tion of a series that lies at the core of the serial experience. Additionally
and importantly, these gaps allow viewers to continue their engagement
with a series in between episodes, participating in fan communities,
reading criticism, consuming paratexts, and theorizing about future
installments, all vibrant practices that I discuss throughout the book.
Arguably the most crucial aspect of screen time’s role in balancing
episodic and serial forms is the opening and closing brackets of each epi-
sode, as screen time defines an episode as a discrete installment of story-
telling and constitutes the gap between episodes. Most episodes begin
with some crucial markers, such as recaps of previous events, an open-
ing title sequence of variable length, and credits that might run over the
titles or early scenes; likewise, an episode almost always ends with clos-
ing credits, bumper cards identifying the production companies, and a
preview of future narrative moments.11 Even when published on DVD,
such framing material is still retained to demarcate individual episodes,
and DVD menus themselves help delineate episodic unity through titles,
graphics, the choice of episode-specific paratexts such as commentary
tracks, and occasionally episode summaries. All of these screen-time ele-
ments exist outside the storyworld or its narrative discourse, operating
in the realm of paratexts or extradiegetic embedded graphics to define
the boundaries, length, and (via act breaks to accommodate advertise-
ments) rhythm of each episode, and virtually every television series
must squeeze its serial storytelling to fit into the constrained parameters
28 | Complexity in Context

of episodic screen time. Even when a highly serialized program strings

its plots and arcs across a full season, the producers always conceive of
each episode as a discrete narrative unit following the established terms
of screen time. Effective storytelling uses episodic screen time to prompt
viewer responses, as with Alias’s ritualistic cliffhangers: producers broke
stories into a conventional four-act structure but shifted each episode’s
final act into the first 10 minutes of the next episode, creating a compel-
ling bridge between episodes while still offering (deferred) resolution of
most individual plotlines.12
Seriality in story or discourse time is less prominent than for screen
time but is still important. Given that one of the key temporal aspects of
seriality is its ritualistic pattern of engagement, some programs extend
that ritual into their treatment of discourse time. Both Twin Peaks and
Deadwood embrace a structured use of discourse time where nearly
every episode takes place over the course of a single day, providing a
clear rhythm to its serialized narrative flow. 24 foregrounds this regi-
mented use of discourse time even more fully by structuring each season
as a pseudo-real-time day in the life of Jack Bauer, highlighting that tem-
porality through its use of on-screen clocks and split-screen simultane-
ity. Serialized story time is much more rare, as real life lacks the gaps and
repetitions that typify seriality — the short-lived Day Break was excep-
tional, presenting the infinite looping of a single day inspired by the film
Groundhog Day, while framing the story as a mystery to be solved by
the program’s protagonist and viewers. Lost draws a connection between
story and screen time by anchoring its twisty, temporally complex story-
telling around the core narrative event of the crash of Flight 815, which
took place on September 22, 2004 — the actual date of Lost’s television
premiere. But more frequently, complex television plays with story and
discourse time through episodic variations on the serialized routine — as
discussed later, one of the most exciting pleasures of contemporary fic-
tional television is when a series breaks from its intrinsic norms to offer
a new take on its conventional storytelling mode.13
We can see the multiple facets of episodic and serial storytelling at
work in two of complex television’s landmark innovators and trend-
setters: The Sopranos and The Wire. While today the former series is
regarded both as the breakthrough program that made HBO the pre-
eminent channel for innovative television and as the narrative template
 Complexity in Context | 29

for the complex serialized dramas that emerged throughout the 2000s,
in retrospect The Sopranos was far more episodic than it is typically
remembered to have been. Like nearly all fictional television, characters
and storyworld on Sopranos were persistent, and certainly it was more
cumulative than typical 1990s crime dramas such as Law and Order or
NYPD Blue. But most episodes had at least one bounded storyline that
began and ended within the episode, often offering thematic resonance
or ironic counterpoint to longer character arcs or event-driven struggles
between mobsters, while some of its most celebrated episodes, such as
“College” or “Pine Barrens,” are highly self-contained in a monster-of-
the-week format resembling X-Files or Buffy. The Sopranos’ story arcs
were far less sweeping than on Buffy or Lost, often lasting less than a sea-
son and resolving with little future resonances, and there were virtually
no mythological enigmas that would encourage viewers to probe back-
ward to try to parse out what happened within any individual event —
save for the infamous final scene, discussed more in chapter 10. Creator
David Chase has said he was much more interested in creating short
films about the characters and their world, but HBO pushed him toward
greater serialization; nevertheless, many episodes would still make sense
if watched out of order without their serial contexts.14 Each season does
add up to something more than a collection of stand-alone episodes
with major plot arcs that define each season, but that seasonal unity is
far more tied to theme or character than to plotting or the rise and fall of
a specific “big bad” as on Buffy. In short, The Sopranos exemplified the
model of serially infused episodic television that typifies most complex
television, with fairly episodic plots building into a serialized storyworld
and character arcs.
The Wire takes a starkly different approach to its episodic structure, as
there are almost no stand-alone plotlines within any given episode. All of
the program’s narrative events are either independent moments illustrat-
ing characters but lacking larger arc importance — McNulty enlists his
kids to play “front and follow” in pursuit of Stringer Bell, D’Angelo takes
time to pick out his wardrobe — or contribute to the slow accumulation
of the central plotlines that run throughout a given season. Individual
episodes are defined less by their narrative events or plot revelations
and more by their notable tonal moments: we remember an episode for
the scene where Bunk and McNulty investigate a crime scene using only
30 | Complexity in Context

varieties of the word “fuck” for dialogue but can easily forget how that
scene’s events are crucial in the larger story arc that takes the entire sea-
son to reveal. Episodes of The Wire are virtually impervious to brief plot
summaries, as each event scattered over the large cast of characters may
or may not be important to the larger story arcs, whereas “Tony Soprano
discovers and hunts down a mafia informant while taking his daughter
on a college tour” is an apt summary of the main story in “College.” This
is not to suggest that episodes of The Wire are just random collections of
character moments and unrelated narrative events that happen to fall in
the narrative sequence of the program’s plot arcs — individual episodes
frequently feature thematic and character-related parallels across plots,
and often an episode’s unity comes more from its consistent mood and
tone than from a contained story. For instance, the third episode, “The
Buys,” presents moments paralleling McNulty’s and D’Angelo’s roles as
midlevel players in their games, unable to effect change, reinforced by
D’Angelo’s monologue about chess, as well as portraying the dealers in
the pit being watched by both police and criminal rival Omar, creating
a feeling of pervasive threat and surveillance. Such thematic and tonal
unity is reinforced with each episode’s epigrammatic quotation that
highlights a key theme within the episode’s storytelling, as with “The
Buys” quoting D’Angelo, “The King stays the King.” Thus we can see
HBO’s dual landmarks operating with differing structural logics: The
Wire crafts season-long plots composed of thematically and tonally con-
nected episodes, while The Sopranos compiles more discrete episodic
stories into larger thematically unified but less plot-driven seasons.
While there are certainly other models available to television story-
tellers, most complex television operates within these various options of
locating events, time, characters, and storyworlds within the spectrum
between contained episodes and ongoing seriality. There are other cru-
cial poetic elements to raise in this overview of narrative complexity, but
first it is important to understand how the rise of this narrative mode
both was enabled by and helped transform the industrial, technologi-
cal, and reception contexts of television in the 1990s and 2000s, with
a consideration of why narrative complexity might not have emerged
earlier. While none of these shifts in industry, technology, and viewing
practices directly caused the rise of complex television, they all served
as enabling conditions, helping to shape these storytelling strategies that
 Complexity in Context | 31

have become more prevalent. Following the paradigm of historical poet-

ics, we must consider the interplay between the formal features of com-
plex television and its contextual surroundings.

The Contexts and Constraints of Complexity

Narrative complexity is sufficiently widespread and popular that we
might consider the 1990s to the present as the era of complex tele-
vision. Complexity has not overtaken conventional forms within the
majority of television programming today — there are still many more
conventional sitcoms and dramas on-air than there are complex narra-
tives, not to mention many popular nonfictional or semifictional genres
such as reality television, satirical news, and “lifestyle programs” that
grew in dominance during this same era. Yet just as 1970s Hollywood is
remembered far more for the innovative work of Altman, Scorsese, and
Coppola than for the more commonplace (and often more popular) con-
ventional disaster films, romances, and comedies that filled theaters, I
believe that American television of the past 20 years will be remembered
as an era of narrative experimentation and innovation, challenging the
norms of what the medium can do.15 Even though this complex mode
represents neither the majority of television nor its most popular pro-
grams (at least by the flawed standard of Nielsen ratings), a sufficiently
widespread number of programs work against conventional narrative
practices to justify such analysis.
Some key transformations in the media industries, technologies, and
audience behaviors coincide with the rise of narrative complexity — a
brief overview of crucial changes in 1990s television practices points to
both how these transformations impact creative practices and how for-
mal features always expand beyond textual borders.16 One major influ-
ence on the rise of narrative complexity on contemporary television is
the changing perception of the medium’s legitimacy and its resulting
appeal to creators. Many of the innovative television programs of the
past 20 years have come from creators who launched their careers in
film, a medium with more traditional cultural cachet: Aaron Sorkin
(Sports Night and West Wing), Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel, and Firefly),
and Alan Ball (Six Feet Under and True Blood) as screenwriters, and
David Lynch (Twin Peaks) and J. J. Abrams (Alias, Lost, and Fringe) as
32 | Complexity in Context

writer-directors.17 Part of television’s appeal to such figures is its reputa-

tion as a producer’s medium, where writers and creators retain control
of their work more than in film’s director-centered model, as discussed
more in chapter 3. Additionally, as reality television has emerged as a
popular and cost-effective alternative to scripted programming, tele-
vision writers seem to be offering innovations to demonstrate what
is unique to fictional television; narrative complexity highlights one
limit of reality programs, asserting the carefully controlled dramatic
and comedic manipulation of plots and characters that reality produc-
ers find more difficult to generate (although many attempt their own
forms of narrative manipulations). Many television writers embrace the
broader challenges and possibilities for creativity in long-form series, as
extended character depth, ongoing plotting, and episodic variations are
simply unavailable options within a two-hour film — notably, Whedon’s
film Serenity, which extended the narrative of the canceled single-season
cult series Firefly, compressed an entire season’s plot into two hours,
minimizing storytelling variety, character exploration, and ongoing
suspense. While innovative film narration has emerged as a “boutique”
form in recent years via puzzle films such as The Sixth Sense and Incep-
tion, the norms of Hollywood still favor spectacle and formulas suitable
for a peak opening weekend.18
However, television’s embrace of complexity has been a long time in
the making due to long-established obstacles to complex storytelling.
The commercial television industry in the United States has historically
avoided risks in search of economic stability, embracing a strategy of
imitation and formula that often results in a model of “least objection-
able content.”19 For decades, the commercial television industry was
immensely profitable by producing programming with minimal formal
variety outside the conventional genre norms of sitcoms and procedural
dramas. Serial narratives were primarily confined to the devalued genre
of daytime soap operas, with more legitimated prime time offerings
avoiding continuing storylines in lieu of episodic closure and limited
continuity. Economic strategies privileged the episodic form for prime
time programming —in large part, serialized content posed problems for
the industry’s cash cow, syndication. Reruns distributed by syndicators
might be aired in any order, making continuing storylines an obstacle to
this lucrative aftermarket. Additionally, network research departments
 Complexity in Context | 33

believed that even the biggest hit series could be guaranteed a consis-
tent carryover audience of no more than one-third from week to week,
meaning that the majority of viewers would not be sufficiently aware
of a program’s backstory to follow continuing storylines — oddly, con-
temporary television producers still repeat this statistic unchanged, sug-
gesting that it is grounded more in industrial folklore than in empirical
research.20 But given these assumptions that viewers were inconsistent,
coupled with networks’ general risk-averse attitudes and the ongoing
success of episodic programming, there was little economic rationale for
broadcasters to undertake the risks necessary to embark on experiments
in more serialized and complex storytelling.
Television’s mechanisms of storytelling also provide some impor-
tant constraints on how stories can be told. More than almost any
other medium, commercial television has a highly restrictive struc-
tured delivery system: weekly episodes of precisely prescribed lengths,
often with required breaks for advertisements — a parallel would be if
publishers demanded the exact same word count for every chapter of
every novel, regardless of genre, style, or author. A given season will
have a specific number of episodes, with variable scheduling for how
long breaks between episodes might be — often producers cannot plan
on precisely when a series will be aired or even in some extreme cases in
what order episodes might appear. Additionally, the series is consumed
as it is still being produced, meaning that adjustments are often made
midstream due to unexpected circumstances. Such adjustments can be
due to casting constraints, as in an actor’s pregnancy, illness, or death, or
feedback from networks, sponsors, or audience in reaction to an emerg-
ing storyline. Constraints such as these make television storytelling
distinct from most other media, although there are some similar limits
on length and structure for comics and dime novels. Such constraints
work to limit how television stories can be told but also provide clear
structures within which innovations can flourish, creatively challenging
well-established norms.
Finally, most successful television series typically lack the crucial ele-
ment that has long been hailed as of supreme importance for a well-told
story: an ending. Unlike nearly every other narrative medium except
comics, American commercial television operates on what might be
termed the “infinite model” of storytelling — a series is deemed a success
34 | Complexity in Context

only as long as it keeps going. While other national television systems

might end a successful series after a year or two, American programs
generally keep running as long as they are generating decent ratings.
This becomes a significant issue for storytellers, who must design nar-
rative worlds that are able to sustain themselves for years rather than
closed narratives plans created for a specific run, an issue discussed
more in chapter 10. Not surprisingly, this need to accommodate an infi-
nite run privileges episodic content with little continuity and long-term
story development, with recyclable characters and interchanging situa-
tions typical of police dramas and sitcoms. These constraints of how the
industry conceived of television’s viewing and storytelling norms posed
obstacles to the innovations that constitute complex television, with a
gradual shift in narrative possibilities emerging throughout the 1990s,
largely in response to industrial and technological transformations.
One factor that opened up storytelling innovations was the recalibra-
tion of industry expectations for what a hit series looked like. As the
number of channels have grown and the size of the audience for any
single program has shrunk, networks and channels have recognized
that a consistent cult following of a small but dedicated audience can
suffice to make a series economically viable. The overall audience size
of Buffy and Veronica Mars did not make them hits, but the measured
expectations of newer networks such as UPN and WB, as well as the
youthful demographics and cult-like dedication drawn by such series,
encouraged networks to allow such experimentations to grow an audi-
ence. Many complex programs expressly appeal to a boutique audience
of more upscale educated viewers who typically avoid television, as
with programs such as The West Wing or The Simpsons — needless to
say, an audience composed of viewers who watch little other television
is particularly valued by advertisers. For cable channels such as HBO,
complex programs such as The Wire, Deadwood, and Curb Your Enthu-
siasm might not have reached Sopranos-like popularity, but the prestige
of these programs furthered the channel’s brand image of being more
sophisticated than traditional television and thus worthy of a monthly
premium (and generating future DVD sales). And on nonpremium
cable channels, complex prestigious programs such as FX’s The Shield
and Justified or AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad helped establish such
channels as legitimate and appealing to cable operators and consumers
 Complexity in Context | 35

alike, even if ratings for such series might not be as lucrative as other
options — notably, FX makes more off reruns for Two and a Half Men
than its original programs, and AMC’s arguably least complex original
series, The Walking Dead, has been its highest rated by far. But because
cable channels get steady income from every subscriber whose cable or
satellite system carries the channel, high-profile prestigious programs
can work to raise a channel’s status and thus its carriage fees, even if
those programs do not produce much advertising revenue. In all of these
instances, programs with comparatively small ratings can provide lucra-
tive results for the industry under their recalibrated new measures.21
This era’s technological transformations have accelerated this shift in
similar ways. Audiences tend to embrace complex programs in much
more passionate and committed terms than they do most conventional
television, using these series as the basis for robust online fan cultures
and active feedback to the television industry (especially when their
programs are in jeopardy of cancellation). Online television criticism
has risen during this era, in both forums such as Television Without
Pity and commercial sites such as The A.V. Club, providing thoughtful
and humorous commentaries on weekly episodes and serving as sites of
fan engagement and conversation. The Internet’s ubiquity has enabled
fans to embrace a “collective intelligence” for information, interpreta-
tions, and discussions of complex narratives that invite participatory
engagement — and in instances such as Babylon 5 or Community, cre-
ators join in the discussions and use these forums as feedback mecha-
nisms to test for comprehension and pleasures, as discussed in chapter
3. Videogames, blogs, online role-playing sites, Twitter, fan websites, and
other digital technologies enable viewers to extend their participation in
these rich storyworlds beyond the one-way flow of traditional television
viewing, extending the universes of complex narrative creations such as
Buffy’s Sunnydale or The Simpsons’ Springfield into fully interactive and
participatory realms. Steven Johnson claims that this form of complex-
ity has offered viewers a “cognitive workout” that increases problem-
solving and observational skills — whether or not this argument can be
empirically substantiated, there is no doubt that this brand of television
storytelling encourages audiences to become more actively engaged and
offers a broader range of rewards and pleasures than does most con-
ventional programming.22 The consumer and creative practices of fan
36 | Complexity in Context

culture that cultural studies scholars embraced as subcultural phenom-

ena in the 1990s have become more widely distributed and participated
in with the distribution means of the Internet, making active audience
behavior even more of a mainstream practice.23 While none of these
new technologies directly caused the emergence of narrative complexity,
the incentives and possibilities they provided to both media industries
and viewers encourage the success and innovations of many such pro-
grams, as explored in chapter 9.
One shift that seems less radical but may be as or more important
than any of these other transformations is the rise of TV-on-DVD box
sets, a development that warrants more in-depth discussion. Releasing
television onto home video formats is certainly not new to the 2000s, as
many programs were released on VHS in the 1990s and even Laserdiscs
in the 1980s. Although the shift to DVD might be more of an accelera-
tion of degree than a transformation to an entirely new kind of distri-
bution, DVDs allowed television to be consumed and collected in new
ways that drastically changed the place of the television series in the
cultural landscape, as well as altering the narrative possibilities avail-
able to creators.24 For the first 30 years of the medium, American tele-
vision watching was primarily controlled by networks, offering limited
choices of programming on a tightly delimited schedule with few other
options to access content. While reruns proliferated in syndication, they
typically were shown out of order, encouraging episodic narratives that
could accommodate an almost random presentation of a series. Since
the mainstreaming of cable and the VCR in the early 1980s, the balance
has shifted more toward viewer control — the proliferation of channels
has helped routinize repeats, so that viewers can catch up on a series in
chronologically aired reruns or catch missed premium-cable programs
multiple times throughout the week. Time-shifting technologies such as
VCRs and digital video recorders enable viewers to choose when they
want to watch a program, but more importantly for narrative construc-
tion, viewers can rewatch episodes or segments to parse out complex
moments. Although self-recording via VHS tapes or burnable DVDs
allows viewers to create their own collections of an ongoing series, such
recordings are an archive of an event, an example of recorded flow cap-
turing a moment designed to be ephemeral. Recordings are bound to
an original time and place, marked by the station identifications and
 Complexity in Context | 37

advertisements as belonging to a broadcast, with the flow between pro-

grams as a strategy designed to yield high ratings and audience continu-
ity. In short, self-recordings were what television had always been but
frozen in the amber of a collection yet still ephemerally at risk to be
taped over.
With TV-on-DVD, a television program is now a tangible object that
can be purchased, collected, and catalogued on your shelf, much like
books, musical albums, and films. This helps raise the cultural value
of television programming, detaching it from the industrial-controlled,
commercially saturated flow of broadcasting, as well as surrounding
a series with the paratextual framing of packaging, design, and video
extras that comment on and expand the text.25 The physical collectibility
of DVD boxes adds to their aesthetic positioning — the ability to shelve
a television series next to a classic film or novel creates the possibility
of aesthetic equality in a way that the ephemeral system of broadcasting
never did. Probably the most critically praised television series of all
time, The Wire, has been hailed as a modern-day Dickens or Tolstoy, a
claim that is bolstered by its status as a bound collectable object much
as the 19th-century novel gained cultural legitimacy in its shift from
serialized to bound form.26 The serial publishing of Dickens and Tol-
stoy certainly garnered these authors both popularity and acclaim, but
had they not been bundled and compiled into published novels, Bleak
House and War and Peace would probably be regarded less as timeless
masterpieces and more as ephemerally tied to their historical moment,
if remembered at all. This pattern of validation through bound pub-
lication extends to other serialized media as well, such as the rise of
graphic novels republishing more ephemeral serial comic books such as
Cerebus and Watchmen in the 1980s or the compilation of Louis Feuil-
lade’s serialized short films of the 1910s at La Cinémathèque Française in
the 1940s. Thus the emergence of boxed TV-on-DVD sets has enabled
contemporary television to be judged and valued as part of a larger aes-
thetic field, and television’s rising evaluative stock over the past decade
has been fueled by positive comparisons with other narrative forms, as
discussed in chapter 6.
TV-on-DVD also changes the terms by which viewers might consume
their narrative texts, moving away from broadcasting and toward a pub-
lishing model, as convincingly argued by Derek Kompare.27 Although
38 | Complexity in Context

such publishing is increasingly manifested as digital files downloaded

via iTunes or streamed on Netflix instead of the waning DVD market,
the effects on viewing practices are quite similar, providing viewers the
opportunity to control how they watch more than with previous media
formats. Serial continuity can be greatly enhanced by this publishing
model, as viewers owning DVD sets or downloaded files can mimic the
flexibility and control of books to consult and replay moments from
episodes or seasons past. If most television storytelling for its first few
decades was designed to be viewed in any order by a presumably dis-
tracted and undiscriminating viewer — a strategy that many programs
and viewers challenged but was certainly encouraged by the industry —
today’s complex narratives are designed for a discerning viewer not
only to pay close attention to once but to rewatch in order to notice the
depth of references, to marvel at displays of craft and continuities, and to
appreciate details that require the liberal use of pause and rewind. Com-
plex comedies such as Arrested Development encourage the rewind and
freeze-frame power of DVDs to catch split-second visual gags and to
pause the frantic pace to recover from laughter; this type of viewing was
fully enabled during the program’s Netflix-distributed fourth season, as
all viewers had even more control of screen time than they did on the
broadcast original. Serial mysteries such as Lost invite us to stop screen
time to parse a complex on-screen image or to consult with a commu-
nity of fellow viewers to ensure full comprehension. These televisual
strategies are all possible via scheduled flow but are greatly enhanced by
the viewing possibilities of published DVDs or streaming.
Additionally, TV-on-DVD makes the published version definitive
and canonical over both the original broadcast and typically shortened
syndicated rerun versions. Publishing can enable continuity corrections
and edits as needed — for instance, the Lost episode “Orientation” fea-
tures a photograph of Desmond and Penny, but it was produced before
Penny was cast as an actual character and thus features the image of
another actress. In the postbroadcast versions of “Orientation,” the pho-
tograph is replaced by an image of Sonya Walger, who was later cast to
play Penny. Such details would be insignificant in the broadcast-flow
era, but for fans encouraged to freeze-frame and parse the images of
Lost, details matter and DVDs allow producers to make such course cor-
rections throughout a series. DVDs can also include footage cut from
 Complexity in Context | 39

original broadcasts for time or content restrictions, making some of tele-

vision’s broadcast constraints irrelevant upon publishing. As I discuss in
chapter 2 in the case of Veronica Mars, DVDs can override the original
broadcast version of a pilot, reasserting authorial intent over network
control as part of the medium’s broader legitimation. Thus while the
broadcast original is what makes a program an example of “television” as
it is traditionally understood, the DVD version serves as the long-term
record of a series as it will be consumed and remembered in the future.
For many series, the ability for viewers to watch on their own sched-
ules has opened up storytelling possibilities, as DVD viewers typically
watch episodes more quickly in succession, working through a season
over a week or two, which fosters a more immersive and attentive view-
ing experience. For some series built on cliffhangers, such as 24, the
DVD viewing becomes a mad rush for narrative payoff, prompting a
binge mentality comparable to the compulsive “eatability” of a bag of
salty snacks — and certainly 24 prompted such binges, in which viewers
would consume an entire season in a 24-hour marathon session. At the
other end of the storytelling spectrum, The Wire’s slow-moving plot-
ting, lack of exposition, and vast ensemble poses challenges for a new
viewer to appreciate on a weekly basis — there are too many opportu-
nities to forget connections and lose track of the copious details vital
to appreciating the complexity of the storyworld for many, so DVD
viewing helps establish more momentum and continuity. Compiling a
serial allows viewers to see a series differently, enabling us to perceive
in ongoing narratives aesthetic values traditionally used for discrete cul-
tural works — viewing a DVD edition helps highlight the values of unity,
complexity, and clear beginnings and endings, qualities that are hard to
discern through the incremental releases of seriality. A series such as
Lost asks viewers to believe that the twisty, looping narrative is guided
by a master plan exhibiting continuity and consistency. Because many
revelations and explanations are deferred for numerous episodes and
even seasons, the long gaps in a serial broadcast can make it feel like the
series is avoiding resolution and even “making it up as they go,” a clear
aesthetic condemnation for many viewers who value perceived unity
and continuity in a complex narrative.28 While revelations may still take
multiple seasons, watching Lost via DVD keeps the pace moving suf-
ficiently as to downplay the issues of deferred resolution and answers.
40 | Complexity in Context

We might consider this drive toward unity and complexity as fulfilled

by bound volumes such as DVD sets as a boxed aesthetic, tied together
and treated as a complete whole comparable to similarly unified forms
such as novels and films.
Of course, there are aspects of a serial aesthetic that might be lost
in the shift to a boxed aesthetic, with Lost as a prime example of these
trade-offs. Even though the quicker pace of DVDs highlights how all of
Lost’s puzzle pieces come together (or fail to), this mode of binge view-
ing does not allow for a viewer to focus on the puzzle-solving process.
One of Lost’s chief pleasures is the ludic sense of play that fills the gaps
between episodes and seasons, with fans congregating in online forums
and wikis to theorize, investigate, evaluate, and debate, as discussed
more in chapters 8 and 9. This mode of fan engagement is dependent
on simultaneous viewership, with everyone at the same point of the
story, enabling a collaborative group process of decoding and engage-
ment. Although Lost will continue to be watched via DVD, downloads,
and streaming (and future distribution technologies) for years to come,
the broader experience of communal serialized viewing is tied to the
original broadcast moment. Watching Lost via boxed sets is inherently
isolated from the larger fan community and its rich network of paratex-
tual materials, suggesting that the truly ephemeral aspect of the series
was not the initial textual broadcast but the experience of serialized
spectatorship. When the next generation of media historians look at the
series, all that will remain from the original airing is the program and
the archived paratexts — the aesthetic experience of collectively making
sense of Lost’s complex narrative will be lost. The structure of broadcast
flow may be replaced by the control of boxed publishing, but there is a
palpable experiential loss that cannot be artificially retained.
Such serialized consumption practices are not unique to television, as
readers of 19th-century serial fiction regularly discussed ongoing stories
as they were released, published critical commentaries within letters to
periodicals, and even corresponded with authors throughout the writing
process.29 The experiences of Dickens’s readers who followed his nov-
els through the serialized publication process were unique and unable
to be replicated by those who read his bound volumes; similarly, the
serialized television viewing experience is ephemeral compared to the
repeatable practice of boxed viewing. As Sean O’Sullivan discusses in
 Complexity in Context | 41

relation to both Dickens and Deadwood, the gap between installments

is the constitutive element of serial fiction, the space between available
story units when both writers and readers imagine new possibilities and
reflect on old tales.30 While a boxed or streaming viewer can re-create
this gap by self-pacing a series, the normal model of consuming a bound
serial is to move forward as time permits, not as dictated by a forced
schedule. Although the broadcast schedule is ultimately arbitrary and
artificial, it is also productive, creating the structure for collective syn-
chronous consumption and providing the time to reflect on the unfold-
ing narrative world. Recently, Netflix’s move into original programming
has embraced the boxed aesthetic even without DVD boxes, publishing
entire seasons of House of Cards, Arrested Development, and Orange Is
the New Black all at once to its digital libraries, forgoing the gap-filled
serial broadcast experience altogether — and raising the question as to
whether these multiepisode narratives can be considered serial at all.
This discussion of TV-on-DVD sets the stage for understanding nar-
rative complexity, as it foregrounds the interplay of industrial strategies,
technologies, viewer practices, and poetic form that constitute the phe-
nomenon of complex television. Using the new technologies of home
recording, DVDs, and online participation, viewers have taken an active
role in consuming complex television and helped it thrive within the
media industries. While it would be hard to claim that any of these
industrial, creative, technological, or participatory developments explic-
itly caused the emergence of narrative complexity as a narrational mode,
together they set the stage for its development and growing popular-
ity — and collectively forge the backdrop for understanding the poetics
of complex television.

Television’s Operational Aesthetic and Spectacular Storytelling

Complex television is marked by greater variations in serial form than
is found in traditional episodic programming or soap opera models,
enabled by shifts in the television industry, technology, and viewing
practices. One of the more interesting ways that creators have responded
to such shifts is by creating a more self-conscious mode of storytell-
ing than is typically found within conventional television narration.
Seinfeld is a key innovator here, as the series revels in the mechanics of
42 | Complexity in Context

its plotting, weaving storylines for each character together in a given

episode through unlikely coincidence, parodic media references, and
circular structure. In conventional television narratives, episodes fea-
ture two or more plotlines that complement each other: a main A plot
that dominates screen time and secondary B plots that may offer the-
matic parallels or provide counterpoint to the A plot but rarely interacts
with it at the level of action. Complexity, especially in comedies, works
against these norms by altering the relationship between multiple plot-
lines, creating interweaving stories that often collide and coincide.
Seinfeld typically starts out its four plotlines separately, leaving it to the
experienced viewer’s imagination as to how the stories will collide with
unlikely repercussions throughout the storyworld. Such interwoven
plotting has been adopted and expanded by Curb Your Enthusiasm,
Arrested Development, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, extending
the coincidences and collisions across episodes in a way that transforms
serial narrative into elaborate inside jokes — for instance, only by know-
ing Larry’s encounter with Michael the blind man from Curb’s first
season does Michael’s return in the fourth season make sense. Likewise,
Arrested expands the number of coinciding plots per episode, with often
six or more storylines bouncing off one another, resulting in unlikely
coincidences, twists, and ironic repercussions, some of which may not
become evident until subsequent episodes or seasons.
While this mode of comedic narrative is often quite amusing on its
own terms, it does suggest a particular set of pleasures for viewers, one
that is relatively unavailable in conventional television narrative. The
viewers of such complex comedies as Seinfeld and Arrested Develop-
ment not only focus on the diegetic world offered by the sitcoms but
also revel in the creative mechanics involved in the producers’ abilities
to pull off such complex plot structures, a mode of viewing that Jeffrey
Sconce labels as “metareflexive” but warrants more detailed consider-
ation.31 This set of pleasures evokes an influential concept offered by
Neil Harris in his account of P. T. Barnum: Harris suggests that Bar-
num’s mechanical stunts and hoaxes invited spectators to embrace an
“operational aesthetic,” in which the pleasure was less about “what will
happen?” and more concerning “how did he do that?”32 In watching
Seinfeld, we expect that each character’s petty goals will be thwarted in
a farcical unraveling, but we watch to see how the writers will structure
 Complexity in Context | 43

the narrative mechanics required to bring together the four plotlines

into a carefully calibrated, Rube Goldberg – esque narrative machine.
There is a degree of self-consciousness in this mode of plotting, not
only in the explicit reflexivity offered by these programs (such as Sein-
feld ’s program-within-a-program or Arrested Development’s winking
acknowledgment of television techniques such as product placement,
stunt casting, and voice-over narration) but also in the awareness that
viewers watch complex programs in part to see “how will they do it?”
This operational aesthetic is on display within online fan forum dissec-
tions of the techniques that complex television uses to guide, manip-
ulate, deceive, and misdirect viewers, such as the highly popular TV
Tropes wiki, suggesting the pleasure of unraveling the operations of nar-
rative mechanics. We watch these series not just to get swept away in a
realistic narrative world (although that certainly happens) but also to
watch the gears at work, marveling at the craft required to pull off such
narrative pyrotechnics.33
The operational aesthetic is heightened in spectacular moments
within narratively complex programs, specific sequences or episodes
that we might consider akin to special effects. Accounts of cinematic
special effects highlight how these moments of awe and amazement pull
us out of the diegesis, inviting us to marvel at the technique required
to achieve visions of interplanetary travel, realistic dinosaurs, or elab-
orate fights on treetops. These spectacles are often held in opposition
to narration, harking back to the cinema of attractions that predated
narrative film and deemphasizing classical narrative form in the con-
temporary blockbuster cinema.34 While such special effects do appear
on television — although arguably television’s dominant mode of visual
spectacle highlights the excessive display of beauty norms found on beer
commercials and Baywatch more than the explosive pyrotechnics of the
large screen — complex television offers another mode of attractions:
the narrative special effect. This device occurs when a program flexes
its storytelling muscles to confound and amaze a viewer, as in the major
temporal leaps forward seen on Alias (“The Telling”), the revelation of
flash-forwards on Lost (“Through the Looking Glass”), or the incor-
poration of the backstory-retrofitted main character Dawn on Buffy’s
fifth season. These moments of spectacle push the operational aesthetic
to the foreground, calling attention to the narration’s construction and
44 | Complexity in Context

asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; often these instances
forgo strict 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.35 The temporal control of DVDs and digital
files greatly enhances viewer engagement with the operational aesthetic,
allowing pausing, rewinding, and slow-motion analysis to ferret out nar-
rative clues from twisty mysteries on Lost and Alias and to replay past
moments to highlight exemplary moments of narrative construction.
One such moment of spectacular storytelling is found in the second-
season finale of Battlestar Galactica, “Lay Down Your Burdens (Part 2)”:
the narrative of the human survivors of an apocalyptic war trying to
outrun their Cylon enemies has portrayed around 300 days of story time
over the course of the initial miniseries and two seasons, amounting to
more than 27 hours of screen time. At this climactic moment, the Cylon-
collaborating human Gaius Baltar has been elected president and has
chosen to colonize a planet instead of running from a potential Cylon
attack. With Baltar left alone sitting in his presidential office, the camera
slowly pulls in for 45 seconds toward an anguished Baltar trying to cope
with his guilt and stress, eventually stopping on an extreme close-up
of his head down on his desk. After a subtle dissolve through his black
hair, designed to be unnoticeable, the camera pulls back to reveal that
although Baltar looks mostly the same, his office has changed and the
dialogue suggests that he is deep into his presidency; after 30 seconds,
a caption appears to orient us: “One Year Later.” This is a remarkable
ellipsis, jumping forward a full year in the course of what appears to be a
single shot, a moment so shocking and affecting that I needed to pause
and rewatch it upon the first viewing and have repeatedly returned to it
via DVD as a marvel of storytelling construction in creating a narrative
special effect and the operational aesthetic. Its power stems from the
program’s manipulation of its own intrinsic norms, or the patterns and
expectations that a given series establishes for itself — because the first
two seasons of Battlestar had taught us that the story time moved more
slowly than the scheduled screen time (with weekly and seasonal gaps
not mirrored in story time), viewers came to expect that same pattern
of gradual-moving narrative moving forward. This ellipsis works as a
narrative special effect by effectively shocking us out of our expected
patterns and norms, forcing viewers to think about how the storytelling
 Complexity in Context | 45

might proceed, raising questions about what might have occurred dur-
ing the yearlong ellipsis, and leaving us unsettled for the shocking story
turns still to come in the final act of this episode. This moment of spec-
tacular storytelling was memorable for television producers as well, as
Parks and Recreation paid homage to Battlestar with its own three-year
time jump to conclude season 7.36 While such moments encourage view-
ers to think about formal construction, they do not distance us from the
emotional pull of the storyworld, as per the operational aesthetic.
As programs become established in their own complex conventions,
we also marvel at how far creators can push the boundaries of complex-
ity, offering baroque variations on themes and norms; these narrative
special effects can be episodic climaxes, as when all the divergent Sein-
feld or Arrested Development plots collide or when a plot twist on Lost or
24 forces us to reconsider all that we have viewed before in the episode.
Or narrative spectacles can be variations on a theme — Six Feet Under
begins every episode with a “death of the week,” but by the second sea-
son, the creators vary the presentation of these deaths to offer misdirec-
tions and elaborations to keep viewers engaged once they understand
the program’s intrinsic norms. Thus the episode “In the Game” begins
with a scene in which a woman’s preparations for a romantic night are
interrupted by an axe-wielding maniac, before cutting to a movie the-
ater to reveal her as an actress watching her own film debut in a horror
movie, only to follow her to the premiere party, where she dies from a
drug overdose in the club bathroom. Other episodes play on our expec-
tations for who will die, as in the baroque example of “In Case of Rap-
ture”: a pair of young men fill inflatable sex dolls with helium to deliver
to a porn awards party, but their truck almost hits a kid on a skate-
board, causing the payload to come loose and rise into the air. We cut
to a middle-aged woman driving a car with a bumper sticker reading, “I
Brake for the Rapture” — when she sees the dolls floating up to the heav-
ens, she exits her car and runs into traffic, yelling, “I’m ready Jesus!” only
to be hit by a car. These variations on the program’s established formal
patterns offer a set of playful pleasures that depend on viewers’ long-
term commitments and operational expectations, which are unique to
serialized storytelling.
A particularly telling moment of narrative spectacle comes from
Lost’s episode “Orientation”: after discovering what is hidden beneath
46 | Complexity in Context

the mysterious hatch, two characters watch an old training film that
details the origins of the facility as part of a research institute. Once
finished with the enigmatic film containing many obscure details that
recast events of the program’s first season in a new light, Locke gleefully
exclaims, “We’re going to have to watch that again!” mirroring the reac-
tion of millions of viewers prepared to parse the film for clues to Lost’s
diegetic and formal mysteries. This is not the reflexive self-awareness of
Tex Avery cartoons acknowledging their own construction or the tech-
nique of some modernist art films or Brechtian theater asking us to view
the narrative artificiality from an emotional distance; operational reflex-
ivity encourages us to simultaneously care about the story and marvel
at its telling. A comparable model within classic film would be found
in a number of Hitchcock films, such as Rear Window’s referential lines
to watching and decoding visual action or Psycho’s shocking murder of
the presumed main character midway in the film, calling attention to
our thwarted narrative expectations — but the lack of seriality in such
examples minimizes the long-term impact on viewers when compared
to television fans, who fill the gaps between episodes analyzing and the-
orizing about such moments for many years of a series.
Another level of narrative spectacle centers on entire episodes. Buffy is
probably the most accomplished series for narratively spectacular theme
episodes, with individual episodes predicated on narrative devices such
as starkly limiting storytelling parameters (the lack of speech in “Hush”),
genre mixing (the musical episode “Once More with Feeling”), shifts in
perspective (portraying an adventure from the vantage point of habitual
bystander Xander in “The Zeppo”), or foregrounding an unusual narra-
tor (Andrew’s pseudodocumentary in “Storyteller”). While each of these
episodes and others like them in X-Files (“Monday,” “Triangle”), Angel
(“Smile Time,” “Spin the Bottle”), Seinfeld (“The Betrayal,” “The Parking
Lot”), Scrubs (“His Story,” “My Screw Up”), The Simpsons (“Trilogy of
Error,” “22 Short Films about Springfield”), Lost (“The Other 48 Days,”
“Exposé”), Community (“Paradigms of Human Memory,” “Remedial
Chaos Theory”), Supernatural (“The Real Ghostbusters”), and Break-
ing Bad (“Fly”) may offer diegetic thrills and laughs, the more distinc-
tive pleasure in these programs is marveling at the narrational bravado
on display by violating the program’s own storytelling conventions in a
spectacular fashion. Through the operational aesthetic, these complex
 Complexity in Context | 47

narratives invite viewers to engage at the level of formal analyst, dissect-

ing the techniques used to convey spectacular displays of storytelling
craft; this mode of formally aware viewing is highly encouraged by these
programs, as their pleasures are embedded in a level of awareness that
transcends the traditional focus on diegetic action that is typical of most
mainstream popular narratives.
Individual episodes can trigger the operational aesthetic through
narrative spectacle, but whole programs can also be predicated on such
storytelling pyrotechnics, through either their larger arcs or their inher-
ent structure. For an example of the former, Alias is a strong example
of narrative complexity, juggling both ongoing and episodic stories of
espionage with arcs of relationship dramas mapped onto both family
and spy politics. But its boldest moments of narrative spectacle occur
when the plot makes unforeseen sharp twists that cause the entire sce-
nario to “reboot,” changing the professional and interpersonal dynam-
ics of nearly every character. The first, and arguably most effective, of
these reboots occurred midway through the second season in the epi-
sode “Phase One,” which aired in the high-profile post – Super Bowl time
slot; over the course of this episode, Alias’s entire espionage scenario was
reconfigured, with the main character’s status as a double agent shifting
to becoming an outright CIA agent, chasing down the same main villain
but with different alliances and motives. Additionally, the relationships
between characters transformed, with Sydney’s innocent-bystander
friend Francie being replaced by a transfigured nefarious agent and her
long-simmering crush on Vaughn finally coming to fruition — all within
one hour! While much of this reboot’s effectiveness was in breathing life
into a premise that may have been on the verge of becoming too repeti-
tive, it also was impressive in how the producers were able to reconfig-
ure the scenario in a way that was diegetically consistent (at least with
the program’s own outrageous norms of espionage technology and con-
voluted mythology), narratively engaging, and emotionally honest to the
characters and relationships. Similar series revisions were pulled off in
subsequent seasons of Alias, as well as in Buffy (through the introduction
of Buffy’s sister Dawn), Angel (with the heroes taking over their arch-
enemy’s law firm), and Lost (as the castaways left the island and discov-
ered time travel). In each of these cases, audiences take pleasure not only
in the diegetic twists but also in the exceptional storytelling techniques
48 | Complexity in Context

needed to pull off such machinations —we thrill both at the stories being
told and at the way in which their telling breaks television conventions.
Narrative spectacle can be built into the core scenarios of programs
as well — 24 is often heralded for its real-time narrative structure, with
parallel story, discourse, and screen time frames (excepting commercial
breaks and gaps between seasons). Even more interesting here is that it
may be the only television series ever named for its storytelling tech-
nique, not in reference to its diegetic world or thematic concerns — the
number 24 refers to nothing notable in the storyworld but rather to the
number of hours (and episodes) needed to tell the story. Notably, the
2014 resurrection 24: Live Another Day still retains the titular 24 ref-
erence, even though it only consists of 12 episodes and eventually did
violate its intrinsic norm by including an ellipsis jumping forward in
the final episode. How I Met Your Mother is also defined by its storytell-
ing mode, with Ted allegedly telling his children the story referenced
in the program’s title via narrated flashbacks, but Ted only meets this
legendary mother in the ninth season, as he is a serial digresser. Yet
many fans continued to watch for years in hopes of the promised nar-
rative resolution to solve the teased-at mystery of the mother’s identity
and role within the program’s complex mythology. Other programs are
similarly notable for their storytelling discourse (how the story is told)
more than the story itself — Boomtown offers fairly typical police stories,
but when told through changing, multiple, limited perspectives among
an ensemble of characters, the cases become more nuanced and com-
plex than they first appear. Jack and Bobby tells a typical tale of teen
brothers, but through the conceit of frequent flash-forward interviews
in the 2040s, a future tale emerges of one of them becoming U.S. presi-
dent, with future events and relationships resonating with adolescent
family drama. Reunion highlights a group of high school friends, with
each weekly episode charting one year in their lives over a 20-year span,
while Day Break limits its temporality to a repetitive loop. In all of these
mostly short-lived series, what is arguably most compelling and distinc-
tive is not the stories that they tell but the narrative strategies used in
the telling.
Complex narratives also employ a number of storytelling devices
that, while not unique to this mode, are used with such frequency and
regularity as to become more acceptable narrative norms rather than
 Complexity in Context | 49

exceptional outliers. Analepses, or alterations in chronology, are not

uncommon in conventional television, with flashbacks either serving to
recount crucial narrative backstory (as a detective narrates the solution
to a crime) or framing an entire episode’s action in the past tense (such
as the dramatization of Rob and Laura meeting on The Dick Van Dyke
Show). Similarly, conventional programs have often used dream or fan-
tasy sequences to explore possibilities of other scenarios (such as Rose-
anne reframed as a 1950s sitcom) or to probe a character’s inner life (the
experimental St. Elsewhere episode “Sweet Dreams”). Another device,
found in episodes of conventional programs such as All in the Family and
Diff ’rent Strokes, is retelling the same story from multiple perspectives,
often called the “Rashomon effect” after the landmark Kurosawa film.
Voice-over narration is atypical in most television, but conventional
programs such as Dragnet or The Wonder Years use it to set the emo-
tional tone and provide expository transitions. Yet all of these devices,
which vary from the “exceedingly obvious” mode of conventional tele-
vision storytelling, typically maximize their obviousness by explicitly
signaling them as differentiations from a norm, predicated by exposi-
tory narration (“I remember it well . . .”) or contrived scenarios (such as
hypnosis, courtroom testimonies, or recollections over a photo album)
to highlight how the series is using nonconventional conventions.
In contemporary complex television, such variations in storytelling
strategies are more commonplace and signaled with much more subtlety
or delay; these series are constructed without fear of temporary con-
fusion for viewers. Fantasy sequences abound without clear demarca-
tions or signals, as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Buffy, and Battlestar
Galactica all present visions of events that oscillate between character
subjectivity and diegetic reality, playing with the ambiguous boundary
to offer character depth, suspense, and comedic effect. Complex narra-
tion often breaks the fourth wall, whether through visually represented
direct address (Malcolm in the Middle, The Bernie Mac Show, The Office)
or more ambiguous voice-over that blurs the line between diegetic and
nondiegetic (Scrubs, Veronica Mars, Arrested Development, Desperate
Housewives), calling attention to its own breaking of convention. Lost,
Jack and Bobby, Boomtown, and How I Met Your Mother offer analep-
ses in nearly every episode with few orienting signals, while Alias and
The West Wing frequently begin episodes with a teaser at the climax
50 | Complexity in Context

of the story, then turn back the clock to explain the confusing situa-
tion with which the episode began, as discussed in the introduction.
In all of these programs, the lack of explicit storytelling cues and sign-
posts creates moments of disorientation, asking viewers to engage more
actively to comprehend the story and rewarding regular viewers who
have mastered each program’s internal conventions of complex narra-
tion, as discussed in chapter 5. These strategies may be similar to formal
dimensions of art cinema, but they manifest themselves in expressly
popular contexts for mass audiences — we may be temporarily confused
by moments of Lost or Alias, but these programs ask us to trust in the
payoff that we will eventually arrive at a moment of complex but coher-
ent comprehension, not the ambiguity and questioned causality typical
of many art films.
The “Noël” episode of West Wing exemplifies the complex use of such
storytelling strategies: the episode is framed by Josh Lyman’s therapy
session to process his posttraumatic stress reactions to being shot, which
allows for the conventions of repeated flashbacks via Josh’s narration.
However, the flashbacks are rampant and not clearly signaled as chrono-
logical, with sound bridges between the present-tense therapy and past-
tense events adding to a sense of disorientation that the episode uses to
increase tension and anxiety. Additionally, we see frequent dramatiza-
tions of Josh cutting his hand on a glass, an accident he claims to have
happened but his therapist correctly suspects is a lie masking a more
self-destructive act; these lying flashbacks are not differentiated from
other past events until the end of the episode, leaving the audience to
decode the contradictions and confusing chronology. The episode cli-
maxes with a five-minute sequence interweaving disjointed sound and
image from five different time frames (including one that never actu-
ally happened), rhythmically edited to convey a robust emotional arc — a
presentational mode more common to European art cinema than Amer-
ican television but ultimately in service of a coherent ongoing narrative.
This sequence is set to a White House performance of Yo-Yo Ma playing
a Bach cello suite, a musical choice that highlights complex television’s
baroque style, with themes and variation, elaborate ornamentations,
multiple threads weaving together in counterpoint, and an invitation to
examine and appreciate formal systems and innovation rather than clas-
sical norms.37 While much of the episode’s pleasure is serial, as the more
 Complexity in Context | 51

we know Josh, the more we can emotionally engage with his breakdown,
the episode stands alone as a dramatically compelling character portrait
(which won actor Bradley Whitford an Emmy), but only if we accept
its distinct storytelling conventions, a competency that regular viewers
learn over time. Complex television programs invite temporary disori-
entation and confusion, allowing viewers to build up their comprehen-
sion skills through long-term viewing and active engagement.
This need to gain competency in decoding stories and comprehend-
ing diegetic worlds extends across a number of contemporary media.
Certainly videogames are predicated on learning how to understand and
interact with a range of storyworlds and interfaces — nearly every game
contains its own diegetic training module, as players learn to master
the controls and expectations for this particular virtual world, as well as
intuiting the procedural logics demanded by a given game.38 Cinema has
also seen the emergence of a popular cycle of “puzzle films” that require
the audience to learn the particular rules of a film to comprehend its
narrative; movies such as The Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Memento, The
Usual Suspects, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Run
Lola Run, The Matrix, The Prestige, and Inception have all embraced
a game aesthetic, inviting audiences to play along with the creators to
crack the interpretive codes to make sense of their complex narrative
strategies.39 But crucially, the goal of these puzzle films is not to solve
the mysteries ahead of time; rather, we want to be competent enough to
follow their narrative strategies but still relish in the pleasures of being
manipulated successfully. I doubt anyone who predicts the twists of
these films could say that they enjoyed them more than the willing (but
still active) spectator who gets taken on an exciting ride. Puzzle films
invite us to observe the gears of the narrative mechanisms, even flaunt-
ing them in a display of storytelling spectacle — think of the climax of
Sixth Sense, as the twist is revealed through flashbacks demonstrating
the film’s mastery in fooling its viewers. Although few television pro-
grams have followed the puzzle-film model fully — individual episodes
of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Buffy, Scrubs, and Lost have mimicked these
films, which themselves are influenced by the seminal anthology tele-
vision program The Twilight Zone — what seems to be a key goal across
videogames, puzzle films, and complex television series is the desire to
be both actively engaged in a story and successfully surprised through
52 | Complexity in Context

storytelling manipulations. This is the operational aesthetic at work,

enjoying the machine’s results while also marveling at how it works.
Thus complex television encourages, and even at times necessitates,
a new mode of viewer engagement. While fan cultures have long dem-
onstrated intense engagement in storyworlds, policing backstory con-
sistency, character unity, and internal logic in classic programs such as
Star Trek and Doctor Who, contemporary programs focus this detailed
dissection onto complex questions of plotting and enigmatic events
in addition to storyworld and characters. We watch Twin Peaks, The
X-Files, Alias, Lost, Veronica Mars, Desperate Housewives, Dexter, Fringe,
or The Killing at least in part to try to crack each program’s central enig-
mas — look at any online fan forum to see evidence of such sleuths at
work. But as in any mystery-driven fiction, viewers want to be surprised
and thwarted as well as satisfied by the internal logic of the story. In con-
suming such series, viewers find themselves both drawn into a compel-
ling diegesis (as with all effective stories) and focused on the discursive
processes of storytelling needed to achieve each program’s complexity
and mystery. Thus these programs convert many viewers into amateur
narratologists, noting patterns and violations of convention, chroni-
cling chronologies, and highlighting both inconsistencies and continu-
ities across episodes and even series — I call this model of engagement
forensic fandom, discussing such viewing practices more fully in chapter
8. While certainly audiences have always been active, most scholarly
accounts of such reception processes focus on negotiations with tele-
vision content, reconciling with the meanings and politics of Madonna
videos or The Cosby Show. Complex programming invites audiences
to engage actively at the level of form as well, highlighting the conven-
tionality of traditional television and exploring the possibilities of both
innovative long-term storytelling and creative intraepisode discursive
strategies.
Many of these programs outright demand such a level of engage-
ment — it is hard to imagine how someone might watch 24, Lost, or
Arrested Development without noting their formal innovations and con-
sidering how their use of real-time narration, atemporality, or reflexive
storytelling respectively impacts the narrative action. You cannot simply
watch these programs as an unmediated window to a realistic story-
world into which you might escape; rather, complex television demands
 Complexity in Context | 53

that you pay attention to the window frames, asking you to reflect on
how it provides partial access to the diegesis and how the panes of glass
distort your vision on the unfolding action. Interestingly, these programs
can be quite popular with a mass audience (Lost, Seinfeld, X-Files) or
have narrow appeals to cult viewers willing to invest the effort into the
decoding process (Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, Firefly) — while
certainly many of these cult series have demanding narratives that may
seem inaccessible to a mass audience, the striking popularity of some
complex programs suggests that a mass audience can engage with and
enjoy quite challenging and intricate storytelling. This is not to down-
play the importance of traditional pleasures of character depth, neat
resolution of plots, storyworld consistency, action-oriented excitement,
and humor — complex television at its best employs all of these elements
while adding the operational possibilities of formal engagement. These
levels of formal engagement and immersive storytelling reinforce each
other, as articulated by Robert King, cocreator of The Good Wife: “The
show wants to embrace complexity and baroqueness, because that helps
hide magic tricks in terms of plot devices you don’t see coming.”40 Lost
similarly works with these dual levels, as it creates sincere emotional
connections to characters who are immersed in an outlandish situation
that, as the series progressed, toggled between genre identities of action/
adventure serial, science fiction, paranormal mystery, and religious alle-
gory, all constructed by an elaborate narrational structure far more com-
plex than anything seen before on mainstream American television.
This account of narrative complexity suggests that a new paradigm of
television storytelling has emerged over the past two decades, redefin-
ing the boundary between episodic and serial forms, with a heightened
degree of self-consciousness in storytelling mechanics, and demanding
intensified viewer engagement focused on both diegetic pleasures and
formal awareness. By exploring the formal structure of this mode of
storytelling, we can appreciate connections with broader concerns of
media industries and technologies, creative techniques, and practices
of everyday life, all of which resonate deeply with contemporary cultural
transformations tied to the emergence of digital media and more inter-
active forms of communication and entertainment. A common under-
lying trend that manifests itself both in television narratives and many
digital forms such as videogames and webpages is a need for procedural
54 | Complexity in Context

literacy, a recognition on the part of consumers that any mode of expres-

sion follows particular protocols and that to fully engage with that form,
we must master its underlying procedures. This manifests itself explic-
itly in videogames, in which procedural mastery is a requirement for
success, and web use, as we have come in a very short period of time to
accept linking, searching, and bookmarking as naturalized behaviors.
For television, contemporary complex narratives foreground the skills
of narrative comprehension and media literacy that most viewers have
developed but rarely put to use beyond rudimentary means. To under-
stand this phenomenon, we must use poetic analysis to chart its struc-
ture and boundaries, while incorporating other methods to explore how
this narrative mode intersects with dimensions of creative industries,
technological innovations, participatory practices, and viewer compre-
hension. That is the goal of the rest of this book.
2

Beginnings

The beginning of a narrative is an essential moment, establishing much

of what will follow, including whether any given consumer is motivated
to keep consuming. If we want to understand contemporary serial tele-
vision storytelling, we need to account for how programs begin. In this
chapter, I explore a range of techniques that various complex television
series use to launch their storyworlds, and I highlight how viewers might
engage with these techniques, both for the specialized audience within
the media industry and the broader set of viewers watching at home.
Via a close analysis of one exemplary television pilot, Veronica Mars, we
can get a better sense of the poetic importance of serial beginnings for a
broad array of programming.
All series start somewhere. Such a statement should be self-evident,
but it is actually a bit more complicated than it might seem. First off, to
highlight a beginning is to suggest the parallel of an ending — but as I
discuss in chapter 10, serial television concludes far less frequently than
it commences. Second, for daytime soap operas and other long-running
series such as Doctor Who or The Simpsons, textual beginnings are so
far removed from present-day experience that few contemporary view-
ers actually experienced them (at least in sequence), making the notion
of a clear origin point of an ongoing story moot for most viewers. Even
with shorter-lived serial television programs, viewers frequently enter a
series midstream, suggesting that watching the beginning of a story is
less uniform than we presume. One of the goals of season openers for
most ongoing series is to invite fresh viewers in, enabling them to fol-
low the action midstream and thus serving often as microbeginnings
to reorient old viewers and to welcome in new ones. So any discussion
of the beginnings of a serial narrative must admit that viewers can and
do enter into the story at places other than the designated starting line.
However, given the rise of the boxed DVD model that enables view-
ers to consume a series chronologically, viewers are now more likely to

55
56 | Beginnings

start at the beginning of a series, as they recognize that many complex

television programs are designed to be watched from the start. And for
commercial television programs, that start is the unusual entity called
the pilot.

The Educational and Inspirational Poetics of Pilots

A television pilot must accomplish numerous tasks. Within the industry,
it serves as the test run for a potential series, providing the blueprint
for the program going forward as well as assembling the cast, crew, and
production routines that will be responsible for creating the ongoing
series. A pilot is also an argument for a program’s viability, first for the
audience of network executives fishing for a hit and then for prospec-
tive home viewers who must be persuaded to keep watching. A pilot
presents an encapsulation of what a series might be like on an ongoing
basis, while providing an exceptional degree of narrative exposition to
orient viewers within an often complex storyworld. It must introduce a
cast of characters via shorthand, such that their personalities and rela-
tionships are clear within moments, but in original enough ways that
they do not seem like stereotypes or overly familiar clones of conven-
tional characters. It must establish the program’s genre as a means of
mapping viewers’ horizon of expectations, while making the case for
why the series will not be “just another” conventional example of what
they have seen before. Through all of these facets, pilots must encapsu-
late the strange alchemy required by commercial television: each new
series must be simultaneously familiar and original. Thus pilots are at
once the most atypical episodes of commercial television and the highly
conventional means by which television series get sold to both networks
and viewers.1
I contend that the chief function of a television pilot is to teach
us how to watch the series and, in doing so, to make us want to keep
watching — thus successful pilots are simultaneously educational and
inspirational. Pilots must orient viewers to the intrinsic norms that the
series will employ, presenting its narrative strategies so we can attune
ourselves to its storytelling style. Frequently such storytelling strate-
gies are presented in a pilot’s opening minutes, providing an immedi-
ate invitation to watch a particular way, and thus we can understand
 Beginnings | 57

much of a pilot’s ability to educate and inspire by looking at the opening

moments of a number of examples. An interesting parallel here can be
found with the opening section of a videogame, which typically offers
a tutorial for how to play the game and navigate the controls, as well as
setting players’ expectations for what type of experience they will have
(if they choose to keep playing). A game tutorial level is typically the
prologue to a bounded text released in a single package, although it
might be updated to fix bugs or add additional content, whereas a tele-
vision pilot launches a text that is still in the process of being made. The
tutorial of the pilot thus applies not only to viewers but to the produc-
ers as well — the pilot locks in a number of creative choices that a series
must either follow strictly or deviate from in an embrace of discontinu-
ity. One of the challenges of any ongoing series is to find the balance
between following its initial template and discovering itself through its
ongoing development.
As one of the early landmarks of complex television, Twin Peaks’
pilot provides an important template for the role of opening moments:
it begins with two and a half minutes of opening credits combining lan-
guidly paced shots of a lumber mill with dreamy theme music, demand-
ing our viewing patience and immediately setting a meditative tone.2 To
viewers today, these credits are a striking anomaly, both in their length
and placement, as most contemporary programs either forgo opening
credit sequences entirely or precede shorter sequences with a teaser
sequence to immerse viewers in the narrative. Twin Peaks’ pilot follows
the credit sequence with an opening scene that both pays off and dis-
rupts what preceded it: we open on Josie preparing for her day in a con-
tinuation of the initial languid tone. We then follow Pete to the shore,
where he finds Laura Palmer’s dead body, iconically “wrapped in plas-
tic,” and calls the sheriff ’s office with a comedically clueless reply from
receptionist Lucy. Within the episode’s first five minutes, we are taught
to expect jarring juxtapositions in style, ironic undercutting of serious
moments, and a dreamy tone leaving viewers unsure how to emotion-
ally respond to the action — is Pete’s discovery played for laughs, melo-
drama, or both? These ambiguous tendencies are reinforced through-
out the pilot, which also establishes more than a dozen characters, key
plot points and relationships, and the intrinsic norm that each episode
takes place within one day of story time. The program’s open-ended
58 | Beginnings

mystery and intriguing tone inspires viewers to want to keep watching,

while the narrative form and style teaches us how to engage with the
ongoing series.
Opening moments of other pilots demonstrate their similarly dual
educational and inspirational roles. Pilots for complex comedies must
establish their style of humor as well as storytelling form. Arrested Devel-
opment begins with a scene on a boat, with Ron Howard’s off-screen
narrator introducing the characters, graphic captions providing their
names and roles, and techniques such as freeze-frames, flashbacks,
and cutaways to newspaper clippings, photos, and maps to create a
highly reflexive, self-aware, pseudodocumentary television style, all
within the first two minutes of the series. The opening sequence also
plants seeds for Arrested Development’s complex narrative structures, as
Lindsey comments that she has the same blouse as a “gay pirate” on
another boat — later in the episode, we learn that it is actually her hus-
band, Tobias, dressed as a pirate and wearing her actual blouse, drawing
a connection across narrative time both as foreshadowing and delayed
gratification of a joke, techniques that become even more ornate as the
series progresses. The episode establishes a comedic style with varying
streams of information, where the on-screen visuals (including graphics
and cutaways) may contradict or reinforce the characters’ actions — as
when Lucille Bluth says, “I love all my children equally,” immediately
followed by a flashback to her saying, “I don’t care for Gob,” earlier that
day — or serve as a callback to previous moments, as well as music cues
and voice-over undercutting or commenting on narrative action, all
for a joke. The pilot makes it clear that the program’s style and nar-
rative structure will be unconventional and demand attention, setting
our expectations for what is to come, even as the series becomes much
more self-assured and effective in its complex playfulness in subsequent
episodes. Although it was not a highly viewed pilot in its first broadcast,
it is not surprising that many viewers were turned off by the need for
careful attention and scrutiny in a manner atypical of most sitcoms; the
episode inspired only a small niche of viewers to keep watching but cre-
ated a cult-like fervor among that group.
Another complex comedy pilot establishing its serial norms and core
concept is How I Met Your Mother. The episode opens with a graphic
reading, “the year 2030,” over a shot of two teenagers looking into the
 Beginnings | 59

camera, when the off-screen voice of “Future Ted” says, “Kids, I’m going
to tell you an incredible story: the story of how I met your mother.”
Although stating the series title in the pilot’s first line is a bit heavy-
handed, this opening line establishes both the contours of the series
story and the mode of its telling: we know instantly that How I Met Your
Mother will use self-conscious techniques such as on-screen graphics
and voice-over, as well as framing the narrative scope for us. It proceeds
to demonstrate an attitude toward self-mockery, as the daughter asks,
“Is this going to take awhile?” with Future Ted quickly saying, “Yes” —
an answer that seems even more apt as the series took nine seasons to
arrive at Ted’s much-anticipated meeting of the titular mother. The nar-
ration then sets the stage as “25 years ago,” as we are introduced to the
program’s key settings and five main present-day characters, encapsulat-
ing their relationships and backstories through reflexive devices such
as freeze-frames, embedded flashbacks within flashbacks, split screens,
and the voice of Future Ted answering questions posed in the present-
day story. The pilot also references the program’s transmedia strategy, as
Barney mentions that he will be writing about something on his blog, an
in-character paratext on CBS.com where the fictional character reflects
on each episode’s events. Additionally, the pilot establishes a number of
running gags and references that appear throughout the series, such as
a blue French horn that Ted steals for Robin, or catchphrases such as
Barney’s “Suit up!” Most importantly, the episode seems to be building
toward a romance between Ted and Robin, narrating the tale of their
meeting and first date, but ends with Future Ted telling his kids, “That’s
how I met your Aunt Robin,” and promising that the true story of meet-
ing their mother will take a while.
The How I Met Your Mother pilot establishes its retrospective frame
story to create an embedded narrative enigma of the mother’s identity,
with key unknowns lodged in the temporal gap between 2030 and the
present-day story starting in 2005. This flashback narration creates the
sense that standard forward-moving narrative statements in the present-
day story can function as narrative enigmas due to the additional infor-
mation provided by Future Ted. As the first season progresses, with Ted
pursuing a relationship with Robin, we know from the pilot’s future
reveal that this is not the titular relationship motivating the frame story
and are thus encouraged to analyze the ongoing series for potential clues
60 | Beginnings

as to the mother’s identity, a task that forensic fans embraced via discus-
sion forums and sites such as the How I Met Your Mother wiki. While
these embedded enigmas are not the conspiratorial mysteries found
more commonly on dramas such as The X-Files or Lost, they do provide
a point of engagement for many fans, adding a layer of reflexive analy-
sis for fans to discuss and pointing toward the operational aesthetic in
focusing viewers on the program’s storytelling mechanics via its self-
conscious narrative devices, playful reversals, and nearly endless defer-
ment of the title’s promised plotline. This storytelling structure serves to
differentiate How I Met Your Mother from other series about a group of
white friends in their late 20s hanging out in New York, most notably
Friends, as the program mixes that well-established formula with more
complex narrative devices to engage viewers in the operational aesthetic
over long-term enigmas. The pilot sets this stage effectively and effi-
ciently, both educating viewers on the program’s intrinsic norms and
central characters and inspiring them to keep viewing for both its effec-
tive use of comedy and its reflexive narrative enigmas.
Dramas can similarly establish their narrative norms quickly within
a pilot. Alias opens with a scene of Sydney Bristow, with bright red
hair, being beaten and tortured by Chinese soldiers as they all argue in
unsubtitled Mandarin. The scene plays out for a minute, ending with her
handcuffed to a chair and staring at a door, where seemingly her inter-
rogator will arrive. We then cut to another door, where a stereotypically
crusty professor enters into a wood-paneled classroom to collect exams
from students, including a brown-haired, healthy Sydney Bristow. The
story proceeds forward from this point without clear temporal, spatial,
or character orientation to explain this transformation, allowing view-
ers to piece it together as the episode continues; we realize that Sydney
is both an astoundingly proficient and stylish secret agent (who ends up
imprisoned in Taiwan on a mission at the episode’s climax) and a down-
to-earth graduate student. These opening moments teach us to expect
disorientation (both temporal and linguistic), a strategy that the pilot
script by J. J. Abrams makes clear is by design: the script describes the
arrival of the professor with the action directions, “Is this a flashback? A
flash-forward? All answers in time. But meanwhile . . .”3 This moment
also instructs us to anticipate unexpected and unexplained juxtaposi-
tions between Sydney’s dual careers — from the start, such purposeful
 Beginnings | 61

confusion is established as one of Alias’s intrinsic norms, as the program

invites us to keep watching and to pay attention to try to sort it all out, a
mode of engagement that becomes more essential as the plots twist and
reverse throughout the pilot and subsequent episodes. This device of
starting a pilot at a moment of climax and looping back to explain how
we arrived at this point has become popular for many complex series,
including Breaking Bad, Damages, Revenge, and Veronica Mars, as dis-
cussed more later.
Other dramas use their opening moments to establish their own
unconventional intrinsic norms. Pushing Daisies opens with a shot of an
exaggeratedly lush field of bright yellow daisies, with a young boy and
his dog running in slow motion. A British man’s voice-over says, “At this
very moment in the town of Coeur d’Coeurs, Young Ned was 9 years,
27 weeks, 6 days, and 3 minutes old. His dog Digby was 3 years, 2 weeks,
6 days, 5 hours and 9 minutes old. . . . And not a minute older.” At that
moment, Digby is hit by a truck, marking a clear tonal blend of lush styl-
ized beauty and stark presentation of death, as framed by a storybook-
style narrative voice, juxtapositions that proved to be a hallmark for
the series. The narrator is a key intrinsic norm, providing an authorita-
tive voice from outside the storyworld to allow for swift and densely
packed narrative momentum, while providing specific details (such
as the precise age of characters), often prefaced with the phrase, “The
facts were these.” The sequence goes on to explain the precise prem-
ise for the supernatural scenario, with Ned’s gift to reanimate the dead
with a touch and the rule that another touch would kill the reanimated
person or animal, while portraying the emotionally scarring moments
from his youth when he learned about his power. Pushing Daisies’ “Pie-
lette” faces the challenge of needing to convey a very elaborate fantasy
premise, to establish an unconventional storytelling mode and visual
style, and to create a compelling emotional hook to a series that could
otherwise be dismissed as a whimsical novelty. It succeeds in all of these
tasks, while also creating a core model of weekly mysteries layered with
larger character and plot arcs, as well as distinguishing itself as a truly
unique program within a medium that rarely sees such distinctiveness
in style. The most successful pilots announce what they are, providing
a template for both the producers and viewers to move forward within
the ongoing series.
62 | Beginnings

24 is another example of an unconventional series needing to teach

viewers how to watch in its opening moments. After the pilot begins
with a digital-LED image of the title 24, a voice-over reads the on-screen
text, “The following takes place between midnight and 1:00 a.m., on the
day of the California presidential primary. Events occur in real time.”
Not only does this explanation highlight the importance of temporal-
ity as a storytelling element, but the simultaneous text and voice-over
makes it clear that the series will be explicit in its narrative strategies,
not allowing for ambiguity or confusion. The scene cuts to an image of a
cityscape, with a caption reading, “Kuala Lumpur, Local Time 4:00:27,”
with the seconds ticking forward to continue the focus on temporal-
ity and explicit narration; the shot then compresses into a split-screen
window juxtaposing the city with a crowded street scene along with
the credits of the actors to introduce the program’s dominant stylistic
norm of split screen. The sequence continues in split screen, cutting into
dual medium shots of the same character, who turns his head simulta-
neously in the dual images; this unusual effect teaches viewers that 24
will use split screen to present multiple perspectives on the same action,
both creating redundancy and maximizing viewer knowledge. In the
sequence leading up to Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) agent Rovner
transmitting intelligence about a planned assassination attempt, the
nearly constant split screen provides no essential new story information
or perspectives but rather serves as a stylistic tutorial of how the series
will visualize stories. This opening scene then spans across the globe to
Los Angeles, with a caption indicating the local time as just past mid-
night, teaching viewers that temporality will be constantly in “real time,”
while cuts between scenes will only be spatial, avoiding typical ellipses
of time in lieu of space. Although not much “happens” in this opening
scene in terms of character or plot, it serves an essential function to ori-
ent viewers to the program’s unique narrative style and its repertoire of
graphic devices.
Some pilots establish themselves clearly in some ways but confound
expectations in others. Terriers is one of the most critically adored
single-season series of recent vintage, with a distinct tone and style that
is clearly established in the opening of the pilot — the episode starts
with scruffy friends Hank and Britt chatting idly about being broke and
having songs stuck in your head, as they prepare for some sort of job,
 Beginnings | 63

seemingly as part of a pool service business but soon revealed to be a

theft of a man’s dog. One of these idle conversation topics turns out to
be more consequential in the long run, as Hank recalls finding an empty
carton of milk in his fridge but cannot remember drinking it — although
he attributes this to early senility, this moment actually foreshadows a
future storyline. Such subtle cues toward future plot developments are
central to Terriers’ storytelling mode, where shaggy, loose banter often
contains important narrative information that reveals itself in hindsight.
The opening also speaks to one of the program’s challenges in finding
an audience, as the title seemed to indicate that it would be about dogs,
and the initial dog-stealing caper might mislead viewers to think dogs
will be a more central focus of the ongoing plot. The fact that the men
are low-rent private investigators who get embroiled in high-stakes
real estate corruption is revealed quite slowly, as the pilot invites us
to become part of their daily routine of witty banter and hustling for
money, rather than to get inspired by a compelling narrative hook. For
many viewers (including me), this was a more rewarding approach, as
the palpable friendship drove the action that eventually became quite
complex and narratively rich, but the program’s minuscule ratings sug-
gest that this appeal was far too narrow to sustain itself on commercial
television, especially when coupled with the misleading title and decep-
tive opening moments.
Sometimes a pilot presents its intrinsic norms in ways that viewers
might not recognize as such, especially when they involve episodic rou-
tines. Six Feet Under’s pilot opens with family patriarch Nathaniel Fisher
dying in a brutal automobile accident, with the rest of the episode por-
traying the consequences of his death for his family and their funeral
home business. As the series goes on, it becomes clear that Nathaniel’s
death was the first of a pattern: every episode begins with someone’s
death, which becomes that week’s stand-alone plot for the Fisher fam-
ily business. Later the pattern becomes more elaborate, as discussed in
chapter 1, with misdirections and thwarted expectations, occasional
deaths of characters already established in the series, and one excep-
tional birth, but the pattern was launched in the pilot’s opening minutes.
Similarly, Lost’s pilot established the structure of interwoven flashbacks
off the island — in the pilot, flashbacks were just to the airplane prior to
it crashing, focused on three characters’ different perspectives, but that
64 | Beginnings

model clearly could not be sustained for long. Going forward, most epi-
sodes centered flashbacks on one character’s pre-island life, interwoven
with island events in the narrative present, until the end of the third sea-
son radically altered Lost’s storytelling structure. Nevertheless, the pilot
developed the intrinsic norm that we would leave the island to expand
the time and space seen within the series and established the visual and
sonic cues for how the program switches to and from flashbacks.
Awake debuted in spring 2012 with a highly acclaimed first episode
that highlights the challenges and possibilities of complex drama pilots
in teaching us how to watch and inspiring us to keep watching. Some
programs face the burden of explaining their defining premise, and the
premise of Awake is seriously high concept: police detective Michael
Britten survives a deadly car accident with his family, and when he
sleeps, he switches between one reality in which his wife was killed but
his teenage son survived and another in which his son died but his wife
did not. The premise is easy to describe, but it is hard to convey what it
means as a series — the most common refrain from critics prior to the
program’s debut was praising its pilot but doubting how it could work as
an ongoing serial. A close analysis of the pilot suggests that the answer
is provided less in terms of the concept and more in terms of the tone,
characters, and approach to storytelling.
As always with an effective pilot, the opening sequence sets parame-
ters for what is to come. The episode opens with the car crash, presented
with painful violent energy culminating in three shots: unconscious wife
Hannah, unconscious son Rex, husband Michael waking up. This last
shot pulls back and rotates in corkscrew fashion to show the inverted
wreck of the car, visualizing Michael’s world turned upside down. Over
this shot, we hear a voice — soon to be revealed as Michael’s therapist,
Dr. Lee — say, “So tell me how this works.” Michael’s voice replies, “I
don’t know. I close my eyes, I open them. Same as you.” We then cut to a
shot of Hannah and Michael grieving at a funeral, clearly suggesting that
Rex has died. Lee’s voice then says, “Let’s just start at the beginning,” to
which Michael says, “No.” We cut to Michael sitting in his therapy ses-
sion to continue his line, “let’s start it right now.”
This first 50 seconds is not particularly rich in narrative details —
we learn that there was a car accident and that presumably Rex was
killed in the accident — but it does provide some key clues on how to
 Beginnings | 65

watch the series. First, the camera work and editing is established as
unconventionally stylized and free roaming across time frames without
explicit motivation, encouraging us to pay attention to visual style in a
way that few network programs do. The dialogue sets up two poles for
how to approach the story that will prove to be crucial — Dr. Lee takes
an analytic tactic, as befits his profession, trying to understand how
things work and to grapple with the situation’s origins. Michael wants
to live in the now, downplaying that anything unusual is happening to
him. These poles of engagement help structure the program’s narrative,
as his two therapists (one in each reality) want to make rational sense
of what is happening to Michael as he flips between reality and a pre-
sumed dream, while Michael just wants to enjoy his split lives, in which
he effectively can live without permanent loss. As he says at the end of
the pilot, “When it comes to letting one of them go, I have no desire to
ever make progress.” Contrasting with the midstory start of Alias and
other pilots, Awake’s insistence that we begin in the present tense seems
to distinguish itself from other high-concept complex television series.
These dual approaches mirror how we might engage with the unusual
narrative scenario as well — we can try to make rational sense of it to
solve a mystery (“so tell me how this works”), or we can enjoy the now
by accepting the premise as it is, not as a problem to be solved. Much of
complex television fosters a mode of forensic fandom in which viewers
are encouraged to solve such high-concept puzzles, to ask “why?” and
presume that there is an answer to be found by drilling down and ana-
lyzing, much like with therapy or academic analysis. But Awake’s pilot
invites viewers to side with Michael, not only as the story’s protago-
nist but as a role model for accepting what we have been given without
wanting to know the reasons why — as viewers, Michael asks that we do
not focus on cracking the enigmas of what is “really” going on here or
deduce which reality is real. The rest of the pilot focuses our attention
on what matters most: Michael works on rebuilding his relationships
with his son and wife in the wake of the massive loss that each has suf-
fered, but he was spared from, at least in part. Michael learns how to
make his condition an asset for doing his job, as his experiences in each
world seem to inform the cases he solves in the other. He develops cop-
ing strategies to orient himself across realities with colored bracelets as
visual reminders, a technique mirrored in the dual color schemes and
66 | Beginnings

lighting tints that the series uses impressively to demarcate (and subtly
blend) the two realms.
In many ways, the pilot situates Awake within a specific subgenre: the
supernatural detective drama. Although very different in tone and style,
there is a parallel here with Medium, which focused on Allison DuBois,
a psychic who worked with the police to solve crimes. On Medium, there
was never any issue as to whether Allison really is a psychic or how
her powers worked — we simply accepted the fantastic premise that she
communicated with the dead, and we enjoyed watching how her powers
offered a twist on procedural cop plots and impacted her personal life.
Pushing Daisies operates similarly, with no effort to explain why Ned
possesses his supernatural gift but focusing on how that talent affects
his life and relationships moving forward. Michael in Awake can be seen
similarly as a character with a special, somewhat inexplicable gift that
both enriches and complicates his life. One way to read the pilot is to
conceive of the series’s overarching narrative not to “start at the begin-
ning” to understand what is happening but to “start it right now” to
understand how his condition matters to him and others in his life going
forward — in other words, the pilot tries to focus attention on narrative
statements instead of narrative enigmas.
Other high-concept series in recent years, such as FlashForward, The
Event, and Day Break, all fell into the trap where concerns about a com-
pelling central mystery overrode all other storytelling imperatives, such
as characterization, relationships, and a clear sense of narrative tone and
place. Often, these series launch with what is termed a “premise pilot,”
in which the chief storytelling goal is to set the narrative gears in motion
to establish the program’s core narrative scenario — subsequent episodes
will differ dramatically once the core situation is in place. Awake’s pilot
starts midstream with Michael already immersed in his narrative situ-
ation, while still educating viewers about this scenario sufficiently to
make sure we understand the premise — we never see Michael experi-
ence his first “cross-reality” awakening. Instead, Awake’s pilot suggests
through its compelling writing, performances, visual style, and emo-
tional realism that the series cares more about going forward with its
character-driven storytelling than it does about solving the mystery;
however, the pull of forensic fandom might make it seem like the goal
of the series is to provide answers to its mysterious enigma, rather than
 Beginnings | 67

to explore its consequences in the lives of characters. A pilot is always

a promissory note for what is to come (if ratings are high enough),
more than a blueprint to be followed, and much can change as a series
develops. Awake’s pilot asks us to accept Michael’s wishes by accepting
him for who he is, not trying to solve his problem, and letting viewers
become immersed in both of his lives. As the series progressed over
its single season, Awake solved some serialized mysteries involving
Michael’s accident but also refused to explain the core premise of his
dual lives.
This survey of different pilot strategies has focused on some of the
most acclaimed examples of debut episodes, hailed by fans and critics
alike. Of course, many pilots start in a very different place than where
they end up, as programs frequently take a while to find their footing.
This is most true in comedies, in which ensembles often need time to
develop a rapport and writers learn which relationship dynamics work
best. The pilot to Parks and Recreation looks little like the series that
many people hail as one of contemporary television’s best sitcoms, as
the characters were more extreme in their personalities and the action
focused on an overarching plot arc of building a park, a plot that was
dropped quickly in the second season. Cougar Town’s pilot reflects the
program’s initial concept of a middle-aged woman dating younger men,
a concept that was quickly jettisoned after a few episodes, and even the
pilot for the all-time classic Seinfeld shows little of the structural flair
or intricate dialogue that later typified the series. Dramas can also start
quite differently than they end up, as with Justified beginning with more
of an episodic procedural focus until the series started to emphasize lon-
ger plot arcs. The series made Boyd Crowder into an ongoing foil for
Raylan Givens, a shift motivated by the producers’ choice to keep Boyd
alive after his planned death in the pilot, due to the strength of Walton
Goggins’s performance and the actor’s subsequent availability. Dollhouse
aired a first episode that downplayed its long-term plot arcs and con-
spiracies instead of creator Joss Whedon’s more serialized original pilot,
a shift demanded by the Fox network — the original pilot was included
on DVD, and fans encouraged new viewers to start with it for a more
authorially sanctioned version of the series, which grew more serial-
ized than the aired first episode had suggested. While we could certainly
learn much by examining pilots that fail to reflect their subsequent series
68 | Beginnings

or that fail altogether in attracting an audience or even making it to the

air, to understand the way complex television programs can launch with
effective momentum, it is more instructive to analyze an exemplary case
of a serial beginning.

“These Questions Need Answers”:

Veronica Mars’s Pilot in Slow Motion
The pilot episode of Veronica Mars is a remarkable piece of television. It
manages to introduce more than a dozen characters and relationships,
to probe numerous backstories, to plant the seeds for three season-long
story arcs, to establish a genre mixture of teen melodrama and film noir,
and to convey a tone combining complex mystery, snarky humor, rela-
tionship drama, and social commentary — all within a running time of
just over 40 minutes. To understand the educational and inspirational
strategies employed by Veronica Mars, we need to zoom in closely on the
pilot’s formal mechanics and structure, detailing the strategies used to
begin the narrative as a microcosm of the series as a whole, an example
of the broader function of pilots, and a window onto the ways that a
hypothetical new viewer might make sense of this serialized beginning.
Such close analysis can also help us understand the complex intersec-
tion of gender and genre that Veronica Mars plays with so compellingly,
an aspect that becomes clearer after a slow-motion walkthrough of the
episode’s storytelling strategies.4
When approaching Veronica Mars’s pilot, there is a complication —
the episode aired on UPN originally on September 22, 2004, in a dif-
ferent form than the version released on the first-season DVD that
came out a year later. The most important difference between the two
versions concerns how each opens, which is crucial to the function of
pilots. The UPN-aired pilot begins in the sunny parking lot of Neptune
High, with Veronica’s voice-over setting the scene, which features class
conflict and teen politics in beautiful Southern California.5 This scene
was pushed back to after the opening credits in the DVD version, which
starts instead with a precredit flash-forward to Veronica staking out the
seedy Camelot Motel along with a highly noir-style voice-over narra-
tion, a moment that will be returned to at the 18-minute mark of the
DVD version, echoing the “in medias res” strategy from Alias discussed
 Beginnings | 69

earlier. Yet another version might be imagined from the original pilot
script available on creator Rob Thomas’s website — this script struc-
turally mirrors the DVD version, although with a number of changed
names such as the town of Playa de Costa instead of Neptune and Logan
Hewitt instead of Logan Echolls, a few altered plot points, and saltier
language and content more appropriate for Thomas’s original pitch
for cable distribution rather than a broadcast network.6 Or we might
seek out the original unaired pilot that UPN bought, which circulated
among television critics and in bootleg versions online, following the
structure of the DVD version but with a few minor differences in cast-
ing and dialogue.
I have chosen to focus on the DVD version as my analytic object, not
because of its status as Thomas’s “preferred” final edit but rather because
the series exists beyond the time frame of its initial airing, and any
attempt to revisit the narrative is likely to turn to the published DVDs.7
While certainly the original aired version set the stage for the program’s
small but dedicated initial fan base, our long-term engagement with
the series will treat the DVDs as the permanent lasting text for viewers.
However, we can learn something from these changes. UPN’s decision
to eliminate the opening flash-forward was certainly trying to make
the series easier to comprehend, avoiding the temporal leap that might
confuse a naive viewer. But it also shifts its initial genre emphasis — by
starting with the high school scene, the broadcast version cues viewers
that this will be a series about teenagers, with a brave and active hero-
ine guiding us through the perils of adolescence. As Thomas said in an
interview, “The network handed me a note that basically said that since
the show is about high school, it should start in the high school. . . .
They were sure that getting young people to watch would be too tough
with the original pilot.”8 Thus even though UPN bought the series on
the basis of the original pilot, the network reimagined it to fit the genre
emphasis that it felt better suited its brand and target audience.
A close look at the DVD version, following the template of the script
and unaired original pilot, reveals a vastly different genre tone, start-
ing with a dire proclamation via Veronica’s voice-over that locates the
opening far from the confines of high school drama: “I’m never getting
married. You want an absolute? Well, there it is.” The televisual style
helps set the tone, with the mellow bass groove of Air’s instrumental “La
70 | Beginnings

Femme D’Argent” (a music cue that Thomas specified in his original

script) accompanying a slow crane up on the late-night scene outside
the Camelot Motel, highlighting the red neon glow of the “No Vacancy”
sign. The visuals cut to a shot of a draped window with a silhouetted
couple having sex, while the voice-over says, “Veronica Mars, spinster.
I mean, what’s the point. Sure, there’s the initial primal drive. Ride it
out.” For the first-time viewer, the impulse is to try to piece together the
emerging story information from the scattered textual cues, following a
cognitive process I discuss in chapter 5. We now know that we are hear-
ing Veronica’s voice but do not have much to help orient us as to where
we are and who this Veronica Mars character might be. Might she be
the long-haired passionate woman seen atop her lover in this shadowed
shot? The language of “primal urge” and “ride it out” suggests an erotic
link, while Veronica’s emotionally detached vocal tone suggests a more
distant observational role.
Our hypotheses shift along with the camera, as a continuous shot
pans right to follow a man in an ill-fitting feminine bathrobe walking
by the window and descending the stairs to fill his ice bucket. Veronica
continues, “Better yet? Ignore it. Sooner or later, the people you love let
you down. And here’s where it ends up: sleazy men, cocktail waitresses,
cheap motels on the wrong side of town. And a soon-to-be ex-spouse
wanting a bigger piece of the settlement pie.” This sequence directs our
attention away from the shadowy lovers and toward the larger signifi-
cance of the Camelot Motel, whose mythical name evokes a reference
point of a glossy surface with hidden secrets of infidelity and betrayal.
Veronica cues us that these people are merely stand-ins for a larger situ-
ation of adultery and distrust, thematic signifiers rather than individ-
ual characters. This moment highlights one key task of a pilot: sorting
out which people are characters and which are simply people inhabit-
ing the world, more like props or set decoration than actual characters.
The continuous camera movement helps establish a broader narrative
impulse toward mystery and problem solving, as we seek answers to
questions that are then redirected and reframed, often away from red
herrings and misleading dead ends. And the sequence helps us rank
the relative reliability of the different sources of information: we trust
what we see, but Veronica’s voice-over appears to be more authorita-
tive in helping us interpret and prioritize the images. Thus we view the
 Beginnings | 71

visuals as objectively true, but the voice-over provides the preferred sub-
jective approach toward the action that includes us among Veronica’s
intimate confidants.
The next sequence solidifies this relationship. The visuals jump to a
reverse angle nestled in the C of the neon Camelot sign, with the other
side of the “No Vacancy” sign centered over the deserted street, save for
four parked cars. The camera slowly zooms in, but after only one sec-
ond, it cuts to a medium shot of one of the cars, continuing the zooming
pattern in a somewhat disorienting jump edit. The voice-over ties the
action to our protagonist: “That’s where I come in.” This clichéd bit of
dialogue evokes film noir, although it might be more directly derived
from the noir-influenced television crime drama Dragnet.9 Veronica’s
line clearly sets up her authority as an expert on adultery and betrayal,
an expertise that will later be revealed as involving more than a pro-
fessional knowledge, and coalesces all of the previous film noir cues:
the sleazy motel, the surveillant gaze, tawdry affairs, and the cynical
worldview. Just 40 seconds into the series, we already have a clear genre
demarcation and an evocative persona for our titular narrator, who
thus far seems exceptional primarily for being a woman in a masculine-
dominated genre.
What we do not yet know is that Veronica is in high school, the key
revelation that UPN sought to foreground through its edit. The next shot
alludes to this aspect of her persona, as we enter the car on a close-up of
a book titled Calculus of a Single Variable. The book’s connotative mean-
ing will matter more later, as we learn of Veronica’s attributes as a sin-
gular free agent with a talent for problem solving, and she will be a key
variable within a number of puzzling calculations — in fact, “Calculus of
a Single Variable” would be an apt title for the episode as a whole. For
now, it offers a small enigmatic detail in an otherwise genre-consistent
storyworld. As the shot drifts from the book toward a camera, Veronica
continues, “$40 an hour is cheap compared to the long-term financial
security sordid photography can secure for you. Your offspring. Your
next lover.” We are still deep in the milieu of noir, as Veronica reaches
for a steel thermos — a concession to the teen drama, as were it a hard-
boiled adult noir, she would probably be drinking whiskey out of a flask.
The first bit of Veronica we see is her right hand, which is adorned with
an ornately designed thumb ring. When paired with her antimarriage
72 | Beginnings

proclamation, the thumb ring instantly marks Veronica as a noncon-

formist with her own individual style. In contrast to the feminine norm
of wedding and engagement rings marking a coupled status, Veronica’s
thumb ring highlights her status as both single and variable.
The shot follows the thermos as Veronica pours herself a cup of
coffee. A seven-second pause in the narration accompanies our first
glimpse of Veronica’s face, giving us time to drink in the close-up sight.
Certainly she is young, but we cannot be sure of an age yet — actress
Kristen Bell was 24 at the time of the program’s debut but easily passed
for younger. She looks off-screen to her left, and the pause in narration
gives us time to do the spatial calculations to gather that her viewpoint
is the perspective from the first shots and that it is she who is surveil-
ling the lurid action at the Camelot, an investigative activity consistent
with the noir style. The earlier voice-over, point-of-view shot, and facial
close-up confirm that our perspective is the same as Veronica’s, making
her our focalizing guide to this still-emerging narrative universe.
Bell’s youthful beauty contradicts her cynical, cold narration, which
continues as she pours and drinks some coffee: “But do us a favor if it’s
you in there: dispense with the cuddling. This motel tryst, it is what it
is. Make it quick. The person sitting in the car across the street might
have a calculus exam in five . . . make that four hours, and she can’t
leave until she gets the money shot.” This sequence helps narrow down
the possibilities of Veronica’s narrative status and identity. Her glance
to the car clock as she corrects the timetable for her exam grounds the
voice-over within the present-tense thoughts of the character, ruling out
a retrospective commentary on the action. The mention of the calculus
exam identifies her as a student, although she could be either advanced
high school or college, and strengthens the link between the textbook
and the character. Most importantly, we realize that Veronica leads a
double life — private eye by night, student by day — setting up the tension
between the dual worlds that will define the series.
At this point in the teaser, our first question has been answered in a
cursory manner — who is this voice lecturing us about marriage? — but
deeper questions are raised about the character: who is this Veronica
Mars, why is she so bitter, and what is the deal with her double roles as
student and private investigator? Any further pondering is interrupted
by the off-camera sounds of revving engines and a musical shift into a
 Beginnings | 73

faster driving synthesizer groove. Veronica looks up, and we get an eye-
line match to a pack of motorcycles driving down the deserted road.
The editing pace quickens to match the music, with 11 cuts in 15 seconds
reversing between Veronica watching the bike gang and the bikers turn-
ing around to park in front of the hotel. The shots emphasize the con-
trast between the bright vehicle lights and the dark night streets, with
the lights reflected off Veronica’s car and mirrors. This shift in music
and visual style changes its television cop drama allusive frame of ref-
erence from Dragnet to Miami Vice, with the latter’s glossy neon style
masking something dangerous beneath the surface. Veronica deadpans
(in spoken dialogue rather than voice-over), “Well, this can’t be good,”
suggesting a calm exterior but raising doubts about her future safety.
The next sequence begins with a shot tilting down the length of the
vertical Camelot Motel sign, ending on street level as the lead biker
rolls to a stop in the center of the frame. A series of reverse angles show
Veronica staring down the biker, who removes his helmet, beckons her
to roll down her window, and then menacingly says, “Car trouble, miss?”
We end with a shot of Veronica inhaling as she ponders her next move
before we cut to the credits, starting with upbeat music and a vastly
different image of a smiling Veronica sitting in the sun. In just under a
minute and 40 seconds, this teaser has set up a great deal of information
and context for the episode and series as a whole. We have established
the title character as a savvy and brave young woman, juggling life as
a student and paid private investigator. The neonoir style serves to set
a cynical and world-weary tone, with clever narration encouraging a
more sophisticated take on conventional crime stories. The frank sexual
content of adulterous motel trysts signals a level of maturity unexpected
in a program that will later be shown to be based around a high school.
And the cliffhanger ending suggests that suspense and action will be a
prime ingredient of the dramatic action.
It is not hard to see both why Thomas might have preferred this
opening for the pilot, highlighting maturity, unconventionality, and sus-
penseful noir, and why UPN forced the more typical opening at Neptune
High to appeal to its core teenage target audience with a more familiar
milieu, style, genre, and set of characters. These two openings high-
light the central challenge of any pilot: demonstrating how the series
is both freshly distinct and yet familiar enough to be recognizable and
74 | Beginnings

comfortable, striking the delicate balance between similarity and dif-

ference that structures commercial television. The UPN opening starts
with the familiar and slowly complicates it with intrigue and genre mix-
ture, while the DVD version puts us in the midst of something uncon-
ventional for television, a young female-centered noir, and then links
it to the more conventional facets of teen drama. Both educate viewers
on the program’s norms and inspire them to keep viewing, but clearly
each approach speaks differently to various subsets of the potential
viewing audience.
To further analyze the Veronica Mars pilot, we could continue such a
slow-motion replay of the episode, highlighting how each shot, sound,
line, and sequence adds to our understanding of the storyworld and sets
the stage for the series. But the length needed for such an analysis would
turn this chapter into a book, along the lines of Roland Barthes’s S/Z.10
Instead, we can zoom out and look at some of the broader trends and
strategies that play out across the entire episode and consider how they
work to teach viewers how to view the series as a whole. Such an account
builds on a model of narrative comprehension explored by David Bord-
well for film and developed more in chapter 5, exploring how a text
draws on both extrinsic (such as genre and stylistic conventions) and
intrinsic norms unique to the film itself to cue viewers how to construct
the story in their minds and posit answers to ongoing narrative ques-
tions.11 For a television series, a pilot is the primary site for establishing
intrinsic norms for the ongoing series and making clear connections to
the relevant extrinsic norms of genre, narrative mode, and style.
One aspect that quickly becomes apparent is that Veronica Mars will
tell its story using complex narrative techniques. The pilot contains a
number of hallmarks of such narrative complexity — direct-address
voice-over narration, frequent flashbacks and jumps in time frame, and
long-term mysteries and story arcs that will traverse the entire season
and beyond. All of these techniques clearly situate Veronica Mars within
the mode of narrative complexity within minutes of the pilot’s open-
ing, establishing intrinsic norms to guide viewers throughout the series.
After the opening credits, we are brought back into the storyworld not
at the moment of cliffhanging suspense but at the sunny parking lot
of a high school. Veronica’s upbeat voice-over, in stark contrast to the
world-weary cynicism of the first scene, quickly sets the scene for the
 Beginnings | 75

moments that opened the pilot as originally aired on UPN: “This is my

school. If you go here, your parents are either millionaires, or your par-
ents work for millionaires. Neptune, California: a town without a middle
class.” The DVD version adds a bit more exposition to explain the tem-
poral shift — a caption reads, “20 Hours Earlier,” as Veronica continues,
“So how does a girl end up surrounded by a motorcycle gang at four
in the morning on the wrong side of town? For that answer, we’ll have
to rewind to yesterday.” Thus we are reoriented to the story going for-
ward, with the two versions becoming mostly identical for the rest of
the episode.
Starting an episode midstory and then flashing back to reveal how
the characters got to that point is a common technique in narratively
complex programs, as discussed earlier concerning Alias’s pilot or in
the introduction concerning Revenge and The West Wing. However,
Veronica Mars’s use of voice-over provides an explanation of the tempo-
ral jump that is more marked than typical on other series — while other
programs using this device, such as West Wing and Damages, normally
use only captions to reset their time lines, and the pilot of Alias avoids
any such orienting devices, Veronica’s narration explicitly notes that we
are rewinding the story, making sure that audiences can follow the com-
plex plotting. More interestingly, the narration frames the rewind as a
question, explicitly asking how she got there and providing an answer
through the narrative logic. Explicitly framing the story as a series of
questions and answers, or “erotetic narrative,” as termed by Noël Carroll,
is a vital aspect of the program’s narrative structure, a thematic dimen-
sion that is repeated throughout the episode (which I return to later).12
By framing this temporal shift so explicitly and by self-consciously pos-
ing the storytelling in question form, Veronica Mars teaches us that it
will employ complex storytelling techniques but assures us that it will
try to keep us oriented through a range of narrative devices, aiming for
comprehension over confusion, clear questions and answers instead of
open-ended uncertainty.
This opening rewind is not the pilot’s only example of temporal com-
plexity, as the episode contains eight flashbacks that run approximately
nine minutes in total, accounting for more than 20% of its running time.
While flashbacks remain an important part of the narrative toolbox for
the series as a whole, the pilot uses them far more extensively than does
76 | Beginnings

almost any other episode. In large part, the use of flashbacks in the pilot
is expository, providing backstory on the characters and situations that
precede the present-day time line. These flashbacks are quite impor-
tant to set up the program’s major plot arcs, as they posit the three key
questions that will motivate the season’s serialized plotlines: Who killed
Lilly Kane? Who raped Veronica? And why did Veronica’s mother leave
the family? All of these major narrative events occurred long before the
pilot begins, so flashbacks help build mystery about the storyworld’s
past events and narrative enigmas, a storytelling strategy that creates
the fictional universe’s depth and richness. The pilot’s extensive use of
flashbacks helps set up an intrinsic norm for the series as a whole but
also underscores how a pilot is often atypical in its storytelling strategies
in order to sufficiently educate viewers on the scenario and key back-
story elements.
Just as the opening rewind is explained clearly with redundancy,
the flashbacks are all highly cued and demarcated as narratively dis-
tinct. The first flashback comes at the episode’s five-minute mark, with
Veronica sitting outside in her high school courtyard, introducing her
classmates via voice-over. In recounting her previous status as part of
the “in crowd,” she admits, “The only reason I was allowed beyond the
velvet ropes was Duncan Kane, son of software billionaire Jake Kane.
He used to be my boyfriend.” The camera alternates between a shot of
Veronica sitting alone staring wistfully at Duncan and her visual per-
spective of him mingling with his friends. The camera slowly tracks in
toward Veronica at the end of her line, as the image blurs via quick dis-
solve into another shot with an accompanying “swoosh” sound effect.
The new shot of kids in the high school hallway is tinted blue, with soft
focus and streaky images to clearly distinguish it from the bright colors
and sun-drenched lighting of the courtyard. The music shifts as well,
to a breathy atmospheric vocal track from the previous subtle guitar
rhythmic background in the courtyard scene. We soon see Duncan and
a longer-haired Veronica in the center of the frame, with a jump-cut
forward to a close-up of them kissing, before the image oversaturates
with white light and shifts into slow motion. All of these stylistic tech-
niques, from film stock to soundtrack, color scheme to hairstyling, serve
to demarcate the flashback sequence from the norms established in the
present-tense scenes. There is no ambiguity about this temporal shift, as
 Beginnings | 77

the sequence is clearly framed as a subjective memory presented to us

by Veronica, our focalizing narrator.
The next flashback is similarly demarcated but differs in terms of
perspective. Veronica is sitting at lunch with Wallace, as she asks him
two related questions: “So what did you do? . . . Why are you a dead
man walking?” These questions trigger the similar blur and sound
effect to signal a flashback of Wallace reporting a robbery while work-
ing at a convenience store, with Wallace narrating events to Veronica.
This flashback, briefly interrupted by a line from Veronica, is the only
scene in which Veronica does not appear throughout the entire episode
and thus the only story material portrayed without Veronica’s firsthand
experience — future episodes focus primarily on the titular character but
feature scenes and plotlines without Veronica, another example of the
pilot’s exceptional status. Although Wallace’s flashback uses comparable
stylistic markers as Veronica’s, its narrative status is different: Wallace
is clearly retelling the story to Veronica within the storyworld, while
Veronica’s voice-overs and flashbacks are internal monologues, shared
only with the nonspecified “you” of the television audience. These dis-
tinctions reinforce the important centrality of Veronica as our main
character, narrative guide, and focalizing figure, a status that remains
consistent throughout the series.
Veronica’s second flashback, immediately following the scene with
Wallace, appears more subjective, motivated by a triggered memory
rather than expository narration. In the courtyard to her apartment, she
hears the song “Just Another” by Pete Zorn playing on a radio as she
walks by the swimming pool. She looks up at the radio, and then we hear
a splash from the pool. Veronica looks down as we “swoosh” into a flash-
back image of Duncan emerging from the water, saying, “Hey, babe, it’s
our song.” The scene shifts abruptly to Veronica’s friends circling a large
birthday cake being held out by a previously unseen woman, who says,
“Happy birthday, Veronica! Are you surprised?” Veronica says, “Mom”
twice — first within the flashback and then in a quick switch back to the
present-day narrative, as she spins her head mistakenly thinking that
another woman in the courtyard was her mother. While this flashback is
stylistically cued as a memory, its narrative function is more opaque, not
answering questions explicitly posed by Veronica’s narration but rather
raising a question still to be addressed: where is Veronica’s mother? All
78 | Beginnings

of Veronica’s flashbacks offer a balance of narrative information and

emotional depth, with this example furthest toward the emotional end
of the spectrum.
The next flashback comes more than five minutes later and includes
the most significant revelations for the major serialized plot arcs. While
Veronica is surveilling Jake Kane for her father’s private investigation
firm, she narrates the details of Kane’s prominent business and civic
roles in Neptune. As she begins to talk about her relationship with
the Kane family, we flash back to a scene between Veronica and Lilly
Kane, revealing Lilly’s murder and how Veronica learned of her friend’s
demise. Most notably, the sequence presents an important but under-
stated uncertainty, with Lilly telling Veronica, “I’ve got a secret — a good
one,” in a conversation that Veronica identifies as “the last words Lilly
and I ever shared.” Lilly’s secret is not highlighted as a key narrative
enigma, but it returns in prominence later in the season as Veronica
begins to unravel the case — looking back from the end of the season,
this referenced secret is the cause of Lilly’s death, and thus its subdued
placement within the pilot helps provide unity to the arc of her murder
and validates the eventual reveal as a well-crafted mystery. Although
the events being portrayed are clearly emotionally fraught for Veronica,
with her best friend’s murder and the subsequent scapegoating of her
father for a botched investigation, the tone of the narration is detached
and factually driven, with Veronica presenting the story more as an
investigator than as someone who is emotionally involved in the case.
This flashback thus helps situate the narrative status of Veronica’s
voice-over narration. After revealing Lilly’s death, she says, “But every-
one knows this story, the murder of Lilly Kane. . . . And, of course,
everyone remembers reading about the bungling local sheriff, the one
who went after the wrong man. That bungling sheriff was my dad.”
This narration suggests that Veronica is explicitly speaking to an audi-
ence within the storyworld, assuming our familiarity with the tabloid-
covered events. While the narration is never overtly identified as fitting
a particular frame of reference, like a diary or therapy session as found
in other programs with first-person voice-over, this mode of direct
address distinguishes it from a more objective narrational tone, like in
Dragnet. Whereas in Dragnet there is no implied audience hearing Fri-
day’s narration that functions like an orated police report, Veronica is
 Beginnings | 79

clearly talking to somebody, explaining her perspectives and asking us

to go along for a ride. This style of narration firmly embeds the viewer
within the storyworld, making us an unspecified but important part
of the diegesis that functions as a sounding board for Veronica’s inner
thoughts and plans, providing access to details of both her investigative
procedures and her emotional life.
Subsequent flashbacks follow these established parameters, present-
ing crucial backstory plot, relationships, and lingering mysteries. Ques-
tions remain central to the use of flashbacks, as with the sixth flashback,
introduced with the voice-over, “You want to know how I lost my vir-
ginity? So do I,” before showing the scene of Veronica’s drug-induced
date rape. The seventh flashback is cued by another character’s ques-
tions — Logan is taunting Veronica about her absent mother, asking,
“Do you know where she is? Any clue?” Veronica stares him down as he
drives away but then answers his question via voice-over: “It’s been eight
months since I’ve seen my mother.” A flashback shows the morning after
Veronica’s mother left, setting up the season-long arc about her status
and Veronica’s relationship with her mother. Throughout the pilot, ques-
tions are articulated either to immediately answer them to orient and
educate viewers or to establish enigmas inspiring viewers to continue
watching in hopes of discovering the answers.
The flashbacks also cue some important parallels and repetitions
that draw characters together, deepen the storyworld, and cue narra-
tive pleasure. For instance, in Wallace’s flashback, Sheriff Lamb mocks
Wallace by saying, “You need to go see the wizard, ask him for some
guts.” Veronica interrupts in the present tense, “ ‘Go see the wizard,’ he
said that?” a comment that seems unremarkable at the time; 22 minutes
later, the comment becomes clearer — during a flashback to Veronica
reporting her rape, Sheriff Lamb cruelly dismisses her by saying, “I’ll
tell you what, Veronica Mars — why don’t you go see the wizard, ask for a
little backbone.” Besides clearly aligning Wallace and Veronica together
against Lamb, this parallel sets up an episodically contained revenge plot
that implicates the sheriff ’s department in exchanging favorable treat-
ment of a strip club for sexual favors. Since the episode does not call
attention to this parallel dialogue, viewers who have been paying atten-
tion can get a brief frisson of pleasure upon recognizing the repetition.
Such moments of recognition and connection are an important facet
80 | Beginnings

of watching serial television, as drawn-out links that may span across

episodes or even seasons offer dedicated viewers an acknowledgment
of, and reward for, their dedication and attention. Although this intra-
episodic repetition requires no long-term commitment, the moment
helps establish the broader norm that the series will expect viewers to
pay attention, forge connections, and reward their dedication via plea-
surable connections and revelations.
Another narrative pleasure is signaled by a subtle repetition. Around
halfway through the episode, Veronica’s father, Keith Mars, returns home
from an attempt to collect a bounty on a bail jumper — Veronica greets
him with an inquisitive, “And?” Keith pauses for drama and then offers
a pseudocool, “Who’s your daddy?” which Veronica dismisses with typi-
cal adolescent exasperation: “I hate it when you say that.” This exchange
creates a bit of playful tension between father and daughter, as Keith
goes on to mockingly claim a degree of coolness that amuses Veronica
but underscores their generational divide. Toward the end of the epi-
sode, a parallel scene occurs as Keith finds Veronica at night in the Mars
Investigation office, where she has discovered that Keith has been with-
holding information from her about the Kane murder case. He tempts
her to leave with promises of pizza and the South Park movie and offers
a repeated “Who’s your daddy?” This time Veronica sighs and smiles
and warmly replies, “You are.” The repeated moment reconciles the ear-
lier tension like a musical phrase, replaying a dissonant theme with a
resolved harmonious chord. This moment highlights the stability of this
relationship that will anchor the entire series, as well as foreshadowing
the forthcoming plot developments when Veronica starts to question
and investigate this precise question of her paternity. Additionally, the
repetition calls attention to the program’s well-crafted storytelling, using
an overt parallel to inspire confidence in viewers that the producers are
in full control of their fictional form. It is a self-aware moment of narra-
tive construction that, at least for some viewers, provides a moment of
playful pleasure in admiration of the program’s creative craft, a moment
of the operational aesthetic in action.
As is typical of all pilots, the episode introduces and focuses our
attention on a number of characters and relationships. Clearly Veronica
is the central figure of the storyworld, appearing in every scene except
Wallace’s flashback, and virtually every character exists primarily in
 Beginnings | 81

relationship to her. The credit sequence introduces the list of major

characters in order: Veronica, Wallace, Duncan, Logan, and Weevil, with
Keith getting the final billing as “and Enrico Colantoni,” a position con-
ventionally reserved for more established actors in supporting roles, as
well as parents in teen dramas. The actual screen time for characters is
differently balanced — Wallace appears in around 25% of the episode and
Keith in 20%, a proportion that effectively establishes those two char-
acters as Veronica’s most trusted and stable allies in the ongoing series.
Duncan’s third billing seems contrary to appearing only in 7% of the epi-
sode, an imbalance that persists throughout the series — the character is
narratively central to many ongoing arcs, but his presence is less vibrant
and active than that of the other supporting actors, culminating in the
character leaving the series midway through the second season. Thomas
has suggested in interviews that the character never quite worked as
the writers imagined it, partly because of Teddy Dunn’s performance
and partly because he was too isolated from Veronica due to their often
estranged relationship. While certainly the romantic link and familial
history between Duncan and Veronica are core dramatic elements, the
pilot shows little of their connection and effectively confines Duncan to
the margins in favor of more colorful supporting players.
Logan was not initially conceived as a main character, but Jason
Dohring’s compelling performance prompted the producers to make
Logan more central to the series and to establish an ongoing romance
between him and Veronica. In the pilot, Logan and Weevil share nearly
equal time, at around 13% of the episode time, helping to establish the
two as rivals, culminating in their confrontation toward the end of the
episode. Functionally the two characters share a volatile bond with
Veronica, serving as both allies and enemies at various times. These
proportions also mirror a legalistic aspect of storytelling unique to the
television medium — contracts often stipulate the number of episodes
per season each actor will appear in. Thus the actors playing Veronica,
Wallace, and Keith were contracted to appear in every episode in season
1, while those playing Weevil, Logan, and Duncan were only available
for approximately 75% of the episodes, forcing the producers to devise
stories that allowed them to disappear for a week.13 The pilot effectively
establishes this balance in character prominence that carries throughout
the first season.
82 | Beginnings

The pilot also establishes the program’s norms for balancing multi-
ple plotlines. Although like many pilots, much of the episode’s time is
spent introducing the setting, characters, and relationships rather than
focusing on narrative events and storylines, the episode does introduce
a remarkable number of events and plots. Typically, a Veronica Mars
episode features a self-contained A plot concerning a case that is intro-
duced and solved within an episode, alongside B and C plots focusing on
long-term arcs of ongoing mysteries and relationships. The pilot is less
typically structured, with six definable plotlines: the robbery at Wallace’s
store, the investigation into the Seventh Veil strip club, the Jake Kane
infidelity investigation, Lilly Kane’s murder, Veronica’s mother leaving
the family, and Veronica’s rape. As is common for the series, the plot-
lines are not rigidly distinct, as they interweave in terms of both events
and themes — the strip-club plot ends up merging with the robbery case,
and the theme of sexual indiscretion and mystery permeates many of
the storylines. It is therefore hard to define a clear A plot; although the
Jake Kane investigation takes up the most time, at nearly a quarter of
the episode, it blurs into nearly all of the other plotlines and lacks the
resolution common of A plots in subsequent episodes. The robbery and
strip-club cases are resolved but lack the central focus typical of other
episodes’ A plots.
Despite a fuzzier distinction between plotlines than the ongoing
norm for the program, the pilot’s atypical multiple story threads do help
orient viewers on how to watch the series. The episode’s self-contained
plotlines (the robbery and strip-club cases) are presented with Veronica
in firm control of the action, effectively rescuing Wallace and manipulat-
ing the sheriff ’s office with minimal stress and effort. These plots situate
Veronica as more knowledgeable about events and backstory than view-
ers are, a norm common to each subsequent episode’s case of the week.
For most of the episode, we are unsure of the relevance of the strip-club
plotline and are not privy to Veronica’s master plan to connect it with
the robbery via a videotape swap — the link is revealed at the moment
of Lamb’s humiliation, rather than positioning us as riding shotgun to
the ongoing procedures of Veronica’s investigations. For most episodes,
the self-contained cases reinforce Veronica’s investigational mastery, and
they function more as games for viewers to try to guess the culprit, out-
come, or Veronica’s investigative strategy.
 Beginnings | 83

The long-term story arcs, involving the Kane family and Veronica’s
emotional traumas of rape and maternal abandonment, align us more
closely with Veronica’s limited knowledge, as we learn about new devel-
opments along with her and as she treats us as confidants sharing vital
backstory. Veronica’s investigative approach foregrounds posing and
answering questions, and the program’s serial storytelling follows this
paradigm. In the final minutes of the episode, Veronica herself asks
a number of key questions: “The Lilly Kane murder file — what’s Dad
been up to? . . . My surveillance photo from the Camelot — why is it
in the Lilly Kane file? What was Mom doing there, and what business
did she have with Jake Kane? And the million-dollar question: why did
Dad lie to me?” After the scene with Keith in which Veronica recon-
ciles his deception, she narrates, “I’ve got too many questions swirling
around in my head to wait until he’s ready to share. These questions
need answers — that’s what I do.” The narrative logic of this sequence
sets up the key season-long story arcs, establishes the program’s erotetic
narration, and guarantees that these arcs will not dangle unanswered.
As Veronica’s final monologue asserts, “I promise this: I will find out
what really happened, and I will bring this family back together again,” a
statement that serves also to assure viewers that these questions do have
answers that will be revealed in due time and will deliver emotionally
satisfying resolutions, at least as long as the network allows the series to
continue to air.
The only question during this sequence that gets answered immedi-
ately is Keith’s “Who’s your Daddy?” which prompts Veronica’s senti-
mental assurance to cement the stability of their relationship in the face
of broader uncertainties — although later in the season, the question of
Veronica’s paternity becomes more than joking repartee and emerges
as a key storyline. This answer helps divide the long-term story arcs
into two categories: plot arcs that posit enigmas and mysteries, and
emotional relationship or character arcs that are more clearly delimited
in the moment. This division is typical of many prime time serials, in
which plot mysteries use complex storytelling strategies around narra-
tive enigmas, while character arcs are more conventional in their pre-
sentation of narrative statements. These differing modes of presentation
allow for distinct modes of engagement and narrative questioning —
the emotional plots about relationships encourage us to ask “what will
84 | Beginnings

happen?” going forward, as with Veronica’s romantic entanglements and

rocky relations with her mother. Conversely, the mysteries frame the
narrative as “what really happened in the past?” privileging the foren-
sic mode of hunting for clues, connecting pieces, and positing theories
alongside Veronica’s own investigation. We know that the answers to
emotional relationship questions, however temporary and fleeting, will
likely arrive soon in the story, but the enigma-driven mysteries linger far
beyond our expectations and take unanticipated twists along the way.
The dual narrative modes of mystery and relationship drama are
tightly tied to codes of gender and genre, suggesting that formal analy-
sis can help illuminate broader cultural questions, a topic addressed in
more depth in chapters 7 and 10. The cast of characters establishes this
balance at the series’s core — the titular character is clearly the female
center of the narrative universe, but she is surrounded almost exclusively
by male figures, especially in the first season. However, Veronica her-
self is far from a simple embodiment of feminine norms — her hardened
present-tense persona is defined in opposition to her prerape feminin-
ity, distinguished by shortened hair, a heightened sarcastic attitude, and
an emotional detachment that alienates her from nearly all of her high
school peers. As established in the opening scene, Veronica eschews
romantic sentiment and embraces personal risk in the service of her
rational, procedural detective work. And arguably the male characters
serve more effeminate roles — Wallace as supportive counselor and con-
fidant, Keith as nurturing parent, and Duncan as sensitive romantic
who eventually becomes a single parent himself. Even Logan and Wee-
vil, who first appear as hypermasculine, aggressive, and hostile threats
to Veronica, undergo a process of becoming more sensitive, emotion-
ally engaged, and feminized throughout the season, a process of gender
transformation that Janice Radway has argued is central to the romance
genre.14 Arguably the only regular character who neatly fits into typical
gender norms is Dick Casablancas, whose hypermasculine doltishness
is played for comic relief and restricted to the margins of the story (and
does not even appear in the pilot); in contrast, each of the more central
figures embodies gender contradictions and complexity.
The pilot comments on its own atypical gender norms —when Veron-
ica gives Wallace the incriminating videotape, he thanks her and tries to
get her to acknowledge that she did him a favor. He says, “Underneath
 Beginnings | 85

that angry-young-woman shell, there’s a slightly less angry young

woman, who’s dying to bake me something. You’re a marshmallow,
Veronica Mars, a Twinkie!” Veronica’s dual gender identity is echoed in
the pilot’s final lines — following Veronica’s assertion that she will solve
the mysteries and reunite her family, she says, “I’m sorry, is that mushy?
Well, you know what they say: Veronica Mars, she’s a marshmallow.” The
prominence of this repetition as the episode’s final moment contrasts
with the highly rational procedures that Veronica has followed in both
explicating and pursuing the mysteries, reminding us that she is acting
out of not just a rationalist mode of justice and detection but a senti-
mental and effeminate urge for family unity and lost friendship. Thus
the final scene sets the stage for the broad range of gendered appeals and
identities to be explored within the series and cues us to be alert to the
complexities of both character and plotting rather than assuming clear-
cut binaries and conventions.
In the end, the pilot of Veronica Mars teaches us how to watch the
series, manages our expectations for what is to come, and inspires us to
keep watching. Most pilots focus on establishing the setting, characters,
and narrative situation and thus are quite atypical of what future epi-
sodes might bring. The Veronica Mars pilot employs more flashbacks,
voice-over, and exposition than typical episodes do but also establishes
many norms of tone, style, and theme that future episodes will typically
adhere to. As such, it is one of the more effective pilots for a complex
serial drama, performing an astounding amount of narrative work while
also offering clear pleasures and moments consistent with the series as
a whole. While the series ended with anticlimactic disappointment (at
least until its resurrection as a feature film in 2014), the pilot remains a
landmark in serial storytelling, positing narrative questions in a style
that transcends the quality of the eventual answers. And by looking at
such an exemplary pilot in slow motion, we can better understand the
complex poetics involved in television storytelling, both at the begin-
nings and in ongoing episodes of a series.
3

Authorship

In 2000, Buffy the Vampire Slayer suffered a crisis of faith. I am not refer-
ring to the titular character, although Buffy Summers certainly suffered
many crises of faith over her serialized transmedia existence. Rather, I
mean the series itself was the site of such a crisis, with fans freaking out
over a plot development that threatened to undermine the program’s
integrity and vision as they had come to know it. The crisis was trig-
gered by the introduction of a new character in the final moments of the
fifth season debut, “Buffy vs. Dracula”: Buffy’s 14-year-old sister, Dawn.
Fans who had spent four seasons, more than 50 hours of screen time,
watching the series, knew Buffy as an only child; suddenly they were
being told that she had a teenage sister who had never been seen before.
The next episode, “The Real Me,” did little to clarify matters, as Dawn
became a central character in the ensemble with no explanation for her
sudden existence. Despite numerous references to her teen angst that
“nobody knows who I am” and hints that something supernatural was
afoot, the established characters all acted as if Dawn had always been
part of the storyworld.
While the program’s fantasy genre certainly allowed for many poten-
tial explanations for Dawn’s appearance, fans were panicking in the gaps
between episodes, left to vent their anxieties on Buffy’s vibrant online
fan discussion boards. On its face, this seemed like an example of typical
television retooling on a teenage-focused series when central characters
grow up: add new teenagers to the cast to maintain its youth appeal.
However, by treating Dawn as an established character and not a new
addition, Buffy was challenging viewers’ beliefs in the fictional world
they had come to know and love in previous seasons, posing a narra-
tive enigma of who (or what) Dawn really was that was not answered
until the season’s fifth episode. We must remember that in the original
airing, this process took a full month, with weeklong gaps between epi-
sodes for fans to theorize and stress out about what was going on: when

86
 Authorship | 87

would this enigma be solved, and could the solution be satisfying? But
while some fans feared that the series had gone off the rails, destroying
its continuity due to a network-mandated retooling, a common refrain
emerged on these online forums: “Trust Joss.”
Of course, this refers to Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator, executive pro-
ducer, head writer, and frequent director — in other words, the text’s
author. It is an unusual moment in television storytelling and fan con-
sumption, but I believe it is indicative of larger tendencies of how serial
television authorship operates. This chapter explores the role of author-
ship within serial television via three related facets. The first is a mate-
rial question of “how is serial television authored?” — explaining how
contemporary American television production establishes its param-
eters of creativity and exploring the tension between the collaborative
realities of production versus the romantic notion of singular authorship
embodied in the concept of “showrunner.” The second question focuses
on such notions as they circulate in larger cultural discourses — “how is
television authorship understood?” — via a broader rhetorical analysis of
the changing role of television showrunners as public figures and stars
in their own right. Finally, I consider “how do viewers use television
authorship?” — looking at the pragmatic processes of consumption in
which imagining an authorial presence is vital to our processes of com-
prehension and interpretation, as with the call to “Trust Joss.” These
three facets of material, rhetorical, and pragmatic analysis will hope-
fully suggest the central importance that authorship plays in framing
our engagement with serial television.

The Author in Production

Narrative television is a highly collaborative medium, with dozens of
individuals participating in the production process of each episode, thus
making the ascription of authorship a difficult process, especially if we
are trying to import a literary model of singular authors. For literary
writers, we imagine authorship by origination, in which a singular creator
devises every word and thus is responsible for creating everything found
in the text. Such a notion is obviously an oversimplification, minimiz-
ing the important role of feedback, editing, publishing, and intertextual
influence, but it is the widespread conception of what a literary author
88 | Authorship

does. Film scholars, critics, fans, and the industry itself have wrestled
with authorship for decades, arriving at a commonly accepted attribu-
tion of a film’s authorship to its director (with some notable exceptions),
which alters our notions of the authoring process. A film’s director
clearly cannot have direct responsibility for creating every aspect of the
final text, as legions of performers, technical crew members, designers,
and executives are involved in the processes of creating and assembling
the sounds and images in a film — not to mention the screenwriter
whose script provides a blueprint for the film but rarely has much power
in the production process. Nonetheless, the director is regarded as the
final decision maker over every choice, from furniture color to the par-
ticular version of an actor’s performance to the levels of the sound mix.
This model of authorial attribution is less focused on what the director
personally creates but rather vests responsibility for collective creativity
in the singular authority of the director — a particular moment in a film
may not have been planned or executed by the director, but he or she is
ultimately responsible for choosing to include it in the finished work, a
mode of attribution we might call authorship by responsibility.
Although few television episodes have the production complexity and
scope of feature films, the medium’s serial form changes the nature of
the production process and thus the attribution of authorship. The need
to create an ongoing series that runs for years is a very different pro-
cess than the bounded system of film production, which typically has
segmented phases of preproduction (writing, rehearsing, and planning),
production (filming), and postproduction (editing, special effects, and
sound mixing). On an ongoing television series, different episodes span
these various stages simultaneously — one or more episodes might be
being written, another in the planning stage for upcoming production,
one shooting, and a few others in the process of being edited and scored
and having visual effects added. This complicated system requires over-
sight that is typically granted to one or more individuals with the some-
what vague credit of “producer,” and the authority granted to this role
has led television to be frequently termed a “producer’s medium.”1 Under
this model, the producer rather than the director is accorded the final
responsibility for the choices that shape the finished work in a model of
authorship by management, evoking the leadership and oversight that
managers take in businesses and sports teams. Highlighting producers’
 Authorship | 89

managerial functions is not to deny their roles in originating ideas or

taking responsibility for choices, but it emphasizes the additional role
that television authors must take in helming an ongoing series rather
than a stand-alone work, as well as highlighting the importance of the
sustained team of creative and technical crew that often stay with a sin-
gle series for years.
The role of producer has transformed significantly over the his-
tory of American television. In the 1950s, many of the most prominent
producers were also the stars of their best known series: Desi Arnaz
and Lucille Ball produced I Love Lucy through their production com-
pany, Desilu; Gertrude Berg both starred in and was the head writer
for The Goldbergs; Jack Webb starred in, produced, and directed every
episode of Dragnet and wrote a few under the pseudonym John Ran-
dolph. For decades, television producers who were identified as being
at least partly in charge of a series included on-screen actors such as Bill
Cosby (Fat Albert, The Cosby Show), Jerry Seinfeld (Seinfeld), and Tina
Fey (30 Rock); directors such as Sheldon Leonard (The Andy Griffith
Show, I Spy), Michael Mann (Crime Story, Miami Vice), and James Bur-
rows (Cheers, Will and Grace); and executive producers credited with no
direct creative production role, such as Aaron Spelling (Charlie’s Angels,
Beverly Hills 90210) and Quinn Martin (The Fugitive, Streets of San Fran-
cisco). But the primary job that has emerged as the typical managerial
role for executive producers within the organizational framework of an
ongoing series is the head writer.
While every television series has its own particular organization
and division of duties, some production roles have emerged as stan-
dards throughout the medium. Typically a series is created by a writer
(or writing team) who pitches an idea to a production studio, broad-
cast network, and/or cable channel. If the pitch is optioned, that writer
develops a pilot script and “bible” for an ongoing series, which again
must be approved by the production and distribution corporations that
will ultimately produce and air the program. The pilot production pro-
cess assembles the collaborative team of actors, designers, director, and
other creative and technical crew who will be responsible for making
the series. If the produced pilot is deemed successful by the network
or channel, it moves into series production, at which time the creator
typically assembles a team of writers and producers to undertake the
90 | Authorship

ongoing creative process, while the creator steps into the role of execu-
tive producer to function as head writer via the unofficial title of “show-
runner.” Sometimes writers with less leadership experience will partner
with a seasoned showrunner to share managerial and creative duties, as
with The Shield ’s Shawn Ryan corunning Terriers with Ted Griffin, who
had created the original idea but had little previous television experi-
ence. Showrunners perform similar roles of authorship by responsibil-
ity as a film’s director does — for instance, typically the editing process
for an episode starts with the editor making an initial assembly of the
footage, the episode’s director working to refine it into their cut, and
then the producer-showrunner taking over to settle on the final cut with
the editor.2
Since most programs’ managerial oversight typically comes from a
writer, the writing process is seen as more central to a series’s creative
vision than is the contribution of directors, who are often hired as rotat-
ing freelancers rather than permanent members of the production team.
The writing staff is much more stable, typically with a regular team of
between 6 and 12 writers (many of whom also have producer credits)
whose work in a “writers’ room” is regarded as a program’s creative
nerve center. For a contrast of such production roles, consider Breaking
Bad: its 62 episodes credit 10 different writers, with the explicit “Written
By” credit rotating among the team with little turnover between seasons;
however, those same episodes featured 25 different directors, most of
whom only directed one or two episodes. Notably, five of the program’s
writers directed episodes, including creator-showrunner Vince Gilli-
gan’s five directorial efforts; additionally, three episodes were directed
by star-producer Bryan Cranston, four by the series’s ongoing director of
photography, Michael Slovis, and 11 by co-executive producer Michelle
MacLaren. While Breaking Bad features a distinctive visual sensibility,
performance style, and pacing — all facets typically controlled more by
directors than by writers — its staffing patterns suggest that such vision
comes more from the ongoing writing and production team than from
the rotating crew of directors, a balance typical for most contemporary
fictional television.
The creative processes found within writers’ rooms is crucial to
understanding the practices of American television authorship.3 Most
writers’ rooms function both as hierarchical collectives, with clear rank-
 Authorship | 91

ings of leadership and authority, and as open collaborations in which all

writers’ contributions are incorporated into a creative stew. There are
rare programs for which a singular writer operates on his (or, even less
frequently, her) own mostly outside a writers’ room, as with David E.
Kelley (Ally McBeal), Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), or Mike White
(Enlightened), but most prime time scripted programs emerge out of
“the room.” A standard practice is for the writers to meet for a few weeks
before the season begins production to map out the season-long arcs,
benchmarks, and goals and to decide on the season’s narrative struc-
tures. The writers then “break episodes” — sometimes collectively in
the writers’ room, sometimes individually — mapping out the specific
plots, story beats, and structure for each episode. This process results in
a detailed outline for each episode, which then gets assigned to a spe-
cific writer to shape into a full screenplay with dialogue and descrip-
tions of action. Usually the writer’s goal is not to create a script that
stands apart from the series as a personal vision but rather to mimic
the showrunner’s voice in an effort for stylistic consistency. A finished
draft will sometimes return to the room for feedback or “punching up”
(especially in comedies) or often be delivered to the showrunner (or
other producer) to “take a pass” on the script, making it fit the program’s
voice, standards, and arcs — showrunners frequently do major rewrites
on drafts, such as Matthew Weiner’s claim that he rewrites more than
80% of most Mad Men scripts.4 Once a showrunner finalizes a script, it
usually must climb the corporate ladder for executives at the production
studio, network, or channel to approve and provide notes — different
corporate cultures mandate different norms, with broadcast networks
typically being more prescriptive in giving notes than are some “hands-
off ” cable channels that pride themselves on being “creator centered,”
such as HBO or AMC. The writing credits for an episode typically are
given to the writer who first drafts the script (although such policies
vary by showrunner and production team), but a program’s story con-
struction and script revisions are usually a collective process organized
via a discrete managerial hierarchy.
The final product of an aired episode goes through complex col-
laborative processes, filtering the contributions of performers, design-
ers, editors, and network executives, but the responsibility for the end
product rests with the showrunner. Although stories of credit-grabbing
92 | Authorship

producers who claim to have written more than they actually did are
common, most showrunners earn their authorship by both responsi-
bility and management for countless leadership decisions and thus are
regarded as the primary authorial figures within an intensely collabora-
tive medium. While it might seem that such authors shift their roles
from an origination model of writing a pitch and pilot to a managerial
approach once they must run the production process of a picked-up
series, the initial creation of a program also has a managerial facet. Writ-
ers are always pitching projects in the hopes of getting produced, and
thus they strive both to meet the expectations of the corporate execu-
tives in charge of picking up programs and to plan for their potential
future showrunner roles of having to implement their creative ideas.
There is a romantic notion that a writer’s creative vision starts as “pure”
and then gets compromised through the process of realizing that vision,
especially in the commercially inflected world of mass media. However,
the creative process in television is always inflected by the realities of
both practical production and commercial concerns for what can and
cannot sell, and these concerns shape television storytelling in all stages
of creativity.
One of the more unusual examples of series development was Lost,
and its unique production history helps explain why its success has been
so hard to replicate. While most television series emerge from writers’
pitches, sometimes network executives conceive a series and hire writ-
ers to develop it; this was the case with Lost, as ABC chairman Lloyd
Braun came up with a concept in 2003 for a dramatic series modeled
on the film Cast Away and the reality program Survivor, focused on
people stranded on a deserted island. Braun hired Jeffrey Lieber to write
a pilot based on the idea, working with him to develop the program,
but fired Lieber after finding his program called Nowhere unsatisfactory.
Braun was still committed to the idea, and pitched it to J. J. Abrams, the
creator and showrunner for ABC’s Alias. Abrams said he was too busy
to take charge of the series but was willing to collaborate with another
writer to develop it. ABC reached out to Damon Lindelof, then a writer
and coproducer on Crossing Jordan, who had been trying to meet with
Abrams and get hired on Alias. Neither writer was particularly invested
in the concept for a program based on island survival — for Abrams, it
was a favor for his boss at ABC, and it was Lindelof ’s potential way to
 Authorship | 93

make a connection to land another job. Given the rumors that Braun was
likely on the outs at ABC, Abrams and Lindelof had fun coming up with
outlandish and risky plans for using flashbacks, creating a deep science-
fiction mythology for the island, and planting mysteries throughout the
pilot without much advanced planning — as Lindelof recalls, they often
said, “They’re never gonna pick this thing up anyway.”5
Despite Abrams and Lindelof ’s attempts to create something unlikely
to air on television, Braun greenlit the pilot, based only on their 13-page
outline without a finished script, and even authorized a then-record
budget of more than $11 million to produce the pilot episode. Braun’s
bosses at ABC/Disney hated the project and used its bloated production
as an excuse to fire Braun in spring 2004; however, enough money had
been sunk into Lost that they picked up the series to debut in September
2004, expecting little from the unconventional program on a medium
where formula and conventionality tend to rule. We now know that
Lost’s unconventionality was an asset, as it debuted to a large audience,
garnered awards, and developed into one of the most cultish series ever
to appeal to a mainstream audience. Notably, Lieber retained a credit
as cocreator (and thus a share of residuals) for every episode of Lost,
despite his own creative efforts having virtually nothing to do with the
series as produced — such credits are determined by the Writer’s Guild
of America’s arbitration process, suggesting a crucial legal and economic
facet of television authorship. Abrams withdrew from active involve-
ment with the series midway through the first season, and Lindelof per-
suaded Carlton Cuse, his old boss from Nash Bridges, to join the series
as co-showrunner to navigate what eventually proved to be one of the
most complex pieces of television (and transmedia) storytelling ever
devised. Of course the actual credits make this attribution hard to parse,
as Lost’s final episode listed nine people as executive producer, including
Abrams (who had no direct involvement by that point), Lindelof, and
Cuse, as well as three other writers; the program’s central director, Jack
Bender; and two producers overseeing the logistical and business ends
of the operation.
So who is Lost’s author? Arguably Lloyd Braun was the person most
responsible for bringing the series to the air, with both the originat-
ing concept and the decision to produce the risky pilot, although his
name appears nowhere in Lost’s credits — however, Braun appeared in
94 | Authorship

nearly every episode as the uncredited voice who says, “Previously on

Lost.” Lieber’s creative stake seems more legal than artistic, but clearly
in the world of commercial television, such credits are both important
and lucrative. Abrams and Lindelof conceived what Lost eventually
became, and Cuse took over Abrams’s managerial role early in the pro-
duction process, cowriting many episodes and storylines with Lindelof;
and together they served as showrunners for the rest of the series. Lost
demonstrates how a serialized text’s authorship can change over time as
the ongoing narrative and production process unfolds. Even years after
Abrams left the program, many articles about the series referred to it as
“J. J. Abrams’s Lost,” suggesting how external discourses can be as vital
in defining authorship as internal creative roles are, as discussed more
later. Lost highlights the way that groundbreaking and popular television
often emerges from an unplanned alchemy of accidents and inspiration,
rather than the imitative logic of formulas and conventions that often
tries to replicate a surprise success. The program’s numerous failed
clones, from Invasion to FlashForward to The Event, all were designed to
mimic Lost’s unconventionality, but by using the logic of convention and
imitation; what might be a more replicable lesson from Lost would be
giving creators license to devise a series that embraces the attitude that
“this is never going to get picked up” and seeing what follows.6
Before turning to the broader cultural role of television author-
ship, we should return to Buffy and Joss Whedon’s authorial role. Buffy
the series was created by Whedon, based on his 1992 film screenplay
of the same name that was changed significantly in production by the
director, producers, and actors to make the tone more comedic and to
downplay its horror elements. Given the comparatively low control that
screenwriters have in feature-film production, Whedon’s input was less
valued in that medium, and thus he sought to revisit the character on
the writer-centric medium of television in 1997 on the emerging net-
work The WB. Whedon served as active showrunner for the first five
of Buffy’s seven seasons, credited as writer or cowriter on 25 of 144 epi-
sodes and director on 19 episodes. Even though Whedon did not write
or direct any of the season 5 episodes introducing Buffy’s mysterious
new sister, he was understood by fans as the program’s creative master-
mind, responsible for the story and thus the appropriate object of either
disdain or faith. To understand how he came to personify the program’s
 Authorship | 95

creative vision requires us to look beyond the production process to see

authorship in broader cultural circulation.

The Discursive Production of Authorship

Although television is clearly a creative medium, many people might
bristle at the ascription of authorship to commercial television, which
has typically been seen as something that is produced rather than
authored. The lexical differences are significant — production evokes
a corporate factory following formulas to mass manufacture a prod-
uct, an image that has been associated with television dating back to
the medium’s early critics Theodor Adorno and Dwight Macdonald.7
There is certainly much truth to this image of television production,
where an industry treats texts as products — which function mainly as
bait for the real product to be sold, viewers’ attention — and creative
personnel as labor; the recent rise of production studies within media
scholarship embraces this definition without dismissive judgment, high-
lighting the ways that labor matters in media creation and validating the
work of “below-the-line” crew who are typically ignored in the study of
creative practices.8
Authorship bears quite different connotations, linked both to the lit-
erary notion of the creative genius working in solitude to give birth to
a finished work of art and to notions of authority that assure a work’s
interpretive frame and cultural validation. Given the intensely collab-
orative nature of the production process, such notions of authorship,
even in its managerial conception, oversimplify the creative process
and threaten to deny agency to the array of contributors who help make
television. Celebrating Whedon as Buffy’s author does little to help us
understand how that series was actually created, obscuring complex col-
laborative processes in the name of celebrating and elevating a singular
authorial voice. And yet even though such images of authorship as a sin-
gular entity are clearly an inaccurate reflection of production practices,
such conceptions still function in our understanding of television nar-
rative, are active within industrial, critical, and fan discourses, and serve
an important cultural role. In fact, we can look at authorship as one of
the key products of television programming, its industrial practices, and
its cultural circulation.
96 | Authorship

To understand authorship as a product of television programming,

not as its originating source, we need to consider how notions of author-
ship have been framed and transformed by literary and film theory.
Traditionally, authorship has served as an interpretive reference point,
framed as the authoritative source of meaning and intentionality. Using
approaches such as biographical criticism or close textual and inter-
textual analysis, critics strive to understand what a text means by dis-
covering what the author’s intended meaning was. Although such tradi-
tional notions of explicit intentionality are less common within criticism
today, a looser form of intentionality follows from the auteur model of
film criticism, in which a director’s body of work is analyzed for consis-
tencies of theme and style — while these authorial markers need not be
identified as explicit “intent,” such criticism assumes that directors bring
particular concerns and approaches to their work and that the critic’s
job is to uncover those commonalities to reveal an authorial presence.
Such auteur studies have been fairly rare within television scholarship,
aside from some critics whose work derives more from literary studies,
although as discussed later, issues of authorial intent do reemerge in the
ways that viewers use authorship as an interpretive framework.
Traditional theories of authorship and intentionality were disman-
tled in the wake of poststructuralist criticism, most famously by Roland
Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author.9 In the same era,
Michel Foucault reframed authorship from a process of creation to a
discursive practice, shifting the study of authorship into the rhetori-
cal realm; for Foucault, authorship is not easy to dispel by proclaiming
its death but rather is a function of discourse that works to attribute,
classify, delimit, contextualize, hierarchize, and authenticate creative
works.10 Television fiction provides an interesting case study for Fou-
cault’s model of authorial function — the medium’s creative processes are
far more collaborative and decentered than in most other media, and
television authorship has been mostly hidden from the public eye for
much of its history, buried in confusing credits far more than the promi-
nent role of literary writers or film directors. As American television has
become more aesthetically valued over the past two decades, its author
function has become more prominent, helping to justify and anchor the
medium’s cultural worth through a range of discursive practices.11
 Authorship | 97

The very act of attributing television to an author is a comparatively

new phenomenon. In the classic network era, it was much more com-
mon to connect a program to actors than creators, typified by nam-
ing a series after its star (The Dick Van Dyke Show), naming the main
character after an actor’s name (I Love Lucy), or both (The Mary Tyler
Moore Show), with only the most dedicated fans aware of the produc-
tion teams behind such programs. Continuity between programs was
most commonly established via spin-offs that followed characters across
series, rather than promoting the shared producers or creators between
unrelated series. More recently, identifying the creators of a new series
can serve similar functions of creating common audiences and brand-
ing — tellingly, NBC initially wanted Parks and Recreation to be a spin-
off of The Office from producers Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, but
instead the series was developed as a separate storyworld and promoted
as coming from the same creative team. While star-branded series are
still commonplace, programs are now also promoted via the authorial
stamp of established creators such as Aaron Sorkin, J. J. Abrams, Alan
Ball, and Shawn Ryan. Even producers without a well-known reputa-
tion are promoted as authorial figures through their work in the writers’
rooms of previous hits, as with Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner and Board-
walk Empire’s Terence Winter, who had both been writer-producers on
The Sopranos.
Such authorial branding functions as an anchor for understanding
programming, delimiting potential appeals, tone, style, and genre. This
branding can certainly help a series get on the air, as a network or chan-
nel can look to a creator’s reputation as an asset to help build an audi-
ence, and can often provide fans with hope that a series will grow to
match a producer’s previous work. Both of these were certainly true with
Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s first series produced after Buffy left the air —
Fox hoped to draw on Buffy’s cult appeal, while fans looked to Whedon’s
track record to sustain hopes that the series would grow to be more
successful as a narrative than its shaky start suggested. Neither hope
fully panned out, as ratings never grew enough for the program to last
beyond two seasons, and fans generally viewed it as an erratic failure
compared to Whedon’s other work. Neither Fox’s faith that Dollhouse
might grow in viewership nor fans’ faith that it might improve in quality
98 | Authorship

make much sense without the authorial function of Whedon’s past suc-
cesses and established brand name.
Authorship frequently functions as a marker of distinction, as we
situate a cultural work within aesthetic hierarchies based on the aura of
an author’s reputation, track record, and public persona. Even in a previ-
ous era of television, a series produced by Aaron Spelling was assumed
to be more conventional, frivolous, and mainstream than a program by
Steven Bochco, even though each produced a wide range of styles and
quality of programming that belie such generalized reputations. Such
authorial identities serve as brand names for a new series, establishing
an aesthetic framework for judging a program and a horizon of expecta-
tions for viewers in terms of tone, style, and approach to the given genre.
A Chuck Lorre comedy such as Two and a Half Men or Mike and Molly
is packaged with an assumed lowbrow, raunchy sense of humor, con-
ventional multicamera production values, and broad appeal to a mass
audience, while Greg Daniels’s sitcoms such as King of the Hill and The
Office feature more innovative production styles, drier wit and satire,
and narrower appeals to cult viewers. While authorship often contrib-
utes to an upscaling legitimating discourse, it is not exclusively a realm
of highbrow distinction, as examples such as Lorre, Spelling, reality-TV
guru Mark Burnett, and crime-program producer Jerry Bruckheimer all
provide their programs with a comparatively lowbrow yet highly popu-
lar aura.12
An author’s reputation can also set the aesthetic bar too high, as the
creator of a beloved series can find future projects quickly condemned
for not meeting expectations established by previous programs. Shawn
Ryan’s The Chicago Code was generally seen as a solid cop show but
nowhere near as edgy or ambitious as his earlier landmark series The
Shield — the failure of the former to catch on with viewers is partly
attributable to some fans of the latter being disappointed by the newer
program’s more conventional style and tone, as befits the formal and
content limits of airing on the broadcast Fox network rather than the
FX cable channel that had enabled and encouraged The Shield to push
boundaries. Many other programs have leveraged an authorial repu-
tation to help make it to the airwaves but have found the unrealistic
expectations established by an earlier series daunting, as with Studio 60
on the Sunset Strip (from The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin), Running Wilde
 Authorship | 99

(from Arrested Development’s Mitchell Hurwitz), John from Cincinnati

(from Deadwood ’s David Milch), and The Return of Jezebel James (from
Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino). The critic Emily Nussbaum
sums up this dynamic well, writing about the initial lukewarm reception
of David Simon’s post-Wire series Treme as “like a new student entering
a school where everyone keeps talking about how much they loved his
big brother.”13
While most contemporary television authorship discourse com-
presses the collaborative creative efforts to a single figure of the show-
runner, sometimes individual writers can develop an authorial presence
that becomes notable for die-hard fans. Frequently, such branding stems
from work on previous programs, as with the fan celebration of writers
from Buffy and Angel — the presence of former Whedon writers David
Fury and Drew Goddard on the staff of Lost gave the series cult creden-
tials. Likewise, Whedon fans track the efforts of Jane Espenson across
programs ranging from Gilmore Girls to Battlestar Galactica to Game of
Thrones, even though she works mostly as part of a writing team sup-
porting an established showrunner rather than as a primary authorial
voice. It is rare for a writer’s track record outside of television to trans-
late into a notable presence in the collaborative realm of television — for
instance, after an initial press burst, little of award-winning playwright
and filmmaker David Mamet’s prestige rubbed off onto the CBS military
drama The Unit that he created. Such cross-media success is more com-
mon in British television, where individual episode writers are given
more agency, leading to high-profile guest writers such as the novelist
Neil Gaiman and the filmmaker Richard Curtis scripting episodes of
Doctor Who. Rarely a single writer can establish his or her own voice,
style, and reputation within an ongoing series, as with Darin Morgan’s
iconic episodes of The X-Files “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” and
“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” — Morgan’s highly reflexive and ironic
take on the program’s style became a fan favorite and inspired a cult
following for the writer, whose approach did not mimic the showrun-
ner’s voice but rather, according to the show’s star David Duchovney,
“seemed to be trying to destroy the show.”14 Morgan’s innovative take on
the series helped develop a television fan base that became attuned to
the role of individual episode writers and what they brought to the col-
laborative creative process, a practice continued on some cult series for
100 | Authorship

which fans try to brand particular credited writers as having a unique

style or perspective, even though the collaborative behind-the-scenes
process usually blurs the boundaries of individual contributions.
Producers’ nontelevision backgrounds can help frame a series in ways
beyond aesthetic judgment and intertextual expectations. For The Wire,
David Simon’s background as a crime reporter in Baltimore certainly
helped saturate the series with markers of authenticity, making it clear
that the program was produced by people who knew the subject matter
firsthand. This authorial validation was deepened by the broader writ-
ing team, with writer-producer Ed Burns’s background as a Baltimore
homicide detective, wiretap expert, and public school teacher all feed-
ing directly into the program’s plotlines and characters. Likewise, other
writers such as Rafael Alvarez, whose experiences as both a reporter
and a laborer on Baltimore ships informed its second season, and Bill
Zorzi, whose newspaper coverage of Baltimore government helped
shape the political storylines, were frequently cited as vital to maintain-
ing The Wire’s authenticity; the numerous novelists on staff, including
George Pelacanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane, all helped provide
both cross-medium legitimacy and decades of experience writing well-
regarded, research-driven urban crime fiction. On-camera talent also
functions to authorize the program’s verisimilitude, with cameos and
recurring roles played by actual Baltimore politicians, reporters, police,
and drug dealers marking the program as grounded in the real city. The
Wire’s authenticating authorship framed many viewers’ disappoint-
ment with the final season, as discussed more in chapter 10, in which
the details of Simon’s own disillusionment and bitterness about his for-
mer employer, the Baltimore Sun, were frequently cited as marring the
journalism storyline, turning the story too much into Simon’s personal
axe-grinding grudge for some viewers, rather than an organic part of
the series. In all of these instances, the biographical knowledge of the
program’s crew and cast helped discursively frame our understanding of
its fictional representations, encouraging many viewers to regard it as a
work of journalism or sociology that uses fiction to tell deeper truths as
authenticated by authorship.15
Traditionally, television creators and producers worked in rela-
tive anonymity, occasionally providing interviews to trade journalists
or appearing at fan events but otherwise letting network promotional
 Authorship | 101

materials construct their low-profile reputations for viewers, with few

exceptions. The rise of online television fandom has enabled showrun-
ners and other production personnel to have a more public, engaged,
and interactive relationship with their fans. Often this is filtered through
journalists, as online entertainment sites such as The A.V. Club and Hit-
Fix regularly run interviews with showrunners with far more depth
and detail than anything previously seen in print.16 Some showrun-
ners have adopted online media as a way to engage directly with fans
and to construct their own public persona. An early example of such
engagement was J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the mid-’90s science-
fiction series Babylon 5, with Straczynski participating in online con-
versations via the preweb Usenet system; JMS (as he was known online)
regularly answered fan questions, offered interpretive perspectives, and
gave glimpses into production practices.17 While few showrunners since
have been so actively engaged online, the recent rise of Twitter has led
many producers such as Dan Harmon (Community), Kurt Sutter (Sons
of Anarchy), and Shawn Ryan (Terriers) to interact directly with fans, as
well as to foster public personalities that can create controversies with
the entertainment press and television fans — Harmon even went as far
as to mockingly reference someone who had been antagonistically cri-
tiquing him on Twitter within an episode of Community itself, creating
an in-joke for his Twitter fans who could celebrate being in the know
about Harmon’s personal feuds.18
The industry has taken advantage of showrunners’ increased public
personas to create official paratexts that surround and augment a tele-
vision series across media. Television specials or online videos that pre-
view an upcoming season or episode, DVD extras, including making-of
segments and commentary tracks, ongoing podcasts released between
episodes, and live appearances at fan-friendly events such as Comic
Con all serve both to hype the core series and to perpetuate an autho-
rial presence used for commercial branding and fan interpretive strate-
gies. Many of these paratexts allow viewers to get an inside glimpse into
production practices, allowing them to see, in the phrase that Battle-
star Galactica’s Ron Moore frequently used on that program’s podcast,
“how the sausage gets made”; however, it is important to remember
that these official paratexts are always authorized and controlled, pro-
viding insider vision only as allowed by showrunners and production
102 | Authorship

companies, not an unmediated glimpse into the broader array of labor

practices, creative squabbles, and behind-the-scenes drama. Such para-
texts have helped create the phenomenon of star showrunners who have
become media celebrities themselves among an expansive fan base of
eager paratextual consumers.19 In the bulk of these paratexts, showrun-
ners are constructed with dual, often conflicting cultural roles — in one
way, they hype their accessibility, speaking directly to fans using insider
lingo and addressing viewer questions with friendly, grounded personas
that Suzanne Scott has called “the fanboy auteur.”20 At the same time,
showrunners are framed as authoritative presences, in control of their
narratives and possessing secrets about coveted long-term mysteries but
only willing to dole out clues or references obliquely. While authorial
paratexts work to convey the illusion of accessibility, they simultane-
ously reassert authority, marking a clear power divide between fans
and producers.
Each program and showrunner frames their personalities and models
of engagement in a distinct way. As Derek Kompare discusses, Battlestar
Galactica’s Ron Moore presents himself as a solitary authorial figure,
rarely incorporating other voices into his regular podcasts aside from his
wife, who is playfully called “Mrs. Ron.” He is willing to admit his own
perceived missteps and to reveal frank insider knowledge, but his tone
is authoritative as well as authorial, grounding the program within his
own singular intentionality and vision.21 Breaking Bad ’s podcast offers
a very different tone and approach — hosted by editor Kelley Dixon,
every episode features showrunner Vince Gilligan and a rotating stable
of creative personnel from the series, including actors, writers, directors,
producers, editors, special effects artists, and musicians. Combined with
Gilligan’s own low-key dissembling personality that usually attributes
creative decisions to “the room” or his collaborators more than himself,
the vision of authorship constructed by Breaking Bad ’s paratexts is far
more decentered, more collective, and less authoritative than how most
other programs with star showrunners represent their creative authority.
Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are among the most prominent
showrunners in using paratexts, including podcasts, online video series,
and public appearances on talk shows, Lost-themed television specials,
and live events such as their annual Comic Con panels. In large part,
Cuse and Lindelof ’s high public profile was necessary to shift attention
 Authorship | 103

away from J. J. Abrams, who was erroneously credited as Lost’s author

by the press and fans, as previous discussed. By making their presence
known in a range of media, Cuse and Lindelof asserted control in the
public eye and promoted their authorial role. They used that promi-
nence to construct a goofy, comedic image that downplayed some of
Lost’s more overwrought tendencies, with podcasts that often felt like
comedy routines and live events featuring scripted scenes, running gags,
and mock mythology — even adopting a combined fannish identity of
“Darlton” to assert their collective authorship and playfully reference
fan investments in developing relationships between characters through
such combined so-called shipping names. Their pervasive public dis-
courses worked both to assure fans that they were in control of the
program’s complex mythology and to urge viewers to lighten up and
enjoy the ride by emphasizing Lost’s more fun and escapist side over the
hyperserious mystery that occupied many fans’ attention and forensic
energies. As I discuss in chapter 10, this balancing act became particu-
larly precarious at the end of the final season, as fans demanded both
mythological payoffs and narrative entertainment.
It is telling that most of the examples I have referenced are male show-
runners; in large part, this is due to the persistent gender bias within
television writers’ rooms, where women make up less than one-third of
writing staffs.22 But few female showrunners have become public figures
like some of their male counterparts, with their online presence more
restricted to a core fan base (as with The Vampire Diaries’ Julie Plec)
and little widespread notoriety among television fans, despite running
very popular programs such as CSI (Carol Mendelsohn) and CSI: Miami
(Ann Donahue), as well as more cult favorites such as Gilmore Girls
(Amy Sherman-Palladino) and Orange Is the New Black (Jenji Kohan).
Shonda Rhimes is a notable exception, with a highly popular Twitter
feed bolstered by her success in running two major hits, Grey’s Anatomy
and Scandal. Arguably television’s best known female showrunner, Tina
Fey, is known mostly because of her on-screen presence in 30 Rock and
Saturday Night Live — tellingly, her 30 Rock character, Liz Lemon, is a
fictional showrunner who is portrayed as competent but hardly authori-
tative or garnering much respect from her nearly all-male writing staff
and production crew. Another recent exception is Lena Dunham, who
has gained much public notoriety and an active social media presence
104 | Authorship

as star and showrunner of Girls, but much of the discourse surround-

ing her authorship questions her talent due to her young age, familial
privilege, and lack of experience, highlighting how female showrunners
face scrutiny rarely seen by their male counterparts. One of the crucial
aspects of the author function is conveying authority, mastery, and con-
trol of fictional universes, and such attributes are highly gendered as
masculine in American culture, reinforcing the perceived authority of
male writers over the more marginalized women both within writers’
rooms and within the imaginations of television critics and viewers.
An exceptional but important moment that promoted the visibility of
television writers as authors was the Writers Guild strike in 2007 – 2008;
the lack of new television production during the strike called attention
to the people responsible for television’s serial creativity. Even for view-
ers who were not avid consumers of authorial paratexts, the strike high-
lighted the authored dimension of people’s favorite programs, raising
awareness in the public eye of the creative and commercial systems that
produce television. Television writers and their allies in other produc-
tion roles helped publicize their cause through direct appeals to view-
ers through YouTube videos, letters to the press, and personal blogs,
and evidence suggests that they were able to recruit most viewers to
their side of the debate with the production companies.23 One of the
most successful outcomes from the strike that helped reframe television
authorship was Joss Whedon’s independently produced web musical Dr.
Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a three-part video distributed online and later
on DVD. Whedon launched Dr. Horrible as an experiment to see if a
successful creator could work around the commercial industry to create
and distribute a program outside the system — the experiment was quite
successful commercially, with over a million paid downloads and even
more via DVD, and was broadly hailed as a valued addition to Whedon’s
body of work. Interestingly in this context, the DVD came with a sung
commentary track (Commentary! The Musical) that directly addressed
the politics of the strike and the ambivalences of authorial paratexts, fur-
thering the discursive production of authorship through reflexive para-
texts. Although Dr. Horrible did not spark a revolution of web-based
seriality competing directly with television (yet), it did exemplify the
possibilities of television creators leveraging their authorial reputations
to create alternative modes of creative work and distribution.24
 Authorship | 105

Paratextual extensions such as authorial podcasts highlight the role of

serial form within the discursive circulation of television authorship. The
gaps between weekly episodes allow time for speculation, conversation,
and engaged fan practices, with the industry and creators happy to fill
these gaps with official paratexts encouraging fans to focus more of their
attention on the ongoing series. For fans of such serials, the podcasts
and other official paratexts become another form of serialized textuality,
with their own intrinsic norms and routines (Battlestar’s Moore high-
lighting his weekly choice of scotch and cigarettes), running gags (Darl-
ton’s satirical promise that Lost’s seventh season will focus on zombies),
and particular content expectations (Breaking Bad ’s emphasis on filmic
technique and production processes). From personal experience, I can
attest that some moments on Breaking Bad prompted me to get excited
about how that week’s podcast might discuss what I just saw, suggesting
that authorial paratexts can function as serial texts themselves, creating
their own ritualized engagements, anticipation, and intrinsic norms. The
importance of such paratexts to some fans’ serial experiences suggests
that we must consider the ongoing ways that serial television relies on
authorship as a facet of viewer comprehension and engagement, beyond
just the industry’s construction of authorial discourses.

Producing Authorship through Serial Consumption

It might seem that authorship is best seen as a facet of television pro-
duction, both in the material ways that television is created and in the
rhetorical production of authorial identity and practices. But author-
ship is also produced through the act of reception, as television viewers
use authorial paratexts and textual features to construct notions about
authors to guide their understanding and engagement with a series.
Arguably, authorship is most vital in the reception process, as that
is where the rhetoric of the author function becomes active, shaping
viewer processes of interpretation, evaluation, and engagement. But to
understand how authorship operates as part of the viewing process, we
need to take a detour into literary theory to explore the concept of the
implied author.
As originally proposed by Wayne Booth more than 50 years ago, the
implied author is a hotly debated and much misunderstood concept
106 | Authorship

within literary theory, and certainly this is not the place to explore these
broader debates.25 For the purposes of discussing television authorship,
it is best to look at the two most prominent participants in the debate
of the term within film studies, Seymour Chatman and David Bordwell.
Chatman argues that the implied author is distinct from the biographi-
cal “real author” who created the work (whether literature or film) but
serves as the source of a narrative’s origination, “the agent intrinsic to
the story whose responsibility is the overall design.” Chatman’s concept
of the implied author serves as the embodiment of textual intent and
thus functions as reference point for viewers trying to interpret a film —
when we ask “what does that film mean?” we are seeking to understand
what the implied author meant to convey, as contained within the text
(not the biographical author’s statements).26
While Bordwell and Chatman agree on the bulk of their narrato-
logical terms and approaches, Bordwell denies the usefulness of the
implied author as a concept, suggesting that it is better to view a film’s
narrational process as the source of storytelling agency itself: “As for
the implied author, this construct adds nothing to our understanding of
filmic narration. No trait we could assign to an implied author of a film
could not more simply be ascribed to the narration itself: it sometimes
suppresses information, it often restricts our knowledge, it generates
curiosity, it creates a tone, and so on. To give every film a narrator or
implied author is to indulge in an anthropomorphic fiction.”27 Bordwell
refuses to use an implied author in his model of cinematic narration
because it seems to contribute little to our analytic abilities as critics,
as he sees the film’s storytelling techniques themselves as sufficient for
conducting narrative analysis. Chatman and Bordwell agree that the text
itself is an agent of storytelling, and their debate boils down to whether
such agency is best understood as an anthropomorphic author or a sys-
tem of narrational properties. Personally, I find Bordwell’s approach to
viewing a text as self-sufficient for containing its own agency and intent
convincing, and I agree that we do not need to claim that only authors
can actively narrate.
But I believe by shifting the question somewhat, we can see a vital
use for the implied author within the television storytelling process —
instead of asking whether an implied author may or may not be lodged
in a text as a scholarly heuristic, we should ask how viewers use the
 Authorship | 107

concept of authorship to guide their processes of reception and com-

prehension. I believe that many viewers themselves “indulge in an
anthropomorphic fiction” by constructing authorial figures within their
viewing practices. Such authorial construction is not lodged in the text,
as authorship exists in the moments of television reception, working
within the broader contextual circulation of author function discourses,
as discussed earlier. It is connected to the material practices of television
production, but only through the windows of text and context, and thus
is not a direct link to authorial biography or intent. By looking at contex-
tually situated reception practices of television serials, we can certainly
see notions of authorship that are posited by viewers as active agents in
the process of reception.28
In a review of the various uses of the implied author, Tom Kindt
and Hans-Harald Müller suggest that the concept might be relevant
within actual reading practices but that traditional literary studies have
not addressed these issues empirically, and thus they focus more on
the notion of textual intent, like Chatman.29 To avoid confusion with
that use of implied authorship, I call this reception-centered notion
of authorship the admittedly clunky term inferred author function.
“Inferred” highlights that authorship is not (solely) being construed
through textual implication but is constituted through the act of con-
sumption itself; Foucault’s “function” retains the centrality of context
and discursive circulation. To briefly define the term, the inferred author
function is a viewer’s production of authorial agency responsible for a text’s
storytelling, drawing on textual cues and contextual discourses. In more
practical terms, when we watch a program and wonder “why did they
do that?” the inferred author function is our notion of “they” as the
agent(s) responsible for the storytelling. While certainly some viewers
might ground agency within a less human notion of “the series” — as in
“why did the series jump forward in time?”— the prevalence of authorial
discourses circulating within the industry, sites of criticism, and fan-
created paratexts and conversations all suggest that for many television
viewers, agency is lodged within an imagined construct of a personified
authorial force. It is difficult to say what portion of viewers use inferred
author functions as narrative consumers, but I believe the popularity
of authorial discourses and evidence of how fans discuss programs in
venues ranging from online forums to casual conversations suggest that
108 | Authorship

authorial agency is a significant part of the reception process for enough

viewers to warrant discussion.
This model of the inferred author function could be generalizable
to all narrative media; readers, theatergoers, and film buffs all might
construct an authorial agent in the process of narrative comprehen-
sion, although critics based in other formats seem skeptical. As Torben
Grodal suggests, most films are immersive narratives in which viewers
are encouraged to engage “downstream” with the diegetic storyworld,
focusing on the agency and choices of characters rather than filmmak-
ers; he sees moments when focus is attuned “upstream” toward authorial
choices as exceptional, either through special effects that shift attention
away from the narrative, in uncommon modes of reflexive film practice
such as art cinema, or in atypical viewers such as film critics and cine-
philes whose attention may be directed at technique and narration more
than immersive experiences.30 However, as I discussed in chapter 1, con-
temporary television offers many moments of reflexive engagement that
do not shatter the narrative frame but instead simultaneously encour-
age diegetic immersion and astonishment at the operational aesthetic
of narrative mechanics. These moments invite viewers to infer author-
ship, drawing on clues in the text and surrounding contextual discourses
to posit what the series creators were trying to accomplish and what it
might mean for the narrative going forward. For savvy viewers of com-
plex television, the author figure itself becomes a ludic site of engage-
ment and forensic fandom, as viewers attempt to parse clues and sepa-
rate truth from hype about these semipublic creators, echoing a mode of
cultural consumption that Joshua Gamson claims is typical of many fans
of celebrity gossip who treat their paratextual pleasures as an elaborate
game.31 Given the prevalence of conspiratorial and mysterious storytell-
ing within complex television programs such as Lost, 24, and Homeland,
the quest to discover who is behind the stories we are watching and to
deduce the veracity of what they claim to be doing is often integrated
directly into a program’s ongoing plot itself, inviting us to experience
the narrative simultaneously in both upstream and downstream modes.
Not only do thrillers and mysteries create thematic parallels with
issues of authorship and attribution, but comedies can also embed issues
of authorship directly into their texts themselves, as with the experimen-
tal programs Curb Your Enthusiasm and Louie. The former focuses on
 Authorship | 109

Larry David, who stars as himself, playing the role of the misanthropic
television writer who cocreated Seinfeld, inviting us to imagine Curb’s
fictionalized David as the authorial voice of the landmark 1990s comedy.
Curb itself is widely known to be more collaboratively created than most
series are, despite its central and pervasive author figure, as every epi-
sode is improvised by the cast following a story outline created by David.
Watching the series, especially in moments when the process of creating
television itself is portrayed, is a highly reflexive process of imagining
multiple levels of authorship and identity, trying to separate the fictional
Larry (as we might call the on-screen version of Larry David) from
the actual showrunner David and merging both into an ever-evolving
inferred author function. This reflexivity took center stage in Curb’s sev-
enth season, with the ongoing plot of Larry producing a Seinfeld reunion
episode and thus portraying a retrospective vision of that program’s cre-
ative process. As is typical of Curb’s plotting, things fall apart during
the production process, leading to a scene in the season’s final episode
(confusingly called “Seinfeld”) in which Larry takes over for Jason Alex-
ander to play the role of George Costanza, a character that was originally
based on David himself — the resulting sequence reflexively shows the
real actor-writer David playing the character Larry playing the character
George, as created by David based on himself. Through moments such
as this, it is hard to imagine how viewers might not consider issues of
authorship as an active part of making sense of the story, as discussed
more in chapter 5.
Louie similarly represents the author on-screen, as Louis C.K. writes
and directs every episode (and even edits most) while playing a fiction-
alized version of himself. Unlike Larry’s character on Curb, Louie (the
character) is portrayed not as a television producer but as a stand-up
comedian and divorced father, like C.K. himself. On both Louie and
Curb, viewers are invited to playfully imagine what elements of the
series are true to real events and characters, versus fictionalized versions
or outright inventions from their central authors, issues highlighted in
the episode “Oh Louie / Tickets.” The episode opens with Louie shoot-
ing a conventional sitcom that he quits due to its lack of realism and
authenticity, a moment that both evokes C.K.’s failed CBS sitcom pilot
“Saint Louie” and reminds viewers that Louie itself is framed as a much
more unconventionally authentic sitcom, partially legitimated by C.K.’s
110 | Authorship

performed author function. The second part of the episode focuses on

Louie reaching out to Dane Cook (played by Cook), the highly success-
ful comedian who was accused of stealing jokes from C.K. years before
this episode aired. The scene between the two directly addresses their
real feud, with both asserting their perspectives in a dialogue that feels
completely organic and even-handed — viewers and critics speculated
about the scene’s creation, generally imagining that Cook had a part in
authoring the conversation to make it accurately represent his perspec-
tive. However, C.K. recounts that the scene was written solely by him,
refusing to take Cook’s suggestions for revisions: “[Cook] took my direc-
tions. He read it verbatim as I wrote it. And nailed it!”32 For the many
fans aware of the high-profile history between the two comedians, the
episode all but demands that we imagine the issues of authorship (espe-
cially given the topic of originality in writing jokes), blurring the lines
between real comedians, fictional characters, and television creators in
making sense of this complex episode.
Seriality itself encourages the inferred author function, making
such inferences more prominent and vital. As discussed in chapter 1,
serial form is defined by the gaps between installments, where viewers
are forced to pause from the diegesis, thus interrupting “downstream”
immersion; such gaps are even more prominent in commercial tele-
vision, where individual episodes are interrupted by commercial breaks.
Studies of fan practices, as explored more in other chapters, highlight
how many viewers fill such story gaps with other ways of engaging with
serialized narratives, often operating at both diegetic and metanarra-
tive levels of form and storytelling mechanics. The inferred author func-
tion becomes prominent in these gaps, both through widely circulating
authorial discourses and speculative discussions about what the creators
might be up to. Such authorial attention is typical of many serial forms,
as we can see when Dickens’s 19th-century readers, fans of comic strips
and books, and soap opera viewers all fill such serial gaps by corre-
sponding with authors, participating in speculative conversations about
authorial intent, and creating paratexts designed to celebrate or critique
their inferred authorial agents.33
For an example highlighting how showrunners can directly engage
with viewers within these serialized gaps to mold both their persona
and our assumptions about their programs, Dan Harmon wrote a long
 Authorship | 111

blog post in reaction to some fans taking offense at the use of stereo-
typical gay representations in the Community episode “Advanced Gay.”
In his self-described “mea culpa” written two days after the episode
aired, Harmon owned the critique, admitting that the writers had used
the gay characters as a “tool” to address issues and conflicts within the
program’s main characters, rather than treating them like real, human
characters. He offered his post as a promise, pointing to a serialized
future: “This blog entry is a sort of ‘receipt’ I’m giving you, proof that
I’m conscious of the fact that some of you might have been abraded,
because if I spent this long typing about this, you know it’s left a mark
on my circuit board. I’m bound to offend you again but it won’t be in
the same way, and it will be an accident then, too. This time, it was
because I was focused on a story that had nothing to do with the ‘issue’
we’re discussing. I cut corners.”34 For Community fans engaged in Har-
mon’s online presence — a significant number, with more than 200,000
followers on Twitter at the time — statements such as these work to
constitute his persona as both a blogger and a television showrunner,
which then inflects how viewers consume the program and imagine his
authorial voice as part of an inferred author function that colors future
reception practices.
Such television programs, like serialized literature and comic books
before them, serialize not only their storyworlds but also their inferred
author functions themselves, as the authorial figures evolve and change
over time through their own public performances, our transforming
inferences about them, and the interaction between showrunner-as-text
and paratext-consuming viewers. As viewers consume more paratexts,
including explicitly serialized ones such as podcasts, we come to develop
new inferences about such authors, which impacts our narrative con-
sumption. If we conceive of authorship as a discursive phenomenon,
constructed by paratexts and other forms of rhetorical circulation, then
the inferred author function is itself a serialized phenomenon, changing
over time and working in dialogue with the core text itself. Additionally,
fans come to feel that they have an ongoing relationship with inferred
authors, just as they develop relationships with serialized television char-
acters — Harmon addresses his viewers as “you,” engages in public Twit-
ter conversations, and invites us into his own thought processes (as well
as more intimate personal details elsewhere on his blog, signaled by its
112 | Authorship

scatological title, Dan Harmon Poops). Through such modes of address

and engagement, an inferred author function develops and changes over
the course of a series, and a viewer’s relationship to a showrunner’s pub-
lic persona is a similarly fluid, ongoing phenomenon.
Harmon’s role as Community showrunner created a good deal of
real-life serialized drama, as he was fired at the end of the third season,
leading to a barrage of publicity and speculative blaming among fans,
critics, and Harmon himself. Not surprisingly, the fourth season under
new showrunners was regarded by most fans and critics as inferior to
the Harmon era, prompting a backlash significant enough for Harmon
to be rehired for a fifth season, despite the previous year of name-calling
and publicity of Harmon’s managerial mistakes. Removing Harmon as
Community’s showrunner actually strengthened his role within many
viewers’ minds as the program’s inferred author — fans approached this
season searching for what was missing because of Harmon’s departure,
rather than trying to look at what was there under the new regime,
and similarly assumed that the fifth season would be a return to form
because of the restoration of a clear authorial figure. Whether these per-
sonnel shifts are actually responsible for changes in storytelling, humor,
or production quality, the inferred author function works to attribute
all differences to the presence or absence of the showrunner, not the
multiple other factors that were probably also at play.
We use such serialized notions of authorship to develop assump-
tions about how a series is created, especially concerning how much is
planned out in advance, and consume the program in search of clues,
using the codex of inferred authorship as a guide.35 For instance, the
second season of Breaking Bad featured an ongoing set of flash-forward
scenes in the precredit teasers of four episodes, mysteriously showing
the aftermath of some major violent occurrence outside Walt’s house.
On podcasts, Gilligan and the other producers alluded to this mystery
and suggested that it would be revealed at the end of the season, thus
framing expectations for the season’s arc and inspiring forensic fandom
to analyze both the text and paratexts for clues to reveal the events in
advance. Such authorial paratexts presented the narrative ambiguities
with a sense of ludic play, encouraging viewers to play along with the
series while guaranteeing resolution, rather than coyly obscuring details
or refusing clarification, as on other serialized programs.
 Authorship | 113

Another example from Breaking Bad highlights how ambiguity and

intent can manifest themselves differently. In the final scene of season
3, Jesse appears to shoot Gale in an act of desperation. However, the
camera angle shifted in such a way that we never saw Gale being shot
and that Jesse may have changed the aim of his gun, a camera move that
some viewers interpreted as suggesting that Jesse did not actually shoot
Gale. In the first wave of interviews after the finale, Gilligan highlights
that any ambiguities were unintentional:

In my mind, no, I don’t intend for there to be any ambiguity. Let me start
this by saying I always am reluctant to tell the audience afterward what
to think or how to feel. I really prefer it when the audience comes to their
own conclusions. . . . I never really intended for there to be any ambiguity.
But it’s funny: in the editing room, my editor and some other people were
saying that the way it counter-dollies around, it looks like he’s changing
his point of aim before he pulls the trigger. . . . I’ve been hearing from the
people who’ve already seen it that it looks like he’s changing where he’s
aiming. That is not intentional. I did not see it that way when I was direct-
ing. It’s not wrong for you to think he shot this guy.36

While Gilligan explicitly asserts his initial intent here and elsewhere,
in later interviews he embraces ambiguity and notes that the uninten-
tional openness means that he might revisit his own intent for season
4. Not surprisingly, fans posited their own speculation, drawing on dif-
ferent facets of Gilligan’s statements to support their own theories on
whether Gale would live or die. The next episode opened, after a 13-
month gap in screen time filled with paratext-driven speculation and
anticipation, with a scene of Gale alive and well; it is soon revealed to be
a flashback, with the next scene showing Gale’s dead body at the crime
scene. Such a sequence invites viewers to posit an authorial presence,
playing with their expectations and building on the paratextual conver-
sation about Gale’s ambiguous shooting — we can almost hear Gilligan
speaking to viewers in this scene, playfully referencing speculations and
debates. Although we could follow Bordwell’s antianthropomorphic
approach and regard it as the series itself playing with audience expecta-
tions, the prevalence of the showrunner’s voice in paratexts encourages
viewers to personalize such intentionality, attaching it to a hypothetical
114 | Authorship

construction of Gilligan, who embodies the entire collaborative team in

the mind of fans.
Of course, savvy viewers are well aware of television’s collaborative
production process and frequently use paratexts and forensic fandom to
analyze who might be responsible for a given choice or outcome. Such
questions of collaboration can stretch beyond the writers’ room — for
instance, African American actors on The Wire were frequently asked in
interviews how much of their dialogue was improvised or self-written,
as many viewers found it doubtful that David Simon or his mostly white
writing staff could be responsible for the program’s vivid black ver-
nacular (which they actually were). In other instances, viewers parse
collaborative creative partnerships to figure out how to map authorial
discourses and intertextual track records, as with Homeland ’s dual show-
runners, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Although the pair had shared
credits on a range of programs in the 1980s and 1990s, Gordon was best
known in the 2000s as showrunner for 24, while Gansa’s solo credits
were more eclectic until he reunited with Gordon for 24’s final season.
In an episode-by-episode breakdown of Homeland ’s first season on The
A.V. Club, Gansa highlights some of their differences in approach, link-
ing Gordon’s more mainstream and conventional choices to his time on
24, while Gansa takes credit for more ambiguous and unconventional
choices; the commenters embrace this distinction, suggesting that such
creative tension might undo (or help fuel) the program’s success.37 Of
course, viewers do not know how much this creative divide actually
manifests itself in the writing process or how much Gansa is exaggerat-
ing his own role, but such paratexts help create an imagined authorial
role with multiple voices in tension and provide a framework to view
future episodes as a product of that inferred author function.
Another important function for inferred authors concerns fan-
created paratexts, which have become more widespread and popular
in the digital era. In an influential post on obsession_inc’s Dreamwidth
blog, the pseudonymous fanfic writer proposed two general kinds of
fandom that directly relate to authorship: affirmational versus transfor-
mational.38 Affirmational fans generally work to reinforce an author’s
vision (as they infer it) and canonical narrative content, fleshing out
details through fan productions, as discussed more in chapter 8; for
such fans, authorial podcasts and blogs provide insight into the creative
 Authorship | 115

process and intentions of an inferred author, extending their narrative

experiences. Transformational fans treat an original text not just as a
canonical work to be appreciated on its own terms but also as the raw
material for productive play, creating noncanonical extensions such as
fanfic, fanvids, and other paratexts that frequently go against the pre-
sumed intentions of the original’s creator. Transformational fans, who
are more likely to be pseudonymous female creators avoiding public
acknowledgment outside their fan communities, engage in dialogue
or sparring matches with their inferred authors, not treating them as
powerful figures to be revered, respected, and treated as the source of
creative authority, which often typifies the predominantly male affir-
mational fan’s attitude toward the television author. This is clearly an
oversimplified dichotomy that requires more analysis than can be given
here, but it seems that inferred author functions can play important if
differing roles among the most committed productive fans of all persua-
sions and practices.39
Throughout this discussion of the inferred author function, I have
focused on how the imagined role of the author fuels narrative compre-
hension rather than interpretation. It certainly could be useful in both,
as viewers can project assumed political beliefs, ethical goals, or world-
views onto an imagined author that would thus shape an interpretation
of a program’s politics or themes. Certainly we read the politics of The
Wire and Treme off each other and in the context of David Simon’s copi-
ous writings and interviews, providing an interpretative frame based
on an authorial identity that is more unified and consistent than are
actual creative processes. But in this project, I am more interested in
how the inferred authorial function operates in the moment of viewer-
ship to construct a sense of narrative coherence and to shape emotional
reactions, as well as guiding our gap-filling efforts to analyze what has
happened and to speculate on what is to come. Per Bordwell’s account,
viewers do not need to construct an authorial figure to comprehend a
narrative — but per pervasive fan discourses and accounts of personal
viewing practices, many often do.
This returns us to the call to “Trust Joss” — in this phrase, Joss was not
the biographical creator of Buffy or the industrial discourses that formed
his public persona but the implied author function constructed by view-
ers out of their textual and paratextual consumption. Viewers who were
116 | Authorship

invested in Buffy’s ongoing storytelling confronted their doubts about

this new narrative development by turning to the authorial and authori-
tative figure that had served them well for the first four seasons, imbu-
ing the program’s creator with knowledge and power that they trusted
would provide ultimate answers. This call to trust Joss despite lagging
faith is a religious move, invoking the author by calling out to a higher
power, a supreme creator who must have a greater plan that will be
revealed to us mere mortals in due time. As with religion, the power-
ful author is a figure only experienced through discourse, via texts and
paratexts, and glimpsed through oblique moments when we infer some-
thing greater at work than just the characters living their lives, as we
hope that the events seen on screen are not just random occurrences
but all part of a larger plan that a creator has worked out in advance. Of
course the belief in a master plan does not stop religious believers from
praying to their deity for particular alterations to that plan — just as tele-
vision fans regularly lobby showrunners to change a series on the basis
of their feedback at the same time that they assert the need for authors
to have a plan beyond “making it up as you go.”
We can see religious metaphors running through the language of
serial television, as with a “series bible” that lays out a program’s core
tenets and story arcs, the idea of “canon” standing in for the authorita-
tive version of the fictional world, fans referring to producers as “The
Powers That Be” (which is also the term that Whedon used to reference
the guiding deific forces on Angel), or transformative fans willfully com-
mitting “blasphemy” through acts of transgressive remixing. It seems
clear that for ongoing serial storyworlds, many viewers want to imag-
ine a creator with full knowledge and mastery guiding the outcomes,
and in moments of doubt or confusion, they put their trust and faith in
this higher power — or renounce such authority and take control in their
own transformative hands. The inferred author serves this role, and our
faith in the author’s ability to shape a well-told story carries us through
the serial gaps — or when the story goes off the rails, we might lose faith
and abandon a series. This act of faith is a form of subjectification, in
which we willingly give over our power to something greater in hopes
for future payoffs — for all the expansions in participatory culture and
fan production in recent years, there is still an active desire for many
viewers to be the recipient of a well-told story, not a productive partner
 Authorship | 117

in its telling. As narrative consumers, sometimes we want to give over

some degree of control to authors, placing our attention in their hands
to guide as they see fit. If we doubt that they know precisely what they
are doing, our pleasures are weakened, losing faith in the coherence and
rationale of their narrative vision. I am not suggesting that serial tele-
vision is only for the religious minded or that we have to imbue the
author with deistic powers — I write as an affirmed atheist but also as
a television fan who has experienced awe and reverence at moments of
authorial prowess and creation that borders on worship.
Of course the actual creative process is much messier, more collabora-
tive, and more contingent than the image of an all-powerful creator with
a master plan suggests. In the real world, many people find the complex-
ity of biology much too vast to be accounted for by the bottom-up emer-
gence of evolution, so they seek the assurance of an anthropomorphized
notion of intelligent design. Similarly, complex stories can seem far too
elaborate to be designed by a decentered team beset by contingencies
and unplanned interference, so we look to an imagined authorial power
to account for narrative complexity and to provide ongoing serial assur-
ances that somebody is actually in control. The inferred author func-
tion offers a model for the pragmatic use of an imagined, all-powerful
creator to guide our faithful narrative comprehension, while the realities
of production studies highlight the messy collaborative realities out of
which our serial stories evolve.
4

Characters

Nearly every successful television writer will point to character as the

focal point of their creative process and how they measure success —
if you can create compelling characters, then engaging scenarios and
storylines will likely follow suit. In a statement echoing dozens of simi-
lar interviews with showrunners, Lost cocreator Damon Lindelof states,
“It’s all about character, character, character. . . . Everything has to be
in service of the people. That is the secret ingredient of the show.”1
Even as television writers, directors, and actors focus much of their
energies into creating fully realized characters and designing plots
and storyworlds around them, academic analyses of storytelling have
focused far less on issues of character than on other narrative elements
such as plot, world building, and temporality. This oversight is espe-
cially true for moving-image media such as film and television, where
character tends to be taken as a self-evident given, wrapped up into
conventions of performance and stardom, rather than analyzed as a
specific narrative element.2 This chapter aims to add to this literature
by exploring the vital role of character in serialized complex television,
considering how characters are produced and how viewers engage with
these figures.
While there is robust debate among narrative theorists and philoso-
phers about the definitions and essences of characters, I am not par-
ticularly interested in considering whether a character is “real” (what-
ever that might mean) or exists solely within textual utterances, in the
minds of viewers, or per the intentions of producers. I follow Jens Eder’s
provisional definition of characters as “identifiable fictional beings with
an inner life that exist as communicatively constructed artifacts” — in
other worlds, characters are triggered by the text but come to life as we
consume fiction and are best understood as constructs of real people,
not simply images and sounds on a screen.3 This chapter considers tele-
vision characters by looking at textual representations, contextualized

118
 Characters | 119

within production and reception practices, and then focuses on the rise
of antiheroes on many of the most prominent examples of complex tele-
vision drama.

Character Contexts, Constraints, and Concepts

As discussed throughout this book, we can only understand the poetics
of television storytelling within its specific contexts, where industrial
norms and viewing practices help shape the creative possibilities
available to producers. These contexts clearly differentiate serial tele-
vision’s characterization from other media, especially compared to the
long-form possibilities of literature. Television characters derive from
collaboration between the actors who portray them and the writers and
producers who devise their actions and dialogue. Performance is always
a collaborative creative act, as actors embody the roles sketched out on
the page; within television’s writer-driven production model discussed
in chapter 3, this collaboration is most typically developed through pre-
production work between actors and showrunners. In film production,
the director is the chief conduit between a script and an actor, helping
to guide a performance and shape it to the contours of the narrative
whole, but the rotating array of television directors places that role more
in the hands of producers, who are typically writers, or in some cases
writer-directors, as with hybrid showrunners such as Joss Whedon, J. J.
Abrams, and Vince Gilligan. In some cases, an actor also serves as a
series producer, as with Timothy Olyphant on Justified or Laura Dern
on Enlightened, while some actors are directly involved in the writing
process, as with Men of a Certain Age’s Ray Romano, 30 Rock’s Tina Fey,
or Girls’ Lena Dunham, all of whom created and ran (alone or in a team)
their programs. Thus actors have varying degrees of creative authority
and collaborative ownership of their ongoing characters, marking a dif-
ference from both the literary model of single authorship and typical
film models of stand-alone character development rather than tele-
vision’s ongoing serial performances.
This link between character and performer sets major storytell-
ing constraints, especially when extratextual factors emerge, or what
the invaluable TV Tropes website calls “Real Life Writes the Plot.”4
Although actors are typically contracted for many years to ensure their
120 | Characters

ongoing availability, sometimes an actor must depart sooner than the

writers planned for a character — an actor might die, as with The Sopra-
nos’ Nancy Marchand, or become too ill to perform, as with Spartacus’s
Andy Whitfield. In the former case, the series portrayed Marchand’s
character, Livia Soprano, as dying in the third season; in the latter, Whit-
field’s titular role was recast with another actor for the second season
when he was diagnosed with cancer, with no in-story reference to the
character’s new appearance. Such recastings of a major regular character
with a new actor are quite rare on prime time dramas, with a few notable
instances such as Cagney and Lacey in the 1980s or more recently Pretty
Little Liars, while they are somewhat more common on sitcoms (such
as Bewitched and Roseanne) and even more so on daytime soap operas.
Since most prime time dramas aim for a degree of naturalism and con-
sistency in representing their storyworlds, recasting a character usually
comes across as too artificial, as well as downplaying what the origi-
nal actor’s performance may have contributed to the character’s iden-
tity. Certainly the most innovative and widespread case of recasting is
Doctor Who, as William Hartnell, the original actor playing the Doctor,
decided to leave the series in 1966; leveraging the program’s science-
fiction premise, the writers created an “escape clause” that the character’s
body regenerates when facing death, allowing new actors to take over
the part, a process that has led to 12 different Doctors as of 2014. This
recasting conceit allows the character both to remain a decade-spanning
constant and to acquire new shadings of each actor’s performance style
and reinterpretation, providing a wide range of connections and collec-
tive memories to generations of viewers.
Despite some exceptions, recasting tends to disrupt a series, violating
viewers’ ongoing commitments to the paired actor-character identity.
More often than recasting, producers integrate an actor’s departure or
other changes into the storyworld. Most typically, writers must work
around actors with scheduling conflicts that limit their availability, cre-
ating episodes that omit or restrict a character’s presence, and must sim-
ilarly shape stories based on actors’ contracts, as discussed with Veronica
Mars in chapter 2. A similar circumstance is when an actress gets preg-
nant, as writers need to either integrate the pregnancy into the charac-
ter’s arc, as with the landmark storyline in I Love Lucy or more recently
Jennifer Garner on Alias and Charisma Carpenter on Angel, or attempt
 Characters | 121

to hide the pregnancy through costuming, plotlines involving the actress

mostly sitting down, or going on production hiatus, all of which were
employed on Parks and Recreation during Amy Poehler’s pregnancy.
When an actor decides to leave a program or producers fire an actor due
to off-screen issues, the ongoing narrative must be shifted to account
for this absence — one high-profile instance was Charlie Sheen’s highly
acrimonious departure from Two and a Half Men, prompting the series
to have his character get hit by a train and die. The Sheen case highlights
that often viewers are well aware of the off-screen issues impacting a
story, making real-life events function as a paratextual framework for
anticipating and interpreting a series, as discussed in chapter 5.
Lost’s second season provides a good example of many issues blur-
ring character arcs and real-world events; the season introduced “the
tailies,” a new group of characters seated in the airplane’s tail section
who landed on a different part of the island. Four tailies managed to
rejoin the main group of survivors, although only Bernard survived past
the third season. Both Ana Lucia and Libby were killed by Michael late
in the second season, a surprising twist that resonated with fans’ extra-
textual knowledge that both actresses, Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia
Watros, respectively, had been arrested for drunk driving during pro-
duction, leading many fans to speculate that their deaths were motivated
by off-screen issues. Producers have attested that Ana Lucia was always
planned to be a single-season arc and that they decided to kill Libby to
increase the impact of Michael’s betrayal, not due to any actor behavior.
The fourth surviving tailie’s fate was definitely dictated by off-screen
issues: Mr. Eko was intended to play a major role in the ongoing story
arc, but actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje disliked living in Hawaii and
requested to leave the series for personal reasons, resulting in the char-
acter’s death at the start of season 3 and major shifts to the ongoing
plan. Additionally, the young actor who played Walt, Malcolm David
Kelley, had a growth spurt between seasons 1 and 2, making it implau-
sible for him to portray Walt within the program’s compressed story
time frame; Lost restricted Walt’s future appearances mostly to scenes
in flash-forwards or apparitions, which Sawyer sarcastically calls “taller
ghost Walt.” Extratextual factors can also help expand a character’s role,
as Michael Emerson’s guest performance as Henry Gale on Lost was so
compelling that the character’s arc was extended, turning out to actually
122 | Characters

be the leader of the so-called Others, Ben Linus, a central character who
persisted until the end of the series. In all of these instances, real-world
practicalities and possibilities of actors have direct impacts on the story-
telling that transcend writers’ plans, complicating notions of creative
agency and impacting viewer comprehension of ongoing narratives in
ways that are unique to serial television.
If the off-screen lives of actors can constrain a series, they can also
open up interesting resonances. As explored by many scholars of star-
dom, actors serve as sites of intertextuality, merging viewer memories
of previous characters and knowledge about off-screen lives to color our
understanding of a role. This intertextual resonance can be heightened
through serial narrative, as our engagement with actors stretches out
over time and we can witness a star’s persona change within the gaps
between episodes. For instance, George Clooney was not well-known
when debuting on ER in 1994, but his popularity grew and he soon
became a major film star, transforming how he was viewed on ER and
framing his departure in 1999. Stars also bring resonance from previous
roles, as with knowledge of Alan Alda’s iconic role of antiwar doctor
Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H as well as Alda’s own left-leaning activ-
ism, both of which undercut the conservative politics of his character
Republican Arnold Vinick on The West Wing, making him a more palat-
able figure within the program’s core liberal sensibility. Michael J. Fox’s
star persona as a likable leading man in the 1980s and 1990s transformed
drastically following the onset of Parkinson’s disease; in the 21st cen-
tury, he has appeared in smaller recurring roles on series such as Scrubs,
Rescue Me, and The Good Wife, as well as launching his own series The
Michael J. Fox Show in 2013, always playing characters that foreground
his disability in ways that clearly cater to viewers’ extratextual knowl-
edge. In such instances, viewers approach characters with a wealth of
star-connected contexts from both on- and off-screen references that
help shape storytelling practices, highlighting the centrality of actors in
constituting characters within serial television.
Viewers bring more than star discourses to their assumptions about
characters, of course, as many viewers are well versed in television con-
ventions that guide their narrative expectations. Murray Smith identi-
fies recognition as one of the chief components of character engagement
in cinema, as film viewers differentiate between characters and other
 Characters | 123

figures, whether they be inhuman objects or humans who do not rise

to the level of character, such as background extras in a group scene.5
For serial television, recognition also means viewers differentiating roles
within a program’s ongoing ensemble, where characters are positioned
in fluid but meaningful tiers of primary lead characters, secondary sup-
porting characters, tertiary recurring characters, nonrecurring guest
characters, and background extras. These tiers have industrial mean-
ings, as actors’ contracts, placement in credits, salaries, and long-term
availability all impact how a character functions in an ongoing story.
Narrative surprises can be foiled by credits — the fan-favorite Buffy char-
acter Spike was added to the cast of Angel in season 5, a revelation that
is not made until the final moments of the first episode, but the actor
James Marsters appeared in the episode’s opening credits as a member of
the ongoing cast. Similarly, Lost episodes frequently saw characters who
had been killed in the main time line appear in flashbacks or in other
alternate time lines, but viewers paying attention to an episode’s opening
credits would know which characters would return from the dead that
week. Producers are aware of this, striving to confound viewers by keep-
ing surprise appearances out of the credits until the end of the episode,
but such matters are dictated by legal matters, guild negotiations, and
contractual stipulations that typically override the impulse for narrative
surprises, providing another example of industrial constraints shaping
creative decisions.
Such credit spotting might be a fringe phenomenon for die-hard
fans, but most viewers know basic precepts of serial storytelling that
set expectations for characters — most crucially, we all assume that main
characters are bound to stay on their programs and highly unlikely to
die or depart the story, unless motivated by off-screen factors. This is
particularly true of title characters, as we cannot imagine Seinfeld with-
out Jerry or House, M.D. without Dr. House. But viewers usually assume
that the core cast of characters will be a stable foundation throughout
a series run, and it is quite exceptional when main characters depart a
series unless it is for their own spin-off. For stories with life-or-death
stakes, this knowledge colors our narrative experiences, as we assume
a degree of character safety that runs counter to threats and dangers
within the storyworld. Dedicated fans are well aware of conventions
such as “red shirts” — named for the costumes worn by crew members
124 | Characters

on the original Star Trek who were typically fated to be the first killed
on any mission — that help shape narrative expectations for how a story
might progress. To counter such expectations, many complex programs
have killed off major characters early in their runs to raise the dramatic
stakes, as seen on Angel, 24, and Heroes, among many others, although
such deaths are almost always of second-tier supporting characters
rather than the core heroes, who usually remain safe until the program’s
final season. Serial television can struggle to create dramatic stakes in
the face of viewers’ knowledge that the fictional jeopardy facing lead
characters is highly unlikely to come to pass, an aspect discussed more
in chapter 5.
A particularly interesting case of the relative safety of lead charac-
ters is Game of Thrones, in which the character who appears to be the
main protagonist, Ned Stark as played by Sean Bean, is executed toward
the end of the first season. Importantly, the television program is based
on a series of novels, with Ned’s shocking death portrayed in the first
book published in 1996 — by the time the television series aired in 2011,
anyone who had read the novels or followed their critical coverage was
anticipating Ned’s demise. Nonetheless, there was a good deal of back-
lash from unaware television fans shocked by Stark’s death, with viewers
pledging to boycott the program or cancel HBO, although the high rat-
ings for the second season suggest that these were mostly idle threats.
As eloquently summed up by a fan on EW.com, “Most of you who think
this was some sort of brilliant move or something don’t understand the
difference between a book audience and a TV audience. . . . TV audi-
ences need to invest in characters. Most of the other characters I don’t
care much about. While the show will probably still appeal to the ‘wow’
crowd, its mass appeal just got beheaded.”6 This comment highlights
the different expectations between novels and television: novels do typi-
cally create bonds to characters — and reportedly readers of the Game
of Thrones novels were similarly outraged when reading about Stark’s
death — but there is a long history of novels killing off main characters,
and the Game of Thrones books’ multiple focalized structure decentered
Ned as the main character. For television, actor embodiment creates a
different type of parasocial bond; when coupled with the medium’s long-
established norms and industrial cues such as credits (Bean got top bill-
ing in season 1’s opening credits) and actor reputations, viewers expect
 Characters | 125

more safety and long-term commitment to main characters. Thus it is

telling that one of the very few examples of a death of a leading character
early in a television series was a literary adaptation, and it is unlikely that
the program would have tried such a twist without the novel’s estab-
lished precedent.7
Lost plays with many of these conventions of character tiers and fates,
initially planning to raise its stakes by ending its two-hour pilot with the
death of the heroic lead Jack Shephard; ABC objected, fearing it would
quickly alienate its audience. Instead, the series surprisingly killed off
numerous characters throughout its run, typically second-tier charac-
ters such as Boone, Shannon, and Ana Lucia, with occasional deaths
of more central characters in highly dramatic fashion, as with Charlie’s
heroic death at the end of the third season. While Lost posed greater
risks for its characters than most prime time programs do, it still kept
the core group of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, and Hurley on the series
throughout its entire run. Lost played games with viewers and their
knowledge of red shirts, often including dialogue referring to the arbi-
trary distinction between named characters central to actions on the
island and the background extras who rarely did anything but murmur
assent or carry out chores at the camp, with such reflexive lines typically
spoken by Hurley, the embodiment of the knowing science-fiction and
comic-book fan. Toward the end of the first season, Dr. Arzt emerged
as a new character from the nameless crowd, becoming differentiated by
being named, going on a mission with the main characters, and speak-
ing dialogue that called attention to his shift from the background — but
Arzt’s emergence was a fake-out, as he was dramatically blown up just
as he was becoming a distinct individual, in a winking nod to audience
expectations. Other background characters were occasionally differenti-
ated from the ensemble in playful ways, such as main characters confus-
ing the names of castaways Scott and Steve, or Neil getting the derisive
nickname “Frogurt,” enabling viewer recognition while also marginal-
izing him as insignificant, before killing him with a flaming arrow to
the chest.
No Lost episode plays with character expectations and norms more
than “Exposé,” an almost parodic rewriting of island history to include
background characters Nikki and Paulo. In the third season, the two fig-
ures had been identified as supporting characters, by receiving names,
126 | Characters

speaking dialogue, and having the actors’ names added to the credits,
but they served little dramatic function within the ensemble. Lost’s
producers claim that they elevated these two characters in response to
fans wanting to know more about the background characters, but they
quickly realized that they could not fit them into the ensemble seam-
lessly.8 “Exposé” simultaneously weaved the characters into the core
ensemble’s history by including them in flashback scenes to previously
seen moments and dramatically killed them by burying them alive (and
bringing back Arzt to highlight their doomed status). The episode is a
distilled example of the operational aesthetic, as we engage at the level of
storytelling discourse, considering how the revisionist history of island
life resembles fans’ rewriting of canonical events, scribbling in the mar-
gins of the established storyworld. For fans who disliked the divisive
episode, the lack of continuity disrupted what had already been estab-
lished — “Exposé” presented new information about already-established
events but did not seem to contribute toward the greater mythology. But
for fans willing to play the episode’s storytelling game, its ludic plea-
sures stem from the willful knowledge that the episode is marginal to
the point of being almost noncanonical, playfully tweaking fans’ forensic
obsessions for continuity and coherence and shining a light on charac-
ters’ functional roles and hierarchies.
Why do television series place such weight on the stability and safety
of core characters while relegating others to the ephemeral periphery?
There are industrial incentives to associate a program with actors who
can be used to promote the series, serve as its public face, and be con-
tractually committed to appear for years at a fixed salary. Creatively,
most programs are so defined by their core characters and their web of
relationships that replacing them becomes a challenge without losing
what drew fans into the series — this is especially true of comedies, in
which ensemble dynamics are usually what distinguishes a given pro-
gram, with character replacements or additions often proving troubling.
Serialized dramas might be based on a high concept or complex plot,
but the character ensemble at its core is usually what hooks in view-
ers, as typified by the failure of series such as FlashForward, The Event,
or Reunion to create sufficiently compelling characters to ground their
enigma-driven storytelling. The large ensembles of daytime soap operas
maintain stability through anchor characters who might live their entire
 Characters | 127

lives on decades-spanning dramas, mirroring the time line of viewers at

home, even as other characters in the ensemble might come and go (or
be recast).9 Episodic procedural dramas are the most common type of
programming with a rotating cast of characters, as long-running series
such as Law and Order and CSI can replace characters with some fre-
quency. Such replacements are less disruptive since storylines depend on
weekly cases with a core setting and tone, while each character plays a
functionary role in the organization, with drawn-out character relation-
ships relegated to tertiary plotlines. Even on such procedurals, viewers
do become attached to particular characters and relationships, leading
to some characters remaining for many years or to a franchise creating
other iterations more committed to a stable cast of characters, as with
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
Television’s character consistency is more than just an industrial con-
venience, as one of the primary ways that viewers engage with program-
ming is to develop long-term relationships with characters. The term
for such engagement dates back to early mass communications research
in the 1950s: parasocial relationships.10 While parasocial relationships
between media consumers and on-air personalities, be they real-life
celebrities or fictional characters, have often been pathologized as an
unhealthy inability to distinguish between reality and media, they can
instead be viewed as an active, participatory facet of media consump-
tion, with fans choosing to engage with a media text and extend its reach
into their own lives. We should not presume that caring deeply about
characters is a sign of unhealthy boundaries but embrace it as a cen-
tral component of storytelling — we temporarily give part of ourselves
over to a fiction to produce intense emotional affect. Murray Smith
offers a detailed theory of such engagement with characters, framing
it as a clearly demarcated process of imagining oneself in relation to
fiction, rather than muddling the boundary between reality and fic-
tion.11 Smith’s approach to engagement highlights how films cue us to
recognize, align with, and forge allegiances with characters, a convinc-
ing model that needs to be expanded for the temporal dimensions of
serial television.
As discussed in the introduction, watching serial television is a long-
term process, stretching over time with interceding gaps. A viewer’s
character engagement will necessarily extend through these gaps, as
128 | Characters

dedicated fans will think about and discuss characters, imagine what
the characters might be doing outside the presented episodes, and per-
haps even produce their own paratextual extensions for characters, such
as fan fiction, fake Twitter accounts, or remix videos. Officially pro-
duced paratexts can also fill serial gaps, including in-character blogs,
commentaries found on podcasts and interviews, and character-based
merchandise. Such ongoing parasocial relationships are heightened for
television, where typical domestic viewing literally invites characters
into your home, often for regularly scheduled visits over the course of
years. Fans will frequently develop sincere emotional attachments to
characters, designating particular figures as their “TV boyfriends/girl-
friends” or cultivating hateful (but often pleasurable) antipathy toward a
character. Such investments are much more commonplace than the rare
instances when a viewer blurs the boundaries between fiction and real-
ity, resulting in behaviors such as stalking; the norm for most viewers
is a playful engagement in which the fictional frame is treated “as if ” it
were real, attaching honest emotions to representations that they know
to be fiction.
Viewers can imagine relationships between themselves and fictional
characters, but it is more common to become invested in the emotional
stakes within the fictional frame itself. A common type of viewing plea-
sure is so-called shipping, a term derived from “relationshipping” fan-
dom that emerged around viewers rooting for (or against) a romance
between Mulder and Scully on The X-Files. In an ongoing series, viewers
make intense investments in the romantic entanglements of characters,
advocating for particular relationships in forums with other fans, often
via “shipping names” combining two characters, such as “Sculder,” as
discussed for Lost in chapter 8. Viewers care about characters beyond
romance, often rooting for particular figures to succeed or fail in busi-
ness, crime, or other professional endeavors, as well as experiencing key
developments in their various relationships with family and friends.
Viewers’ investment in characters bleeds outside the storyworld as well
into the realm of storytelling mechanics; fans might hope that minor
characters get more screen time or that major ones get less, as well as
imagining potential spin-offs or crossovers between series. These facets
of serial engagement all suggest the centrality of the nonreciprocal rela-
tionship between viewers and television characters.
 Characters | 129

Often such connections between viewers and characters are termed

“identification,” but I agree with Murray Smith that this term is inad-
equate to convey the complexity of the viewing process — viewers do not
literally think of characters as standing in for them within the story-
world or imagine themselves as being characters, as implied by “identi-
fication.” Instead, Smith proposes that engaging characters involves the
three practices of recognition (as discussed earlier), alignment, and alle-
giance (discussed shortly).12 Smith’s notion of alignment helps explain
the connections viewers feel with characters, both within the storyworld
and parasocially outside it, as a series manages what we know about
and experience with characters. Alignment consists of two key elements:
attachment, in which we follow the experiences of particular characters,
and access to subjective interior states of emotions, thought processes,
and morality. In a long-form serial, attachment is a crucial variable, as
our relative connection to individuals can shift from episode to epi-
sode, and nearly all serials have a pattern of multiple attachments to
an ensemble of characters — the most exclusive attachment on fictional
television might be the highly episodic Dragnet, in which Joe Friday’s
narration mimics the form of the police report, restricting every scene to
his presence and personal experience.13 Individual episodes might simi-
larly restrict attachment to a single character, as with the Veronica Mars
pilot discussed in chapter 2, but such patterns expand over the course
of a series for both practical production reasons (as it is too inefficient
to require an actor to be present for every scene) and to encourage con-
nections with a wider range of characters. A series typically creates a
broad ensemble with wide-ranging attachments across scenes and epi-
sodes; these attachments often work to foster the sense that the serial is
aligned more broadly with its setting and scenario than with individual
characters. On The Wire, a scene might attach to any one of dozens of
characters whom the narrative differentiates and recognizes — and the
series’s opening credit sequences and season-ending montages attach to
nondifferentiated people who serve in familiar roles, such as cop, dealer,
and dockworker, without elevating them to recognizable characters.
This vast breadth of attachment locates Baltimore itself as an immersive
place functioning as the core aligned character, with its various inhabit-
ants providing access to the city’s interior subjectivity, as discussed more
in chapter 6.
130 | Characters

Attachment is particularly important for serials, as spending time

with characters encourages parasocial connections — the more time we
spend with particular characters, the more we extend that time through
hypothetical and paratextual engagement outside the moments of watch-
ing. Attachment strategies can become a crucial site of intrinsic norms
that help define the storytelling parameters of a series. Lost offers a key
example, with most episodes centered on a single character, including
that character’s flashbacks (in the first three seasons), flash-forwards
(season 4), time-travel experiences (season 5), or flash-sideways (season
6); fans typically label these episodes as “centric” to a character, as in a
“Kate-centric episode.” Lost episodes do usually feature scenes in which
the centric character does not appear, but these usually take place in the
on-island narrative “present” (a tricky term for the temporally convo-
luted series). The effect of such centric episodes is to deepen viewers’
knowledge of particular characters, providing access to their backstories
(or futures) and thus providing viewers with a broader range of knowl-
edge than any individual character possesses, delivered through piece-
meal episodic accumulation. Some episodes violate these centric norms
by attaching to multiple characters — sometimes dually focused on the
couple Sun and Jin, in a group flashback, as with the season 1 finale
“Exodus,” or by dispensing with the flashback structure altogether, as
with “The Other 48 Days,” which offers a linear account of the on-island
events for the tail-section survivors. Lost’s complex but patterned use of
attachment helps deepen our experiences with a range of characters, as
well as offering engaging variations on serial storytelling.
Smith suggests that alignment consists of both spending time with
attached characters and accessing those characters’ interior subjective
state, but film and television rarely employ the literary conventions of
hearing characters’ interior voices or describing characters’ emotional
state or thoughts. Instead, moving-image media convey subjective inte-
rior states through the accumulation of exterior markers of what we see
and hear about characters: appearance, actions, dialogue, and other sorts
of evidence explicitly presented within the narrative discourse. View-
ers necessarily infer and construct interior states of characters, filling
in internal thoughts through a process of reconstruction and hypoth-
esizing. Thus in a scene on The Wire, Cedric Daniels glaring at Jimmy
McNulty (a frequent action) is an exterior marker, but we infer that it
 Characters | 131

is a judgmental and infuriated glare, suggesting that Daniels might be

thinking, “I cannot believe what he just did.” There are no adverbs in
television’s visual storytelling, so the program cannot simply state that
Daniels is glaring judgmentally, but it must cue viewers to infer his inte-
rior state through exterior markers, ranging from the subtleties of Lance
Reddick’s facial expression and posture that convey tense, suppressed
rage to the dramatic context of whatever disrespectful thing McNulty
just did to motivate Daniels’s glare, to our own memories of previous
instances when Daniels showed that same expression toward McNulty
and other characters. In the moment, we infer Daniels’s interior state
as a hypothesis, which is typically confirmed by subsequent exterior
markers, such as Daniels tensely barking, “McNulty, my office!” other
characters’ awkward reactions to witnessing such anger, or McNulty’s
typical defensive reaction: “What the fuck did I do?” We might imagine
another scenario in which Daniels breaks the tension of his glare with a
playful, sarcastic insult, which would convey a different interior state of
bemusement or camaraderie toward McNulty, but within the context of
Daniels’s larger characterization, such exterior actions and interior states
would be wholly out of character (whereas they would be in keeping
with other characters, such as Bunk or Kima). Such interplay between
explicit exterior markers, inferred interior states, and serialized contexts
is part of the cognitive viewing process that I discuss more in chapter 5.
Some programs do allow for greater access to subjectivity, such as
the voice-over and fantasy sequences on Scrubs, in which we are privy
to J.D.’s thoughts, attitudes, and imagination. Although this might seem
like full access to J.D.’s interior state, even those manifested moments of
interiority contain gaps for us to flesh out through the same processes
we follow in less subjective narrative techniques. For instance, in the
first-season episode “My Bad,” J.D.’s voice-over interrupts a conversation
he is having with Dr. Cox with, “I’ll always remember that moment as
the first ‘thank you’ I got from Dr. Cox.” Dr. Cox follows with a sarcastic
line, “Well, geez, Agnes, does the field hockey team know that you’re
missing?” to which J.D.’s voice-over responds, “It felt good.” Viewers
have to parse out the degree to which J.D.’s desperate need for affirma-
tion ignores Cox’s sarcasm, how much Cox truly is appreciative but can-
not express it openly, and how much J.D. himself might be sarcastically
mocking Cox. Just because we are inside J.D.’s head with a great degree
132 | Characters

of subjective access, the process of narrative comprehension always pos-

its hypotheses about what a character is thinking and feeling, even when
the storytelling seems to portray a character’s interiority.
Fleshing out a character’s interiority is a core appeal of most fiction,
a process that Blakey Vermeule argues is crucial to understanding how
and why we engage with fictional characters.14 She suggests that fic-
tion invites us to access characters’ interior states through a process of
mind reading, in which we probe the thoughts and emotions of others —
while we never can fully know the interiority of another person, whether
fictional or real, narratives offer a laboratory for using social cues to
explore others’ minds with more access than in reality. Mind reading is
especially compelling around a character’s attitudes toward other peo-
ple, and thus an ongoing serial portraying a community of characters
interacting and reacting to one another becomes a particularly fertile
ground to explore interiority. Over the course of a serial, the characters
whom we are aligned with, connected to, and invested in are typically
those we spend the most time with and who provide the most interest-
ing interior states, balancing scrutable access with complex dimension-
ality to engage us as active mind readers, a process I discuss more later
regarding Walter White in Breaking Bad. As discussed throughout the
book, one of the pleasures of watching complex television is engaging
with a sense of ludic play and puzzle-solving analysis, and attempting
to read the minds of nuanced, multifaceted characters is fertile ground
for such playful viewing practices. Through a long-term investment in a
series, viewers accrue knowledge and experiences about characters that
allow us to posit our own version of their interiority, especially within
the gaps between episodes, when we are left to think about what we have
seen and consider our own relationship to characters. Our alignment
with characters certainly changes throughout the course of a series— but
do the characters themselves change?

Serial Characters and the Possibility of Change

Viewers of serial television engage with an ongoing, dynamic system,
not a fixed text like most films. We identify characters not just within a
fixed ensemble but also from episode to episode, across gaps of various
 Characters | 133

lengths in both screen time and story time. One commonplace strat-
egy to maintain such recognition is dialogue explicitly mentioning
characters’ names, relationships, and identity to help orient the audi-
ence — most series offer such identifying information about characters
far more than we typically do in real life, and programs that eschew
such dialogue cues, such as The Wire, are often viewed as confusing and
disorienting, requiring guides, as discussed in chapter 8. But at a more
abstract level, how do we recognize a character who has changed from
the first season to the last? Is he or she the same fictional person, or has
he or she changed at a more intrinsic level?
While it may seem that a pleasure of serial narratives is watching
characters grow and develop over time, most television characters are
more stable and consistent rather than changeable entities. This is not
to suggest that characters do not experience major life events, traumas,
and conflicts that have an impact on who they are — surely most serial
characters experience an unrealistic number of such occurrences in the
high-drama realm of fiction. And as discussed in chapter 1, a core facet
of seriality is that narrative events accumulate in characters’ memories
and experiences. But even in the face of such life-changing events, tele-
vision characters are mostly stable figures, accumulating narrative expe-
riences more than changing from them, as Roberta Pearson argues:

Over the course of a long-running series, the routine augmenting of

traits and biographies for novelty purposes can lead to highly elaborated
characters. But a highly elaborated character is not the same as a well-
developed character. . . . For literary and dramatic critics, development
has often meant that the protagonist grows, achieves a higher degree of
self-awareness and makes life-transforming decisions. But the repeti-
tive nature of the television series dictates a relative state of stability for
its characters, whose failure to perform key narrative functions and to
interact with other characters in pre-established fashion could seriously
undermine a series’ premise. . . . In television, it’s more accurate to talk
about character accumulation and depth than it is to talk about character
development. The long-running American television drama can create
highly elaborated characters of greater accumulation and depth than any
contemporary medium.15
134 | Characters

I agree with Pearson’s account of most serial characters, for whom elabo-
ration substitutes for change, but there are certainly exceptions, in which
character development and transformation do occur.16 How might we
define stability and change within these terms, especially given that so
many narrative events and shifts in relationships occur over the course
of a serialized program?
To grapple with character changes, we need to consider Smith’s
third factor of character engagement: allegiance, the moral evaluation
of aligned characters such that we find ourselves sympathetic to their
beliefs and ethics and thus emotionally invested in their stories. Since
interiority is a restricted area of access, we must infer characters’ moral-
ity and beliefs on the basis of exterior markers, including their appear-
ance, behaviors, and interactions as well as how other characters act
toward and talk about them. When Pearson connects character devel-
opment with a “higher degree of self-awareness” and “life-transforming
decisions,” she is referring to changes within interior beliefs and moral
values (which prompt shifting actions) that Smith frames as promot-
ing allegiance. Most of such changes in a serial are either temporary,
attributed to an external factor that dissipates over the course of an
episode or short arc, or only midlevel shifts in behaviors and attitudes,
rather than high-level transformations of core morality and ethics that
would prompt a change in our allegiances. So when examining stabil-
ity and change, we need to look for indications of shifting allegiances,
as motivated by transformations within both exterior actions and inte-
rior thoughts and feelings. But because we can only access interiority
through exterior markers, shifts in character allegiance must be mani-
fested externally.
There are many ways to assess changed interiority on the basis of
exterior markers —a character’s new appearance might indicate a revised
attitude or belief system, as a different haircut or wardrobe might sig-
nify a transformation. Dialogue can certainly signal change, either from
characters themselves (“I’ve changed!”) or what other people say about
them (“She’s changed”). Of course, dialogue, costuming, and appear-
ance all might be indications solely of superficial changes or characters’
attempts to change that viewers assume are ultimately futile. Complex
multifaceted characters must have their interior states confirmed by a
number of different exterior markers, and typically overt actions speak
 Characters | 135

louder than dialogue to indicate a character’s true subjective state. For

instance, at the end of Homeland ’s first season, CIA agent Carrie Mathi-
son undergoes a mental breakdown that we have anticipated, given that
we learn of her bipolar mental illness in the pilot and see her medication
run out midway through the season. In the midst of her breakdown, she
asserts that she is fine, but Claire Danes’s manic performance trumps
those claims, as we are aligned with her colleague Saul in trying to dis-
cern how much she has lost touch with reality. He ultimately finds his
answer, and we find ours alongside him, when he discovers a huge wall
collage of color-coded papers that she has assembled in a fit of mania —
more than any other marker, this artifact of her actions both conveys her
unhinged state and reinforces our allegiance with her, since her madness
enables her to discover a pattern pointing to the truth about a terrorist
conspiracy. Thus while we want to gauge a character’s interiority, we
judge characters mostly by what they do, cued by how other characters
regard, interact with, and talk about them; through these actions and
reactions, we locate our own allegiances within a set of characters. Our
sustained allegiance through her breakdown marks Carrie’s shift as a
midlevel behavior change, rather than a high-level moral shift — Car-
rie is still motivated by noble ethics and consistent beliefs, even if her
actions and attitudes differ radically from where she started the season,
and we believe the shift to be temporary, anticipating her renewed sta-
bility following psychiatric treatment.
Not all character changes are manifested in actions, as one significant
way characters might change is through a shifted perspective on them-
selves and their situation that does not translate into different actions.
Carmela Soprano is a good example of a character who makes many
attempts to change outwardly, by forging new relationships, seeking a
career, changing her appearance or material world, or even leaving her
husband, but none of these changes seem to make much of an impact
on her core character, as she always reverts back to the narrative status
quo. Yet Carmela does seem to have learned something about herself
and changed her own internal attitudes over the course of The Sopra-
nos, gaining some peace and acceptance about the core hypocrisy of
her lifestyle and Tony’s profession in the wake of numerous traumas,
accepting her guilt in living off the spoils of his violence. We gauge this
shift less from differing actions than through subtle shifts in Edie Falco’s
136 | Characters

performance — the way she looks at people and things, how her emo-
tional reactions to Tony’s actions mellow — and contrasts to other char-
acters’ lack of growth and maturation. We also fill in the gaps in these
silent moments of Carmela looking or reacting by filling in her interior
state by referencing our own serial memories of the character, construct-
ing an internal monologue that draws connections across the life span
that we have shared with her, a process discussed more later.
Characters rarely shift significantly, but our understanding of them
often does, a change of a somewhat different narrative order that we
might call character elaboration, referring to Pearson’s distinction
between elaborated and developed characters. This model of change
exploits the serial form to gradually reveal aspects of a character over
time so that these facets of the character feel new to the audience, even if
they are consistent and unchanging character attributes. Lost’s flashback
structure harnesses the power of character elaboration, as each episode
reveals elements of characters’ backstory that cast their on-island actions
in new light.17 While most series are less predicated on such structures,
many use intermittent flashbacks or moments of recounting to fill in
crucial backstory contexts to elaborate a character, a strategy seen in
programs ranging from Mad Men to How I Met Your Mother, Terriers
to Orange Is the New Black. Since we measure character change in large
part on the basis of our own allegiances toward characters, elaborating
more about a character’s backstory can make a static figure seem more
dynamic, so that our own shifting knowledge and attitudes create the
illusion of character change, much like the sun appearing to orbit our
seemingly fixed position on Earth.
This perspectival illusion of change is not unique to viewers, but it
is even more commonly seen within the relationships between charac-
ters themselves, as the most fluid dynamic of television characters is the
way they interact with one another, via romances, friendships, alliances,
conflicts, and betrayals. As discussed in chapter 7, Robert Allen argues
that daytime soap operas focus on the ripple effects of events within the
web of character relationships, observing how intracharacter reactions
and attitudes shift and resonate within the diegetic community and thus
color viewers’ own perspectives on characters.18 For prime time serials
with far fewer hours of story material, such character webs are usually
more compact and less elaborated, but they still form a key point of
 Characters | 137

engagement for viewers, helping to create the perception that charac-

ters are fluid and dynamic through the shifts in how other characters
relate to them. For instance, Lost’s Ben Linus is a highly complex and
engaging character, but he changes little throughout the series — he is
driven by a stable set of motivations for personal survival, paternal pro-
tection, and quest for validation, accompanied with a moral flexibility
and lack of loyalty to anyone but his daughter. He may not change much,
but our attitudes toward him do, as he becomes much more elaborated
through revelations about his backstory through flashbacks, as well as
the shifting ways that other characters regard and act toward him, mov-
ing from fear and hostility to pity and contempt. On most series, we
watch fairly stable characters interacting to form dynamic relationships,
with such interactions providing the surrogate dramatic hook for change
and development that might be lacking within the interior stability of
characters themselves.
Although wholesale shifts in allegiance are rare, there are instances
when we do see characters change; to describe such examples, we might
use a number of terms interchangeably, such as “development,” “growth,”
and “transformation,” but more specific vocabulary can help distinguish
between different types of character arcs. One common model of change
is character growth, evoking the process of maturation in which a char-
acter becomes more realized and fleshed out over time. Not surprisingly,
such arcs are most common with young characters; their physical and
emotional maturation fulfills a coming-of-age narrative. This frame-
work succeeds particularly well because viewers know from the start
that young characters are not fully formed, and we expect the ongoing
story to portray them transitioning out of youthful tumult into more
stable adulthood. Thus many complex programs center on young char-
acters, including Buffy, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, and Friday Night
Lights; highlight them within an ensemble, as on Six Feet Under, Game
of Thrones, and Arrested Development; or feature young secondary char-
acters that serve as a focal point for how they grow in relation to the
more static adult world, such as on The Sopranos and Mad Men. Even
when a character is not young, an arc can mimic a growth narrative by
presenting a major transition that resembles the traumatic development
of adolescence, such as Bubbles overcoming drug addition on The Wire,
the eponymous protagonist of Chuck adjusting to a world of espionage,
138 | Characters

or various figures on Heroes adapting to their new superpowers. In

almost all of these series, the characters who follow such growth arcs are
contrasted with stable adults whose personalities and actions are much
more static, highlighting how character change is far from universal.
Another frequent character arc might be considered character educa-
tion, in which a mature adult learns a key life lesson over the course of
a series and ends up a changed person. This type of education is com-
monly seen in the smaller scale of an individual episode, as many sit-
coms and dramas portray characters learning something about them-
selves and promising to change; however, those lessons rarely stick, as
the episodic nature of conventional prime time storytelling demands a
return to a narrative status quo each week. Lost’s Jack Shephard offers an
example of a long-arc character education, spending most of the series
struggling with his role as a reluctant leader, his need to fix situations,
and his inability to see beyond his own rationality. The series portrays his
gradual acceptance of irrational phenomena and coming to terms with
his lack of control, an arc that enables him to ultimately fulfill his destiny
to save the island and his friends. Similarly, The Wire’s Carver starts the
series as a mediocre cop who betrays his boss and takes dangerous risks
without thinking, but we see him learn from his mistakes and follow the
mentorship of Daniels and Colvin to become “good po-lice.” Typically
such educational arcs are contrasted with other characters who do not
learn those lessons, either because they lack the ability to change (as
with Carver’s partner, Herc) or because they already knew them (as with
Jack’s frequent adversary John Locke), highlighting thematic lessons as
well as aligning viewers with the figures that are most able to adapt and
adjust. Neither Jack nor Carver undergoes major moral shifts, as both
start as basically good if flawed people who must learn how to move
beyond their limits, and thus our allegiance does not waver significantly
throughout the series. This type of character education is fairly common
in long-form serials, as characters learn to accept their life’s situations,
come to terms with their pasts, or develop skills and abilities that change
how their behavior — but in all of these instances, such an arc leaves the
character’s core morality and our allegiances unchanged.
A more abrupt form of change might be called character overhaul, in
which someone undergoes a dramatic sudden shift, often tied to a super-
natural or fantastic situation that creates body switches or clones, but we
 Characters | 139

retain our serial memories of earlier events and relationships. Such char-
acter overhauls can be seen on a range of programs, including Locke on
Lost, Francie on Alias, both Starbuck and Sharon on Battlestar Galactica,
and Olivia on Fringe. Buffy and Angel employ such character overhauls
quite frequently, often just for a single episode in which a character is
possessed by a demon, switches bodies with someone else, confronts a
doppelganger from another dimension, has his or her memory erased,
is turned into a puppet, or is otherwise temporarily recharacterized.19
Some of these shifts are more long term, tying into larger arcs that make
overhauls part of the character’s core identity. Angel is a key example
here, as he is a reformed vampire with a soul, but occasionally on both
Buffy and Angel, he becomes Angelus, a soulless killing machine. How-
ever, for both viewers and other characters, the memories of Angel’s soul
persist, and we imbue Angelus’s actions with a level of moral complexity
and sympathy that the demonic vampire himself lacks. A more lasting
transformation occurs in Angel’s fifth season, as Fred is permanently
transformed into Illyria, an ancient demon who is bewildered by the
modern world; we experience this transformed character through the
sympathetic perspective of her boyfriend, Wesley, who tries to sustain
Fred’s memory by helping Illyria learn from humanity. Along with Wes-
ley, we feel the loss of Fred and see Illyria inflected by our shared serial
memories that she herself does not understand. Such fantasy conceits
allow extreme examples of character transformation that contrast most
normal characters’ stability, whether it is a temporary overhaul that
quickly returns to normal or a longer-term shift that highlights what
was lost through the disappearance of the character’s original stability.
Overhauls offer opportunities to play with recognition, teasing view-
ers and other characters about which version of a character is present.
Such mistaken identities are often integrated into key plot threads, so
that a character’s recharacterized version deceives other characters
within the story, as in Fringe’s so-called Fauxlivia version of Olivia, who
manipulates her colleagues across dimensions. In such plotlines, viewers
typically know about the deception, creating suspenseful anticipation
of when the truth will come out, as well as layers of dramatic irony in
which we know the true meanings of dialogue. More rare are instances
of overhauls in which the audience is unaware of the switch, only to
learn of it at a later point in the series to create a moment of dramatic
140 | Characters

surprise — Lost featured a significant instance of this, as the 2007-era on-

island scenes with John Locke featured in six episodes in the fifth season
turned out to be a doppelganger manifestation of the unnamed Man
in Black in Locke’s form, a transformation only revealed in the season
finale. This twist forced viewers to retroactively reinterpret the season’s
events (and inspired many to rewatch within this new context), positing
new interior states to explain the same external markers performed by
the newly identified character, known by fans as “Flocke” (fake Locke)
or “UnLocke.” Playful names such as Fauxlivia and Flocke speak to fans’
need to identify and recognize characters within viewer discourses, ori-
enting themselves within complex layers of characterization and mul-
tiple identities, as discussed in chapter 8, as well as indicating the ludic
fun that many fans have in playing such games of comprehension.
This need to recognize an overhauled character is a heightened
instance of what viewers of all cumulative narratives must constantly
do: locate a character in their experiential arc. Most programs simplify
this process by mirroring the chronology of characters and viewers, so
at any given time, a dedicated sequential viewer will be drawing on the
same set of shared memories and experiences as the characters them-
selves. Programs with convoluted chronologies complicate this process,
as we must locate characters within the serial time frame and calibrate
our knowledge and memories of their experiences, a process that is mir-
rored within the series of Doctor Who itself. As discussed in chapter 8,
the romantic arc between the dual time travelers River Song and the
Doctor features a tremendously twisty narrative chronology, with the
characters carrying their own orienting journals to sync up their expe-
riences whenever they meet. The two characters take time to recognize
each other and to figure out who they are at this time, as defined by their
shared or divergent experiences — and River Song herself expresses the
melancholic anticipation that the Doctor will eventually not recognize
her at all given their opposing temporal vectors (a moment that viewers
had previously witnessed), as well as insisting on “no spoilers” for events
in each character’s future. Of course, many television viewers are time
travelers themselves within serial storyworlds, consuming episodes out
of order or rewatching selected episodes, requiring viewers to similarly
sync up their memories or consult paratexts to orient themselves as to
which version of a character is appearing on screen.
 Characters | 141

My final category of character change is what we might traditionally

think about under such an umbrella: a character transformation of an
adult, complete with a gradual shift of morality, attitudes, and sense of
self that manifests itself in altered actions and long-term repercussions.
Pearson suggests that traditional norms of character change feature such
“life-transforming decisions,” a model that seems suited to the more
stand-alone narrative forms of film and literature than to the ongoing
serial model of television, but a few rare examples of television’s charac-
ter transformations do seem to fit this category. One of serial television’s
most effective character transformations is Wesley Wyndam-Pryce from
Buffy and Angel, who was introduced in the former’s third season as a
comedically pompous, cowardly, and bumbling Watcher ineffectually
trying to supervise Buffy. The following year, Wesley moved to spin-
off Angel and began to transform into a more competent and assured
“demon hunter” through his experiences and meaningful relationships
with coworkers and friends, eventually rising to a leadership role within
the team. Yet when he betrays his friends in a well-intentioned attempt
to spare Angel additional torment, he is outcast from the group and
becomes involved in a dark and manipulative sexual relationship with
the antagonistic lawyer Lilah. Wesley eventually returns to Angel’s side
but is clearly a changed man, with a darker and more cynical edge; he
confronts romantic situations and personal sacrifice quite differently in
the program’s final season through his relationship with Fred and the
trauma of Illyria’s emergence. Although he encounters numerous super-
natural phenomena in his journey, his transformation is not a paranor-
mal overhaul but a gradual human shift — at any point in his multisea-
son journey, Wesley feels like a robust and fully realized character, and it
is only through a broader view that we can see his arc as a rare example
of serialized character transformation.
By concluding this roundup of different models of character change
with transformation, I do not mean to suggest that television’s dominant
approach to characterization is flawed by overemphasizing stability or
less organic models of change except for a few notable exceptions. The
desire for stable characters with consistent traits and personalities is a
major draw for serial storytelling, as we want to feel connected to such
characters through parasocial relationships and might be quite disap-
pointed if they changed in ways that violate their initial connections and
142 | Characters

appeals — certainly a common complaint among television fans is when

a character’s actions seem unmotivated and inconsistent, a critique that
speaks to the need for character stability. Viewers invest themselves in
the shifting web of relationships between fairly stable characters; focus-
ing on character change does not belittle that dominant mode of tele-
vision storytelling in either episodic or serial forms. However, character
transformation remains an exceptional feature for most television, and
looking closely at how a series can accomplish such dramatic changes
highlights one of the more innovative possibilities of complex television.
No series embraces character transformation more fully than Breaking
Bad, so to explore its remarkable approach to television characteriza-
tion, we need to examine an important dramatic staple of many complex
series: the antihero.

Lengthy Interactions with Hideous Men:

The Serial Poetics of Television Antiheroes
In the collection of short stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,
David Foster Wallace creates a resonance between the two adjectives
in his title — if we are going to spend time in the company of hideous
men, it best be brief. Most television abides by this link; distasteful and
unpleasant characters are treated briefly, whether as unsympathetic
protagonists on an anthology program such as The Twilight Zone or as
single-episode villains featured in a procedural’s police investigation or
medical case. But as I argue throughout this book, serial television is
distinguished by the long time frames it creates, and thus any interaction
with hideous men found in a series’s regular cast will last quite a while.
One common trait shared by many complex television series is the nar-
rative prominence of unsympathetic, morally questionable, or villainous
figures, nearly always male (as discussed more shortly), a trend typi-
cally identified as the character type of the antihero — a term that may
not be applicable per traditional literary definitions but has become the
common cultural moniker for this style of characterization. The rise of
television’s antiheroes raises a key question: why would we want to sub-
ject ourselves to lengthy interactions with such hideous men?
Using Murray Smith’s vocabulary, an antihero is a character who is
our primary point of ongoing narrative alignment but whose behavior
 Characters | 143

and beliefs provoke ambiguous, conflicted, or negative moral allegiance.

Although often lumped into a singular character type, antiheroes can
come in a wide range of variants, from misanthropic, selfish, but ulti-
mately redeemable heroes, such as Mal on Firefly or Tommy on Rescue
Me, to arrogantly superior, destructively flawed, but moral figures, such
as Gregory House on House, M.D. and Jimmy McNulty on The Wire, to
outright amoral villains as protagonists, such as Tony Soprano and Dex-
ter Morgan. Some antiheroes stretch a rebellious member of a typically
upright organization to its moral limits, as with The Shield ’s portrayal
of rogue cops turned into corrupt murderers and thieves, while others
focus on a community of villains within an unlikely locale, as with Oz’s
prison or the Sons of Anarchy bike gang. Complex comedies have also
embraced antiheroic protagonists, as with Larry David’s misanthropic
self-portrait on Curb Your Enthusiasm or the ensemble of horrid losers
populating It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Television features a lon-
ger history of comedies centered on unlikable protagonists, including
Archie Bunker on All in the Family, Seinfeld ’s core ensemble, and the
main characters on The Larry Sanders Show, with even more promi-
nence on British comedies such as Fawlty Towers, Absolutely Fabulous,
Blackadder, and The Office. In nearly all of these comedic instances, we
are positioned as rooting against the unsympathetic heroes, watching
them fail for our amusement as well as laughing at their boundary-
pushing behavioral extremes. But how do we account for the pleasures
of watching a highly unpleasant protagonist at the center of a dramatic
narrative that asks us to truly care about his actions and potentially
encourages our allegiance?
Antihero narratives regularly invoke relative morality, in which an
ethically questionable character is juxtaposed with more explicitly vil-
lainous and unsympathetic characters to highlight the antihero’s more
redeeming qualities.20 On Mad Men, Don Draper’s misbehavior is often
seen as more redeemable and motivated than that of less sympathetic
characters Pete and Roger; on Dexter, the title character’s murderous
ways are always contrasted with another murderer who lacks a code and
targets innocents. Although The Wire is not directly focused on anti-
heroes, criminal characters such as Stringer Bell, Omar Little, and Bodie
Broadus are framed as more multifaceted and morally complex than
unredeemed villainous figures such as Marlo Stanfield, The Greek, and
144 | Characters

Maury Levy. Within The Sopranos, it would be hard to say that Tony’s
actions are truly more ethical than those of his mafia associates, but
through his therapy sessions and familial interactions, we come to know
his personal history that shaped his amorality, his moral quandaries,
and the anxiety attacks that derive from his internal conflicts. We may
not be certain that Tony is a morally superior person than more vil-
lainous associates Richie Aprile and Ralphie Cifaretto are, but due to
our alignment with Tony, we perceive him as relatively more worthy of
our allegiance than these more distanced and opaque characters. Even
more central characters Paulie and Christopher are viewed as less noble
than Tony, lacking leadership abilities, parental grounding, and an abil-
ity to overcome their respective flaws of superstitious paranoia and drug
addiction.21 With Tony Soprano and other leading antiheroes, we feel
more connected to characters with relative morality within that pro-
gram’s ethical universe, even if all of the characters would be reprehen-
sible in real life — in effect, these main characters are validated for being
less hideous than the alternatives presented in the series.22
As suggested by The Sopranos, alignment and elaboration are key
components of our allegiance to an antihero — the more we know about
a character through revelations of backstory, relationships, and interior
thoughts, the more likely that we will come to regard them as an ally
in our journey through the storyworld. This might be partly akin to a
fictionalized Stockholm Syndrome, in which time spent with hideous
characters engenders our sympathy as we start to see things from their
perspective. However, we are not being held captive by serial television,
so a series must justify why it deserves our attention week after week;
and compelling characters are an essential element of any program’s
appeal. Charisma helps us overlook the hideousness of many antiheroes,
creating a sense of charm and verve that makes the time spent with them
enjoyable, despite their moral shortcomings and unpleasant behaviors.
Charisma largely stems from an actor’s performance and physicality
but is also cued by how other characters treat the antiheroes, so that
on-screen relationships guide viewers how to feel toward a character.
Thus on The Sopranos, nearly every character respects, loves, desires, or
follows Tony — and those who do not rarely survive for long — despite
the fact that he consistently treats people quite poorly, whether they be
family members, colleagues, or friends. Likewise, everyone tells Don
 Characters | 145

Draper how good he is at his job, with most of Mad Men’s male charac-
ters aspiring to be him and many of the women desiring to be with him.
Both James Gandolfini and Jon Hamm are magnetic actors, with the for-
mer using his physical bulk to create a sense of menacing but approach-
able power, while Hamm is commonly regarded as one of the most
handsome actors in Hollywood, a physicality that certainly feeds into
Draper’s desirability. Additionally, both Tony and Don are positioned
as accomplished leaders in their respective careers, generating material
wealth and power that signals desirability and success within much of
American culture. Both characters exude charisma that inspires viewers
to want to spend time with them, despite their moral hideousness.
The draw of antiheroes does not simply override such hideousness
but partly stems from the fascination that it prompts — the immoral
actions of these characters create viewer intrigue, or what Smith calls
“the innate fascination of imagining experiences that we lack the oppor-
tunity or courage to experience in reality.”23 The fictional bubble allows
us to witness actions and traumas that we are hopefully safe from in real
life, and through aligned antiheroes, we are able to read their immoral
minds. Vermeule connects such fascination to a cognitive concept
called “Machiavellian intelligence,” in which success in a socially com-
plex environment depends on the ability to understand and manipulate
other people, a trait that is well served by interpersonal mind reading.
For Vermeule, much of our engagement with fiction stems from our
interest in reading the minds of Machiavellian characters who display
social intelligence, cunning, and a keen ability to manipulate others—we
learn from their adventures, helping to develop our own social intel-
ligence through the tales of fascinating characters. She posits the core
Machiavellian character as a “mastermind” who manipulates others
(for good or ill), excels at social problem solving, and is often found in
narratives with “high narrative reflexivity” and allusions to games and
puzzles, all traits common to complex television.24 Although most of
Vermeule’s literary examples are not antiheroes, we can see such traits
within many complex television series focusing on amoral figures, sug-
gesting that Machiavellian fascination is a key component driving the
antiheroic boom.
The lead character on Showtime’s Dexter offers an interesting exam-
ple whose hideousness as a serial killer may be unmatched in terms of
146 | Characters

reprehensible actions among television antiheroes; he is responsible for

murdering more than 130 people over eight seasons. However, Dexter
Morgan is clearly framed as a protagonist deserving sympathy and alle-
giance via a number of characterization strategies. Actor Michael C. Hall
brings an intertextual shine to his portrayal, as he was well-known as the
sympathetic, soft-spoken, and occasionally victimized David Fisher on
HBO’s Six Feet Under for the five years immediately before Dexter’s 2006
debut; given the two shows’ shared style as a dark premium-cable drama
with comedic undertones, Hall’s previous role helped make Dexter feel
more familiar, charismatic, and accessible to viewers of both series.
Viewers are highly aligned with Dexter, spending most of the narra-
tive attached to him and being granted exclusive access to his interiority
via voice-over narration, flashbacks, and subjective visuals. Such align-
ment facilitates mind reading as well as granting access to Dexter’s dryly
ironic sense of humor, highlighting our shared connection to the char-
acter. This attachment allows us to witness actions that no other char-
acters know about, providing shared secrets and knowledge of Dexter’s
personal ethical code to promote allegiance and even positioning view-
ers as passive witness to, and accomplices in, his vigilantism. The series
clearly embraces relative morality, as his victims are almost always more
monstrous than is Dexter himself, and we repeatedly hear his thoughts
about his adoptive father’s code of ethics and his need to target those
who deserve to be brought to justice to protect innocents. We admire his
Machiavellian prowess; his cunning and dedication to rational analysis
allow him to evade capture and discovery for many years. Thus even
though we see Dexter doing unspeakably hideous things, we are steeped
in his perspective, his rationales, and his backstory enough to under-
stand and even sympathize with his murderous and deceitful actions.
Dexter’s first season sets important groundwork for the character,
establishing clear alignment and allegiance for viewers to build on for
the rest of the series. The season gradually elaborates the character in
tight alignment, as we discover alongside Dexter himself the gruesome
childhood trauma that caused his mental illness: when three years old,
he witnessed his mother’s murder via chainsaw and was locked in a
room in a pool of her blood for two days. The harrowing flashbacks to
this event, which stand out as the most gruesome and troubling images
in a series full of them, provide a plausible explanation that such trauma
 Characters | 147

might cause a mental break and turn a boy into a serial killer, creating
sympathy for the character’s victimization in childhood that extends to
his older murderous version as trained and guided by his adoptive father.
As discussed more in chapter 5, this sympathy is contrasted to his previ-
ously unknown brother, whom Dexter discovers also experienced this
matricidal trauma and became a serial killer but lacks Dexter’s moral
code and familial grounding. The series accomplishes what would seem
to be an impossible task — making a serial killer into a sympathetic hero
whom we enjoy spending time with each week — but gets stuck in a nar-
rative bind: because Dexter must continue to kill to fulfill the program’s
concept but cannot deviate from his moral code to sustain viewers’ sym-
pathy, the character has little room for conflict, change, and develop-
ment. Nearly every season portrays Dexter fighting his instincts and
working to eliminate his murderous urges, but he must always embrace
who he is to exact justice, to save his family, or to preserve his own life,
leading to character stagnation and repetition and stretching emotional
credulity for a series that already lacks realism in much of its storytell-
ing. Typically a program can use the fluid dynamics of relationships to
offset static characters, but because Dexter’s concept is predicated on his
character posing behind a stable facade to all of his long-term friends
and family, they cannot have sincere relationships with him compared
with what we know of him as aligned viewers; instead, Dexter’s family
situation is the most fluid variable, as he marries, has a child, and then
copes with being a single parent, but none of these shifts have much pal-
pable impact on his core characterization. Without a sense that Dexter’s
character changes over time, either internally through transformation or
development or cued via the surrogate of externalized relationships, the
program’s concept wears thin after numerous seasons, only rekindling
interest in the seventh season when his sister, Deb, learns his secrets and
thus transforms their relationship and challenges his worldview.25
Dexter’s serialized challenge highlights one of the key issues with
antiheroes: what are our expectations for character change? Since anti-
heroes are predicated on a careful chemistry of alignment, relative
morality, fascination, and charisma, character change can upset that
balance, but overt stagnation becomes dull and troubling for the rela-
tionships portrayed on the series. Additionally, the narrative scenarios
of most antihero dramas seem pointed toward an ultimate reckoning,
148 | Characters

when characters will have to pay the price for their crimes and immoral
behaviors — but without clear character changes or development, cou-
pled with the endless delay of television’s infinite model (which Dexter
suffers from for much of its run), the final destination of an antihero
can set up mixed expectations. In chapter 10, I discuss the conclusion
of The Sopranos and the need for narrative closure and potential justice
for Tony, but we can see similar challenges raised for the arcs of Don
Draper and Dexter Morgan. Seinfeld ’s ending delivered a reckoning for
the lead characters, imprisoned for their insensitivity, but most viewers
felt like the punishment did not fit the crime, especially in the program’s
comedic context. Probably the most celebrated final fate for an antihero
is The Shield ’s, with Vic Mackey working the system to get immunity for
his crimes, but he ends up condemned to a desk job that feels like prison
given his action-oriented personality. Antihero conclusions are extraor-
dinarily difficult, as they must provide a motivated end to a complex
character arc, pay off serialized arcs that reward viewers’ dedication, and
offer (or actively refuse) a moral position toward the characters’ behav-
iors. And for many ongoing serials, the anticipated ending looms over a
series run, with viewers waiting to judge a character’s arc and morality
in lieu of where the story takes him.
As I have argued throughout this book, complex television acknowl-
edges its own role as fiction through reflexive storytelling strategies,
even when programs are highly dedicated to realism, as with The Wire.
This is an important element for antiheroes, as we must remember
that their hideous acts are fictional to allow us to suspend moral judg-
ments and rationalize their behaviors, which Margrethe Bruun Vaage
argues is essential to enable allegiance with characters doing horrible
actions.26 However, the serial model of television complicates the solid
line between fiction and reality, as parasocial engagement with tele-
vision characters allows serialized characters to persist beyond their
time on the screen. If you immerse yourself within the fictional lives
of Dexter Morgan or Tony Soprano, you are likely to think about their
behaviors even while you are not watching television, perhaps positing
how they would handle a situation in your own life or imagining what
they might be doing in between episodes. While we do maintain a clear
sense that these are fictional characters, parasocial engagement allows
hideous characters to occupy our thoughts and attention outside the
 Characters | 149

clear frame of televised entertainment, creating uncomfortable blurs in

which we might find ourselves imagining the actions and thoughts of a
psychopath within our daily lives. Although antiheroes do spark a dif-
ferent set of allegiances than typical serialized characters do — though I
am loathe to acknowledge that there are certainly viewers who imagine
Dexter as their “TV boyfriend” — there is no doubt that watching an
ongoing serial tightly focused on an antihero does entail entering into a
relationship with the character and allowing him into our daily routines
and thoughts, for better or worse. While this does not mean that view-
ers cannot distinguish between fiction and reality, it does highlight how
watching serial television blurs character boundaries and suggests that
any notion of a clear fictional frame might be a bit more muddy than we
might expect for other, more bounded media.
In my discussion of antiheroes, it should be clear that crafting charac-
ters who effectively balance alignment, allegiance, and stability is quite
difficult to pull off successfully throughout a serial, which leads to a
key question: why bother? Decades of dramatic television have avoided
such antiheroes at their centers, settling for charismatic villains we love
to hate to explore darker characters, such as Dallas’s J.R., Melrose Place’s
Amanda, or numerous figures on every daytime soap opera. Certainly
part of antiheroes’ appeal stems from the imitative logic of commer-
cial television — when The Sopranos became a surprise hit, it invited the
industry to ride on its success by mimicking its focus on a criminal pro-
tagonist, a trend that proved lucrative through commercial and critical
successes such as The Shield and Dexter but also certainly yielded less
successful imitators such as Kingpin and Brotherhood. This innovation
also signaled to television creators new possibilities for darker heroes,
storylines, and themes, capitalizing on the freer content standards avail-
able on cable to tell a broader range of stories than had been permis-
sible in television’s classic network era. Not surprisingly, such dark sto-
ries tend to get more critical accolades and awards for their innovative
approaches and subject matter, so there are incentives for creators to rise
to the challenge of creating compelling antiheroes that encourage view-
ers to stick around for such lengthy interactions.
As mentioned earlier, all of these antiheroes are hideous men, with
a distinct lack of female characters who invite us in to embrace their
troubling morality. Female characters who approach antiheroic status
150 | Characters

tend to be either sympathetic but prickly, as with Veronica Mars, Star-

buck on Battlestar Galactica, and Sarah on The Killing, or more comedic
approaches to morally questionable women, as with Sex and the City,
Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Enlightened. The few examples of a full-blown
female antihero I can name who might be dramatically equivalent to
Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Dexter Morgan, or Vic Mackey fall short of
those programs’ characterization. Patty Hewes on Damages seems simi-
larly ruthless and unsympathetic, but her protagonist function is more
doubtful, as she is contrasted with the more noble and sympathetic char-
acter of Ellen, making Patty more into a villain we love to hate, at least in
early seasons before her backstory is more fully explored. Revenge teased
with transforming its main protagonist from a vengeance-seeking hero
into a morally questionable antihero, but the series maintains Emily
Thorne’s moral superiority to her victims, backing away from murder
and other explicitly immoral acts. The Americans focuses on a married
couple of undercover Soviet spies, with Elizabeth presented as more
capable of violence and betrayal than is her husband, Phillip, but the
dual focus makes the antiheroic woman less central than on most male-
centered series.
Part of why antiheroes seem limited by gender stems from the cul-
tural norms of particular genres, with crime dramas that lend them-
selves to antiheroes tending toward masculine appeals, as discussed
in chapter 7. More centrally, there are broader cultural norms at play;
men are more likely to be respected and admired for ruthlessness, self-
promotion, and the pursuit of success at any cost, while women are still
constructed more as nurturing, selfless, and objects of action rather than
empowered agents themselves — or when women do embrace powerful
agency, they are often recast as the comedic “unruly woman.” This cul-
tural stereotype can yield a backlash against an aggressive, morally ques-
tionable female character, who is often viewed as more of an unsympa-
thetic “ball-busting bitch” than the charismatic rogue that typifies most
male antiheroes. But clearly there is room within television’s narrative
palette to expand the range of female antiheroes that might serve as the
focus of serial narratives.27
Throughout this discussion of antiheroes and character change, I
have avoided one example that might be the most salient and interest-
ing from contemporary television: Breaking Bad ’s Walter White. Thus
 Characters | 151

I conclude this chapter with a detailed look at Walt as a case study of

television character analysis, with the clear caveat that it is an excep-
tional and atypical example. Creator Vince Gilligan conceived the series
to be predicated on character change to a degree that he had rarely seen
on television, with the title indicating this transformative arc — “break-
ing bad” is an American southern idiom for someone losing his or her
moral compass. Gilligan regularly mentions that his goal was to take
Walter White on a journey “from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” referring to
cinematic character tropes of the model schoolteacher and gangster
kingpin, respectively, a transformation he elaborates in more depth in
comparison with The Sopranos:

Where you meet Tony Soprano, he was a guy born into a world of
crime. . . . I like the idea of approaching a crime show from my point of
view. . . . I’m just a big weeny; there’s no way that I’d break the law — not
because I’m particularly moral but because I’d be scared of the conse-
quences. And I like the idea of approaching a bad-guy character from a
starting point of zero, from never having jaywalked or littered to doing
some of the crazy shit Walter White does. . . . What would I do if I sud-
denly decided to become a criminal? How would I approach it? The
process . . . was a big part of what appealed to me, delineating the process
of transformation, of going from a normal schlub to a bad guy and ulti-
mately to a kingpin.28

As Gilligan makes clear, the program starts with Walt as an everyman

“schlub,” a high school chemistry teacher who is clearly aligned with
the audience and encouraging our allegiance; by the final season, Walt
is a monstrous villain, murdering rivals, poisoning an innocent child
for a risky, selfish scheme, and deceitfully manipulating those whom he
claims to love. How did this epic moral transformation work?
To understand Walter White, we must start at Breaking Bad ’s pilot —
or even earlier, as Breaking Bad ’s debut in January 2008 was linked to
three key intertexts. As the cable channel AMC’s second foray into origi-
nal dramatic programming, Mad Men loomed large, having debuted six
months before Breaking Bad and establishing AMC as a legitimate venue
for ambitious, antiheroic serialized drama and thus encouraging viewers
and critics to take the new series seriously. At the level of plot, Breaking
152 | Characters

Bad was initially framed as a male version of Weeds, with shared focus
on a “respectable” middle-class parent entering into the illegal drug
business in a moment of crisis; this comparison helped highlight Break-
ing Bad ’s dramatic darkness and heavy serialization in contrast to the
more playful comic (and female-centered) tone of Weeds. The third and
most important intertext in terms of characterization was Malcolm in
the Middle, the landmark single-camera sitcom that pioneered many
techniques of complex comedic television in the early 2000s, featuring
Bryan Cranston as the befuddled man-child father Hal for seven sea-
sons. Breaking Bad was initially known as “that show where Malcolm’s
dad gets cancer and becomes a drug dealer,” an important framework
for how Walter White was perceived: Cranston’s star persona as an
affable comedic actor (on both Malcolm and a recurring role on Sein-
feld) inflected his portrayal of Walt, whose character was vastly different
from Hal but drew on Cranston’s reservoir of goodwill and likability.
Thus Breaking Bad emerged into a context where viewers were poised to
embrace Walt as a sympathetic lead character, fulfilling Gilligan’s con-
ception of an everyday schlub.
Indeed the pilot’s opening moments evoke the Malcolm intertext,
as we first see Walt recklessly driving an RV through the desert, wear-
ing nothing but “tighty whitey” underpants and a gas mask. It is not
hard to imagine Hal in such a manic situation, albeit without the dead
body in the back of the van, as Cranston was hailed on Malcolm for
his outlandish physicality and no-shame style of physical comedy —
Malcolm’s writers used to play a game called “what won’t Bryan do?”
as they created outlandish and humiliating stunts for which the actor
always was game.29 The underwear is an unintended intertextual con-
nection that Cranston initially resisted, pushing back against Gilligan’s
scripted call for Walt to wear the same style of underwear as Hal. After
further consideration, the actor embraced how the wardrobe choice
says something different about each character: for Hal, it indicates his
boyish immaturity, as “he always wore them and it never occurred to
him to wear anything else,” while Walt wears them as a sign of “stunted
growth” and a depressive lack of caring about himself.30 For viewers who
knew Cranston from Malcolm, this opening moment taps into positive
sentiments toward Hal and extends them to this still-unknown figure
of Walter White. Beyond this shared taste in undergarments, the two
 Characters | 153

characters are both motivated largely by fear, which Cranston suggests

manifests itself differently: an outlandish cartoonish cowardice in Hal
and a closed-down emotional and physical absence for Walt.31
We get our first indication that Walt is not Hal when we first see
Cranston’s face upon removing the gas mask, as Walt has what the actor
calls “an impotent mustache” that Hal never featured. Physical appear-
ance is crucial to creating characters, and Cranston, as a producer as
well as a star (as well as an occasional director starting in the second sea-
son), had an active hand in creating Walt’s look: “I told Vince, he should
be overweight, he should wear glasses, he should have a mustache that
makes people go, ‘Why bother?’ His hair should be undefined; he always
needs a trim. He doesn’t care. His clothes should blend in with the wall,
no color in his skin. As he changes, color palettes will change, his atti-
tude, everything.”32 These exterior traits clearly reflect on Walt’s internal
psyche, and Cranston has noted that physicality is crucial to his perfor-
mance, both in how Walt feels and in how that interiority is conveyed
to the audience. As the series progresses, Walt’s changes are external-
ized through his appearance, as the impotent mustache and undefined
haircut shift to a shaved head with a goatee, a look that Cranston calls
“badass, . . . the most intimidating look there can be,” both signaling his
changing psychology and allowing Walt to help rationalize his behav-
ior because he “doesn’t recognize the man in the mirror.”33 Similarly,
Walt adopts a black porkpie hat to wear in his persona of “Heisenberg”
within the drug business, an iconic marker that transforms both our
perception of the character and his interior sense of self. By the second
season, it is hard to imagine a viewer looking at Cranston and thinking
about Malcolm’s Hal, but at the start of Walt’s journey, that association
was crucial to forge allegiance and a positive emotional connection with
the character.
Walter White does not start as a villainous antihero, as his initial
characterization seems driven less by questionable morality than by a
desperate situation — he makes a series of bad choices that lead to his
eventual moral dissolution, but he starts by evoking pathetic pity rather
than the charismatic confidence of most other antiheroes. As we learn
about his cancer, his unfulfilling career, and his dire financial situation,
we are fully attached to the character, sharing knowledge that he keeps
secret from other characters, thus increasing our alignment. The first
154 | Characters

lines of dialogue we hear from Walt are his confessional thoughts, even
though the series never uses voice-over narration, as he videotapes a
message he presumes to be his dying words to his wife and son. In a
now-conventional format discussed in the introduction and chapter 2
regarding Alias, Revenge, and Veronica Mars, this pilot opens with an in
medias res scene that invites us to wonder how he came to this desper-
ate moment — on Breaking Bad, this curiosity is cued by Walt telling the
video camera as the surrogate for his son, “There are going to be some
things that you’re going to learn about me in the coming days.” Impor-
tantly, the video message clearly establishes Walt’s character constella-
tion, as he assures his family that all of his mysterious and seemingly
suspicious actions were done for them. This opening scene, in which
Walt is the only character present (aside from an unconscious Jesse),
establishes that the series will be a highly aligned character study and
that it will pivot on the enigma of how this man, so clearly uncomfort-
able holding a gun, ended up in such a dire situation — and, given the
show’s serial nature, what complications will follow from these events.
As suggested earlier, the relative morality of characters is important
in establishing allegiance, and even though Walt does not begin as an
amoral antihero, he is still partially redeemed in comparison to others,
especially his bombastic, blowhard brother-in-law, Hank (who is later
revealed to be far more conflicted and less confident than he seems),
his seemingly shallow and materialistic sister-in-law, Marie (who we
will learn is both a kleptomaniac and stronger than she lets on), and
the brash young drug dealer Jesse who introduces him to his life of
crime (whose moral journey will be almost as complex as Walt’s). Com-
pared to these strong personalities, Walt shrinks into the background
and seems too inconsequential to be anything but morally sound. His
wife, Skyler, and son, Walt Jr., are both more sympathetic, though nei-
ther character has the degree of depth and nuance that Walt does, at
least for the initial two seasons. Walt garners our sympathies if not our
admiration, as he is clearly pitiable in a hopeless situation that begs the
question, “what would you do?” While his desperation-driven decision
to cook crystal meth to secure a nest egg for his family is not posited
as admirable, it is reasonable given the dire circumstances — in fact,
“reasonability” is a crucial facet of Walt’s decision-making process, as
Breaking Bad presents Walt as a master rationalizer for his increasingly
 Characters | 155

hideous actions. Throughout the series, we watch Walt convince himself

that various immoral decisions are the right thing to do, given a lack of
alternatives, leading to a descent into monstrous behavior that is always
presented as reasonable within Walt’s own self-justification and immedi-
ate context.
By the time Walter White becomes a full-fledged antihero, a hideous
man whose actions bring suffering on his family and colleagues, whom
he claims to be protecting, it is clear that he is of a different ilk than other
television antiheroes. Unlike Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey, he is not a
charismatic leader with loyal followers or devoted family members — for
most of the series, the only characters who seem to like or respect him
are family members who know nothing of his secret criminal life, and
thus such feelings do not extend to viewers, who know the full depths of
his moral decline. He lacks “friends” in any conventional sense, with his
closest confidant being Jesse, who grows to regard him with contempt,
working with him only when “Mr. White” (as Jesse calls him) manipu-
lates him into an alliance or when Jesse’s own insecurities drive him to
seek for the security of a father figure. Walt’s sometimes estranged wife,
Skyler, only accepts him back into a tenuous reconciliation to maximize
her own safety, but only before she knows of the extent of his crimes
or when he bullies her into submission. And unlike nearly every other
antihero, there are no romantic plotlines that frame Walt as an object of
sexual desire — his sex life with Skyler perks up when he discovers his
dark side in the first season, culminating in an aggressive nonconsen-
sual encounter in their kitchen that Skyler must defensively cease once
she gets over her shock at his behavior. But otherwise Walt is sexually
neutered for most of the series and even attempts a ludicrously inap-
propriate advance toward his high school supervisor, Carmen, resulting
in his being fired. He creates the artifice of a powerful and respected
villain under the Heisenberg moniker emblematically tied to the black
hat, with a feared street reputation, his demand that adversaries say his
name, and even a narcocorrido ballad celebrating his mythic exploits,
but long-term viewers recognize Heisenberg as a shallow put-on rather
than an authentically awe-inspiring figure. While other antiheroes gain
our allegiance through the attitudes of other characters, Walt might be
the least respected or admired ongoing character on the series, despite
our clear alignment toward him.
156 | Characters

Instead of relationships cuing our allegiance to Walt or numerous

flashbacks to his originating backstory, we instead have our own memo-
ries of who Walt used to be, as long-term viewers can recall him as being
decent and ethical, if boring and depressed. Our serial memories help
sustain lingering allegiance, despite his irredeemable acts along the way.
Such memories help us understand the characters in micromoments as
well, given that Breaking Bad features many scenes with minimal dia-
logue that invite us to think along with the characters. Through a long-
term investment in a series, viewers accrue knowledge and experiences
about characters that allows us to mind read our own version of their
internal monologues. For instance, in the opening two-minute scene
from the fourth-season episode “Open House,” nothing really happens:
Walter White comes to work in the meth lab, drinks coffee, notices the
newly installed surveillance camera, and gives it an obscene gesture,
with the only dialogue a muttering “Son of a . . .” And yet for serial view-
ers sharing Walt’s memories from more than 30 previous episodes, we
can read Cranston’s subtle cues and infer Walt’s raging interior drama
that contradicts the lack of exterior action — we infer his contempt
toward the workaday life he tried to escape via the drug game, evoking
his feelings toward his old car-wash job from the pilot. His one moment
of pleasure comes while drinking coffee made in an elaborate contrap-
tion, as he fondly remembers its quirky architect, former coworker Gale.
This joy turns to grief as he thinks about Gale’s recent death, then to
guilt when he remembers that he is directly responsible for ordering
Gale’s murder. In typical Walt fashion, guilt turns to indignant anger,
as he rationalizes his own acts and convinces himself that he is actually
the victim — an anger confirmed and further stoked by discovering the
camera. The scene concludes with Walt channeling his anger and sense
of outraged victimization into an impotent attempt to fight back, repre-
sented by the obscene yet ineffectual gesture and reminiscent of many
other times he has raged against people purporting to be his superiors.
While different viewers might construct their own particular accounts
of Walt’s interior emotional state, through the power of serial memory
we can overcome television’s limited access to character interiority and
provide a subjective account of tightly aligned characters.
As Walt shifts from his pitiable but sympathetic initial status through
his moral journey, we are gradually confronted with increasingly
 Characters | 157

escalating actions that challenge our character allegiance, a process

that can be benchmarked by those who die or are injured at his hands.
In the pilot, he concocts a gas explosion in the RV to escape a direct
threat, killing Emilio and incapacitating Krazy-8, an action of unthink-
ing self-defense that seems completely justified in the moment. Walt
and Jesse take Krazy-8 hostage and rationalize that they must murder
him to protect themselves from his vengeance or being caught, but Walt
is unable to commit murder until Krazy-8 poses an immediate physical
threat, again justifying the act as self-defense. Later in the first season,
Walt shaves his head and adopts the pseudonym Heisenberg to take on
a more intimidating facade of a drug criminal, confronting the kingpin
Tuco and his henchman by triggering a seemingly nonfatal explosion in
his office — this is Walt’s first act of planned violent aggression, but since
it is aimed at characters who are clearly more dangerous and immoral
than he is, we are still clearly allied with Walt. Indeed, the Heisenberg
persona and visual style is clearly framed as an enjoyable “badass” facet
of Walt’s character, inviting us to enjoy his violent acts against more hid-
eous criminals in a fashion common to other morally ambiguous crime
series such as The Shield and Justified. Although some of Walt’s actions
are violent and his contributions to the drug epidemic are a negative
social force, for the most part Breaking Bad ’s first two seasons situate us
on Walt’s side against less moral characters.
The end of the second season takes a major step toward Walt’s
broader moral dissolution. Walt is investing more of his emotions and
energies into his secret drug career and personal relationship with his
protégé Jesse than into his own family, including missing his daugh-
ter’s birth to make a drug delivery, but he reaches an impasse with Jesse,
who has sunk deeper into his drug habit along with his girlfriend, Jane.
When finding Jane choking on her own vomit in a heroin-induced stu-
por, Walt chooses to let her suffocate in order to reclaim Jesse and avoid
Jane’s blackmail — we watch him wordlessly rationalize this passive act
of murder. As discussed more in chapter 6, this moment plunges us into
Walt’s interiority by triggering serialized memory: we reconstruct Walt’s
interior thought processes via our shared experiences of his life that we
have witnessed over the previous two seasons. We know his talent for
rationalization and his need to prioritize his own well-being over that of
others, as well as his paternal connection to Jesse, and thus can imagine
158 | Characters

his internal monologue as he stops himself from saving Jane’s life and
watches her die to protect himself and his surrogate son. Although at
this moment it is unlikely that most viewers feel that Jane deserves to
die the same way that they may have felt toward Krazy-8, Walt’s ratio-
nalization makes sense as an act of passive cruelty toward a character
we have less allegiance toward and as an attempt to rescue Jesse, whom
we have become more allied with through the series. However, this
moment indicates some vital character change, as the Walt whom we
met in the pilot certainly would have saved Jane had he found himself
in the same situation.
Walt and Jesse’s relationship is crucial to Breaking Bad ’s shift in char-
acter morality. Throughout the first season, Walt is clearly more admi-
rable, driven to crime out of desperation and a sense of familial obliga-
tion and displaying an impressive mastery of chemistry that allows him
to thrive in this new criminal world, while Jesse is an avid if not addicted
drug user, bright but uneducated, and seemingly only motivated out
of selfishness, greed, and hedonism. We are more aligned and allied
with Walt, although learning more about Jesse’s family background
and undernourished artistic talent makes him more sympathetic and
understandable in his actions. Season 2’s “Peekaboo” is a key episode for
increasing our connection to Jesse, as we follow him into a dangerous
situation in which he both acts to save a young boy and refuses to mur-
der the boy’s junky parents, revealing a moral center that grows stronger
and more admirable as Walt’s dissolves. The end of season 2 troubles
our allegiances, with Jesse being less aligned but more admirable despite
his addiction, while Walt’s selfishness and deceit becomes less justifiable
in contrast.
By season 3, the duo shifts roles in terms of allegiance: armed with
the secret of Jane’s preventable death, most viewers root for Jesse’s even-
tual salvation and hope he can escape from Walt’s dark influence. Jesse
comes away from Jane’s death blaming himself and, as he says in the
episode “No Mas,” accepting who he is as “the bad guy,” an identity that
viewers regard as undeserved and avoidable. Meanwhile, Walt runs from
his own moral culpability, as he renounces his criminal career to sal-
vage his crumbled marriage and restore his normal life. But Breaking
Bad puts viewers in an uncomfortable situation — the moral version of
Walter White is an unpleasant, boring, and pitiable character whom we
 Characters | 159

feel little desire to spend time with over the course of a series, while the
amoral, “bad” version is much more vibrant, Machiavellian, and engag-
ing as an antihero. The series pushes Walt further and further across the
moral line, making us root for him to do hideous things for our enter-
tainment, while calling attention to his hideousness in a way that refuses
to glorify violence or celebrate depravity. The series poses and reasserts
the questions of how far is too far for this man and, given his actions,
what price should be paid and how should we regard him. Thus we root
for him to get back to cooking meth, even though we know there will be
unforgivable consequences from that decision and must reconcile our
own culpability in watching his moral decline. At the end of the third
season, he is even deeper in the drug game, easily killing two henchmen
who threaten Jesse and plotting to kill Gale to protect himself— his most
brutal act is enlisting Jesse to shoot Gale, as discussed more in chapter 3,
corrupting Jesse further by pushing him into being a murderer and thus
generating more viewer antipathy for Walt through the moral rebalanc-
ing of the two characters. Walt’s turn toward the monstrous reaches far
beyond the point of no return by the end of season 4, when he sends his
innocent neighbor into his house to root out an ambush from murder-
ous thugs and poisons a child to manipulate Jesse back to his side, not
to mention directly causing the deaths of five drug criminals and setting
off a bomb in a nursing home.
For the first half of season 5, Walt tries to become a full-time Heisen-
berg supervillain in the “empire business,” alienating all of his family
and Jesse in the process. He finally triumphs over all adversaries but
finds the lack of recognition and hard work empty despite the nearly
infinite monetary rewards; thus he retires from the meth business and
attempts to rededicate himself to his family. Yet the monsters he has
unleashed, from his alliance with the dual evils of a global corporation
and a band of neo-Nazi enforcers, will not remain dormant, nor will his
brother-in-law Hank, who discovers Walt’s secret life. The final string of
episodes presents an elongated moral reckoning that stems from Walt’s
hubris in thinking that he could transcend the drug game that provided
his wealth, with a string of deaths, exiles, bankruptcies, and betrayals.
Walt’s most brutal penance is in the series finale, as he finally admits —
to Skyler, to us, and to himself — that his rationalizations were ultimately
hollow: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was alive.” He
160 | Characters

finally owns up to his own villainy and antiheroic status, but only as he
stands as a dying shell of the kingpin he had become, knowing that his
pride and selfishness has led him to his death and condemned his family
to pay for his sins.
The complexity of Walter White’s characterization stems in large part
from the disjunctions between how we see his actions and how he sees
himself. The points where those two perspectives merge is in the epi-
sodes whose plots follow a pattern of “trap and escape” — Walt and Jesse
find themselves in a seemingly inescapable situation, and we watch how
they manage to work free in slow-burning detail.34 As Vermeule sug-
gests, “Machiavellian narratives drop their characters into the middle
of the march and watch them try to wriggle out.”35 From the beginning
of the series, Walt’s genius is decidedly not in the realm of the social, as
his scientific knowledge allows him to escape traps often set by his own
inability to play the human side of the drug game, but his Machiavellian
intelligence gradually grows as he becomes more immersed in crimi-
nality. Thus in season 2’s “Four Days Out,” Walt wriggles out of being
trapped in the desert using his scientific expertise to create a battery,
but by season 3’s “Sunset,” he uses his social intelligence to escape the
RV by ruthlessly tricking Hank into believing that Marie has been in a
car accident. In these moments when Walt asserts his abilities, we enjoy
marveling at his antiheroic exploits, even when it means morally ques-
tionable behavior such as cruelly manipulating Hank, which also results
in a devastating assault on Jesse in retribution.
More often, Breaking Bad presents a gap between how Walt sees
himself and how we regard him and his actions, as the character is a
master rationalizer of his own decisions, able to convince himself that
his immoral choices are either for the greater good of his family or not
decisions at all given the circumstances. Even though he frequently
attempts to withdraw from the drug world, he is repeatedly pulled back
in because of the thrill and ego boost that it provides — between his
increased sex drive in the first season to moments when he confronts
other drug manufacturers with competitive vigor, it is clear that Walt’s
criminal acts have awakened a vibrancy within him that contrasts with
our initial image of him with his impotent mustache, and this ego rush
drives him more than his rationalized justifications do. Walt’s vigor
and antiheroic sense of self is tied to his professional achievements, as
 Characters | 161

his initial depression and passivity stems from his neutered career as a
chemist despite his talents, while his renewed vigor stems from becom-
ing known as the region’s preeminent meth manufacturer, a professional
accomplishment that he painfully must keep hidden from his loved ones
and former colleagues until the series ends.
However, Walt also sees himself as more of an aggressive leader than
he really is, as typified by his conversation with Skyler in season 4’s
“Cornered.” When Skyler expresses concern for his safety after hearing
about Gale’s murder, saying, “You are not some hardened criminal, Walt.
You are in over your head,” Walt responds with prideful indignation that
shows her Heisenberg for the first time: “You clearly don’t know who
you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am
the danger! A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of
me? No. I am the one who knocks!” While there is little doubt that Walt
wants to believe in his own power, his assertions are contradicted by
our serial memories of Walt being previously thwarted in his repeated
attempts to kill Gus and manipulate Mike and Jesse, while he felt the
need to sow doubts in Hank’s mind to avoid Gale getting credit for Walt’s
meth-making prowess. Additionally, he was not the “one who knocked”
on Gale’s door, but rather he forced Jesse to do it on his behalf. Walt’s
assertions of Machiavellian prowess are often hollow attempts to puff
himself up rather than insights into his own antiheroic capabilities, but
these contradictions create layers of interpretive engagement for viewers
to exert our own social intelligence, rooting out dimensions of deception
and self-revelation as we construct these complex characters through
our narrative engagements.
After Walt’s defiant proclamation to Skyler, he walks away, with his
lips moving as if he has more to say, but turns into the bathroom, a
strikingly ambiguous moment. The richness of Cranston’s performance
opens up a wide range of different thoughts that we imagine he might
be suppressing: he might want to apologize to Skyler for berating her,
or he yearns to boast more of the dangerous havoc he has caused but
stops to protect her, or he might be trying to convince himself that he is
indeed the one who knocks, not the target of his adversaries’ danger. All
of these are potential outcomes of reading Walt’s mind, but the program
never tells us precisely what he is thinking, allowing for ludic hypoth-
esizing across serialized gaps in the narrative. Such interplay between
162 | Characters

tight alignment and limited interior access into a highly layered and self-
deluded character is one of the key pleasures of Walt as a transforming
antihero, with his fascinating psychology keeping us attuned and inter-
ested in him, even as he grows more hideous.
The power of Breaking Bad ’s antiheroic characterization is that it is
predicated on charting changes, rather than inviting us to wonder what
makes an already hideous man such as Tony Soprano tick. By the end
of Breaking Bad ’s fourth season, we have witnessed the remarkable
transition of Walt from everyman schlub to amoral criminal kingpin, a
gradual enough shift that we have still maintained a degree of allegiance
to him — in part because we have invested so much time in following
his exploits, an instance of “sunken costs” of attention and engagement.
The series was premised on Walt’s need to break the law to provide for
his family, but as it progressed, his deeper goals have been revealed: to
be seen, known, and appreciated for his talents and unwilling to accept
outside help or to accept the monetary spoils of crime without the rec-
ognition of his chemical mastery. The character is liberated as he grows
less fearful and timid, willing to stand up for himself in moments of
danger and then creating moments of danger to assert his own power
and importance. The series makes this transformation work through
its gradual progression, as each step along the way feels organic and
consistent to the character, to our accrued experiences with him, and
to the interiority we infer about his character. As discussed more in
chapter 7, Walter White’s characterization presents a critical vision of
ineffectual masculinity striving to find redemption in a changing world
yet choosing the path that leads to the dismantling of the very things
he claims to be trying to protect: his family and sense of self.36 Break-
ing Bad is a highly moral tale, in which actions have consequences, and
thus we expect it is unlikely that Walt emerges from this story as a vic-
torious hero — even though he proclaims “I won” when he finally kills
Gus, we recognize that the cost of that victory is another part of his
dwindling morality.
Breaking Bad ’s character transformation invites a “what if?” experi-
ment for viewers: would you start watching a new series focused on Wal-
ter White that begins with him at his antiheroic peak at the end of the
fourth season? Personally, I doubt I would get invested in the story of
a pathetic and uncharismatic man who poisons a child to manipulate
 Characters | 163

other criminals without any other clear protagonists with whom to align
myself. Yet having watched from the beginning, I find myself connected
to Walt to the point of having used the iconic Heisenberg line drawing as
my Twitter avatar, an emblem of self-identification as a fan of this trans-
formed monster. The pleasures of Breaking Bad are in the character’s
journey; we find ourselves uncomfortably in a situation that we would
rather not be in, aligned to an immoral criminal whom we remember as
having once been decent and sympathetic. And thus I find myself lov-
ing Walter White, not as a person (even though I do personify him and
grant him a more robust interiority than nearly any other fictional char-
acter I can think of) but as a character — I am endlessly fascinated by his
behavior, his arc, and his enactment by Cranston and the program’s pro-
duction team. Just as complex television plots encourage the operational
aesthetic in observing the storytelling machinery in action, Walt’s com-
plex characterization invites me to examine what makes him tick, how
he is put together, and where he might be going, while at the same time
emotionally sweeping me up into his life and string of questionable deci-
sions. We might think of this engagement as operational allegiance — as
viewers, we are engaged with the character’s construction, attuned to
how the performance is presented, fascinated by reading the mind of the
inferred author, and rooting for Walt’s triumph in storytelling, if not his
actual triumph within the story. Although his moral transformation is
unique within serial television, understanding the unusual case of Wal-
ter White helps explain the contradictory appeal of serial antiheroes and
our willingness to spend lengthy times with such hideous men.
5

Comprehension

Viewers engage with a television series through a wide range of prac-

tices, as detailed throughout this book. But at the most basic level, nearly
all viewing starts with the core act of comprehension, making sense of
what is happening within a episode. This might seem obvious, and cer-
tainly much of television storytelling aims to make comprehension easy,
invisible, and automatic. However, complex television has increased
the medium’s tolerance for viewers to be confused, encouraging them
to pay attention and put the pieces together themselves to comprehend
the narrative. While television rarely features an avant-garde level of
abstraction or ambiguity, contemporary programming has embraced a
degree of planned confusion. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner cred-
its The Sopranos for demonstrating that a serial can leave plot points,
characters, and relationships unstated, suggesting, “Now it’s the view-
ers’ problem if they don’t know what’s going on. And all of a sudden, a
world has opened up to us as writers.”1 This chapter explores how view-
ers make sense of complex serial television.
My approach to comprehension is based on the cognitive poetic
model developed primarily through David Bordwell’s work on film nar-
ration.2 This approach assumes that viewers actively construct story-
worlds in their minds, a process best understood through the tools of
cognitive psychology. Since I claim no psychological expertise, I primar-
ily build on how Bordwell and other humanists have adapted psycho-
logical principles to poetic analysis, rather than engage directly with the
psychological literature.3 I avoid too many technical terms about cogni-
tion or mental processes, choosing instead to explore viewing practices
on their own terms as inspired by cognitive poetic theory. The applica-
tion of cognitive science to television studies is still quite rare outside
the paradigm of media effects research; this chapter is a brief foray into
what may hopefully evolve into a subfield exploring how cognitive poet-
ics might help us understand the cultural facets of television more fully.4

164
 Comprehension | 165

If this cognitive approach to comprehension seeks to understand how

viewers make sense of television, we need to be careful about what we
mean by “viewer” here. Bordwell makes it clear that the viewer or spec-
tator he discusses is neither an empirical person nor an ideal reader best
situated to understand a text but rather a “hypothetical entity executing
the operations relevant to constructing a story out of the film’s represen-
tation” —in other words, the generalized receiver of a film who processes
its formal systems and cues to create a narrative within his or her mind.5
When Bordwell charts out this viewer’s activity, he strives to understand
the underlying universals that any competent viewer would likely carry
out, rather than considering the contextually shaped variances that real
viewers bring to their experiences. Contexts can matter greatly for the
process of cinematic comprehension, but we can assume that most view-
ers watch a typical nonserial feature film within some narrow conven-
tional parameters, including focused attention and seamless chronology
in one sitting. While certainly there are many different ways one can
watch a film — even more so today than in the 1980s, when Bordwell
developed his theories — his approach outlines an assumed norm for
how films are viewed and arguably one that most filmmakers have in
mind when crafting the work, thus making it a useful project to establish
an underlying baseline of viewing cognition.
But serial television lacks such an assumed viewing norm, especially
in today’s media environment. As discussed in chapter 1, industry lore
has long asserted that fans only watch one-third of new episodes, sug-
gesting that creators must write for a spectrum of potential viewers,
ranging from novices approaching any episode as the first of the series
that they have seen to erratic viewers who may have seen any combina-
tion of the episodes up to that point, to comprehensive viewers who have
seen every previous entry, potentially multiple times. Additionally, the
rise of DVDs, DVRs, streaming, and downloading has shifted television
from the schedule-dominated model of broadcasting to alternative
consumption patterns in which viewers binge on series, catch up from
earlier seasons after starting midway through, and frequently rewatch
episodes; such varying screen-time patterns may or may not include
breaks for advertising or between episodes — as I argue throughout this
book, seriality is constituted by the gaps between installments, and such
gaps can be experienced or overridden in various ways. As the Internet
166 | Comprehension

has emerged as an active place for discourse about television, paratex-

tual frames have become more important, meaning that a viewer might
be frequenting discussion sites, fan wikis, or Twitter conversations or
searching for spoilers in moments before, during, and after viewing, all
of which substantially change the experiences of narrative comprehen-
sion. So which of these models of television viewing should we assume
to be the baseline norm? I contend there is no single norm of viewing,
but instead of ignoring these varieties of viewer practice, I incorporate
the role of such contexts in the viewing process, using a contextual cog-
nitive poetics to explore how programs cue our understanding and how
varying viewing practices help shape serial television comprehension in
a manner applicable to novice, erratic, and comprehensive viewers.
A cognitive poetics of serial television could cover a wide array of
issues. Serial television prompts viewers to create cognitive maps of
storyworlds, suggesting the importance of spatial orientation and visual
construction in the viewing process. The question of emotional response
is an important topic within cognitive studies of fictional forms, and
certainly the ongoing immersion within serialized stories prompts dis-
tinct types of affect and engagement. Viewer attention is a vital variable
in moving-image media, so we might explore how programs help cue
our attention through visual, aural, and temporal strategies for story-
telling impact. All of these issues and others are worth considering, and
I hope future cognitive poetic studies of television might take up these
questions. But this chapter concentrates on viewers’ knowledge in the
process of narrative comprehension — stories are systems of information
management, with revelations, enigmas, and ambiguities mobilized for
emotional impact. Focusing on how serial television handles narrative
information and manages viewers’ knowledge can help us better under-
stand some of the chief appeals of complex television.

Serial Systems of Knowledge

There are many types of narrative information and knowledge that
might be conveyed by a television series. As discussed in chapter 4, we
learn about characters’ backstories, relationships, interior motivations,
and beliefs throughout a series. We gather information about the story-
world’s geography, history, temporality, and particular norms and rules,
 Comprehension | 167

especially in genres with somewhat unreal universes, such as science

fiction and fantasy. We also gain operational knowledge, as we learn the
intrinsic storytelling norms of a series and extrinsic information about
the genre, creative team, network, or codes of the television medium
itself — the conventions catalogued by fans at the TV Tropes wiki speak
to the huge amount of information about how stories are told that might
be activated within the process of narrative comprehension. And at the
most basic level, we learn about narrative events, answering the essential
question of “what happened?”
Consuming a narrative requires constant information management,
as we must keep track of what we know and what knowledge gaps might
be filled throughout the series, a process that can be quite engaging
and pleasurable for viewers. Most of this information management is
preconscious and automatic, driven by underlying assumptions and
conventions — we recognize a face and connect it to what we know
about a character, we identify the sounds coming from a character as
language and comprehend its meaning, we see an edit and process it
as a shift in perspective within the same continuous fictional time and
space, we hear music and situate it as either nondiegetic score or diegetic
sound from within the scene. Such automatic processes of assumptions
and inferences rely on cognitive schemata that viewers develop through
accumulated experiences of consuming media, as well as norms of
everyday perception and cognition.6 One strategy that a complex tele-
vision series can use to create greater narrative intrigue and engagement
is to play with the boundaries of such preconscious schemata, push-
ing back against our normal viewing competencies to create interest-
ing variations on expectations by relocating automatic inferences into
the realm of conscious comprehension. For instance, Battlestar Galac-
tica’s robotic Cylon race is composed of only 12 humanoid prototypes,
meaning that multiple characters are played by the same actor — viewers
experience dissonance in our automatic facial recognition schemata, as
we are forced to consciously think about precisely which iteration of a
Cylon character is being embodied in any given scene by actors Tricia
Helfer and Grace Park.
Many narrative schemata are based not on everyday universals such
as language or facial recognition but rather through the norms of the
television medium. In Bordwell’s terms, these are extrinsic norms that
168 | Comprehension

pervade a medium to guide our comprehension process, including genre

conventions, stylistic modes, and standard expectations for what a tele-
vision series is supposed to do. Within American television, screen time
is a powerful site of extrinsic norms, as we watch a program knowing
full well that it will last for a prescribed amount of time (typically 30
or 60 minutes) and will be interrupted by commercial breaks (unless
it is on PBS, a premium cable channel, or DVD). Our moment-to-
moment comprehension is framed by our perception of screen time,
as the approaching end of an episode will frequently trigger expecta-
tions that particular plotlines will be resolved — or in the case of genres
such as soap operas and serialized thrillers, we anticipate a cliffhanger
to motivate our desire to watch the next episode. While sometimes we
feel like we “lose track of time” in a particularly compelling episode,
at a preconscious level our comprehension processes maintain a sense
of how far into an episode we are and approximately how much time
remains. We use our sense of screen time to manage our expectations
for upcoming plot points and pacing, following a set of guidelines that
have developed through our accrued experiences of television watching.
Shattering these established expectations can become particularly excit-
ing or frustrating (or both), as with the moment when an episode ends
with an unexpected “To Be Continued” graphic.
As discussed in chapter 1, series establish their own intrinsic norms
as well, teaching viewers how to watch and what to expect from future
episodes. We learn to parse Battlestar Galactica’s multiplying Cylon
characters, to recognize The Office’s direct-address interviews as part
of a fictional documentary film, and to anticipate the weekly death that
starts every Six Feet Under episode. As with extrinsic norms, an indi-
vidual program’s intrinsic norms guide viewers’ assumptions, as well as
providing an opportunity to create pleasurable moments of confusion,
surprise, and twisty trickery by violating these norms via a narrative
special effect. Lost was particularly adept at both creating and subverting
such intrinsic norms — three seasons of character-centered flashbacks
created a strong set of intrinsic norms that were used to fool viewers into
a stunning surprise at the end of the third season, portraying a flash-
forward to Jack’s postisland future masked as a preisland flashback. The
program then adopted flash-forwards as a new intrinsic norm for the
fourth season, teaching viewers to watch episodes in a new way, as well
 Comprehension | 169

as setting up new possibilities for narrative special effects. Season 4’s “Ji
Yeon” offers a particularly interesting play with Lost’s intrinsic norms of
temporality and character attachment. The “present-time” island plot
focuses on Sun’s pregnancy and her relationship with her husband, Jin,
intercut with off-island flashes to Sun going into labor and Jin rushing
through Seoul looking to purchase a baby gift and get to the hospital.
The season’s intrinsic norms suggest we are attached to the couple in a
flash-forward as they have their child after they escape the island, but
the end reveals that Jin’s scenes were a flashback to preisland life, getting
the baby gift for a business associate — and the flash-forward to Sun’s
delivery ends with the revelation that Jin is dead (or so she believes). As
the only episode of the series that mixes types of off-island “flashes,” it
plays on our established expectations for Lost’s intrinsic norms, ending
with a twist that both elicits the operational aesthetic and delivers an
emotional punch about a character’s future death.
These examples of subverting norms point to an important strat-
egy that serial television uses to engage viewers’ attention and inter-
est: shattering expectations by shifting comprehension processes from
preconscious assumptions and inferences to conscious hypotheses. An
established norm can provide the answer to a question that we may not
even be aware that we are asking: When are we in this character’s his-
tory? Why are we hearing this character’s thoughts? Using these norms
allows for smooth comprehension that guides viewers’ understanding
and expectations, but over the course of a long-running series, they can
become overly predictable, stale, and repetitive. Serial narratives must
strike a balance between familiarity and difference to keep viewers
engaged, and shifting an assumed norm into the realm of consciousness
can provide important variations. Such variations can play out on the
level of an individual episode, as with episodes of Buffy that shift genre
norms or storytelling perspective, or provide a “reboot” to a program’s
ongoing premise and storytelling mode, as on Alias, Angel, and Chuck.
On Lost, altering the norms of episodic structure and temporality start-
ing with the shift to flash-forwards served to engage viewers by forc-
ing us to make more active hypotheses within the operational realm —
how do these narrative time frames relate? As I argue throughout this
book, viewers engage with complex television through the operational
aesthetic, which we can understand as the conscious accumulation,
170 | Comprehension

analysis, and hypothesizing of information concerning how the story

is told. As discussed later in this chapter, such operational engagement
intersects with a range of other realms of narrative information.
One of the chief drives for narrative consumption is to increase our
knowledge of a compelling story, as we learn more about characters,
relationships, the world, events both past and future, and the opera-
tional storytelling itself through active hypothesizing and analysis of
a an ongoing serial. Bordwell, following Meir Sternberg, calls the pro-
cess of learning more about a narrative’s past curiosity hypotheses, as we
are presented with gaps in the backstory that motivate further discov-
ery, whether in the form of a mysterious illness, a character’s unstated
motivations, or the causal events that led to the particular storyworld
conditions, such as a political election, a romance, or an apocalypse.7
Curiosity questions can be posed explicitly, as with a murder mystery,
or inferred implicitly, as with a character’s behavioral shift. As discussed
in chapter 1, narrative enigmas emerge from such curiosity; we hypoth-
esize to fill in the story gaps and speculate on what revelations might
be revealed. Contemporary complex television can draw out curiosity
over a longer span of screen time than in previous modes of prime time
programming, as producers are much more willing to rely on viewers’
sustained interest and memory, as discussed later in this chapter.
New bits of narrative information often help us answer lingering curi-
osity questions that viewers have been thinking about, filling in charac-
ters’ backstories, vague gaps, or enigmatic mysteries by offering new or
revised hypotheses. Lost certainly excelled at such long-term curiosity,
often drawing out such gaps over years, as with the question of how
John Locke became paralyzed before arriving on the island, posed in the
program’s fourth episode, “Walkabout,” and answered in its 62nd, “The
Man from Tallahassee.” In rarer cases, new narrative information will
create questions and resonant meanings retroactively, as we look back at
what we thought we understood with a new layer of comprehension that
prompts curiosity. Early in Revenge’s first-season finale, “Reckoning,”
we are reminded of the already established backstory information that
Emily’s mother had died when Emily was a child; later in the episode,
Emily’s fights with a mysterious unnamed “white haired man,” who
says, “You’re a hell of a fighter — you must have gotten that from your
mother.” This line might raise the question “How does he know Emily’s
 Comprehension | 171

mother?” but the scene’s context provides a more obvious understand-

ing of the line — before the fight, Emily says, “I’m not here because of
how my father was framed. I’m here because of how he died,” activat-
ing our established knowledge that this is the man who murdered her
father. Within that context, we infer that the man’s comment is an insult
aimed at Emily’s father’s inability to fight, not prompting us to even con-
sider that he might know her mother — we assume “mother” signifies
“not father” more than anything about her actual mother. But at the
end of the episode, Emily learns that her mother is still alive and might
be involved with this larger conspiracy — this new knowledge reframes
this earlier inference, which we probably did not even consider could
be taken two ways (I certainly did not), suggesting that this man might
know of Emily’s mother’s fighting abilities firsthand. The line’s meaning
transforms even more in the second season, as it is revealed that the
white-haired man is actually married to Emily’s mother, retroactively
changing our comprehension processes through new connections and
contexts. Such moments of revelation and revision, transforming an
invisible inference first into a conscious curiosity question and then
into a deeper moment of narrative interconnectedness, contributes to
the rewatchability of many complex serials, using our increased base
of knowledge to increase our appreciation of foreshadowing or buried
information or perhaps encouraging a critical analysis of inconsistencies
or discontinuity.
Backward-looking narrative enigmas are less common than are narra-
tive statements that propel the storytelling forward, prompting anticipa-
tion hypotheses about what might happen next. Sternberg uses suspense
to refer to any such anticipated narrative outcome, but I prefer to reserve
that term for its more specific usage: a subset of anticipation hypotheses
in which the events that viewers hope to happen to characters in risky
situations seemingly has a low probability of occurring within the story-
world: Can Walt and Jesse escape from Tuco in Breaking Bad ’s episode
“Grilled”? Will Jack Bauer rescue his kidnapped wife and daughter in
24’s first season? While at the operational level we are assured that our
protagonists cannot die or profoundly fail, given the extrinsic norms of
both television and most forms of popular storytelling, the storyworld’s
scenario makes us anticipate the more likely, undesirable outcome to
create suspense in our imagined hypotheses of how things might turn
172 | Comprehension

out.8 But suspense is a special subset of a broader mode of narrative

anticipation, in which we react to a narrative statement by hypothesiz-
ing about what will happen next at both macro plot levels (will Kate
choose romance with Jack or Sawyer on Lost?) and micro scene levels
(how will D’Angelo react to learning of Wallace’s murder on The Wire?).
Serial narratives thrive by creating narrative statements that demand
the next bit of information, inspiring our anticipatory hypothesizing
about what might happen next to sustain us through the structured gaps
between episodes.
Both curiosity and anticipation are emotional responses prompted
by the desire for more narrative information and the drive toward
discovery — when we talk about whether we “care” about a series, we
are typically referring to whether we are curious about filling in gaps
about what has already happened or eagerly anticipate what is yet to
come. (Of course, when dealing with a series with complex temporality,
such as Doctor Who or Lost, parsing the differences between curios-
ity toward the narrative past and anticipating the narrative future can
be quite muddled, as one character’s past might be another’s future.)
One of the challenges of such hypothesizing is that producers must bal-
ance between the need for plausibility, so that the new information feels
consistent and motivated within the storyworld, and unpredictability,
so that the revelations are not obvious to anyone who had bothered to
hypothesize. Often programs strive for shocking twists and surprises
through thwarted expectations, but those often feel inconsistent with
what we have come to expect from the storyworld and the program’s
operational norms — the ideal surprise is followed by a viewer thinking,
“I should have seen that coming,” suggesting unexpected but effective
internal motivation. The American version of The Killing fell prey to
these pitfalls in its first season, with numerous “red herring” suspects
in the murder mystery who viewers could clearly see were not guilty, as
well as surprising revelations that seemed unmotivated except as a tactic
to surprise viewers; such weak surprises helped lead to a major back-
lash among fans and critics for what was perceived as an unmotivated
and inconsistent season-ending twist. Serialized enigma-driven myster-
ies have a difficult time sustaining curiosity over long-term questions
and thus often resort to surprises that lose their impact if overused or
unmotivated. As I discuss shortly, even though surprises can seem like
 Comprehension | 173

primary motivations for viewers, they can be thwarted without losing

much narrative power.
As I discuss throughout this book, many viewers do not consume
television in individual isolation but watch as part of viewing communi-
ties, often facilitated by fan cultures and online paratexts. Hypothesizing
is a cognitive process enacted by individuals in the act of viewing, but
such ideas and potential answers to narrative questions are frequently
articulated within fan communities, turning internal hypothesizing into
the cultural practice of theorizing. Such theorizing takes place in numer-
ous cultural realms, from interpersonal conversations on the couch
during commercial breaks to popular websites, as discussed in chapter
8. The internalized process of hypothesizing and the externalized cul-
tural realm of theorizing are interwoven, as viewers will integrate the
shared theories that they have read or heard from others into their own
hypothesizing while watching (or rewatching) episodes. This interaction
between individual cognitive activity and broader cultural circulation
is a crucial facet of any attempt to understand the process of narrative
comprehension, especially for a serialized narrative whose gaps invite
viewers to speculate, theorize, and converse about a program — while
there may be broadly shared commonalities of cognitive engagement,
the actual experience of consuming a serial narrative is a highly con-
textualized practice, and thus we must consider how such interpersonal
discourses can help shape the comprehension process.
Some series can inspire anticipation and curiosity as part of a larger
intertextual franchise, as with prequels such as Smallville, which builds
on viewers’ knowledge that the young Clark Kent will grow up to
become Superman, or the dual contemporary adaptations of Sherlock
Holmes, Elementary and Sherlock, both of which knowingly play with
the original’s iconography and characterizations. A particularly inter-
esting case is the series Hannibal, which dramatizes the iconic serial
killer Hannibal Lecter’s life as a practicing psychiatrist before he was
imprisoned. For viewers familiar with the Thomas Harris novels and
film adaptations, the series both acknowledges and modifies the charac-
ter’s previous representations, changing the mythology to make it more
appropriate for an ongoing television series, while providing little hid-
den references and “Easter eggs” for dedicated fans to catch allusions
to the books and films. The series assumes basic awareness of Lecter
174 | Comprehension

as a cannibalistic serial killer, as the character is sufficiently iconic to

be known to most adult viewers even if they have not read or seen the
source materials — the first few episodes portray him cooking elaborate
meals, serving meat that we assume to be human to guests, but it is
never overtly acknowledged within the narrative. The program’s tone
creates dark, ironic humor through this knowledge differential, placing
viewers in a more knowledgeable state than any character except Lecter,
despite the television series not actually providing such key information.
The effect is to highlight the operational aesthetic, calling attention to
the storytelling’s playful practices of both withholding information and
relying on intertextual cues.
One mode of sharing narrative information that has become more
prevalent in recent years is spoilers, which short-circuit the narrative
information system by providing viewers advance knowledge of what
is to come in a given series. The line between “normal” and “spoiled”
consumption is defined differently by various viewers, as some fans
treat any advance information found in episode previews or summaries
as forbidden knowledge, while others regularly read brief summaries
published in television listings and watch promo videos to fuel their
anticipation. Inadvertent spoilers proliferate in the online television-
viewing community, as people tweet about a program from American
East Coast hours before West Coasters have a chance to see an episode;
likewise, viewers who watch programs online, recorded on DVRs, or on
long delays outside the United States must step lightly through the Inter-
net to avoid stumbling on unwanted plot revelations. However, there is
a class of viewers who actively seek such revelations ahead of time, as
so-called spoiler fans frequent online sites that traffic in the black mar-
ket of advance narrative information, with many embracing watching a
program in a spoiled state as their normal mode of viewing. Jonathan
Gray and I conducted audience research on this phenomenon, examin-
ing Lost spoiler fans via an online survey to try to root out why view-
ers might actively seek to consume such a serialized narrative in what
seemed to be an aberrant manner.9 While we found no uniform answers
that apply for all spoiler fans, many respondents highlighted that know-
ing where the plot is going heightens their attention to other modes of
engagement, as they focus on the “how” and “why” of the storytelling as
well as the operational aesthetic of how the story is being told, mirroring
 Comprehension | 175

the experience of rewatching a program.10 Spoiler fans effectively dictate

the terms of their own narrative experience, transforming anticipation
about uncertain narrative futures as designed by producers into antici-
patory curiosity as to how the series will connect the dots to the spoiled
event, with the spoiled information almost serving as flash-forwarded
story information. Additionally, some of the spoiler fans we surveyed
sought out narrative information as a way to control their emotional
responses, avoiding surprises or preparing for disappointments about
the fate of beloved characters, as well as filling the anticipatory gap
between episodes by revealing story information in advance.
One interesting question about spoiled viewings is to what degree
suspense might still be available, especially given that the majority of
Lost viewers we surveyed claimed to enjoy the program’s suspense-
ful storytelling. Bordwell suggests that even though suspense involves
anticipating narrative events, we still experience suspense for a narrative
outcome that we know is coming, whether in historical fiction portray-
ing a well-known real-life event or in rewatching a film, because emo-
tional responses to suspense are partly involuntary, “bottom-up” phe-
nomena as well as being based on the information-processing model of
anticipating undesirable outcomes.11 Such innate emotional responses
to suspenseful stories can withstand the advanced knowledge provided
by spoilers, as tension derives more from how events will arrive at their
known outcome than from the unpredictability of the outcome itself.
Seymour Chatman argues this point by quoting Alfred Hitchcock, who
suggests that suspense generates from the audience’s inability to reveal
crucial information to sympathetic characters and offers what might be
a mantra for spoiler fans: “For that reason I believe in giving the audi-
ence all the facts as early as possible.”12 Thus spoilers can ratchet up the
anticipation that fuels suspense by pointing toward an inevitable out-
come, but we must remember that narrative outcomes are often well-
known regardless of whether they are spoiled or not — viewers draw on
their operational expertise and awareness of storytelling norms to be
assured that protagonists are safe from mortal harm, mysteries will be
solved, and other conventions will be upheld.
We can compare how viewers with different narrative knowledge
might watch the same sequence using the climax of Veronica Mars’s first-
season finale, “Leave It to Beaver.” Veronica has solved the season-long
176 | Comprehension

mystery of who killed her best friend, Lilly (which I will leave unrevealed
to avoid inadvertent spoilers), but has been trapped in an outdoor chest
freezer by the murderer who is threatening to let her die in a spreading
fire if she does not hand over evidence. Will her father, Keith, come
to her rescue before she is burned alive? Will the killer be captured or
escape? A “fresh viewer” who comes to the episode unspoiled, with no
insider knowledge of what happens next, experiences the story that pro-
ceeds down an unknown path as designed by the program’s producers,
but how uncertain is the outcome? Genres have established storytelling
norms that are rarely broken, including the assumption that the detec-
tive will capture the criminal, not the reverse. As discussed in chapter
4, television series have industrial norms concerning actors that struc-
ture storytelling, making it highly unlikely that the lead character will
be killed or seriously hurt, especially when the series is named after her.
Thus within the storyworld, the odds are stacked against Veronica’s sur-
vival, which leads to suspense, but viewers know that they are watching
televised fiction, not experiencing the storyworld directly. Viewers who
are savvy, which I would argue a complex series such as Veronica Mars
all but requires, realize that the storytelling odds are actually reversed:
Veronica’s escape from peril is all but assured, making the dreaded
outcome of Veronica’s death highly unlikely. The typical fresh viewer,
especially for an ongoing serial demanding dedicated viewing, does not
approach a new episode naively nor treat the fictional world as if it were
real but watches with a set of operational expectations that point toward
likely outcomes as they typically play out on television. This viewer
watches the scene with minimal uncertainty as to the outcome, quite
confident that Veronica will ultimately survive and that justice will be
served, with the unknowns clustered around how exactly the inevitable
resolution will play out.
A spoiler fan would come to this episode knowing that Veronica sur-
vives and that the killer is captured, analogous to Bordwell’s example of
watching historical fiction such as United 93, in which we know the cli-
mactic end before we begin. The spoiled viewer approaches the episode
with far less uncertainty than the fresh viewer does, as any surprises
from unexpected twists (such as the specific identity of the killer) are
gone. But in Veronica’s moment of peril, spoiled viewers’ expectations
are not drastically different: they know Veronica that will survive, but
 Comprehension | 177

precisely how her escape will unfold is uncertain. According to Hitch-

cock, suspense comes from being unable to intervene in the storyworld,
a position that all viewers share regardless of their spoiled status. But
there is another level as well here, as Hitchcock’s expertise was in how
he revealed his story points, not the narrative information itself, with
the elements that trigger suspense found less in narrative events than
in their telling through expressive cues eliciting emotional reactions via
music, camera angles, and facial expressions. This is why a potentially
suspenseful series of events can be narrated in a way that undermines
suspense (as in most chase cartoons) and a seemingly nonsuspenseful
set of events can be told to create suspense (the red-herring moments of
many horror films) — such emotional reactions stem from how a story
is told, rather than what actually happens in the story. Both fresh and
spoiled viewers experience the narrative discourse for the first time,
even if the spoiled viewer has more confidence in what events will occur;
however, both viewers share the same uncertainty in precisely how the
events will be narrated and what cues will be presented, experiencing
suspense from these cues in mostly similar ways.
The third type of viewer is the rewatcher, somebody reliving the
narrative experience through repeated viewings, a practice that is cer-
tainly quite common in the TV-on-DVD era, just as it was in the era
of ubiquitous reruns for many series. The rewatcher shares the spoiled
viewer’s knowledge of the narrative events to come but also knows how
those narrative events will operationally unfold through the specific tell-
ing; yet according to Bordwell, a rewatcher still experiences suspense
through the familiar but powerful emotional cues of the storytelling.
On multiple viewings, a rewatcher will still be enthralled by the sus-
pense of Veronica’s jeopardy but will also be more attentive to how that
tension is being generated via crosscutting between scenes and musical
cues, as well as thinking about how the entire season led to this cli-
mactic showdown with foreshadowing and anticipatory character seeds.
A rewatcher’s anticipation is inflected with imperfect memory, as our
memories are rarely sufficiently exact to precisely match our anticipa-
tion. Thus rewatchers actively compare the unfolding series with their
memories, resulting in minor surprises and moments of recognition
alongside larger feelings of anticipation; this creates a playful engage-
ment with past experiences, adding another layer of viewing pleasure
178 | Comprehension

to rewatching. Both spoiled viewers and rewatchers can use their story
knowledge to focus their attention on the narrative discourse, absorb-
ing and enjoying how the story is operationally told and the subsequent
emotions that the telling stimulates. Some of Lost’s spoiler fans indi-
cated that they used their foreknowledge of narrative events to focus
on textual details, subtleties of performance, stylistic flourishes, and
foreshadowed clues. Thus by knowing the story ahead of time, spoiler
fans and rewatchers both approach an episode more like a critic,
simultaneously experiencing and analyzing a text, foregrounding the
operational aesthetic.
Another important variable concerns how viewers reconcile their
own narrative knowledge with the information that characters seem to
possess. We can consider a series as exhibiting varying degrees of open-
ness with its narrative information, offering more or less range, depth,
and communicativeness of knowledge.13 These variables often connect
with specific characters, charting how many characters we share infor-
mation with, how much access we have to characters’ interiority and
backstory, and how much characters seem to be withholding from view-
ers, all issues discussed more in chapter 4. We can see these variables
played out over the course of a long arc, using Dexter’s first season as
a brief case study. We are tightly aligned with Dexter Morgan, seeing
what he sees, hearing his thoughts in voice-over, sharing his secrets and
discoveries, and rarely learning more than what he knows. In the pilot
episode, we witness (and are informed via voice-over) his secret life as
a serial killer, learn of his adoptive father Harry’s code that he follows,
and meet every other character from his perspective, via storytelling
that appears to offer limited range but high depth and communicative-
ness of knowledge. The pilot also sets up the season-long arc, with the
“Ice Truck Killer” making his presence known in Miami by sending
messages to Dexter directly, suggesting that Dexter’s secret is not safe —
the enigma of the killer’s identity and his connection to Dexter align
us with the main character, as we share identical gaps in knowledge
and the resulting curiosity. While the narrative range expands some-
what in subsequent episodes to include scenes of the secondary char-
acters without Dexter, especially his sister, Debra, for the most part all
of our significant new information, curiosity, and anticipation directly
parallels Dexter’s.
 Comprehension | 179

This tight alignment shifts in episode 8, “Shrink Wrap,” when we

learn something Dexter does not: that Rudy, Debra’s new boyfriend, is
the Ice Truck Killer. In the subsequent episodes, Rudy seems creepily
obsessed with Dexter for reasons that only we understand (at least par-
tially). This knowledge shift alters the narrative intrigue away from the
curiosity question of the killer’s identity and toward anticipation of what
will happen down the road — by allowing us to know more about Rudy
than Dexter or Debra do, we start to anticipate their potential jeopardy
and notice hidden motivations in Rudy’s behavior. This dynamic is espe-
cially effective in episode 9, “Father Knows Best,” when Dexter discovers
that he inherited a house from his biological father and travels there
to uncover pieces of his past. Rudy convinces Deb to join Dexter, and
we watch Rudy insert himself into Dexter’s emotional life, building on
the established game that the two killers have been playing. We watch
these episodes with the assumption that we have the essential knowledge
about Rudy and his twisted motivation and that our position as more
knowledgeable than Dexter provides anticipatory pleasures, expecting
the emotional and violent payoff when Dexter discovers that the killer
has been lurking around his sister. The season finale, “Born Free,” does
pay off this anticipation but raises the stakes even more when we learn
that Rudy and Dexter are long-separated brothers, a revelation that pulls
all of the Ice Truck Killer’s actions into focus, providing clear motiva-
tion as to why he was tweaking Dexter’s past and repressed memories
and how he knew more about Dexter’s history than Dexter himself did.
Dexter uses these differentials in narrative knowledge to drive the serial
narrative forward via suspense, anticipation, and curiosity.
However, the revelation of Rudy and Dexter’s shared parentage is
more complex than just a surprise twist, as it turns our attention back-
ward toward the mechanics of storytelling that drive the narrative,
shifting focus on the characters and their relationships to offer more
depth and complexity in light of this new knowledge. The last half of the
final episode plays out the inner conflict that Dexter feels between his
monstrous nature, represented by his fellow traumatized brother, and
his socialized code, fostered by his adoptive family of Harry and Debra
and their shared profession as police. Anchored by a compelling lead
performance from Michael C. Hall, the episode pays off the big twist by
focusing inward into Dexter’s damaged psyche, with subsequent events
180 | Comprehension

resolving this conflict, at least temporarily. But with this revelation in

mind, previous narrative events take on a new light that would only be
visible to spoiled viewers, rewatchers, or viewers familiar with the novel
that the series is based on. In “Father Knows Best,” when Dexter goes
to sort through his biological father’s house, Rudy is also visiting his
own familial past. On first viewing, we know that Rudy is manipulat-
ing Dexter, placing us in a more knowledgeable position than the lead
character, but only with full narrative knowledge can we see ramifica-
tions of the crucial bit of narrative information that only Rudy knows at
that moment. Dexter does not call attention to this revelation, offering
no introspective moment of Dexter putting together the pieces of his
and Rudy’s shared past; instead, the series rewards viewers for continued
contemplation into the gap between seasons or for rewatching, creat-
ing an opportunity for making pleasurable narrative connections on our
own that feel more earned than if had we watched Dexter come to the
same conclusions himself. But to make such connections, serial tele-
vision must rely on and trigger viewers’ memory, a complex topic on
its own.

The Mechanics of Serial Memory

Complex television requires viewers’ effort and attention for ongo-
ing comprehension, strategically triggering, confounding, and playing
with viewers’ memories via medium-specific poetic techniques. For
instance, cinematic narratives typically engage a viewer’s short-term
memory, cuing and obscuring moments from within the controlled
unfolding of a two-hour feature film, while literature designs its stories
to be consumed at the reader’s own pace and control, allowing for an
on-demand return to previous pages as needed.14 The typical model of
television consumption, divided into weekly episodes and annual sea-
sons, constrains producers interested in telling stories that transcend
individual installments, as any viewer’s memory of previous episodes
is quite variable, with a significant number of viewers having missed
numerous episodes altogether. In a series told over a period of months
and years, managing the mechanics of memory becomes a challenge for
storytellers. As discussed in chapter 1, shifts in technologies and view-
ing practices have made concentrated binge viewing more common,
 Comprehension | 181

providing a competing pressure for serials to avoid redundancies and

repetitions that become annoying and excessively obvious when viewed
without long serial gaps between episodes. Viewers also vary as to what
paratextual expansions they explore, as some read reviews, participate
in fan forums, and visit other participatory cultural sites that keep mem-
ories fresh in their minds, while others may not think at all about a
program until the next episode airs. Thus the long arcs of complex tele-
vision must balance the memory demands of a wide range of viewers
and reception contexts.
Similarly, individual episodes need to manage our short-term mem-
ory of events that roll out over the course of the episode along with
the longer-term serialized recall from weeks, months, or even years
beforehand. While the paradigm of the distracted television glance is
less relevant today, especially concerning demanding and slow-paced
narratives such as The Wire or Mad Men that might take years to pay
off long-dormant story threads, producers still need to create programs
for a domestic environment that is prone to split attention and multi-
tasking viewers more than for many other media.15 Over the course
of an episode, television narratives embed minor redundancies that
remind viewers of key story information, ranging from establishing
shots locating a scene’s setting to dialogue repeating characters’ names
and relationships. Soap operas rely on a common device for redundant
narration that both facilitates viewers’ recall and offers the pleasure of
watching characters’ reactions to past events: diegetic retelling, in which
dialogue reminds viewers of what has already happened on the series.
Prime time serials are far less dependent on the dialogue-based practice
of diegetic retelling as a core narrative pleasure than daytime soaps are,
but characters still call each other by name and reference their relation-
ships more frequently than people do in everyday life, using dialogue as
a way to keep crucial character information active in our minds. Often
past events are retold to new characters both to update them on the
status of a situation and to remind us of what we have already seen. For
a typical instance, early in Lost’s fourth-season episode “Cabin Fever,” a
scene shows the mercenary leader Keamy arriving via helicopter on a
freighter with an injured man. The ship’s doctor asks, “What did this to
him?” Keamy replies, “A black pillar of smoke threw him 50 feet in the
air, . . . ripped his guts out,” retelling a spectacular event portrayed two
182 | Comprehension

episodes earlier in “The Shape of Things to Come.” While anyone who

saw the previous episode was unlikely to have forgotten the source of
the injury, this diegetic retelling reminds us of the events via naturalistic
dialogue and reinforces what we have already previously seen.
This example points to an important concept for understanding how
viewers make sense of ongoing serials. At this point in Lost’s original
broadcast run, a dedicated viewer would have watched 79 episodes over
the course of four years, creating a vast array of narrative information to
retain and recall. Even the most attentive viewers could not possibly have
all of that narrative information active in their operative working mem-
ory, which is able to hold around seven discrete thoughts at a time —
most of the story information they have retained would be archived in
long-term memory.16 When a character’s dialogue uses diegetic retell-
ing, viewers activate that bit of story information into working memory,
making it part of their immediate narrative comprehension. While cer-
tainly some viewers might have been actively thinking about the smoke
monster’s attack from two weeks earlier when starting “Cabin Fever,”
this diegetic retelling ensures that everyone has this context active in
working memory while watching the rest of the episode, as subsequent
events build on this past event to motivate Keamy’s actions to find his
betrayer and return to the island.
Diegetic retelling typically uses dialogue as a means to activate past
events into working memory, but more subtle visual cues such as objects,
setting, or shot composition can serve a similar function to activate
long-term memories. For instance, in the third-season Battlestar Galac-
tica episode “Maelstrom,” Kara Thrace gives Admiral William Adama a
figurine of a goddess to use as a masthead for his model ship; at the end
of that episode, Adama destroys the model out of grief when Thrace’s
spaceship appears to be destroyed in a fatal crash. In the next season’s
episode “Six of One,” Adama is shown rebuilding the model after Thrace
has seemingly returned from the grave. Lingering shots of the figurine
and boat activate memories of the earlier episode, adding resonance
to these characters’ relationship and the mysterious circumstances of
Thrace’s survival, but without the explicit expository function of dia-
logue. Typically, visual cues are more subtle than dialogue, function-
ing less to catch up viewers who might have missed an episode than to
 Comprehension | 183

integrate past events into a naturalistic style of moving-image storytell-

ing that still activates viewers’ memories.
While diegetic strategies of dialogue and visual cues are a primary
means for activating viewers’ memories, many programs use nonnatu-
ralistic techniques to trigger recall. The use of voice-over is a common
way to convey story information via a more self-conscious mode of nar-
ration. While many screenwriters condemn voice-over as overly literary
and a lazy tool for film and television, it can be used effectively in cer-
tain genres such as detective programs or sitcoms, serving both to guide
viewers within the narrative world and to offer a distinctive personality
to the storytelling. As discussed in chapter 2, the film-noir-infused teen
drama Veronica Mars uses often sarcastic first-person voice-over nar-
ration by the titular character both to keep viewers on track with the
complex story and to convey the character’s perspective on narrative
events. In the first-season episode “Silence of the Lamb,” Veronica is
helping her friend Mac grapple with the discovery that she was switched
at birth with another baby. Veronica’s voice-over narration intones, “I
could tell Mac I know how she feels, but the truth is, I don’t. When I had
the opportunity to learn my paternity, I chose blissful ignorance with
a side of gnawing doubt.” This reference to Veronica’s paternity refers
to an event from two episodes earlier, as Veronica discovered that her
mother had been unfaithful and ordered a kit to test her father’s DNA
but decided not to go through with the test. While Veronica’s mysterious
parentage does not become a significant plot point until later in the sea-
son, recalling this previous event helps viewers draw parallels between
Mac and Veronica and colors how Veronica and her father interact later
in the episode.
Voice-over narration can also resemble the more literary model of
third-person omniscient storytellers. Such narrators typically act only
to frame a story, as in Rod Serling’s opening and closing narration on
the 1960s science-fiction anthology series The Twilight Zone, but some
recent series have played with third-person voice-over narration as a
self-conscious device. Pushing Daisies, a whimsical cross between super-
natural romance and detective fiction, uses the voice of Jim Dale, recog-
nizable as the reader of the Harry Potter audiobooks, as an omniscient
narrator both to present new story information and to remind us of past
184 | Comprehension

events. In episode 7, “Smell of Success,” the narrator comments, “Chuck

continued to keep the secret ingredient of her pies secret. Not even Olive
Snook knew the baked secret she delivered contained homeopathic
mood enhancers meant to pry Chuck’s aunts out of their funk.” This typ-
ically baroque voice-over reminds us of a plot development introduced
four episodes earlier, while also orienting us as to who knows what
about the secret pie ingredient. Given Pushing Daisies’ highly elaborate
narrative mechanics and fanciful storyworld, the omniscient narrator’s
storybook style, as reinforced by the intertextual link to Harry Potter,
functions both to manage memories and to promote a self-conscious
playful tone.
The third-person voice-over found in the farcical sitcom Arrested
Development is differently playful, with producer Ron Howard narrat-
ing the action about a dysfunctional wealthy family as if he is providing
deadpan commentary within a nature documentary.17 Howard’s narra-
tion fills in gaps and moves the story forward, allowing the fast-paced
series to cover an astounding amount of story in less than 30 minutes.
The narrator frequently provides clarifying references to a previous
episode — in the second-season episode “The One Where They Build
a House,” the aspiring actor Tobias appears with blue paint on his ear,
leading Howard to clarify, “Tobias had recently auditioned as an under-
study for the silent performance-art trio the Blue Man Group,” an event
that occurred in the previous episode. Howard’s deadpan narration often
serves to humorously undercut or comment on the character’s action,
providing narrative momentum, clarifying recall, and comedic density.
Arrested Development’s narration highlights how moving-image media
rely on more than just language to manage memory — often the narra-
tor’s comments are accompanied by images and scenes to further trig-
ger memories and to move the narrative forward. Following the com-
ment about the Blue Man Group, the scene shifts to a flashback of Tobias
auditioning for the part. While this scene references an event that hap-
pened over the course of the previous episode, it was never shown in the
earlier episode, making it a flashback within the storyworld but adding
new narrative information beyond just triggering recall. Arrested Devel-
opment uses more than flashback scenes to retell past events, relying on
a number of pseudodocumentary techniques for comedic effect. Later in
the same episode, Michael and his son are talking about how Michael is
 Comprehension | 185

no longer in charge of the family company. Howard’s narration reminds

us of another event from the previous episode: “In fact, since Michael’s
father escaped from prison, his brother G.O.B. had been made presi-
dent.” The visuals cut to a shot of a newspaper reporting both the prison
escape (complete with still photo taken from the previous episode)
and the leadership succession. The scene then shifts to a conversation
between Michael and G.O.B., in which they recount the events that led
to G.O.B.’s presidency and the accompanying criminal investigation, all
framed with the running gag of Michael disingenuously saying, “I have
no problem with that,” which is even quoted in the newspaper. Such an
array of storytelling strategies prompt viewer recall while providing a
comedic toolbox to create running gags and self-conscious style.
Nonverbal techniques can retell information as well. Flashbacks are
a common technique to incorporate previous events into an episode,
and like voice-over, they can follow first- or third-person focalization.
A first-person subjective flashback is more common, presenting a char-
acter’s memories as cued by suggestive close-ups, subjective visuals, and
special effects. For instance, in the season 4 Battlestar Galactica episode
“Guess What’s Coming to Dinner,” the Cylon leader Natalie tells a group
of humans that being rescued by Kara Thrace was their destiny. Kara
watches the speech as the image begins to blur and break up, leading
into a subjective flashback of Kara being told that she is the “harbinger
of death” in the previous episode. While this was an important prophecy
that viewers are likely to recall, the explicit flashback both activates the
memory and highlights its importance to Kara in imagining her own
role in the battle between humans and Cylons. Reinforcing this dialogue
by replaying the scene via flashback makes it more prominent in the
long-term mythology, which proves to be a central narrative concern
in the program’s final season. Such glimpses of characters’ memories
via flashbacks are a common cue to trigger viewers’ own memories, to
promote empathy and alignment with a character, and to frame our
comprehension of upcoming events. Flashbacks can be paired with
voice-over narration to visualize a narrator’s memories. Veronica Mars
frequently uses this device, as we often see flashbacks from Veronica’s
memories and clues about a lengthy mystery cued by her voice-over.
Comedies can use a similar technique, such as on My Name Is Earl,
in which Earl will reference a minor character we have met previously
186 | Comprehension

and narrate a flashback composed of earlier appearances and footage.

In these instances, the voice-over typically serves as a determining
thread of knowledge, framing previous scenes and cuing the relevant
memories of earlier events and relationships as needed to advance the
ongoing story.
Flashbacks presented from a more objective third-person perspec-
tive, or what we might call replays, are more commonly used as a way
to fill in backstory than to trigger memories — series such as Lost, Jack
and Bobby, and Boomtown use atemporal storytelling to craft their com-
plex narratives, but their flashbacks are rarely used to present memories
rather than new narrative material. Flashbacks of previously seen events
that are not framed as characters’ memories are quite uncommon.
Crime dramas such as CSI often use replays in the context of retelling
the previously seen crime scene, but they present new narrative infor-
mation in the retelling, making the flashback less about memory than
filling story gaps. The legal thriller Damages and the hostage drama The
Nine both use complex atemporal structures to narrate their core crime
stories, portraying previous events repeatedly throughout the season
and adding more information each time to string together a new story
thread — again, this model of repetition is more about filling in gaps in
multiple time lines than about reminding us what we might have forgot-
ten. Matt Hills discusses such objective flashbacks in the British science-
fiction series Doctor Who but suggests that they function more to invite
new viewers into the complex narrative than to refresh the memories of
long-term fans.18 An exceptional example of a memory-driven replay
came at the end of Lost’s final-season episode “Across the Sea.” The epi-
sode takes place entirely in ancient times to tell the origin story for The
Man in Black and Jacob, concluding with Jacob placing his mother’s and
brother’s bodies in a cave; this final scene is intercut with a replayed
scene from the first-season episode “House of the Rising Sun,” portray-
ing Jack, Kate, and Locke finding the decayed bodies in 2004. The pro-
ducers have said that the replay was not included to remind viewers
about the bodies, known for years as “Adam and Eve,” but instead to
connect the ancient plotline to the lives of the main characters; however,
the backlash from fans suggests that the atypical device felt too obvious
and redundant to warrant this violation of the program’s intrinsic story-
telling norms.
 Comprehension | 187

A more common use of such replays is on reality television, where we

often are shown earlier scenes and moments to refresh our memories
of previous events and to heighten the dramatic stakes. Within fictional
television, the most common examples of objective replays triggering
memories might be within comedies that use cutaway gags as a comedic
technique, commonly found in animated series such as Family Guy or
single-camera sitcoms such as Scrubs. Such asides frequently cut away
from the main action to comment on, illustrate, or refute whatever just
happened in the story, often cutting to a random vignette featuring fan-
tasy sequences, unknown moments from a character’s past, or replays
from past episodes. An example of the latter comes from “Kidney Now,”
a third-season episode of 30 Rock: Tracy tells Kenneth that he never
cries, which triggers a cutaway to a montage of six moments from previ-
ous episodes showing Tracy crying. The sequence certainly functions
as a comedic aside, but it also builds on our memories of Tracy’s fre-
quent crying jags that counter his own statement. However, the paucity
of relevant examples suggests that such replays are a comparatively less
utilized strategy to promote memory recall within fictional television.
The memory-triggering strategies I have discussed thus far all occur
within diegetic narration, but television has also adopted a number of
strategies outside the core storytelling text to help manage memories.
Most contemporary series air a brief recap before each episode to sum-
marize key events “previously on” the series. These recaps are generally
crafted by series producers, who choose key moments that they believe
relevant for refreshing viewers’ memories for upcoming storylines and
enabling new viewers to join the series midstream. While recaps are
designed for the weekly original airings, they often do get included on
DVDs, with some series offering the option of viewing each episode
with or without recaps, while others leave them integrated into the core
episode. The presence or absence of recaps can drastically change the
way episodes are consumed and comprehended. Most recaps high-
light the upcoming episode’s most pertinent narrative information. For
instance, the Veronica Mars episode “Silence of the Lamb” replays three
brief scenes in the recap, drawing from three different episodes, ranging
back over nine weeks. The scenes capture highly expository moments —
first is a two-line exchange between Veronica’s father and the former
sheriff Keith Mars and his successor Lamb, discussing the season-long
188 | Comprehension

murder mystery of Lilly Kane. Next is the scene in which Veronica and
Mac meet, setting up Mac’s role in this episode’s primary plot. Finally,
shots of Veronica investigating her mother’s past are overlaid with a
voice-over explaining the contested paternity, which sets up the second-
ary plot of this episode. In just 30 seconds, the episode activates the
relevant long-term arcs into working memory to comprehend this epi-
sode’s developments. However, these clips would mean almost nothing
to someone who had not seen most of the previous episodes, as the snip-
pets are far too minimal to actually provide adequate exposition for new
viewers. Just as notable is what the recap omits, with no reference to the
major characters Logan and Duncan — these characters do not appear in
this episode and thus can stay archived in long-term memory.
Recaps can serve more expository roles, especially early in a series
run. Dexter’s second episode features a two-minute recap, culled exclu-
sively from the 52-minute pilot. This recap functions as a summary of the
pilot, providing glimpses of each main character, highlighting the core
narrative scenario of a serial killer working for the Miami Police Depart-
ment, and establishing the ongoing arc of Dexter pursuing the Ice Truck
Killer. While it might be a bit confusing, it would certainly be possible to
watch the series without viewing the pilot, filling in narrative gaps solely
from this recap and other internal redundancies. For viewers who had
seen the pilot (especially in the short order of a DVD viewing), the recap
seems quite redundant, offering little to cue memories aside from char-
acters’ names — the core narrative situation of a serial killer working as a
forensic investigator is sufficiently memorable not to need refreshing, as
simply thinking about the name of the series would likely activate that
basic narrative memory. The recap from Dexter’s first-season finale is
much more in keeping with the memory-refreshing role typically found
later in a season. The finale’s almost two-minute recap contains clips
from many of the previous 11 episodes and presents them in such quick
succession that they would be incomprehensible to a new viewer. For
ongoing viewers, however, the flashes of clues remind us of how far Dex-
ter had gotten in his pursuit of the Ice Truck Killer, and the final shots of
his sister in peril refresh the cliffhanger from the previous episode. The
recap also highlights Angel’s stabbing from episode 10, which becomes
a major plot point in the finale. Such memory-refreshing recaps help
filter the hours of story information that an ongoing viewer accrues,
 Comprehension | 189

activating the most crucial bits of narrative into working memory while
allowing other moments that will not become relevant in the upcoming
episode to remain in the archives of long-term memory.
Recaps can trigger long-dormant memories that might work to fore-
shadow upcoming narrative events. Often in complex narratives, a recap
will remind viewers of a key mystery or enigma that has receded to the
background in recent serialized episodes. In the seventh episode of Lost,
“The Moth,” Sayid is attacked and knocked unconscious while trying
to use radio equipment to send a message off the island. Sayid recovers
in the following episode, but it is left uncertain as to who attacked him,
going unmentioned for numerous episodes. In Lost’s 21st episode, “The
Greater Good,” the recap replays the knockout scene that had first been
seen five months earlier, suggesting (correctly) that this dormant ques-
tion as to who attacked Sayid would finally be addressed. While differ-
ent viewers might have varying investments in that particular mystery,
Lost had introduced so many burning questions and enigmas over the
months between these two episodes that without this recap, the mystery
over Sayid’s attack would be fairly unlikely to be active within most view-
ers’ working memories, even if they were binge viewing in rapid succes-
sion. The recap includes the scene to encourage viewers to remember
this lingering question, to rekindle the anticipation of an answer, and to
trigger the narrative satisfaction of its forthcoming resolution.
Sometimes a recap can trigger memories beyond dormant questions,
highlighting important character backstories or relationships instead.
For instance, the recap before the fourth-season Battlestar Galactica epi-
sode “Escape Velocity” includes a scene from the third-season episode
“Exodus (Part II)” featuring the death of Ellen Tigh, the wife of Colonel
Sol Tigh. The gap between the original airdates of these episodes was
over 18 months, marking this scene’s presence in the recap as unusual —
when I first saw it, I hypothesized that including Ellen’s death in the
recap signaled that she would reappear in some fashion in the episode.
That prediction proved correct, as Sol Tigh begins to hallucinate visions
of Ellen, a connection that proves to be even more significant in the
series mythology later in the season. The recap effectively reminded
me about Ellen, who had receded from my working memory, but also
made her reappearance more predictable than it would have been within
the diegetic narrative without the recap. Viewers watching the series on
190 | Comprehension

DVD or DVR might choose to skip over the recaps, which might make
Ellen’s reappearance prompt confusion or surprise, two reactions miti-
gated by her presence in the recap. For those who saw the recap, Ellen’s
reappearance was presaged in a manner analogous to spoilers, making
us anticipate her reappearance even without knowledge of how or why
she would be back from the dead. Clearly recaps must balance between
the dual demands of activating memories for comprehension and avoid-
ing foreshadowing to allow for surprises to register for viewers without
being confusing; creators have devised a number of strategies for avoid-
ing such recap spoilers.
One option is using diegetic flashbacks to serve as embedded recaps
for viewers in the moment of the surprise itself. “Daybreak,” the series
finale of Battlestar Galactica, offers a good (if convoluted) example. Five
characters (including Tory and Galen) agree to share in a technologi-
cal process that will share their memories with each other to facilitate
a peace agreement between the warring Cylons and humans. Prior to
the procedure, Tory mentions that they may discover shameful things
in their pasts, a protest that is quickly brushed aside. During the pro-
cedure, we glimpse memories in the form of flashbacks of some key
moments from each character. Among these events, we see Tory con-
fronting Galen’s late wife, Cally; Galen starts to focus on these memo-
ries, and we witness a replay of Tory’s murder of Cally from “The Ties
That Bind,” which had originally aired 11 months before “Daybreak”;
this revelation triggers Galen to break from the procedure and strangle
Tory. Series producer Ron Moore stated in his commentary track that
the writers intentionally “buried” the storyline of Cally’s murder, wait-
ing for this climactic moment to pay off Galen’s revenge with high nar-
rative stakes in the finale. Notably, the recap for “Daybreak” contains
no reference to Cally or her murder, allowing the viewer to experience
the rekindled memory along with Galen’s realization. While a dedicated
viewer certainly could have recalled that Tory had murdered Cally, it
was far from active memory after 11 months and many subsequent plot
machinations — viewers watching the series on DVD would have a more
compressed experience and thus would be more likely to have the lin-
gering plot point fresh within their minds. But for viewers watching the
original airings whom I spoke with, the revelation prompted a gradual
surprising realization that Galen would witness his wife’s murder. Had
 Comprehension | 191

the recap reminded us about the murder, we would have likely antici-
pated the result of the memory meld earlier, defusing a moment of high
drama. The effect of such revelations might be called surprise memory,
or the moment of being surprised by story information that you already
know but do not have within working memory.
Surprise memory need not be triggered by a flashback. In the fourth-
season episode of Lost “Cabin Fever,” which notably aired without a
“previously on Lost” recap, Claire awakens in the jungle to discover that
her infant son is not with her. She looks around for him, and we see
Christian Shephard holding him. Claire looks at him with confusion and
says, “Dad?” right before we cut to commercial. It had been previously
revealed via off-island flashback in the third-season episode “Par Avion”
that Jack’s father, Christian, was also Claire’s father, but that relationship
had not been actively referenced for over 10 months of broadcast time.
While it is surprising enough to see Christian in the woods (especially
given that the character is dead and previously had only appeared on the
island as a mysterious apparition for Jack), the average viewer would not
likely have his identity as Claire’s father in working memory until she
calls him Dad, prompting this satisfying moment of surprise memory.
When a long-term viewer has accrued a large amount of story informa-
tion, a storyteller can guide emotional reactions based on what is in
working memory — an episode might highlight particular relationships
and connections within working memory or prompt surprise or sus-
pense via elements buried in long-term memory. The feeling of being
surprised through the act of remembering is quite pleasurable, reward-
ing a viewer’s knowledge base while provoking the flood of recognition
stemming from the activation of such memories. Such pleasures are
hard to imagine working in nonserialized formats, as the shorter-term
forms of cinema or novels do not typically allow sufficient time over the
course of narrative consumption to enable the process of archiving, for-
getting, and reactivation needed to be surprised by your own memory.
One additional memory trigger found within television episodes is
the credit sequence. Such sequences vary greatly in form and scope,
from brief title cards on Lost or Breaking Bad to two-minute montage
sequences on Six Feet Under or Homeland. Some title sequences use
footage outside the main narrative, as with Tony’s drive from New York
City to his suburban house on the gangster drama The Sopranos, with
192 | Comprehension

the sequence working to emphasize the program’s setting and milieu, or

Dexter’s visually stylized images of the title character preparing to go to
work, evoking the theme of finding the gruesome within the mundane.
Many longer title sequences include images from the series itself, which
for both episodic and serialized programs can evoke fond character
moments, as with Friends or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Each season of
The Wire offers a new montage of images of Baltimore and from narra-
tive moments of the series, most of which have little explicit resonance
within the story, but some images do trigger particular memories. For
instance, season 4’s credits include a brief close-up of an unidentified
man putting a lollipop into his pocket. For the first four episodes, this
image bears no real meaning and seems out of place next to images
of criminals, cops, and kids on the street. In the fourth episode of the
season, “Refugees,” we see the image in context: the crime boss Marlo
pickpockets the lollipop in an act of petty crime aimed to openly mock
a security guard, who is later killed for daring to confront Marlo about
shoplifting. For the rest of the season, this repeated image in the cred-
its serves as a reminder of Marlo’s arrogance and cold-blooded lust for
power, highlighting how he might do anything to climb the ranks of
Baltimore’s drug game and build his reputation. Through this repetition
and constant reminder, we keep this minor action in working memory,
shading Marlo’s character.
As I have argued throughout, the process of consuming television
narratives plays out in a broader context than the singular television text
itself, and thus the television industry has devised a number of extra-
textual means of helping manage viewers’ memory. One long-standing
tradition is the rerun — for decades, networks typically played each epi-
sode of a season twice throughout the year, filling in off times with ear-
lier episodes. These network reruns have become less common in the
21st century, especially with DVDs, DVRs, and online video as methods
for viewers to rewatch or catch up on missed episodes. Lost aired with
reruns over the summer and during breaks from new episodes in its
first two seasons, but ABC ceased this practice in later seasons. Instead,
Lost and other network series took a page from cable channels, showing
the same episode multiple times throughout the week of its first run,
a scheduling practice that allows viewers to refresh their memories,
to take a closer look at an episode during the week’s gap, or to catch
 Comprehension | 193

up on missed material without falling behind. Lost used these second-

ary airings to offer so-called enhanced versions of episodes after their
initial broadcast — these versions added caption annotations to clarify
references and previous events. For instance, in “Something Nice Back
Home,” when Claire encounters Christian, the captions read, “Chris-
tian Shepard is also Claire’s father, making Jack and Claire half-brother
and sister, though neither one of them know it.” Such comments can
certainly help refresh memories for casual viewers, but most die-hard
fans found the “enhanced” experience too obvious, literal, or trivial in
its annotations.
More commonly, serialized programs use paratexts to refresh memo-
ries and orient new viewers. ABC aired 14 hour-long compilation epi-
sodes over the course of Lost’s six seasons, with each episode replaying
key moments along with voice-over narration and interviews retelling
the narrative. Battlestar Galactica and The Wire, among others, aired
similar recap compilation episodes before the start of new seasons to
refresh viewers’ memories and to invite new viewers. Compilation epi-
sodes, like recaps, are quite strategic in their summaries, selecting plot
threads with continued relevancy while ignoring storylines that have
been resolved and made dormant within the ongoing narrative. The rise
of online video has enabled a number of other strategies for recapping.
Some networks, channels, and programs have created “minisodes” that
briefly sum up previous episodes, such as NBC’s online-only “2 Min-
ute Replays” or Rescue Me’s “3 Minute Replays” that could be seen both
online and on the cable channel FX. Such replays function more to allow
viewers who missed episodes to fill gaps, but they could also serve as
memory refreshers like preepisode recaps; however, such replays are
designed more to retell the entire episode than to strategically present
key story information for the upcoming episode.
An interesting trend emerged in 2007 with the popular YouTube
video “The Seven Minute Sopranos.” A high-speed recap of the previous
five and a half seasons in advance of the final episodes airing, the humor-
ous but affectionate fan-created video garnered over a million views
and successfully promoted the final season.19 The television industry
took note of the success and created similarly glib online recaps, such as
“Lost in 8:15” and “What the frak is going on?” for Battlestar Galactica.
These humorous recaps are designed for long-term fans as affectionate
194 | Comprehension

parodies, but they also function to effectively remind viewers of key

events and to highlight patterns and repetitions across the series, such
as the numerous times that Carmela Soprano “gets pissed” at her hus-
band, Tony, captured by the repeated visual of her throwing his luggage
at him down the stairs. In addition to recap videos, viewers’ memory can
be refreshed via many of the orienting paratexts discussed in chapter 8,
yielding an array of media extensions that allows nearly any question a
fan might have about a serialized television series to be answered by a
quick Google search or by perusing the program’s most active fan sites,
making these complex long-form storyworlds effectively searchable and
highly documented.
Clearly, a complex series can use a range of narrative strategies to
trigger and play with viewers’ memories. This catalogue of memory-
aiding techniques highlights the importance of underlying processes of
memory in the seemingly simple act of narrative comprehension. Man-
aging a multiyear narrative universe is difficult enough for television
writers, but they also face significant challenges to ensure that viewers
can follow the action without falling into either confusion or boredom
from redundancy. Even though new modes of viewing have made it
more common for viewers to watch a serial in sequential order with-
out missing episodes, it is still common enough for viewers to watch
erratically, requiring internal redundancy and paratextual extensions to
ensure narrative comprehension. To understand the process of making
sense from a series without full background knowledge and memories,
we can take a closer look at the comprehension of a single episode.

The Serial Viewer’s Activity

Comprehending a television narrative is both so straightforward as to
fall beneath the threshold of analysis and potentially rich in complexity.
To understand how we make sense of complex television, we need to
take a slow-motion look at comprehension in practice, following Bord-
well’s model pioneered by his account of viewing Rear Window.20 But
as suggested earlier, the television viewer’s activity is too multifaceted
to bracket off the viewing context, as serial texts can be comprehended
in drastically different ways depending on what viewers bring to their
viewing. To highlight this process, I examine viewing a Curb Your
 Comprehension | 195

Enthusiasm episode with some self-reflexivity, considering how the

particular context I first brought to the episode shapes the comprehen-
sion experience, frames knowledge differentials, and structures viewing
memory. I am not suggesting that the viewing I trace here is identical to
my own comprehension process, as much of this activity operates at the
level of preconscious automatic processing that I cannot claim to access
for myself or others; rather, by highlighting the contexts that I brought
to the episode, I hope to show the microlinks between contexts and cog-
nition. Thus the comprehension activity charted here is abstracted and
hypothetical, but the crucial shaping contexts are not. This slow-motion
account of the episode’s storytelling and the process of viewer compre-
hension allows us to see complex narrative form operating at the level
of an entire episode, exemplifying many of the poetic aspects explored
throughout the rest of the book.
I have chosen to focus on “Vehicular Fellatio,” the second episode of
the seventh season, in part because it is a particularly elegant episode
of television (despite its crude name) and in part because of my own
idiosyncratic context. I first saw this episode upon its initial airing in
September 2009, as a longtime fan of Curb but one with an erratic view-
ing history. I had watched the program’s first four seasons in full when
they aired from 2000 to 2004 but gave up after a disappointing fourth
season made me less interested in the series, as well as the complication
that I lacked HBO during the next two seasons. I returned for the sev-
enth season because it was to feature a Seinfeld reunion as a serialized
plotline — as a longtime Seinfeld fan, I was compelled to watch. So my
experience watching this episode was framed by the context of knowing
the program’s first four seasons well (although in distant memory) but
not knowing the next two at all. Prior to watching the seventh season,
I read brief online summaries of the fifth and sixth seasons to see what
I had missed, but many of the characters and relationships portrayed
in the seventh season were new to me. This experience of watching a
serialized program with breaks in viewing history and using extratextual
information to fill in gaps is certainly not the ideal as designed by tele-
vision producers, but it is common among viewers, highlighting how
serial television’s viewing contexts are far more variable and unpredict-
able than those for film. While not ideal, my background made me a
“competent viewer,” drawing on both previous viewing and extratextual
196 | Comprehension

information to put me in a position to adequately comprehend the sea-

son. I foreground my own experiences to demonstrate how comprehen-
sion is shaped by the intersection of a television text and a viewer’s con-
textual background within the cognitive process of watching a program.
As discussed in chapter 3, Curb’s main character, Larry David, is a
television writer who made a fortune after creating Seinfeld, a series
modeled in part after his own life. Of course, Curb itself is created,
produced, written by, and stars Larry David, a television writer who
made a fortune after creating Seinfeld, a series modeled in part after his
own life via his on-screen surrogate of George Costanza. On top of this
layer of metareferentiality are numerous celebrity guest stars playing
themselves, always reminding us that the people who play (fictional)
Larry’s friends are often (real) David’s friends. These blurring boundar-
ies between reality and fiction become particularly fraught in the sev-
enth season, as the story follows from Larry’s divorce of his longtime
(fictional) wife, Cheryl, in the sixth season, paralleling David’s well-
publicized divorce from his longtime (real) wife, Laurie. Additionally,
the season’s main arc follows Larry’s attempts to create and produce a
Seinfeld reunion special, culminating in a reunion of the Seinfeld cast
that stages part of this reunion special within Curb itself, offering scenes
from an embedded (fictional) episode of Seinfeld in lieu of any actual
reunion special. Thus anyone watching Curb with a degree of cultural
literacy about Seinfeld and David (which the series certainly encour-
ages viewers to seek out) must keep these multiple frames of reference
in mind, inviting us to chart out what on-screen events are based on
real events and how those representations mirror, rework, or comment
on reality.
Another important level of extratextual knowledge involves Curb’s
highly unusual production model — David writes a detailed story out-
line for every episode, but the actual lines of dialogue are improvised
by the actors in multiple filmed run-throughs. Thus as we watch, we
are invited to imagine how scenes were put together, wondering what
was improvised by actors and what was scripted. Although with most
programs such meta-analysis is something that only a small subset
of viewers do — including those trained in media studies, aspiring to
become television creators themselves, or just fascinated with “how
the sausage gets made” — Curb invites such operational attention to the
 Comprehension | 197

creative process because the fictional world itself frequently portrays

the characters creating television, theater, or other storytelling media,
a trend that is magnified in the seventh season. Additionally, Larry and
his friends are always obsessing over what people mean by what they
say and why on earth somebody might have said that — extending such
nitpicking analytic detail to how the spoken lines came to be seems con-
sistent and encouraged by the program’s analytic attention to minutiae
and motivations.
Season 7 picks up on two main plotlines from the sixth season: Larry’s
divorce from Cheryl and his romantic relationship with Loretta Black,
a member of the African American New Orleans family that the Davids
welcomed into their house in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The
season premiere, “Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister,” links these together
by making it clear that Larry would like to end his relationship with
Loretta to reunite with Cheryl, but the episode’s final moments reveal
that Loretta has cancer, a diagnosis that the ever-selfish Larry regards as
an obstacle to both extracting himself from the relationship and playing
golf. Thus “Vehicular Fellatio” begins at this key moment in the story
arc, with Larry facing his role as Loretta’s caretaker, a position for which
he is wholly unsuited. After watching the season debut, I investigated
some questions that arose as an erratic viewer: how long have Larry and
Loretta been a couple? How long has she been ill? And who exactly is
Leon, who seems to be of a different ilk than the rest of the Black family?
Consulting resources such as fan sites, other viewers, or even Wikipedia
has become commonplace for television viewers, as discussed in chapter
8 — while Curb does not feature a convoluted mythology like Lost or a
vast world of characters like Game of Thrones, it does invite us to explore
extratextual sources, largely cued by the program’s own references to
extratextual concerns.
Differences in viewing contexts can shape emotional investments in
characters — on the basis of my partial viewing, I was wholly unsympa-
thetic to Loretta and her relationship with Larry, as I lacked any context
for her character beyond her appearance in this season’s first episode,
and thus I shared Larry’s disdain for her and interest in reuniting with
Cheryl, whom I knew much better from the first four seasons. Thus
I first watched “Vehicular Fellatio” armed with this partial knowledge
and framed anticipation. As is typical in the era of electronic program
198 | Comprehension

guides and DVRs, the episode title precedes the episode; in this case, the
title certainly calls attention to itself, setting up anticipatory questions
about who might be giving and receiving such fellatio and in whose
vehicle. Curb episodes lack “previously on” recaps, so depending on how
long it may have been since a viewer had watched “Funkhouser’s Crazy
Sister,” the episode must diegetically remind us of the lingering ques-
tions surrounding Loretta. However, the opening sequence forgoes plot
concerns for a moment of pure physical comedy — Larry opens a gift
bag containing a GPS device but struggles to open the plastic clamshell
packaging for nearly two minutes of escalating frustration, a wordless
sequence featuring only Larry’s rage-induced shouts. This opening aims
our anticipation away from plot questions and more toward the emo-
tional realm of pure comedy. The sequence ends with Loretta’s voice
calling for Larry to come upstairs, leading him to stomp on the package
in anger, connecting this microfrustration to the broader reminder of
his sense of being trapped in an unhappy relationship with ill Loretta.
Her illness is activated into working memory when he converses with
her upstairs, as Loretta mentions her cancer to make Larry feel guilty
about his petty complaints and desire to play golf. Over the course of
the conversation, Larry mentions a few other characters that activate
our memories, including series regulars Jeff and Susie, Richard Lewis,
who has played himself as a recurring role throughout the series but had
not yet appeared in the seventh season, and Lewis’s unnamed new girl-
friend, suggesting a new character. Iterating such characters helps prime
viewers for who might appear in subsequent scenes and establish the
relationships for viewers who might have missed episodes. The scene
also displays Loretta being petty and demanding, using her cancer as a
rationale to have Larry wait on her, which reinforces our allegiance with
Larry in rooting for him to dump Loretta despite her illness, rather than
making us pity her and condemn his selfishness.
The next scene seems to be a throwaway, as Leon asks Larry to
call his friend Alton, revealing that Alton is a huge Seinfeld fan, he is
depressed, it is his birthday, and he has “a hot-ass wife.” The brief scene
offers little comedy, aside from Leon’s curse-filled dialect, but sets in
motion another plotline, with Leon leaving Alton’s number on Larry’s
dresser. Thus five minutes into the episode, we have five potential dan-
gling story threads: Larry and Loretta’s dysfunctional relationship, the
 Comprehension | 199

upcoming dinner with Richard and friends, Alton’s birthday call, the
GPS gift, and the mysterious episode title. Additionally, we know of the
lingering possibility of Larry and Cheryl reconciling and the extratextu-
ally hyped Seinfeld reunion that has yet to be mentioned in the season.
Having learned how to watch Curb and recognize intrinsic norms of
plotting, we expect some of these plotlines to come together in surpris-
ing ways, as we imagine such possibilities through hypotheses of opera-
tional speculation. The next scene moves one of these plots forward, as
Larry glances at the television to see Dr. Karen Trundle urging cancer
patients to ditch their “toxic relationships,” which she defines as “some-
one who is impatient, someone who is obnoxious, someone who is petty
and argumentative, obsesses over meaningless details at the expense of
a harmonious relationship.” Larry’s face moves from interest to plea-
sure to jubilation as he hears his own faults itemized, and we engage in
an easy bit of mind reading (as discussed in chapter 4) to imagine him
rationalizing the breakup as better for Loretta’s illness. The next scene
moves this plot forward, with Larry telling Loretta that he has made an
appointment for them to see Dr. Trundle — although this being Curb, we
anticipate that this plan will backfire in unpredictable ways.
The Alton plotline advances next, as Larry calls him with birthday
wishes. All goes well in the phone call, until Larry succumbs to his ten-
dency to overshare information, as he tells Alton that Leon thinks his
wife is beautiful, triggering a jealous rage in Alton that Larry hangs up
on. We predict that this conflict will come back before the episode’s end,
as Larry often makes minor social miscues that lead to overreaction and
conflict, and thus experienced viewers remember other Curb moments
of comparable awkwardness and their repercussions in predicting the
potential confrontational outcome. The next scene is the anticipated
dinner, which begins with Jeff and Larry talking at the bar. Jeff makes
Larry swear to secrecy, to which Larry says, “I’m a vault,” a reference to
a phrase commonly used on Seinfeld, which both strengthens the link
between Larry and George Costanza and evokes the anticipated out-
come that, as on Seinfeld, this vault will soon be opened. Jeff tells Larry
that on the way to the restaurant, Richard’s girlfriend “blew him in the
car,” providing a reference for the episode’s titular sex act and thus seem-
ingly answering that lingering question. The conversation drifts into
comedic riffing, as Jeff and Larry discuss the dangers of blow jobs, hand
200 | Comprehension

jobs, or “any kind of job” while driving and then speculate as to why they
are called “jobs.” This type of comedic dialogue evokes the operational
dimension of comprehension — knowing the program’s improvisatory
production model, viewers can imagine the actors coming up with these
digressions and watch for frequent signs of the actors breaking character
to laugh at each other.
When Jeff and Larry reach the table, Richard’s girlfriend introduces
herself as Beverly, which furthers the process of character recogni-
tion discussed more in chapter 4 — and assures erratic viewers that she
is indeed a new character, rather than a reoccurring figure we might
be expected to remember. Beverly encourages Larry to try a sip of her
drink, which repulses him because of his memory of her recent sexual
activity — as viewers, we share Larry’s knowledge and thus can fill in the
unstated rationale for why he refuses the sip, even as the other char-
acters are confused by his rude behavior. At the end of the dinner, Jeff
asks Larry if he is going to Michael York’s party, which raises a memory
question: do we know this character? Some older viewers might know
York as the British actor best known from 1970s films such as Cabaret
and Logan’s Run, while dedicated Curb viewers would remember York’s
appearances in four episodes in the third season. Regardless of how we
know him, his name sets up our anticipation that he will reappear in
this episode, cuing narrative expectations for another setting and char-
acter to emerge. York’s mention becomes an excuse to bring up the GPS
system, which Larry thanks Jeff and Susie for. He then recounts how he
failed to open the package; 10 minutes into the episode, this reference
functions as a short-term memory cue, reminding us of this opening
moment and suggesting that the GPS package will return to relevance
beyond just the opening bit of physical comedy. Beverly tries to kiss
Larry upon her departure, and he recoils from her, prompting her out-
rage and Richard demanding that Larry explain himself. As we wonder
whether Larry will open the vault, Jeff gestures to keep it secret, so Larry
lies that he was ashamed that he had a cold sore — given our knowledge
of Curb’s obsession with such health-related minutiae and deceptions,
we can assume this fake cold sore will reappear in some form.
The next day, Larry goes to a hardware store to buy a knife to open
the GPS package; at the store, Leon confronts Larry for disclosing what
 Comprehension | 201

he thought about Alton’s wife, which it turns out was more than just a
compliment. As Larry and Leon argue about the latter’s habit of “tapping
the ass” of married women, it raises curiosity questions about Leon’s
backstory. Given the context of my serial gaps, I was not sure how much
about Leon’s past, personality, and relationship with Larry had been
established in the sixth season versus what was intentionally unstated.
For me at the time, he seemed like a particularly inscrutable character,
notable mostly for his profane speech and comic banter with Larry but
lacking any clear role in the ensemble; such instances are telling for the
varieties in serialized experiences, as many fans who had watched the
sixth season celebrated Leon as one of their favorite characters. Thus
watching without the full backstory prompts viewers to create uninten-
tional curiosity questions and hypotheses, leading to a wide range of
possible narrative responses due to varying backgrounds and contexts.
Larry and Loretta visit Dr. Trundle in the next scene, which plays
on our knowledge differences. We know that Larry is trying to appear
“toxic” by selfishly ignoring Loretta and belittling her cancer, and thus
we laugh at his petty, horrible behavior as an exaggerated performance
of his typical insensitivity — mirroring how the fictional Larry functions
as an exaggeration of the real-life David as well. These layers of perfor-
mance foreshadow a theme that will grow in prominence throughout
the season, as Larry views Jason Alexander’s performance of George as a
fictionalized reflection of his own worst tendencies. Within this episode,
we root for Larry to extract himself from Loretta and enjoy his over-the-
top attempts to be insensitive and obnoxious. When Larry leaves the
room, we follow him to maintain full alignment throughout the episode;
in the waiting room, he encounters Mr. Trundle, the doctor’s husband
whose picture he saw in her office, but this interaction only lasts a single
line — given Curb’s norms that new characters and interactions usually
amount to something significant, we anticipate his eventual return.
Dean Weinstock, Larry’s former neighbor, arrives and reminds Larry
(and us) who he is, which we have likely forgotten, having appeared only
in one first-season episode that originally aired nearly nine years ear-
lier. They get into a highly petty, minutiae-focused argument about who
broke Dean’s glasses, which escalates in typical Curb fashion until Dean
mentions that he has cancer; this mortifies Larry, who disengages and
202 | Comprehension

agrees to pay for the glasses. Larry’s shift in demeanor highlights that
he is not wholly a horrible person but also contrasts with the insensitive
way he is willing to treat Loretta for personal gain.
On the drive home, Larry tells Loretta, “I got a pretty good vibe from
that doctor. Pretty, pretty, pretty good.” His drawn-out delivery of the
repeated “pretty” is one of Curb’s catchphrases, evoking memories of
past episodes and our affinities toward Larry. This positive sense is fur-
thered by the impression that Dr. Trundle told Loretta to dump Larry,
as Loretta alludes vaguely to things she needs to do for her health, which
Larry encourages. After arriving home, Richard stops by to blame Larry
for destroying his relationship with Beverly, which Richard claims was
“maybe the most special one” he ever had; Larry questions this claim
by highlighting how Richard had said the last one was special. Without
knowledge of the previous seasons, this reference is unclear, although
given the program’s sense of history, we can assume that Larry was
somehow involved in wrecking Richard’s last relationship as well. Rich-
ard insists that Larry apologize to Beverly for his actions, and we antic-
ipate a reiteration of the cold-sore lie. However, Larry tells the truth
for once, mistaking Richard’s gesture as the “blow-job sign,” and opens
the vault, talking about the vehicular fellatio and thus reactivating the
episode title. The dialogue between Larry and Richard again enters the
realm of operational pleasure, as they riff about sex and manners, with
both actors on the verge of cracking up.
Larry drives Loretta to Dr. Trundle’s lecture, and they see Mr. Trundle
in the car ahead of them, mentioning him by name, relationship, and
previous encounter, all of which seem to be setting him up for playing
a major role in the anticipated narrative collision course that Curb epi-
sodes frequently feature; and thus his presence triggers an operational
anticipatory question: why do we keep seeing him? We soon get our
answer, with the first crossover between plotlines: as both cars are driv-
ing, we see Dr. Trundle’s head rise up from her husband’s lap, wiping her
mouth after some implied vehicular fellatio. Loretta is so offended that
she discredits the doctor, insisting that Larry turn the car around, thus
foiling his plan to inspire Loretta to leave him. At the operational level, it
feels like the title has now fully been paid off, crossing between plots and
serving as a major narrative stimulus to undercut Larry’s grand scheme.
Yet it returns in the next scene, as Larry goes to Dr. Trundle’s office to
 Comprehension | 203

leave payment for Dean’s glasses, but Dr. Trundle expresses her disap-
pointment that Larry and Loretta missed the lecture and accuses Larry
of interfering because she was going to urge Loretta to leave him. Larry
“rejects the hypothesis,” and when she presses him to tell the truth, he
describes what they witnessed in the car. The doctor denies it, becom-
ing so incensed with Larry’s implications that she beats him with her
book. We are left uncertain whether she was lying about her explanation
that she was searching for her cell phone, but clearly we can support
her accusation that Larry has a “tiny little, insecure, infantile mind of
about a twelve-year-old” (to which he replies, “I think you blew him”) —
and yet we are fully aligned and allied with Larry throughout his pet-
tiness and misanthropy. Like the antiheroes discussed in chapter 4, we
see Larry as an undesirable person but enjoy him as a character, saying
things that are socially unacceptable and living without shame or fear of
consequences from his petty griping.
The fellatio-related complications are not yet over, however, as Larry
arrives home to find Leon attempting to hide Alton’s wife from Alton,
who has arrived hoping to catch them in an uncompromising posi-
tion. Alton’s unnamed wife hides by ducking in Larry’s car until Leon
convinces Alton that nothing is going on, but just as the coast is clear,
Loretta drives up to see Alton’s wife sit up in the car. With vehicular
fellatio active in her working memory, Loretta assumes the worst and
promptly leaves Larry, moving out with her family. Despite being called
a “cheating, no-good, bald-head motherfucker,” Larry is elated to be free
from Loretta, and our sympathies are certainly with him. Our sense of a
happy ending is intensified with the operational aesthetic of having the
multiple plot threads come together in such an elegant manner, united
around the unusual act of vehicular fellatio that randomly allowed Larry
to accomplish the goal that his scheming could not. This effect is typi-
cal of the series, as Larry’s successes are rare but are most frequently
attributable to random fortune rather than careful planning, social skills,
or decent behavior. As I discussed in chapter 4, we enjoy mind reading
characters with particularly adept social skills or Machiavellian intelli-
gence; in Larry, we have a character whose social intelligence is stunted
within an infantile mind but who manages to succeed through coinci-
dence and fortunate failure, conveying the message that no matter how
culturally awkward we might be, we can still survive via dumb luck.21
204 | Comprehension

However, the episode is not yet over, as there are a few more threads
to weave into the web of vehicular fellatio. The final scene shows Larry
driving to Michael York’s party, calling back to that reference from the
dinner scene, when he sees a car accident on the side of the road. He dis-
covers Jeff and Susie in the car, having swerved off the road in a moment
of vehicular fellatio, a danger that Larry had cautioned Jeff against ear-
lier in the episode. To help them escape their compromising situation,
Larry says he will get the knife he bought earlier to cut Jeff ’s seatbelt —
only to discover that the knife itself is wrapped in an impenetrable plas-
tic package, leaving Larry screaming in an incoherent rage, just as the
episode began. This is a dually satisfying moment, offering both the
visceral laughs of a panic-stricken Larry grappling with an improba-
bly packaged knife and the operational pleasures of a circular comedic
structure. Such circularity and contrivances make for highly unrealis-
tic storytelling, as Curb clearly sets its norms far from expectations of
plausibility. Instead, the series values the elegance of a well-crafted set
of contrivances, in which the situations pile up and top one another in
highly implausible but resonant ways. Per the program’s intrinsic norms,
we do not expect that these closing events will have serial implications —
while we can assume that Loretta leaving (and Leon staying) will persist
beyond this episode, we also expect that Jeff and Susie’s car accident and
Larry’s attempted rescue will go unresolved, treated as a thrown-away
gag rather than a lingering plot point. This assumption is proven cor-
rect in the next episode, “The Reunion,” which launches the Seinfeld arc
now that the lingering situations from season 6’s story with the Blacks
are wrapped up.
As an exemplar of complex comedy, Curb highlights how innova-
tive plotting, reflexive story mechanics, and awareness of its own norms
and expectations can work to offer new possibilities for narrative com-
prehension. While not as elaborately serialized as many dramas or as
infused with backstory enigmas and suspense-driven mysteries, Curb
Your Enthusiasm offers a good glimpse into how we engage with an
episode of complex television to make sense of an ongoing narrative.
Although comedy is typically less naturalistic than drama is, Curb is on
the extreme side of the spectrum along with Arrested Development in
rejecting realism for more operational pleasures, coupled with a pseudo-
documentary shooting style and improvised dialogue that invite us to
 Comprehension | 205

imagine how the program was made. With at least five plot threads all
connected to a central character, the episode must keep each plate spin-
ning independently, actively reminding us about each storyline and
playing with our anticipation as to how they might all crash together. All
of this cognitive stimulation does not forestall emotional engagement,
as we laugh at the episode, root for Larry to move forward with his per-
sonal life, and cringe at his inappropriate behavior. This slow-motion
description of the viewer’s activity in making sense of an episode can
highlight how complex television storytelling works to interweave the
pleasures of a story and its telling that typify the operational aesthetic.
Taking a cognitive poetic approach to television storytelling does not
close down other theoretical models or methods — it is an approach that
is best suited to answering particular, limited questions about viewers’
mental activity and engagement. Although cognitive approaches to film
and media studies have been criticized for making overly universalized
assumptions about viewers and ignoring cultural contexts, my analysis
shows how using cognitive models for viewer comprehension can fit
within contextualized accounts of active audiences and participatory
culture more common to television studies. We can combine what we
know about cultural contexts with the mechanics of mental comprehen-
sion and engagement to develop a more pluralistic and complementary
set of theoretical tools. Looking closely at how we comprehend com-
plex television narratives through both contextual and cognitive models
helps explain how this narrative mode engages various types of viewers
and fosters creative innovation within television storytelling.
6

Evaluation

In the introduction, I discussed how my experience watching Alias and

24 in 2001 helped shape this book, as seeking ways to explain both pro-
grams’ narrative complexity inspired me to study television’s storytelling
poetics to help fill a gap in the field. However, these dual programs point
toward another blind spot in television studies: my own sense that Alias
was much better than 24. There was no shortage of discussion over the
relative worth of these or other series in the backstage arenas of media
scholars, whether on barstools at conferences or in departmental mail-
rooms — sites that today extend to online networks on blogs, Twitter,
and Facebook. But there was then, and still is, little space for a media
scholar to make such an evaluative argument within the realm of official
scholarly discourse. Perhaps such evaluation might appear in disguise,
masked in the garb of political analysis arguing the superiority of Alias’s
representations of gender, race, and global politics in comparison to 24.
While I would not argue with such an assessment (although those are
certainly complicated issues), my own evaluation was more due to an
aesthetic judgment than a political preference: I believe that Alias is a far
more effective serialized narrative than 24.
So what might I do with this evaluative judgment? The most common
tactic among media scholars is to pack it away, bracketing it off from
our professional writing in the name of analytic objectivity, or at least
neutrality. But I see two main flaws with this quick dismissal. First, it is
dishonest — my aesthetic judgments do structure and shape this book.
Since analyzing serial television requires an investment of many hours
into watching, rewatching, and researching any given series, I have cho-
sen to focus on programs that I actually enjoy as my primary case stud-
ies. Does this emphasis on my favorite programs such as The Wire, Lost,
Veronica Mars, and Breaking Bad over complex television series I do
not particularly enjoy, such as Mad Men, 24, and Heroes, mean that my
analysis is skewed? Certainly, as this would be a different book if my

206
 Evaluation | 207

analysis had focused on other objects of study. But I make no claims

toward objectivity or neutrality, as I fully acknowledge that my own
taste biases shape what programs I analyze and how I approach them.
I do not know how someone could manage to write a book like this
without being selective in what programs to cover, and it is far better
to be up-front about why I have focused on these particular programs
than to bury the hidden rationale in pseudo-objectivity. And while I do
not personally like some of the programs that I overlook, I would never
claim that they are irrelevant to our understanding of television story-
telling — I encourage critics with more sympathy for Mad Men or 24 to
offer their own poetic analyses of such important series.
The more vital problem with bracketing off questions of taste and
evaluation is that it ignores key questions concerning television story-
telling: Can we analyze why some programs work better than others for
particular viewers? Can we analyze taste as anything more than a reflec-
tion of either textually inherent aesthetic value or contextually deter-
mined markers of the critic’s social strata? In analyzing the poetics of
television narrative, can we ask both how something works and how it
works well? I believe the answers to all of these questions are yes — we
can use evaluative criticism to strengthen our understanding of how a
television program works, how viewers and fans invest themselves in a
text, and what inspires them (and us) to make television a meaningful
part of everyday life.1 At its best, evaluative criticism helps us to see a
series differently, providing a glimpse into one viewer’s aesthetic expe-
rience and inviting readers to try on such vicarious reading positions
for themselves.
Before proceeding to such evaluations, it is important to contextual-
ize what it is we do when we evaluate. An evaluative critique does not
aspire to the status of fact or proof. By claiming that a given program is
good or that one series is better than another, I am making an argument
that I believe to be true, but it is not a truth claim — in Stanley Fish’s
terms, evaluation is an act of persuasion rather than demonstration.2
Even more than other types of analysis, evaluation is an invitation to
a dialogue, as debating the merits of cultural works is one of the most
enjoyable ways we engage with texts, establish relationships with other
consumers, and gain respect for other people’s opinions and insights. Of
course, I do hope to convince readers that my evaluation is correct, and
208 | Evaluation

I certainly believe it to be true. But we do not make evaluations to make

a definitive statement about the value of any given text; instead, they are
contingent claims lodged in their contextual moment that will almost
undoubtedly be revised after future viewing and conversation. While
my persuasive evaluation emerges from a context of authority, with an
imprint of academic expertise that might give it more weight than a ran-
dom pseudonym in an online comment thread, any evaluation’s effec-
tiveness stems more from successful analysis and argumentation than
from the backing of institutional power or authority.
So why do I claim (however contingently) that Alias is a better
case of complex television than 24 is? For me (as such evaluations are
always draped in the cloak of personal caveat), both series are ludi-
crous, but Alias revels in its own ludicrousness in a way that 24 fails
to. Both programs tell ridiculous tales of action-oriented espionage,
double and triple agents uncovering moles and deep-seated deceptions,
and far-fetched scenarios of global peril that strain credulity. However,
Alias never pretends to be serious in its vision of espionage and global
intrigue — it wears its preposterous vision of globe-trotting secret agents
as part of its high-fashion, stylistic sheen. It invites us to care about the
characters and their relationships but winkingly acknowledges that its
plot and scenarios are absurd in their fantastic glossy style, undercut by
the comic relief of SD-6’s technology guru Marshall Flinkman’s nerdy
fanboy reflexivity, by the superhuman talents of Sydney Bristow and her
fellow agents, and the scenery-chewing villainy of Arvin Sloan and Irina
Derevko. Alias presents itself as a rollicking good time of a series, a thrill
ride with a campy level of self-awareness and an overt embrace of end-
less attempts to top its own cliffhanging twists and reversals — in short,
it’s a hoot.
In contrast, 24 takes its own ludicrousness way too seriously. From its
production style of gritty realism to the real-time storytelling gimmick
to its naturalistic high-stakes acting tone, 24 invites viewers to believe
that this all might be real.3 At least judging from the first season (which
is the only year I watched in full, along with selected episodes from sub-
sequent years), the program does little to puncture its own self-serious
tone, with minimal comic undercutting, reflexive acknowledgment,
or moments of stylistic artifice. This is not to say that a program must
mock itself or undercut its own seriousness to be good but that there
 Evaluation | 209

seems to be an inherent incompatibility between 24’s serious, naturalis-

tic style employing techniques that connote realism (on-screen anchor-
ing text, split screens signaling simultaneity, handheld camerawork) and
its ridiculous first-season storylines about faked deaths, body doubles,
a double-crossing double-agent mistress, and a plane-exploding, hyper-
sexual lesbian assassin — not to mention Kim randomly getting attacked
by a cougar in season 2. As a viewer, I found myself perpetually unsure
how seriously I was supposed to be taking the series and its dramatic
arcs, an uncertainty that becomes even more troubling with the pro-
gram’s political celebration of torture and demonization of Muslims.
Additionally, the plotting was frequently sloppy, with loose ends and
shortcuts that belied the program’s real-time illusion of tightness and
planning. Although Alias had its own fair share of narrative missteps
and shortcuts, it never presented itself as anything more than a stylish
fantasy, while 24 always maintained a pretense of being a coherent and
well-constructed suspense thriller.
The takeaway from this brief evaluative comparison of Alias and 24
is that a series must effectively provide a framework for understanding
its own storytelling and style to be successful — the text must speak to
its viewers in a voice that guides us how to watch it. To me, Alias is a
far more effective series (especially for its first three seasons) because it
established my expectations to offer escapist, fantastic propulsive fun,
with character relationships providing emotional weight to stories that
were far from grounded. Of course, 24 was far more commercially suc-
cessful in the long run, with higher ratings, a larger fan base, and broader
cultural influence. However, as an outsider to the program’s viewership,
I do not understand how viewers made sense of the program’s contradic-
tions in tone and storytelling — is it supposed to be a serious thriller, a
campy hypermasculine melodrama, or somewhere in between? Viewers
who fail to appreciate a series often have such a sense of not speaking
the program’s language, creating a layer of miscommunication between
what the text is saying and what we might be hearing. Many of the best
complex television series work on numerous levels, providing both sur-
face pleasures and deeper resonances for different groups of viewers, so I
am sure that many 24 fans find that it does succeed at these goals, as they
can understand the program’s language. But 24 fails for me at multiple
levels, succeeding only at developing cliffhangers that make me want
210 | Evaluation

to keep watching, even though I do not enjoy the program, making it

the televisual equivalent of a can of Pringles. I do find it an interesting
failure, marrying ambitious formal innovations to more conventional
content in ways that run counter to other innovative contemporary tele-
vision series that are frequently labeled “quality television,” a label that
deserves more discussion.

The Qualities of Complexity

In writing about complex television series, many of which I find highly
compelling and successful works of popular art, I have consciously
avoided the label “quality television.” This term is most usefully under-
stood as a discursive category used to distinguish certain programs from
others, with such programs less united by formal or thematic elements
than used as a mark of prestige to elevate the sophistication of view-
ers who embrace such “quality” programming. The field of television
studies has a mixed relationship to the term — “quality television” is a
more commonly used phrase in Europe, referencing upscale fictional
programs in the press and academic discourse, while it is used far less
frequently in the United States, even though much of what is labeled
“quality” is American television. Most American media scholars regard
the emphasis on quality with skepticism and even have outright hostility
toward regarding television as an aesthetic object. In charting out some
of these different perspectives, I hope to move away from the discursive
trap of quality and model an approach to evaluating television program-
ming that can hopefully open up a space for scholars to engage more
productively with aesthetic analysis.
The first approach to evaluation might be considered unselfconscious
quality television discourse, but this is actually quite rare among media
scholars. “Quality television” as a term is rarely used without layers of
caveats and disclaimers within academic writing, noting that “quality”
(frequently compartmentalized by quotation marks) is subjective or
that it is more interesting as a discourse circulating within the industry
or fans, rather than an evaluative label itself.4 Yet for all of these cave-
ats, there still seems to be a general consensus as to what programs are
included and excluded among scholars who use the term, suggesting
that it has some salience as a critical category. Looking at books that
 Evaluation | 211

use the term “quality television,” as well as the Reading Contemporary

Television series from publisher I. B. Tauris that typically embraces the
category if not the term explicitly, we can see common series including
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ER, The X-Files, The Sopranos, The West Wing,
Lost, and Six Feet Under. While we might see a shared corpus identified
under the label, there is rarely any analytic clarity as to what precisely
counts as quality television, making it hard to justify why CSI, Dead-
wood, Scrubs, and The Daily Show are all covered within the book Qual-
ity TV, aside from all being part of a shared taste culture that appeals to
academics and critics.5
Attempts to define quality television typically depend on implied
resemblances, contrasting quality with its presumed opposite and used
to elevate certain series over others. Such programs are united less by
a clear set of formal or thematic elements than by cultural markers of
prestige linked to “serious” content, cinematic style, and convention-
breaking innovations that reflect well on viewers who embrace such
programming as a distinctive (and oft-repeated) exception to their
standard antitelevision tastes — “that’s the only program that I watch.”
For the commercial television industry, quality refers most directly to
the “quality audience,” the educated, upscale, urbane demographic that
mainstream television frequently struggles to attract but that advertis-
ers most want to capture — it was this niche audience that helped make
unlikely commercial successes out of programs such as All in the Family,
Hill Street Blues, and The West Wing, the latter of which was renowned
as the most popular program with viewers who otherwise did not watch
television. Historically, American quality television was rhetorically
crystallized in opposition to the “vast wasteland” of lowbrow, inter-
changeable formulaic programming, with the term reaching its highest
profile in the 1980s to celebrate, and lobby for the continuation of, low-
rated programs such as St. Elsewhere and Cagney and Lacey.
The American scholar who has touted quality television most directly
is Robert Thompson, who fully admits that the label is ultimately rela-
tional: “Quality TV is best defined by what it is not. It is not ‘regular’
TV.”6 Under this formulation, “quality television” refers to series that
stand in opposition to the majority of programming, with an oxymo-
ronic implication to the term —television must be redeemed by its oppo-
site. For some critics, quality is a marker of value, suggesting that these
212 | Evaluation

programs are better than others, while for others, it serves as a con-
struction of either a class of targeted viewers (“the quality audience”)
or a set of textual attributes of high production values, serious themes,
and connection to other more culturally legitimated, prestigious media
such as literature and cinema. However, the slippage between notions of
value, prestige, and audience and the need for quality to assert its equally
vague opposite of assumed “low quality” or worthless television make
the concept aesthetically incoherent and not particularly useful either as
a textual category with analytic or evaluative precision or as a label for
how television circulates culturally.
Many uses of “quality television” accept an implicit notion of textual
value, in which evaluative criteria are left unspoken or undeveloped and
a program’s critical worth is viewed as inherent to the text itself rather
than tied to contingent contexts or active viewer engagement. In an
unusually self-aware and reflective piece about quality television, Sarah
Cardwell outlines a number of features that distinguish quality television
more as a genre and less as an evaluative category, noting that “to notice
a programme’s signifiers of quality is not to assert anything about its
value.” But her next sentence reinforces the assumption that a text’s value
is inherently tied to such markers of quality: “Yet I believe these qualities
also make them good.”7 She stops short of carrying forward her detailed
account of the quality genre to explore the experiential dimension of
television evaluation that she briefly points to, allowing the illuminated
category of quality television to stand in for more in-depth evaluative
criticism. I agree fully with Cardwell that we should be up-front and
open about discussing programs that we like and engage in evaluative
discourse, but I find that the category of quality television does little to
help explain this facet of media engagement, frequently complicating an
already muddy terrain through a slippage between the established cat-
egory and the type of aesthetic possibilities that such texts offer. Instead,
we need to find a way to engage in evaluation without resorting to the
loaded and misleading category of quality television.
A different, explicitly antievaluative approach dominates American
television scholarship, arguing that questions of value should not be on
the disciplinary agenda.8 Often this position is constructed by omission,
as most scholarship avoids overt evaluation so pervasively that there
is no need to even mark the gap as notable — evaluation is framed as
 Evaluation | 213

what journalistic critics and fans do and is only studied by media schol-
ars at a discursive remove when analyzing those cultural practices of
criticism and reception. When American scholars do raise questions
of evaluation, they typically follow a tradition of cultural studies that
frames issues of taste and aesthetics as social constructions that rein-
force power dynamics and hierarchies, inspired primarily by the work
of Pierre Bourdieu.9 Under this formulation, evaluation creates distinc-
tions that elevate one social sphere by belittling others, typically mirror-
ing established class and gender norms. Bourdieu and his followers cer-
tainly offer a vital rejoinder to the universalizing discourses of aesthetics
by highlighting how such practices are always embedded in social rela-
tions and cultural contexts, rather than inherent in texts themselves;
however, this critique can be taken too far by reductively dismissing
all issues of aesthetics and value in the name of political egalitarian-
ism. Additionally, there is an unintentional consequence of how Bour-
dieu’s sociology of taste has been embraced within media studies — in an
attempt to empower people with delegitimated tastes via denaturalized
aesthetics, the resulting social determination of taste becomes too rigid
and disempowering to account for the actions of people who help con-
stitute their own aesthetic realms and taste cultures, such as fans and
active audiences.10
A recent book that exemplifies both this antiaesthetic approach and
its shortcomings is Michael Newman and Elana Levine’s Legitimating
Television, which provides a compelling account of how television has
become more culturally valued throughout this century by reinforcing
cultural hierarchies. As they write in the book’s thesis statement,

The work of analyzing patterns of taste judgment and classification is thus

to unmask misrecognitions of authentic and autonomous value, bring-
ing to light their political and social functions. Such is the project of this
book. We argue that it is a mistake to accept naively that television has
grown better over the years, even while such a discourse is intensifying
within popular, industrial, and scholarly sites. In contrast, we argue that
it is primarily cultural elites . . . who have intensified the legitimation
of television by investing the medium with aesthetic and other prized
values, nudging it closer to more established arts and cultural forms and
preserving their own privileged status in return.11
214 | Evaluation

In surveying an array of critical, industrial, and scholarly practices as

part of a larger discourse of cultural distinction, they map this discur-
sive terrain and highlight the ways that it can reinforce class and gender
norms. They also shine an important light on how evaluative approaches
to television often strive for legitimacy by highlighting connections to
more legitimated media such as cinema and literature, instead of focus-
ing on specific attributes unique to television. But they fall prey to a core
danger of such discursive analysis: glossing over the varieties of micro-
practices that fall under a discursive umbrella in the name of mapping a
more totalizing and cohesive macropicture of unreflective “golden age”
celebration. Thus while they claim to be arguing for more self-awareness
and reflection in our analyses, they quickly label everything fitting into
these broader trends of legitimation as “naive” and thus reinforce pre-
existing class and gender hierarchies, while they themselves often ignore
cases exhibiting the very self-awareness and reflection that they call for.
And thus we are left with a situation in which we cannot escape legiti-
mating discourse, rendering all evaluative judgments suspect or invalid
and regarding the pragmatics of taste solely as reflections of social strata
rather than as cultural practices on their own contextualized but non-
determined terms.12
A danger in treating Bourdieu’s critique as gospel is that it paralyzes
scholars who want to say anything about issues of evaluation, as accusing
an academic of “perpetuating class and gender hierarchies” is among the
harshest critiques imaginable within contemporary scholarly discourse.
But just as “quality television” is too vague of a brush to paint an effec-
tive picture of media practices, “legitimating discourse” is a similarly
slippery concept, used both to focus on specific technological or genre
shifts and more broadly to caricature criticism as politically complicit
or naive. This is not to say that Bourdieu is wrong in highlighting how
aesthetic evaluation is a socially situated practice that can perpetuate
power relations or that the legitimating discourse mapped by Newman
and Levine is not an important facet of media today. But taken as gospel,
these are deterministic dead ends, providing little room to account for
the multifaceted pragmatics of taste distinctions and evaluations that
cultural consumers regularly engage with pleasurably, as these are the
very practices that arguably constitute television’s cultural hierarchies
more than any top-down institutional power that Bourdieu charted via
 Evaluation | 215

the French educational system. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz

aptly push back against this antiaesthetic model, “surely we cannot
reduce all declarations of a show’s artistry to the politics and perfor-
mance of superiority.”13 Thus we need to take the antiuniversalist lessons
of Bourdieu and his followers seriously but use them to reimagine how
we can talk about issues of aesthetics and evaluation more contingently
and without the broad brushes of universalized quality television claims.
Thus I want to offer a middle-ground approach to the critical evalua-
tion of television, one that avoids the categorical sweep of either quality
television or antilegitimation discourses. This approach follows that of
a number of mostly British and Australian media scholars whose writ-
ings have had unfortunately little influence in American television stud-
ies, in which treatment of evaluation mostly either celebrates quality
television or critiques legitimation and distinctions. Before Stuart Hall
effectively defined the scope of the cultural strain of television studies
with his seminal “Encoding/Decoding” essay, he cowrote The Popular
Arts with Paddy Whannel, offering a defense of popular culture via aes-
thetic analysis and evaluation.14 For Hall and Whannel, the category of
popular art is forged by the type of distinctions made unfashionable by
Bourdieu but still remains analytically useful even after the recognition
that aesthetic judgments are embedded more in power relations than
in transcendent essences of beauty. Hall and Whannel, as in other early
cultural studies work by Raymond Williams and Dick Hebdidge, explore
the aesthetics of everyday life, attempting to understand popular cul-
ture on its own terrain, not measured against incompatible paradigms
of high art. A number of recent works of cultural studies, and a few in
television studies, return to questions of aesthetics and value to open up
the possibilities of evaluative criticism of popular arts.15 This approach
to evaluative criticism allows scholars to be honest and reflexive about
our own taste cultures and commitments and to provide insight into
our assessments of television texts without assuming universal or essen-
tial criteria of value. I distinguish typical notions of valuation, in which
a text’s worth is seen as intrinsic and needing to be discovered by the
critic like an appraiser setting a price on an antique, from evaluation, the
active process of engaging with aesthetic criteria, textual features, and
cultural circulation — valuation follows a norm of close reading that pre-
sumes that meaning and value exist in texts, awaiting a critic to reveal
216 | Evaluation

their truth, while evaluation highlights the contextualized cultural pro-

cesses of consumption in which meaning and value are produced. Valu-
ation follows traditions of the literary school of New Criticism, in which
close reading aimed to prove a work’s intrinsic worth, a trend continued
by quality television advocates; instead, evaluation foregrounds the pro-
cess of critical analysis and ongoing conversations about texts, contexts,
and aesthetic criteria.
In discussing television’s complexity, it is important to emphasize that
“complex television” is not a synonym for “quality television.” Complex-
ity and value are far from mutually guaranteed — personally, I much
prefer watching excellent conventional programs such as The Dick Van
Dyke Show and Everybody Loves Raymond to narratively complex but
conceptually muddled series such as Heroes and FlashForward. None-
theless, we can see complexity as one criterion of value, a distinct goal
for many contemporary programs. Harking back to New Criticism in
literary studies, to call something complex is to highlight its sophistica-
tion and nuance, suggesting that it presents a vision of the world that
avoids being reductive or artificially simplistic but that grows richer
through sustained engagement and consideration. It suggests that the
consumer of complexity should engage fully and attentively, and such
engagement will yield an experience distinct from more casual or partial
attention. We teach students to strive for complexity in their analyses, as
we believe the world to be multifaceted and intricate enough to require
a complex account to accurately gain insight, whether the field is biol-
ogy or media studies. Contrast “complex” with “complicated,” and the
latter seems to suggest both less coherence and more artifice, an attempt
to make something appear more nuanced than it really is, rather than
offering a more intrinsically motivated elaboration or unconventionality
that might be found within complex programming. Thus while com-
plexity need not be seen solely as an evaluative criterion, it can certainly
serve as one that helps shine a light on how serial television can reach
aesthetic achievements.
One frequent objection to evaluation is that it inherently creates
cultural hierarchies by valorizing one cultural practice over another, a
mode of distinction that Bourdieu has convincingly shown can work
to reinforce social power relations. However, we must think beyond
a reductive binary logic that insists that value is a zero-sum game in
 Evaluation | 217

which lauding any single criterion inherently derides its opposite. Thus
while complexity can be a virtue, that does not mean that simplicity is
a sin — there are many contexts in which simple would trump complex,
whether in constructing an effective rhetorical motto or designing a user
interface. There is certainly pleasure and value in some forms of simple
television, where a straightforward elegance of purpose and execution
is a laudable achievement — there are few televisual pleasures as purely
satisfying as the single-scene transformation of Lucy Ricardo into the
drunken Vitameatavegemin spokeswoman on I Love Lucy. Likewise,
achieving complexity is no inherent marker of value, as a complex nar-
rative that sacrifices coherence or emotional engagement is likely to fall
short in any evaluative analysis. In analyzing any specific series, we can
use the multifaceted qualities of complexity as an evaluative category,
while avoiding the assumption that only complex series are worthwhile
or that there is only one formula for successful televisual art. Likewise,
in charting an era of complex television, I am not claiming that this rep-
resents a singular golden age of television — rather, we can see a number
of programs clustered around this innovative narrative mode, many of
which succeed in notable aesthetic innovations whose prominence does
not belittle or marginalize other forms or pleasures.
Complexity is a guiding feature of the two television series that I cur-
rently place atop my (regularly shifting) personal list of best all-time
television: The Wire and Breaking Bad. I am certainly not alone in cel-
ebrating these two serial dramas, as both are roundly celebrated by crit-
ics and frequently appear in discussions of the best television series of
all time — for instance, New York magazine ran a series of articles in
2012 to determine the best television drama of the past 25 years, with
The Wire winning the critic’s prize and Breaking Bad capturing the fan
vote.16 The parallels and differences between the two series shine a light
on complexity as an aesthetic tendency, highlighting how it functions in
divergent ways toward similar positive results. In contrasting the two, I
am not interested in attempting to argue that one series is superior to
the other or even in validating why I see them as more successful than
many other excellent programs, but instead I want to use the pair to
tease out qualities of complexity and how each series manages to suc-
ceed in accomplishing its own ambitious aesthetic approach. Like all
evaluative claims, my analysis is an argument offered not as fact but as
218 | Evaluation

supported belief — I make my case in the hopes of helping others see

these series in a new light, not to convince the world that these two
programs are the pinnacle of television. Additionally, I aim to evaluate
them both on their own medium terms: they are television programs,
not novels or films adapted to the small screen, and thus we can look to
their successes as aspects of a distinctive televisual aesthetic. Hopefully
this evaluative analysis demonstrates the usefulness of academic critics
engaging in such discussions and not abdicating questions of judgment
solely to journalistic critics and fans.
In many ways, The Wire and Breaking Bad are strikingly similar. Both
were produced for emerging cable channels in the shadow of a critical
darling that had immediately established the channel’s brand identity
(HBO’s The Sopranos and AMC’s Mad Men, respectively). Both pushed
the channel toward new aesthetic directions and slowly grew to match
or surpass the earlier series in critical reputation. Both came from writ-
ers who had established themselves on landmark 1990s network inno-
vators (David Simon on Homicide: Life on the Street, Vince Gilligan on
The X-Files), but neither producer seemed poised to create programs as
innovative and acclaimed as these follow-ups. Both programs feature
five-season runs, ending on their own terms after approximately 60 epi-
sodes. Both series have a somewhat similar focus on drug dealers, crime
syndicates, and ongoing battles among police and competing criminal
groups in an unheralded midsize American city. And both mix intense
violent drama with a vibrant vein of dark comedy to explore contempo-
rary struggles of men attempting to find meaning in their relationship
to work and labor, along with a commitment to portraying procedure
through a detailed vision of how characters do what they do, whether
wire-tapping pay phones or cooking crystal methamphetamine.
Yet in other ways, the two series are diametrically opposed, starkly
contrasting the range of options available to serialized prime time dra-
mas. The Wire is generally restrained in its visual and sonic style, follow-
ing naturalistic cinematic norms by eschewing the use of nondiegetic
music except for its opening credits and notable season-ending mon-
tages and adhering to typical editing conventions that we read as “real-
istic” storytelling.17 Breaking Bad embraces a much wider visual palette,
ranging from stylized landscape shots evoking Sergio Leone West-
erns to exaggerated camera tricks and gimmicks situating our vantage
 Evaluation | 219

point within a chemical vat or on the end of a shovel, as well as editing

devices such as time-lapse and sped-up montages. The program’s sound
design is also widely varying, with unusual choices of licensed pop
songs, ambient electronic score, and even an original composition of a
narcocorrido ballad, a Mexican genre of songs celebrating drug dealers.
While Breaking Bad embraces atemporal storytelling jumps and subjec-
tive sequences like other examples of complex television, The Wire is
fully linear and conventional in presenting chronology and objective
narrative perspective throughout. In short, The Wire embraces a “zero-
degree style” that strives to render its televisual storytelling techniques
invisible, whereas Breaking Bad foregrounds a “maximum-degree style”
through kinetic visuals, bold sounds, and unpredictable storytelling
form — it is hard to imagine two programs within the general norms
of crime drama that take such different approaches to narrative, visual,
and sonic style.18
The two series also approach their thematic and storytelling scope
in similarly contrasting manners. The Wire is nominally about the drug
war, especially in its first season, but eventually reveals itself to treat
crime as a window to peer into the larger urban condition of 21st-century
America. As seasons progress, its scope expands to include the shipping
docks, City Hall, public schools, and the newsroom, tracing the inter-
play between these new dramatic sites and the established police pre-
cincts and drug corners. The series begins with an already large scope,
as the pilot episode introduces more than two dozen characters who
will serve recurring roles, with more to come in subsequent episodes
to reach a mass of 60 significant characters in the first season alone.
This narrative scope broadens over five years to create the sense that
viewers have experienced a full range of people and places constitut-
ing the program’s fictionalized Baltimore. Moreover, the series not only
creates a vast world but presents a guided tour of the city’s political and
economic machinery by portraying how each person, place, and institu-
tion fits into a broader system of function and dysfunction. No other
television series comes close to achieving such a sense of vast breadth
as The Wire’s storyworld, and arguably only a few examples from other
narrative media do either.
The Wire’s emphasis on the vastness of Baltimore’s interlocking insti-
tutions and inhabitants necessitates that it sacrifice character depth to
220 | Evaluation

achieve such breadth. Characters on The Wire are certainly multidimen-

sional and quite nuanced human beings, but they are defined primarily
by their relationships to larger institutions, whether the police force, the
school system, or the drug enterprise — the characters who accomplish
their goals are usually those who play the rules of their particular games
best, while individualistic rebels fail to escape, change themselves, or
transform unjust systems. The series rarely focuses on characters’ inte-
rior lives or nuanced relationships with each other, as The Wire creates a
world where people are defined more by what they do than by what they
think or feel, except as those thoughts and emotions become manifest
in their actions — our sense of characters comes from nuanced subtle-
ties in performance and glimpses into how these people do their jobs
and live their lives. Depth accrues from the accumulation of numerous
characters and their institutional affiliations, as Baltimore itself is con-
structed as a living entity with its own complex interiority. If one of the
pleasures of serial narratives is the desire to read the minds of fictional
figures, as discussed in chapter 4, then The Wire poses Baltimore as the
most engaging site of interiority and depth, rather than the individuals
who inhabit the city.19
Despite a shared focus on drug criminals, Breaking Bad has quite
different thematic concerns, rejecting a vast sociological breadth for
an inward-looking psychological depth. The series has little interest in
constructing a working model of Albuquerque, forgoing urban verisi-
militude in exchange for a tight focus on a central character and his
immediate associates. It has a comparatively small cast for a serialized
program, with an initial core ensemble of six main characters with little
expansion over its five seasons. Every character is defined primarily
through his or her relationship to Walter White, and the narrative traces
how his choices and actions impact each of their relationships. Instead
of subsequent seasons spinning outward from the core characters and
setting, the series layers itself inward, creating deeper layers of Walt’s
psychological makeup. If The Wire presents a world where characters
and institutions are immutably locked into a larger system, Breaking
Bad is a profile of psychological change as the core character becomes
darker and more amoral, pulling everyone around him down on his
moral descent, a unique model of change discussed more in chapter 4.
The program’s spatial universe seems fairly small and nondistinct, but
 Evaluation | 221

the psychological depth and web of interpersonal history is arguably as

complex as the political machinery of The Wire’s Baltimore.
These different approaches to style and storytelling highlight dis-
tinct modes of realism pursued by each series. Televisual realism is not
a marker of accurate representation of the real world but rather is an
attempt to render a fictional world that creates the representational illu-
sion of accuracy — a program is seen as realist when it feels authentic,
even though no media text comes close to a truly accurate represen-
tation of the complex world.20 The Wire embraces a fairly traditional
mode of social realism, with minimal stylization and strict adherence to
norms of accuracy that befit Simon’s background as a journalist; we are
asked to judge the storyworld, its characters, and their actions on a met-
ric of plausibility, with success measured by how much the fiction repre-
sents society as we know it (or might discover it, if we had the multisite
access offered by the series).21 The number of sociologists, geographers,
and other scholars of urban America who have used the program as a
teaching tool and research reference point to illustrate social conditions,
often ignoring its fictional frame, is a testament to The Wire’s realist suc-
cesses.22 The program’s techniques for achieving its social representa-
tions are innovative in their scope and vastness, resulting in a vision of
the world with great explanatory and rhetorical power. It is telling that
for many fans and critics, The Wire’s final season fell short of its earlier
heights primarily because it forsook its full commitment to such realist
storytelling in exchange for a more reflexive and satirical tone, as dis-
cussed more in chapter 10.
Breaking Bad strives for a different mode of realism, privileging the
psychological over the social. In its portrayal of a long-term character
transformation, the series aims for a nearly unprecedented effect in tele-
vision: chronicling how a character’s core identity and beliefs can drasti-
cally change over time. The program’s flashy visual style signals that the
world seen on-screen is less naturalistic than the thoughts and emotions
playing out inside characters’ heads, so even something as implausible
and even antirealist as two planes crashing, as triggered by Walt’s self-
ish actions, is grounded as psychologically plausible and consistent with
the program’s thematic and tonal approach. Breaking Bad is ultimately
less invested in creating a realistic representation of its storyworld than
in portraying people who feel true, and through this sense of honest
222 | Evaluation

representation, the series engages with questions of morality, identity,

and responsibility.
So The Wire and Breaking Bad are both similar and different —a banal
observation probably true for any random pair of series. But their story-
telling differences point to two distinct modes of narrative complexity,
and the fact that two such different programs can be so successful with
the same critics (including me) is instructive for how we evaluate tele-
vision. The two series approach serialization with distinctly different
vectors, paralleling terminology discussed more in chapter 9. The Wire
embraces what we might call centrifugal complexity, in which the ongo-
ing narrative pushes outward, spreading characters across an expanding
storyworld. On a centrifugal program, there is no single narrative center,
as the action traces what happens between characters and institutions
as they spread outward. It is not just that the series expands in quantity
of characters and settings but that its richness is found in the complex
web of interconnectivity forged across the social system rather than in
the depth of any one individual’s role in the narrative or psychological
layers. For instance, the fourth season’s resolution is predicated on how
the fate of kids like Randy and Namond is not determined by their own
mettle or talents but by the coincidental actions undertaken by agents
of the interconnected institutions of the school system, the police, drug
gangs, and city government. On the basis of conventional narrative log-
ics, Randy’s entrepreneurial spirit and warmth would allow him to rise
above his circumstances, while Namond’s bitterness and sense of entitle-
ment should doom him to replicating his father’s role on the corners —
but on The Wire, character traits and choices are frequently determined
by complex institutional networks portrayed through the program’s vast
serial expanses. On The Wire, characters’ agency is rarely able to make a
difference in broader institution systems, and individuals can only hope
to escape their fates by happy accident combined with a willingness to
make personal sacrifice. Systemic logic trumps characters’ actions or
motivations, as when Snoop (quoting Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven)
answers the question of what a potential victim did to deserve his fate —
she justifies an unjustifiable murder by saying, “Deserve’s got nothing
to do with it.”
But on Breaking Bad, deserve’s got everything to do with it. If The
Wire is all about broad systemic vastness, Breaking Bad exemplifies a
 Evaluation | 223

model of dense television, embracing centripetal complexity in which

narrative movement pulls actions and characters inward toward a
gravitational center, establishing a thickness of backstory and character
depth that drives the action. The effect is to create a storyworld with
unmatched depth of characterization, layers of backstory, and psycho-
logical complexity building on viewers’ experiences and memories over
the program’s numerous seasons. All narrative expansions connect back
to Walter White or his associate Jesse Pinkman, typically becoming part
of their ongoing interrelated transformations; nearly every plot event
is triggered by Walt’s choices and behaviors, rather than by social sys-
tems or conditions. Walt’s choices may be circumscribed by his contexts,
but they usually present multiple options with divergent outcomes —
he could have accepted the generosity of Elliot and Gretchen, walked
away from Gus’s financial offers, rescued Jane, or taken numerous other
opportunities to avoid getting deeper into his criminal lifestyle, yet each
time he opts to break bad, triggering spirals of pain and suffering on
his community. Additionally, the series frequently revisits moments
from the narrative past to fill in gaps in characters’ histories or rela-
tionships, whether through flashbacks to Walt’s hyperconfident persona
before becoming a teacher or returning to the narrative consequences of
Combo’s murder, an event that at the time felt secondary but reemerged
months later to directly trigger a crucial narrative turn at the end of the
third season. On Breaking Bad, there is always the sense that a marginal
past event might get pulled back into the narrative center and impact
Walt’s fate in unpredictable but justifiable ways; this centripetal force
creates a complex storyworld that holds its main characters accountable
for past misdeeds and refuses to let them (or us) escape these transgres-
sions at the level of story consequences or internal psychology.
A comparison between two similar climactic moments, each com-
ing from the penultimate episodes of their respective seasons, highlights
these dual approaches to complexity. Breaking Bad ’s “Phoenix” sees Walt
estranged from his partner, Jesse, who is immersed in a heroin habit
with his girlfriend, Jane; Walt goes to Jesse’s house to try to win him back
but finds him passed out in bed with Jane. When Jane starts vomiting
and choking, Walt reaches out to turn her body to save her life but hesi-
tates — for the next minute, we watch Walt wordlessly realize that Jane’s
death provides him an opportunity, and thus he rationalizes letting her
224 | Evaluation

die. Bryan Cranston’s stunning performance portrays Walt’s interior

thought processes, as discussed more in chapter 4, as we watch his char-
acter’s morality erode through rationalized selfishness — the dramatic
action here is within Walt’s unspoken psychology, conveyed to viewers
through the shared layers of his experience and memories.
At the end of The Wire’s first season, we also witness the death of
character at others’ hands, as Bodie and Poot shoot Wallace per Stringer
Bell’s orders. While there are certainly character resonances between
the three friends, and we recognize that this is a point of no return for
Bodie’s and Poot’s commitment to “the game,” it is clear that they have
no real choices: their only source of livelihood is as part of a drug crew,
and the game demands that they demonstrate their loyalty or end up
like Wallace. Ultimately what underlies the emotional impact of the
scene is the social conditions and institutional logics that led inevita-
bly to this moment, not complex moral calculations or psychological
developments for the characters — Poot and Bodie undertake an all-too-
common action dictated by their institutional marginalization, while
Walt’s act is fully unique and individualistic, not standing in for larger
social forces. Both deaths are powerful, memorable scenes that resonate
emotionally. But Breaking Bad ’s impact is felt more through Walt’s com-
plex psychological characterization and the lingering shadow it casts on
his relationship with Jesse, while The Wire uses Wallace’s death to put
a memorable human face on the social costs of urban poverty and the
drug war.
These two different modes of complexity point to the need to evalu-
ate a series on its own aesthetic terms. Even under the same umbrella of
complexity, we can see that their approaches are so different that each
would fall short of the other’s aesthetic criteria: The Wire fails to provide
psychological depth to its characters to suggest how their actions are
forged by personal histories and individual tragic choices, while Break-
ing Bad falls short of painting a picture of how people are impacted and
constrained by interlocking institutions. But their specific modes of
complexity function as criteria for their own evaluation, as each dem-
onstrates a relentless commitment to its own storytelling norms and
approaches — the failure of each series to achieve the other’s model of
complexity is to be viewed not as an aesthetic shortcoming but as a facet
of each program’s own particular model of complex storytelling. And
 Evaluation | 225

it is through these serialized storytelling strategies that each program

speaks to its viewers, and our ongoing attachments to each series run
through such aesthetic facets. Thus I would argue that such models of
complexity are not simply embedded in the series, to be rooted out by
critics, but emerge through viewers’ contextualized engagements with
texts — we are the ones who flesh out the models of centripetal and cen-
trifugal complexity by filling in gaps, making connections, and investing
our emotional energies into these storyworlds and then discussing those
engagements in public forums, both online and in person. By critics
and fans publicly reiterating the qualities that they value in their favor-
ite series, the broader cultural understanding of the program’s evalua-
tive terms becomes more established and shared. There is no universal
essence of complexity that all television must aspire toward, but rather
complexity can be crafted by each text as a specific set of values and
aesthetic goals.
My goal here is not to prove that these are great programs (although
I believe that they are) but to argue that how they each achieve aes-
thetic success helps explain how they work as texts and what they say
about the world, as well as pointing toward avenues for further research
on how they engage viewers, contrast with other series, and fit into
trends across media. We could probably analyze such dual models of
complexity without considering evaluation, but it would be untrue
to cast me as a detached, objective observer of these programs. I find
them both tremendously powerful and compelling works of fiction,
and I am moved to write about them because I find them aesthetically
exceptional and exceptionally interesting — two facets that are certainly
related. By acknowledging my own personal investments, it allows me to
go beyond asking “how do these programs work?” to consider “how do
they work so well?” When scholars bracket off our aesthetic engagement
with media, we are not only being dishonest but also missing the chance
to participate in larger conversations with critics, fans, and producers
about the very cultural hierarchies that some scholars seem fearful of
replicating. What is most important about this analysis is not whether
you agree with my take on the evaluative worth of The Wire or Breaking
Bad but what these programs teach us about contemporary television
storytelling and the particular qualities of complexity. Through the dual
vectors of vast centrifugal and dense centripetal complexity, we can have
226 | Evaluation

a better sense of how various series create their storyworlds and charac-
ters and help establish expectations for narrative payoffs.
I began this chapter by highlighting evaluative criticism as an invita-
tion to dialogue rather than an attempt to impose a critical judgment
onto others, and an important part of this dialogic approach is to be up-
front about our own contexts. I write this book, and watch these series,
as who I am: an American, white, educated, heterosexual, middle-aged
professional man, one with an investment and expertise in long-form
television narrative that is far from universal. I fully acknowledge that
my identity is similar to the class habitus that has long policed traditional
aesthetic judgments, as well as that of the creators of these two specific
programs — in other words, these programs are speaking my language
in my own accent, and I have a vocabulary and voice to respond. Yet
that does not change the fact that the texts are speaking, creating their
own aesthetic fields and urging viewers and critics to respond. But I am
not responding with a universalized appeal to transcendent aesthetics
outside of who I am. I am not asking you to join me in celebrating the
complexity of The Wire and Breaking Bad (although I am happy if you
do), but rather I am inviting you to see the series how I see them, to hear
how they are speaking to me. I have faith that you would see something
interesting if you do, but I also think there is much more in each pro-
gram to be explored and discussed — and I welcome the opportunity to
read different perspectives that highlight other aspects and evaluations
of these and other programs. What I have done here, and what I think
evaluation can do more broadly, is to present an argument to open a
conversation. Making an evaluative claim is designed not to construct
a canon to exclude other possibilities but rather to posit a contingent
perspective on why something matters, both to me and presumably to
other viewers who similarly embrace it. It is neither a statement of fact
nor a proof but an invitation to dialogue and debate.

The Challenges of Devaluation

This dialogic approach to evaluation works well to argue for the worth
of something, as we can explore specific criteria offered and imple-
mented by a series and contextualize our judgments within larger social
and intertextual systems. But what of the arguments against a program?
 Evaluation | 227

What does it mean to devalue a cultural work? I began with such a

claim, highlighting 24’s shortcomings in establishing its own internal
conventions and viewing logics. I am sure some readers felt put off by
my critiques, as the devaluation of something that you enjoy can feel like
a personal attack on your own tastes and pleasures. But 24 is a frequently
critiqued series that even its biggest supporters admit is erratic in qual-
ity, so I doubt my criticisms would be viewed as too controversial. But
what happens when you devalue a series that garners nearly universal
critical praise and is particularly embraced by the social strata of media
scholars who might be reading such a critique?
I had that particular experience in 2010, when I was invited to con-
tribute to an anthology about Mad Men. I informed the editors that I
did not really like the series, and we decided that an essay exploring
that dislike would be an interesting addition to the volume. I posted the
resulting essay to my blog under the title “On Disliking Mad Men,” and
it has become the site’s most read and commented-on entry.23 The piece
explored both my critiques of the series and the challenges of thinking
about devaluation in a scholarly context, highlighting the difficulties in
writing about a negative aesthetic reaction without appearing either to
condemn other people’s tastes or to persuade viewers that their pleasure
is somehow false or unwarranted. I am sure I convinced nobody that
Mad Men was bad television (which was neither my goal nor my argu-
ment), and at best I offered a snapshot of how a series that clearly works
well for many viewers with similar tastes can fail to speak to a would-be
sympathetic viewer. It is telling that the piece was cut from the anthol-
ogy, as it did not fit the typical paradigms of academic analysis and the
tonal norms of a collection of media criticism. I will not attempt to fully
repurpose my critique here (as it lives on online for anyone to read and
rebut), but I do think it is interesting to revisit my negative take on the
series to highlight some of the perils of aesthetic devaluation and hope-
fully to model the benefit of going beyond simple declarations like “it’s
boring,” which might be where another conversation about Mad Men
both starts and ends.
I approached Mad Men inspired by the best account of critical dislike
that I have read, Carl Wilson’s “Journey to the End of Taste” with Céline
Dion — Wilson offers a vision of a different mode of aesthetic discus-
sion beyond argumentation: “What would criticism be like if it were
228 | Evaluation

not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If
it weren’t about making cases for or against things? It wouldn’t need to
adopt the kind of ‘objective’ (or self-consciously hip) tone that conceals
the identity and social location of the author, the better to win you over.
It might be more frank about the two-sidedness of aesthetic encounter,
and offer something more like a tour of an aesthetic experience, a trav-
elogue, a memoir.”24
Following Wilson, my aesthetic travelogue of Mad Men starts in my
habitus, as the program’s narrative complexity, slow-burn seriality, and
immersion in American media and cultural history make it required
viewing for people within my taste culture. I fully acknowledge that it is
a “good” series: well crafted, impeccably styled, smartly written, expertly
produced, and effectively acted. But despite such traditional markers of
“quality,” I would rather watch many programs that are less well made,
less intelligent, and less ambitious, as I find them more satisfying and
pleasurable. My failure to enjoy and value Mad Men highlights the lim-
its of Bourdieu-inspired aesthetic determinism and the dangers of try-
ing to reduce evaluative response to a reflection of social structures.
Although Bourdieu’s analysis focuses on the aggregate societal level and
acknowledges that individual experiences certainly vary, the model has
taken on a predictive and structuring power for many media scholars,
ignoring such individual differences as outliers, instead of exploring
such variations to uncover the complexities of taste and cultural engage-
ment. According to such models, I am supposed to love Mad Men, since
it resides squarely within my middlebrow cultural sphere and nearly
everyone of a similar habitus seems to adore it.
But I do not love it; in fact, I dislike it. To clarify what I mean by “it,”
I watched Mad Men’s first season in full, along with assorted episodes of
subsequent seasons. While numerous commenters on my blog criticized
me for basing my claims on a first season that they acknowledged was
weaker than subsequent years, the program’s critical praise and copi-
ous awards began in season 1, and my sampling of later seasons did not
change my opinions. So my analysis of what I dislike about the series
is based on the first season; whether we can fairly judge a serial text on
a limited sample is a larger topic for another time, but certainly many
viewers do just that all the time — in fact, most viewers judge programs
on the basis of single episodes (or even partial episodes), so the idea
 Evaluation | 229

that we must consume something in full before evaluating it seems both

impractical and misguided.
I find Mad Men’s sumptuous production design to be a cold artifice,
echoing the program’s thematic exploration of advertising as the domi-
nant site of constructed imagery defining postwar America’s visual cul-
ture but creating a hypocrisy in the incongruity inherent in fans embrac-
ing and emulating the stylistic sense of a series that regularly highlights
the manipulations of marketing and the creation of consumerist con-
sciousness. Embracing its design as a primary pleasure, as many fans and
critics do, seems to me intellectually incompatible with the program’s
own critical edge, suggesting either internal inconsistencies within the
text or a widespread misreading of the program’s use of style. I find it
hard to understand how Mad Men’s champions navigate this terrain and
reconcile this seeming contradiction — in reading criticism, I recognize
that many people do find this tension productive and compelling, rather
than off-putting, but it makes no sense to me, either intellectually or
emotionally. If one of the goals of any serial is to teach its viewers how to
watch, relate to, and enjoy it, Mad Men’s efforts to establish its intrinsic
norms simply fail to convince me; the dialogue between this viewer and
this text is a case of miscommunication, in which I fail to understand
the guiding norms that clearly many others find clear and compelling.
This disconnection is not limited to the program’s treatment of visual
style and production design but extends to its larger treatment of period
culture and values. The series strives to create a world that is simulta-
neously an idealized nostalgic place and an object of cultural critique,
an opposition that I find impossible to either intellectually reconcile
or aesthetically experience. Mad Men employs a sophisticated form of
social engagement that is unique to the form of a serial period drama —
we watch the characters move forward in small installments but with
foreknowledge of much of what is to come in their world. Thus, when
we witness the characters’ casual sexism and racism, we regard them as
dinosaurs unaware of the coming ice age; from our privileged perch in
the 21st century, we know that they will be forced to adapt or become
extinct. At times, such commentary seems to be little more than conde-
scension toward the 1960s characters, as we are meant to feel superior
to them at a fairly obvious level — as the critic Mark Grief dismissively
characterizes the program’s message, “Now We Know Better.”25
230 | Evaluation

Often the series embraces a more subtle take on 1960s norms, but
not without its own discomforts. While we are obviously supposed to
condemn the sexist attitudes of the ad men, the fact that we spend so
much time with these characters and grow to like them (at least to a
degree) makes it awkward when they casually belittle and mistreat peo-
ple. For example, when in a seemingly heartfelt moment in the episode
“Indian Summer,” Roger Sterling compliments Joan Holloway by calling
her “the finest piece of ass I’ve ever had,” we certainly are dismayed by
what strikes us as cruel insensitivity — but Roger’s character makes such
offensive behavior charming and charismatic, and thus we can simul-
taneously dismiss and embrace his attitudes, especially as Joan seems
content to take it as a compliment. Coupled with the fact that Christina
Hendricks emerged as a sex symbol through her hypersexualized por-
trayal of Joan, regarding her as a “fine piece of ass” is not too dissimilar
from how many contemporary fans seem to regard her.
This discomfort is more problematic in the numerous scenes of the
ad men engaging in one-upmanship by belittling their secretaries and
wives. We simultaneously recoil at their attitudes and appreciate being
invited into their gang. In many ways, Mad Men’s social critique func-
tions similarly to the ambivalent politics common in many contempo-
rary advertisements, especially for beer. In this beer-commercial logic,
male protagonists are presented as unrealistically stupid, offensive, and
clueless, and we are invited to mock them — but simultaneously, we are
encouraged to be like them, hanging out, enjoying their camaraderie,
and sharing their beer. In Mad Men’s upscale, scotch-drinking version
of this mode of address, the more time we spend with the ad men, the
more charming they become, making their outmoded sensibilities less
offensive and more appealing. By situating us as insiders in a shared
culture stretched out over serialized time, the series promotes character
and group sympathies and engagement, resulting in a kind of Stockholm
Syndrome in sympathy for values that we might otherwise find abhor-
rent. Spending hours of time with characters whom we dislike either
makes that time unpleasant or invites us to see their behavior as more
sympathetic and acceptable — I am not sure which option is worse.
As I discuss in chapter 4, serial television is dependent on creating
connections between viewers and fictional characters over the course
of hours and years. That does not mean that such characters must be
 Evaluation | 231

sympathetic or morally upright to promote identification, as we can see

with problematic figures such as Walter White, Tony Soprano, and Dex-
ter Morgan, but they must be compelling, creating an emotional attach-
ment and investment in their lives, relationships, and actions. As I watch
Mad Men, I find myself simply unmoved by these people and what they
are doing, seeing them more as both inscrutable and inhuman — I lack
empathy with these characters, watching from an emotional remove that
makes them appear as pieces in a mannered dance, not people I enjoy
spending time with. Don Draper is posited as analogous to other tele-
vision antiheroes, but I find his character and Jon Hamm’s performance
to be more of a blank slate of callowness than a complex rendering of a
psychologically damaged man. The series plays with the enigma of Don
Draper’s identity, but as a viewer I find little beneath the surface to care
about who he really is or what he will become; nor does Draper elicit
the operational allegiance I have toward other antiheroes, as discussed
in chapter 4. Hamm’s performance nails Don’s slick exterior, but I have
little sense of any humanity or motives underneath his callous charms
beyond a backdrop of blank brooding. The program constructs Don as a
charming bad boy whose sex appeal regularly allows people to overlook
his misdeeds, but I find his charisma to lack depth and thus am only
invested in seeing his failure. As the critic Todd VanDerWerff notes in a
review of the Man Men episode “Nixon vs. Kennedy,” “the show doesn’t
work if you can’t buy that Don is a cold bastard but capable, somehow,
of being both better than his contemporaries and himself.”26 I simply
can’t buy how Don is, or could be, better than everyone else, except in
his abilities to pitch products and charm women, and thus the series
doesn’t work for me.
In the end, watching Mad Men leaves me feeling unclean and unpleas-
ant, having spent time in an unenjoyable place with people I do not care
about and coming out smelling of stale cigarettes. The gloss and sheen
is seemingly meant to be charming, but instead it masks something hol-
low, dark, and cancerous. For people who like the program, this reso-
nance is affecting and provocative, but for me, it feels like one of Don
Draper’s callow ad pitches. None of the characters’ emotional arcs feel
real or earned; instead, I am being sold the illusion of drama rather than
honest drama itself, much like the packaging of nostalgia and memory
in a Kodak slide projector. But I would not try to convince you of that
232 | Evaluation

assessment, as condemning something that a fan loves can feel like a

personal insult — and I fully expect that most people reading a book on
complex television would likely be current or future Mad Men admir-
ers. My negative reaction is ultimately analytically inexplicable, only
pointing to my own personal preferences and tendencies toward a form
of textual complexity exemplified by The Wire and Breaking Bad and
against the subtextual interpretative complexity invited by Mad Men’s
symbolism and thematic sensibility. This is ultimately not an argument
about the program’s value but rather the transcript of my own aesthetic
dialogue, as suggested by Wilson’s approach. Since we watch television
as a dialogue between text and viewer, hopefully there is critical value
to sharing such intimate conversations with others, especially when
the dialogue becomes awkward and noncommunicative, leading to a
public breakup.
My devaluation of Mad Men, along with more positive evaluative
takes on other programs, aims to shine a light on how we engage in
aesthetic dialogues with serial television. My approach is nonnorma-
tive, as I am not trying to measure these programs up to any universal
or preestablished norms of aesthetic quality or uniform set of criteria,
and I make no claims that my accounts are inherently more valid than
any others. But what I have tried to do is to put my own nonuniver-
sal engagement under the microscope to try to discover what we can
about how serial television works as an aesthetic experience. By more
scholars sharing such accounts, we can gain perspectives from multiple
critics that together can help us understand the range of voices, appeals,
and pleasures offered by serialized texts. We cannot simply lump all of
these programs together into an undifferentiated category of “quality
television,” nor can we bracket off aesthetic engagement as a byprod-
uct of social power. Instead, we need to listen to our ongoing aesthetic
exchanges, sharing such dialogues to understand the voices of serial tele-
vision texts, and we need to look closely to unpack the enigmatic long
arc of why we find such programming either so frustrating or reward-
ing. That is the shared goal of evaluation.
7

Serial Melodrama

Complex television is not a genre. As I argue throughout this book,

complex television is a storytelling mode and set of associated produc-
tion and reception practices that span a wide range of programs across
an array of genres. Television genres are cultural categories that discur-
sively bundle texts together within particular contexts, not simply sets
of textual conventions.1 This is not to suggest that questions of genre are
irrelevant to understanding complex television — to the contrary, look-
ing at genre as part of its growth and circulation highlights how the
mode has grown to pervade and influence a wide range of types of tele-
vision fiction, including both comedic and dramatic genres. Complex
television is a site of tremendous genre mixing, where conventions and
assumptions from a range of programming categories come together
and are interwoven, merged, and reformed.
Likewise, melodrama is more of a mode than a genre, an approach
to emotion, storytelling, and morality that cuts across numerous genres
and media forms.2 However, when it comes to American television,
melodrama is often assumed to belong solely to the important genre
of the soap opera, and thus moments of melodrama appearing outside
the daytime schedule are often linked to the soap opera genre, as with
the derogatory label “soapy.” This chapter teases out the formal and cul-
tural linkages between the complex narrative mode discussed through-
out this book and the genre of daytime soap operas and its associated
affective style of serial melodrama. Most complex television dramas that
proliferate in prime time today are serial melodramas and thus share
some traits with the daytime soap opera; however, in terms of formal
elements, industrial histories, and critical discourses, prime time serials
and daytime soaps have crucial distinctions that need to be underscored.
Thus by highlighting complex television’s distinctive take on serial melo-
drama, I consider how it functions as a “narrative technology of gender,”

233
234 | Serial Melodrama

per Robyn Warhol’s model, and argue against the claim that prime time
serials “masculinize” the traditionally feminine realm of soap operas.3

Soap Operas and Questions of Genre

To understand how prime time complex television works as serial
melodrama, we need to first consider how both television seriality and
melodrama have been historically linked to the soap opera genre. Prior
to the 1990s, the primary site of television seriality in America was the
daytime soap opera, a genre that precedes the medium with long roots
back into network radio, including some individual programs such as
The Guiding Light that ran for decades spanning the two media. Unlike
most genres, the name “soap opera” refers neither to elements from
the television text (like the setting of Westerns or the central topic of
cooking shows) nor to the intended audience response (as with hor-
ror and comedy); instead, soap operas are a derogatory moniker coined
by commentators in the 1930s to mock the juxtaposition of high melo-
drama with low commerce, condescending to the presumed audience
of allegedly unsophisticated housewives. Prior to the term’s populariza-
tion, soaps were known more commonly as “daytime dramatic serials,”
highlighting their industrial placement on the radio schedule, their
narrative form, and their intended emotional affect. All three of these
features became culturally linked to the term “soap opera,” as the pro-
grams migrated to television in the 1950s, with the genre becoming the
primary manifestation of television seriality for decades.4 The stigma of
soap operas has remained active for decades, as certainly many contem-
porary prime time serials benefit from distinguishing themselves from
the daytime tradition, and calling a series “soapy” is regarded by most
people as a damning insult.
However, it is important to note that daytime soap operas were not
the sole or even primary form of American radio serials in the 1930s
and 1940s — many emerging forms of radio fiction were commonly
referred to as serials, including the most popular and influential early
radio fiction program, Amos ’n’ Andy.5 Such early radio serials most
resembled daily newspaper comic strips as a model of seriality, with sus-
tained settings and casts of characters dealing with ongoing scenarios
but generally avoiding plotlines with open-ended narrative situations
 Serial Melodrama | 235

demanding resolution. Notably, many of these early prime time series

were broadcast daily via the scheduling format now referred to as “strip-
ping” (after daily comic strips), rather than the weekly installments now
nearly universal on prime time television. While the plotting and story-
telling found on 1930s prime time radio programs such as Amos ’n’ Andy
more closely resemble contemporary episodic television sitcoms that we
rarely label as “serialized” than today’s complex narrative forms, seriality
encompassed a much larger umbrella of narrative forms in the radio era,
including daytime soap operas and their ongoing melodramatic plot-
lines, prime time texts within numerous genres that emphasized con-
sistent and enduring characters and settings, and even ongoing public
affairs programming, as Frank Kelleter argues that President Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” functioned as serial culture.6
As television took over radio’s role as the primary site of fictional pro-
gramming in American homes in the 1950s, serialized plotting became
less common within prime time schedules — while a few prime time
radio serials (both dramatic and comedic) made the shift to television,
by the mid-1950s they had shifted to daytime or disappeared from the
television schedule.7 Of course, sitcoms such as I Love Lucy and dra-
mas such as Gunsmoke were serialized in important ways mentioned in
chapter 1, with consistent settings and ongoing casts of characters much
like Amos ’n’ Andy and the comic-strip convention. But just as genre
labels function as clusters of cultural assumptions, formal labels such
as “series” and “serial” carry their own shifting connotations — by the
mid-1950s, “serial” came to imply cumulative ongoing, open-ended plot-
lines, while “series” suggested continuous storyworlds and characters
typical of comic strips and radio comedies but not necessarily cumula-
tive plots. Both of these serial and series modes contrasted to the era’s
important traditions of “variety” and “anthology” programming, which
typically introduced a new set of characters, setting, and plotlines each
episode.8 Along with seriality’s shifting signification came an important
cultural linkage between the genre that most prominently featured this
plot-based serial model, the daytime soap opera, and the serial form
itself; thus from the late 1950s onward, television seriality was viewed by
many critics, viewers, and producers as synonymous with, and exclu-
sive to, daytime soaps, forging a connection between serial form and the
derogatory disdain for the genre.
236 | Serial Melodrama

This discursive link between the soap opera genre and serial form
has taken on additional associated meanings, with seriality tied to other
aspects of the genre through some slippery chains of signification. I
believe that these slippages have led to a frequent assumption: that con-
temporary prime time complex television has “borrowed” or “evolved”
from the daytime soap opera.9 While this claim of generic influence has
rarely been made via in-depth scholarly argument, it is frequently men-
tioned in passing within industrial, popular, and academic realms — I
have seen it referenced in journalistic pieces and conference papers alike,
with little elaboration or evidence.10 But what is the basis for this seem-
ingly commonsense claim of generic evolution? While contemporary
prime time television embraces seriality in a range of ways, I contend
that the specific modes of serial storytelling it employs derive less from
American soap operas than from other serial modes such as comics,
classic film serials, and 19th-century serial literature, all of which have
their own connections to melodrama. But since the history of television
seriality is so linked to the soap opera genre, the common assumption
is that all prime time serials must be reacting to or building on soaps,
an assumption that I hope to break apart here. By itemizing some of the
specific formal conventions and cultural assumptions tied to the soap
opera genre, including the episodic structures, daily scheduling, melo-
dramatic focus, and ties to female viewers, we can have a better sense of
how contemporary prime time serials operate differently than soaps and
can also foster a better appreciation for the distinctive aspects of soap
opera storytelling.
At a formal level, soap opera seriality employs very particular struc-
tures and practices, with a distinctive mode of production, scheduling,
acting style, pacing, and episodic narrative structure. The redundant
narration of soap operas depends on the device of diegetic retelling, as
discussed in chapter 5, a device that both facilitates viewer recall and
provides the pleasures of watching characters react to past events. A
contemporary hour-long soap opera episode follows four to six story
threads, intercut throughout the hour, selecting between a program’s
dozens of potential ongoing stories active at any one time. At the begin-
ning of an episode, each storyline features one scene to set up that
day’s conversation, typically with the characters talking about some
recent event and revealing some new information about how that event
 Serial Melodrama | 237

impacts their relationship or situation. These initial scenes are highly

focused on retelling, reminding and catching up viewers about every
element in the scene — previous events, relationships, settings, and even
characters’ names. As the episode progresses, this process of retelling
continues to remind viewers as each scene cycles back from a com-
mercial break but gradually advances the plot by highlighting the new
story elements rippling out from past events. The final scene from each
storyline typically concludes with a moment of uncertainty, often in the
form of a suspense-inducing cliffhanger, that will prompt future retell-
ings when the next episode featuring that storyline airs. Typically, each
of an episode’s plot threads progresses with minimal temporal shifts
or ellipses (aside from occasional flashbacks that are highly marked as
atemporal anomalies), with each of the crosscut scenes typically play-
ing out within a narrow frame of an hour or so of story time. Thus a
given daytime soap episode rarely has either self-contained closed plot-
lines or thematic linkages seen in the majority of prime time serials,
as discussed in chapter 1; unlike prime time programs, soap episodes
lack titles and are rarely rebroadcast as discrete storytelling units. A
soap opera episode functions as an ephemeral daily “check-in” on the
storyworld as well as a part of the week’s larger plot and character arcs,
rather than a self-contained unit of a larger narrative structure, a dis-
tinction highlighted by some fans fast-forwarding through stories that
disinterest them.
Soap operas embrace a poetics of slow-paced redundancy — but
instead of treating repetition as a necessary evil, soaps raise it to an art
form. Robert Allen influentially argues that soap operas, which were
designed for both dedicated fans and distracted and erratic viewers,
derive their narrative pleasures less from the forward-moving plot of
new events and developments and more from the ripple effects of an
event across the community of characters and their relationships within
the drama, a model he calls “paradigmatic storytelling.”11 A soap opera
might portray a key event, but the event itself becomes less narratively
important in its initial portrayal than in the chain of subsequent con-
versations about the event. Thus any single event can be retold numer-
ous times through the dialogue-heavy conventions of the genre, as
each character reacts to hearing about the event and we witness each
retelling’s impact on the characters’ web of relationships. Through this
238 | Serial Melodrama

convention of narrative recall, we are both repeatedly reminded of what

happened and guided to focus our attention on the characters’ emo-
tional lives, making redundancy an active pleasure of the genre. Yet this
mode of repetitious seriality is by no means the only option for tele-
vision seriality, as it is quite rare to see such embedded redundancy as
part of prime time serials; instead, it is a facet nearly unique to the day-
time soap opera.
In large part, this model of daytime soap redundancy and its com-
parative absence on prime time serials stems from the different mate-
rial demands of each mode’s production and scheduling. Most network
prime time fictions air no more than 24 episodes per year in weekly
installments, and cable programs often reduce that order to 13 or fewer
episodes, with lengthy gaps between seasons. Daytime soap operas are
in constant production, airing five days per week throughout the entire
year, meaning that the longest gap between episodes will be over a week-
end, aside from rare preempting for special events. The significance of
these scheduling differences is enormous, for both producers and view-
ers. On the industrial side, soaps’ constant demand for the next epi-
sode leads to a highly regimented, factory-style production model that
depends on conventions, repetitions, and formulas, given that daytime
soaps air 10 times more narrative material each year than an average
prime time network series. Just as daily newspapers and comic strips
differ drastically in form from weekly magazines or monthly comic
books, respectively, we must distinguish between the production models
and resulting programming of endless daily soaps and seasonal, weekly
prime time programs as vastly different textual formats.
These scheduling differences forge vital contrasts in how viewers
engage with daytime versus prime time serials. For viewers of prime
time serials, an episode can be a regular appointment in a weekly sched-
ule, emerging as a must-see occasion or a routinized time shift through a
DVR; in contemporary television, many viewers prefer to bank episodes
to watch in quicker succession or even wait for DVD or download release
to embrace the boxed viewing aesthetic discussed in chapter 1. Whether
episodes are watched in scheduled installments or boxed binges, most
prime time viewing practices center on the episode as a discrete unit;
this viewing practice matches the narrative form that maintains epi-
sodic unity with some self-contained storylines and defined episodic
 Serial Melodrama | 239

structures and themes. Daily soap opera viewing is more part of the
ongoing texture of everyday life than a special event to be scheduled —
even the many viewers who time shift their daily soaps, a common prac-
tice dating back to VCRs in the 1980s and done via DVRs and online
streaming today, find ways to integrate the playback into their everyday
routines and schedules, such as watching over dinner or while working
out. The sheer volume of episodes prevents a binge aesthetic from taking
hold, compounded by the rarity of soap opera reruns or boxed releases;
this broadcast model requires soap viewers to be responsible for their
daily rituals to keep up with their favorite ongoing narratives. For most
soap fans, such a daily ritual is a key pleasure of the genre and even a
defining component of the genre.12
While these daytime viewing practices have some parallels in prime
time, the contrasting schedule and distribution models make the expe-
rience of watching daytime soap operas and prime time serials more
distinct than similar, raising doubts about claims that prime time serials
are merely legitimated, high-class, or masculinized soap operas, at least
in terms of viewing practice. In chapter 1, I argue that the installment-
driven structuring of screen time with significant temporal gaps between
episodes is essential to the definition of seriality and the specific ways
that serial television tells stories. Daytime soaps and prime time seri-
als have vastly different structures of screen time, and the daily sched-
ule of soaps deemphasizes the gaps between episodes by locating them
within part of a daily routine. For prime time programs, the weekly
gaps, and even longer breaks between seasons, make each episode seem
more eventful and encourage fans to bridge those gaps with paratextual
engagement and speculation, as discussed more in other chapters —
while some soap fans fill daily gaps with paratextual participation via
online forums and communities, the different time frame for daily ver-
sus weekly installments changes the scope and prevalence of such prac-
tices. This is not to privilege one mode of engagement as more valued
or effective than the other but to highlight the experiential differences
between the two scheduling models and the resulting storytelling strate-
gies that they enable and encourage.
If we look at genre as defined by viewing practices, industrial systems,
textual norms, or discursive valuation, soap operas seem clearly distinct
from most prime time serials, and thus an analysis of the melodramatic
240 | Serial Melodrama

mode of complex television need not be lodged within the soap genre.
But the question remains about the role of influence, as some observers
claim that today’s prime time programs are retreading ground already
broken by soaps. To understand the potential relationship of influence
between daytime and prime time serial forms, it is useful to look at
three programs that stand as some of the earliest successful attempts
to incorporate serialized plotting into American prime time program-
ming, all of which had explicit relationships to the soap opera genre. The
first is Peyton Place, the mid-1960s hit that signaled the arrival of serial
melodrama on prime time. Although the series adapted a well-known
novel and movie, the storytelling format drew explicitly from soap
opera precedents. ABC scheduled the series to air two or three nights
per week, running in continuous production rather than the “seasons
with reruns” model typical for prime time drama, and enlisted the soap
opera pioneer Irna Phillips to consult with series creator Paul Monash
in making the drama succeed as serial television. Caryn Murphy dis-
cusses how Monash was adamant in denying the program’s ties to soap
opera, preferring labels of “television novel” and “continuing drama” to
highlight more respectable formats than the lowbrow associations with
daytime serials, even though the prime time series diverged significantly
from the original novel and followed many of Phillips’s suggestions over
Monash’s objections.13 There is no question that at the levels of both
production and cultural circulation, Peyton Place was deeply influenced
by and linked to the daytime soap opera, and the brief wave of failed
prime time serials in the late 1960s followed its precedent with the con-
tinuous, multiepisode weekly schedule evoking the ritual experience
of soap opera viewership. However, no imitator came close to Peyton
Place’s success, leading networks to eliminate such serialized dramas
from prime time schedules by 1970.14
Serialization and explicit connections to soap operas returned to
television outside the daytime schedule through the unusual vehicle
of comedy in the late 1970s, with the dual innovators Mary Hartman,
Mary Hartman and Soap. The former was a highly idiosyncratic hit
that emerged from Norman Lear’s successful production team in 1976,
explicitly embracing the form, production values, and pacing of daytime
soap operas via daily airings. Rejected by all of the national networks,
Mary Hartman was distributed to local stations through the system of
 Serial Melodrama | 241

first-run syndication, airing in various time slots outside prime time

but most frequently in the daily stripped late-night spot of 11 p.m. to
avoid controversy over its risqué content. The program married over-
the-top storylines involving a small-town mass murderer and an elderly
flasher with quotidian details of domestic drudgery, most notably
Mary’s obsession with the “waxy yellow buildup” on her kitchen floor,
creating a unique blend of the outrageous and the mundane. Although
the series embraced a dry, absurdist wit and was certainly best under-
stood as a comedy, it featured none of the era’s sitcom conventions of
laugh tracks, studio audiences, or even actual jokes; instead, the humor
came through its conventional soap opera style of unpolished video-
taped staging and melodramatic music cues played straight, but with a
quirky small-town setting and an ambiguous tone that most resembles
future television innovator Twin Peaks. This allegiance to soap opera
was affirmed behind the scenes, as Lear hired a team of soap opera vet-
erans to write the series, led by Ann Marcus, who had previously written
for both daytime soaps and prime time Peyton Place but never before
(or again) for comedies. Thus Mary Hartman retains much of the feel of
daytime soaps in its emphasis on relationships, deliberate pacing, redun-
dant dialogue, and lack of overt sitcom style.15
Through the program’s daily schedule, Mary Hartman developed a
strong following from viewers who tapped into the ritualized rhythms
of daily serialized storytelling. Although the series certainly did mock
many soap opera conventions through heightened absurdity, it also
embraced melodramatic takes on relationships and characters’ struggles.
While many viewers laughed at its exaggerated characters and subtle
jabs at consumer culture, moments such as Mary’s televised nervous
breakdown at the end of the first season also delivered intense emo-
tional moments of character melodrama. Reports on the trendy fasci-
nation with Mary Hartman focus on viewers’ speculation on potential
storylines and the fate of relationships — these are not the pleasures of
ironic parody but sincere serial engagement. The parodic frame gave
license to audiences who would normally dismiss soap operas to enjoy
the pleasures of serial melodrama without guilt, with rave reviews in
upscale periodicals such as the Village Voice and The Nation celebrat-
ing its ironic sensibility; the program’s writerly intelligence and formal
inventiveness was seen as rising above soap opera convention, even if its
242 | Serial Melodrama

reported pleasures were comparable to those of daytime fans. Viewers

wrote to the program’s producers praising Mary Hartman while being
sure to mention that they did not like soap operas — and that they could
not wait for the next episode. For its brief two-year yet more-than-300-
episode run, Mary Hartman delivered the compelling story engine of
serial melodrama, alongside soap opera production style and daily view-
ing rituals, but viewed through an absurdist, askew lens that tempered
the genre’s emotional sincerity and allowed viewers who were skeptical
of the daytime genre to shamelessly enjoy some of its pleasures.
The third early prime time serial had the most overtly stated connec-
tion to soap operas but the least in common in terms of textual norms,
production pedigree, or viewing practices. Soap debuted on ABC in 1977
following the conventional scheduling and production model for sit-
coms: weekly prime time airings in a lineup filled with other comedies,
shot with a live studio audience whose laughter cues viewers at home,
created by veteran sitcom writers and producers, and featuring the broad
humor and joke-filled dialogue typically found on the era’s sitcoms. In
fact, creator and head writer Susan Harris asserted that the program’s
writers had no desire to either mimic or mock soap operas but rather
viewed the series title as simply a “shorthand reference” to serialized
television storytelling — Harris denied even having viewed soap operas,
and none of the program’s key production staff had a background in the
daytime format. The program’s cultural reception similarly saw it pri-
marily as a sitcom, albeit one that drew on soapy serial style and mocked
the genre’s storytelling excesses. The series featured much-faster-moving
plotting than either daytime soaps or Mary Hartman, and the weekly
scheduling disallowed the daily viewing rituals common to soap opera
viewers. Additionally, internal redundancy and diegetic retelling was
far less common, but instead repetition was outsourced to tongue-in-
cheek “previously on” segments that both recapped earlier events and
mocked Soap’s serial complications. Episodes featured numerous nar-
rative events that grew more and more outlandish, as well as character-
driven conversational humor (usually between women) more akin to
Mary Tyler Moore than General Hospital.16
I highlight these three early innovators to show what explicit soap
opera influence on prime time programming might look like and
thus to argue that most contemporary serial programs lack such clear
 Serial Melodrama | 243

connections to the daytime tradition. In the 1960s, Peyton Place inspired

a number of failed imitations that curtailed prime time serial experi-
mentation for many years. In the 1970s, the comparative influence of
these dual serial comedies suggests a road not traveled for prime time
serial storytelling. Although Mary Hartman received great buzz and
cultural validation, it did not spawn imitators in incorporating its soap
opera scheduling, production style, and creative pedigree into prime
time, marking it as the last time a daily scripted serial attempted to move
outside the daytime block and the soap opera genre delineation. Like-
wise, Ann Marcus proved to be one of only a handful of writers who
worked on both daytime and prime time series, while it has been much
more common in recent years for prime time series to be staffed with
writers and producers from other media such as comics, film, theater,
literature, and journalism, as discussed more in chapter 3. Created by
prime time comedy veterans, Soap offered a more popular and influen-
tial model by grafting serial plotting onto standard prime time genres, a
technique seen in subsequent 1980s innovators that became major tele-
vision landmarks: the sitcom Cheers, the cop show Hill Street Blues, and
the medical drama St. Elsewhere.
Even the rise of what are often called “prime time soaps” such as Dal-
las and Dynasty bear little formal resemblance to daytime soaps in terms
of production style, plot structures, and most importantly episodic fre-
quency and use of screen time. Instead, they incorporate serial plotting
into tales of family melodrama that are structurally and formally more
similar to other prime time programs than to established daytime soaps.
The label “prime time soap” persists as a category of weekly serial melo-
dramas that indulge in excessive emotional displays and relationship-
focused complications, used to describe a succession of series from Dal-
las to Melrose Place to The O.C. to Revenge, but they are formally still
distinct from the key features of daytime soaps in both episodic struc-
ture and viewing practice. It is in the prevalence of melodrama in nearly
all modes of serial storytelling that we can find the most commonality
between daytime soap operas and prime time serials, but we should not
assume that the latter is somehow mimicking or transforming the for-
mer; instead, we need to understand melodrama as a much more wide-
spread facet of television narrative that is not unique to daytime soaps
or any single genre category.
244 | Serial Melodrama

Serial Melodramas and Mixed Gendered Affect

It is far more important to understand what complex serials are than
what they are not. While I question their ties to soap operas, nearly
every dramatic program I discuss in this book can be considered a form
of serial melodrama, whether the “soapy” excess of Revenge, the adult
family drama of Six Feet Under, the weighty political debates of The West
Wing, or the realist social critique of The Wire. While few critics would
resist framing the first two programs as melodrama, many would bristle
with giving the latter two that label, as their intellectual seriousness,
measured production style, and claims to authenticity and realism are
often viewed as the opposite of melodramatic excess. I was one of those
skeptical critics myself, regarding melodrama as the core element that
prime time soaps such as Revenge shared with their daytime counter-
parts, and I differentiated them from the nonmelodramatic, more realist
approach of other, more unconventional series such as The Sopranos and
The Wire. But I was persuaded by Linda Williams’s call to redefine melo-
drama away from the terrain of excess: “melodrama has become so basic
to all forms of popular moving-picture entertainment that it is futile to
continue to define it as ‘excess,’ since these apparent excesses are not
necessary for melodrama to do its work nor are they of the essence of
the form.”17 Instead of a specific genre tied to women’s films or daytime
soap operas, melodrama, she argues, should be construed as a narrative
mode that uses suspense to portray “moral legibility,” offering an engag-
ing emotional response to feel the difference between competing moral
sides as manifested through forward-moving storytelling.18
This more expansive definition of melodrama as mode rather than
genre unites various forms of serial television via a shared commitment
to linking morality, emotional response, and narrative drive. As I argue
throughout the book, the sustained storytelling time that viewers spend
with a long-form serial, as well as the productive gaps between episodes,
fosters deeply felt emotional engagement with television characters and
their dramatic scenarios, often tied to moral allegiances outlined in
chapter 4. Television fiction only succeeds if we care about the drama,
and Williams highlights how that caring is mobilized to create a shared
moral map: “strong affect combined with moral legibility to create a felt
good is what these popular moving pictures do.”19 Williams suggests
 Serial Melodrama | 245

that prime time television’s melodrama stems from its “shared DNA”
evolving from daytime soap operas, but we do not need to follow her
evolutionary implication (as I argued earlier) to see the melodramatic
mode running throughout the television schedule — in fact, her argu-
ment about the ubiquity of melodrama across film genres is more com-
pelling as a shared cultural vocabulary than as an evolutionary tree of
influence. But whether or not we want to chart influences or highlight
shared modes, recognizing the ubiquity of melodrama throughout com-
plex television is crucial to understanding the medium’s cultural work.
Extending the melodramatic mode to encompass realist narratives
that reject many norms of emotional and stylistic excess challenges well-
established critical categories. Thankfully, Williams has already done
the critical heavy lifting by highlighting how television’s most acclaimed
realist drama, The Wire, embraces her new conception of melodrama.
The series charts a shared “felt good” in the nostalgic ideal of a func-
tioning, fair city of Baltimore and provides emotional hooks to make
us care about what has been lost (even as an ideal, if not an actual lived
experience) through a range of injustices such as the drug war, global
capitalism, and political corruption. Its melodrama is presented in an
understated, often dry tone, but the cumulative emotional responses
to the tales of personal redemption (Bubbles climbing the stairs) and
institutional failure (bulldozing Hamsterdam) are as affectively power-
ful as any recognizably melodramatic narrative trope like consummated
romance or familial tragedy.20 And once The Wire’s melodramatic core
is made visible, then it is difficult to view any other complex serial with-
out seeing its own map of moral legibility, narrative drive, and emotion-
ally resonant characterization all working to create a shared “felt good.”
Expanding our understanding of melodrama into a more pervasive
mode instead of a narrower genre has at least two major impacts on our
understanding of contemporary television seriality. First, it disrupts a
dichotomy that has been posited for decades, pitting the “prime time
soap,” marked by stylistic excess and trashy sensibility, against the “qual-
ity drama,” heralded as serious, socially engaged, and more aesthetically
mature than its lowbrow competition.21 If we separate excess from melo-
drama, we can see 1980s programs such as Hill Street Blues and Dynasty
as coexisting in a spectrum of affective morality and serial storytelling,
rather than as polar opposites. We can better understand the multiple
246 | Serial Melodrama

facets of stylistic play and emotional engagement offered by hybrid pro-

grams such as Twin Peaks and Mad Men. And, of course, we can avoid
defensive caveats of why a series is not being “soapy” when it embraces
moments of emotional pathos or moral judgment, recognizing the ubiq-
uity of the melodramatic impulse across various modes and genres of
serial storytelling, regardless of their stylistic excesses or connections to
soap opera traditions.
Embracing complex television’s melodramatic elements also has an
important impact on how we see the narrative mode’s gender politics.
A frequent critique of many of the programs I discuss in this book is
that they are overwhelmingly masculine in focus and appeal and that
through that emphasis they deny the traditional links between serial
melodrama and more conventionally feminine subject matter, viewing
practices, and pleasures. Michael Newman and Elana Levine extend this
critique to suggest that “the legitimated serials of the convergence era
masculinize a denigrated form, negating and denying the feminized
other upon which their status depends,” suggesting not only that prime
time serials derive from daytime soaps but also that they actively try
to deny those origins as a strategy of gendered differentiation.22 While
certainly many prime time serial creators, viewers, and critics do deny
links between complex television and soap operas (I contend with good
justification) and melodrama (with far less justification), I do not want
to focus on this question of differentiation and legitimation, as doing so
reinforces what I regard as overly simplified dichotomies between serial
and episodic forms, melodrama and realism, and feminine and mascu-
line texts and viewing practices. Instead, I hope to more productively
suggest how we can reframe the conversation to see how integrating
serial melodrama into other genres has led to more fluid possibilities of
gender identification and to the challenging of rigid stereotypes of gen-
dered appeals. But first we need a better understanding of what it means
to call a narrative form “masculine” or “feminine.”
I doubt any contemporary critic would claim that melodrama or
seriality are inherently “feminine” in expressing a viewer’s biological
essence or even a static cultural norm, but rather most would say that
such narrative modes have been discursively linked to female practices
as to signify a nonessential yet significantly gendered cultural realm.
Robyn Warhol productively explores the gendering of serial narrative
 Serial Melodrama | 247

consumption, suggesting that emotional responses to sentimental fic-

tion, such as “having a good cry,” function as “gendered technologies of
affect,” an analysis she develops through case studies of Victorian serials,
soap operas, and marriage-plot movies.23 Warhol labels such affective
responses as “effeminate,” both linked to and constitutive of behaviors
culturally coded as female but by no means determined by or limited to
female bodies — by using the term “effeminate,” which more commonly
describes gay men’s behaviors than women’s, she highlights the perfor-
mative aspect of gender practice rather than its connection to sexed
bodies. She identifies how such sentimentality is marginalized within
both academic criticism and broader mass media, which dismiss melo-
dramatic genres and forms as unserious, manipulative, excessive, and
aesthetically barren, especially when compared to more legitimated and
masculine forms, arguments that Newman and Levine echo. But War-
hol’s emphasis on affect and form allow for a more fluid understanding
of the cultural politics of taste and engagement, as effeminate pleasures
are not exclusively tied to formats such as daytime soaps; instead, she
provides a formal vocabulary of sentimentality that helps demonstrate
how it might be evoked within both conventionally effeminate and non-
effeminate genres and modes.
While Warhol focuses her account on effeminate responses and tex-
tual modes, she also suggests that there are masculinist pleasures and
engagements with texts such as Patrick O’Brian’s serial maritime novels,
focusing on adventure plots and homosocial friendships.24 Other key
facets of serial narrative are conventionally coded as masculine as well,
such as the analytic puzzle solving common to mysteries and proce-
dural explorations of systems such as science-fiction technologies and
mapping fictional worlds — all responses frequently elicited by complex
television and forensic fandom, as discussed more in chapter 8. Again,
labeling such modes of engagement as masculinist is not to suggest they
belong exclusively (or even primarily) to male viewers, as many women
embrace genres such as mystery and science fiction in which such affec-
tive engagement thrives, and certainly many forensic fans are female.25
Rather, such practices are culturally coded as masculine no matter who
is performing them, just as sentimental crying is regarded as effeminate
even (or perhaps especially) when done by a man. These distinctions, at
their most reductive, echo the long-standing stereotypical mapping of
248 | Serial Melodrama

rationality as male and emotion as female or the gendered dichotomy

between thinking and feeling, a set of dualities that map onto the modes
of affirmational versus transformative fandom discussed in chapter 4.
Warhol’s performative model highlights how such assumptions are reit-
erated through cultural practice rather than illuminating innate gen-
dered differences, and despite the status of such distinctions as reduc-
tive stereotypes, exploring the gendered dimensions of such affective
engagements is crucial to understanding the cultural dynamics of nar-
rative consumption.
As explored throughout this book, a good deal of complex tele-
vision foregrounds narrative elements that invite such typically mas-
culinist analytic, forensic responses, but Williams convincingly argues
that melodrama and its “felt good” are importantly prominent in such
programs as well. By merging Williams’s and Warhol’s arguments, we
can see that the melodramatic pathos that suffuses most television seri-
als can work to evoke effeminate feelings, even outside the tradition-
ally feminine genre of soap operas. Williams’s account highlights how,
despite an overwhelmingly male cast and crew, a focus on the world
of men at work, and a rational procedural focus, The Wire generates
deeply felt emotional responses of pathos and sadness, and I would
extend her analysis to suggest that it occasionally elicits a “good cry,”
per Warhol — I certainly get choked up at the untimely deaths of a few
characters, the suffering heaped on victimized children such as Randy
and Dukie, or the understated triumph of Bubbles getting (and coming)
clean.26 Such sentimental responses exist alongside the program’s more
conventionally masculinist pleasures of procedurality, systems analysis,
political critique, and homosocial bonding in the workplace, producing
a vibrant mixture of gendered responses that can appeal both to a wide
range of viewers and to a spectrum of affective engagements within a
single viewer of any gender identity. Thus I reject Newman and Levine’s
claim that contemporary serials “masculinize” the soap opera form but
rather invert their claim to suggest that the pervasive spread of serial
melodrama has added an effeminate layer to traditionally masculinist
genres such as crime dramas, espionage thrillers, and science fiction.27
Lost provides a good example of the type of genre and gender mixing
prevalent in complex television serials. Few programs are more exem-
plary of the importance of forensic fandom, the operational aesthetic,
 Serial Melodrama | 249

and the ludic engagement with transmedia storytelling that I discuss

throughout the book, and these facets, along with its central focus on
male heroes coming to terms with their “daddy issues” and conflicts
over leadership, would suggest that Lost is a resolutely masculinist pro-
gram in its appeals. Yet Michael Kackman convincingly highlights how
it intertwines melodramatic plotlines that evoke both effeminate and
masculinist narrative conventions and appeals, mixing the formal nar-
rative complexities triggering forensic fandom with the affective pulls of
melodrama to foreground a cultural complexity of morality and emo-
tional engagement.28 We can extend this analysis using Warhol’s seven-
part “narratology of good-cry techniques” as a yardstick to measure
sentimentality, highlighting the prevalence of melodrama and effemi-
nate pleasures within Lost.29 Warhol suggests that sentimental films use
highly emotive acting and cinematic styles, “rendering emotion as some-
thing overtly visible” as well as manifested in the emotionally excessive
musical cues, all tendencies common to Lost’s dramatic moments.30 In
Warhol’s account, sentimental fictions are focalized around the per-
spective of characters who are most emotionally vulnerable, with Lost’s
rotating focalizations via flashbacks highlighting the inner emotional
life and struggles of many members of the large ensemble, usually flash-
ing back to moments of peak vulnerability and pathos. Warhol notes
that sentimental literature often directly addresses its readers to actively
engage in narrative comprehension, although film rarely embraces this
device; while Lost’s use of direct address is more implied in moments of
reflexivity that call attention to narrative enigmas or plot devices, rather
than sweeping emotion or romance, it does “blend its metafictional self-
consciousness with sentimental techniques” in a way that is consistent
with her account.31
Warhol suggests that “the sentimental plot emphasizes close calls and
last-minute reversals, either for better or for worse,” a description that
perfectly captures Lost’s penchant for twisty plotting that services both
rational and emotional engagement.32 She argues that characters in sen-
timental texts frequently act against established type at critical moments
of emotional payoff, a tendency we can see repeatedly in climactic
moments for many of Lost’s characters, including Jack, Ben, Jin, and
Sawyer. Finally, she suggests that sentimental fictions balance moments
of tragedy and joy, suffering and triumph; given Lost’s multithreaded
250 | Serial Melodrama

plot structure, especially with the sixth season’s parallel “sideways” nar-
rative, virtually every character in the ensemble experiences important
moments of both suffering and triumph, death and redemption — often
within the same episode — with no singular fate overriding the other.
Lost hits every element of Warhol’s inventory of sentimental storytell-
ing techniques, highlighting the centrality of melodrama to its appeal
and its mixed-genre format that refuses any simple classification that
the series “just” belongs to a masculinist genre of science fiction or
action-adventure.
Newman and Levine acknowledge that series such as Lost do incor-
porate “soapy” elements such as these into their storytelling stew, but
they argue that these elements are always marginalized and secondary,
functioning as an internal “other” to highlight a program’s cultural legit-
imation in more masculinist terms.33 But as I argue in chapter 10, Lost
frequently foregrounds affective over forensic fandom, and the series
concludes by privileging the emotional over the rational, much to the
chagrin of many of its more masculinist fans. It is telling that the nearly
universal choice among critics and fans for Lost’s best episode is “The
Constant,” which balances a science-fiction time-travel tale centered
around arcane physics experiments with a sweepingly romantic tale of
doomed lovers reuniting across time and space. As critic Ryan McGee
writes, “ ‘The Constant’ represents the humanist side of Lost better than
any other [episode], using its narrative trickery not to create riddles
about smoke monsters and glowing caves, but rather a simple, power-
ful story about human connection.”34 The episode’s climactic romantic
moment is among the most affecting of many in Lost when the senti-
mental wells up to produce tears as an emotional payoff to hours of serial
engagement, and it belies any claims that such a program’s melodramatic
tendencies are an afterthought meant to “legitimize” it in comparison to
soap operas. If anything, I would contend that the series is more of an
emotionally focused melodrama, in both the adventure and sentimental
incarnations of the form, that uses puzzles and science-fiction trappings
to draw in masculinist viewers.
With Warhol’s and Williams’s perspectives on sentimentality and
melodrama in mind, we can see the importance of effeminate viewing
practices in nearly all prime time serials, and it becomes clear that most
complex television offers a blend of gendered appeals. These gender
 Serial Melodrama | 251

mixtures are a comparatively recent phenomenon within mainstream

fictional television, made visible when looking back to a seminal work
of 1980s media studies, John Fiske’s Television Culture.35 Fiske frames
masculine and feminine television forms as stark oppositions, using
examples such as The A-Team and Dynasty, respectively, while acknowl-
edging that (then) newer innovations such as Hill Street Blues and Cag-
ney and Lacey were starting to blur such distinctions. In his dichot-
omy, Fiske contrasts the feminine facets of open narrative deferment,
emotional expressiveness, domestic settings, and character complex-
ity against masculine norms of exclusively male professional spheres,
rational actions, and narrative closure. What is striking is how difficult
it is to find a contemporary prime time drama that fits neatly into his
feminine or masculine paradigms, as the blends of episodic closure and
serial deferment, character actions and emotions, and blurred work and
domestic spheres are nearly universal. As I discuss more later in this
chapter, incorporating sentimental melodrama and female characters
into traditionally masculinist genres has worked to validate effeminate
emotional experiences for male viewers and helped destabilize tele-
vision’s long-standing gender hierarchies.
The various ways that new forms of television storytelling and genre
mixing have reframed the medium’s techniques of gender representation
are far too multifaceted to deal with fully here, but it is worth exploring a
few techniques that have emerged as part of this mode of narrative com-
plexity.36 One common strategy places a female protagonist at the center
of a highly serialized version of a traditionally masculinist genre story,
such as the espionage programs Alias and Homeland, the legal thriller
Damages, and the police procedural The Killing. One key innovator of
such gender reversals mixed the traditionally masculinist horror genre
with female-centric teen dramas to forge the influential (and highly
studied) series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Less written about, but arguably
just as interesting, is Veronica Mars, which mixes the effeminate teen
drama, highlighting romantic and familial relationships, with the neo-
noir crime procedural, typically framed as masculinist. As discussed in
chapter 2, the series opens by positing teenage Veronica as a hard-boiled
cynic, solving crimes and condemning romance, while surrounded by
a cast of male characters who often surpass her in sensitivity and sen-
timentality. In terms of narrative pleasures, many of Veronica Mars’s
252 | Serial Melodrama

core storylines fit more neatly into the masculinist norm of action and
detective drama than into the effeminate realm of romantic melodrama.
While Hill Street Blues and other early prime time serials focused their
ongoing stories on traditionally effeminate relationship and character
arcs, keeping the masculinist crime and professional plots more epi-
sodically contained, Veronica Mars typifies the new breed of complex
narratives that weave serialization into all realms of their plotting, fea-
turing heavily serialized mysteries alongside character melodrama, blur-
ring gendered appeals into a fictional world that actively questions the
presumed gender norms of its characters and, by extension, its viewers,
especially when framed within the female-skewing network branding of
UPN and The CW.
Gender norms also are blurred within Veronica Mars’s plotting. The
self-contained detective stories seem consistent with more masculinist
crime narratives, but the low-stakes high school setting and Veronica’s
status as a savvy investigator willing to use both traditionally mascu-
line and feminine traits to solve mysteries complicate this simple gender
identity. The ongoing serial storylines embrace both the effeminate and
masculinist traditions that Warhol discusses — the relationship arcs gen-
erally follow serial melodrama patterns typical of teen dramas but often
interweaved with detective mysteries, such as the connections between
Logan’s budding romance with Veronica and his potential involvement
with both mystery arcs of Lilly’s murder and Veronica’s rape. Veronica
often applies her hyperrational detective skills to explore her emotional
realm, whether by investigating her own paternity, solving mysteries for
friends, or implicating her boyfriends in criminal cases. The program’s
serialized mysteries offer narrative thrills in a more masculinist vein but
tied to the emotional and female-centered realms of rape, motherhood,
and soured romance motivating murder. While Veronica Mars clearly
embodies both gendered modes of narrative pleasure, it does more than
offer parallel pleasures for distinct types of viewers; instead, the pro-
gram’s storytelling structures intermingle and complicate such neat gen-
dered binaries, inviting all viewers to experience both effeminate and
masculinist emotional responses.
If centering a masculinist genre on a female figure can disrupt tra-
ditional gender norms, the infusion of serial melodrama into male-
centered narrative worlds often calls the dominant definitions of
 Serial Melodrama | 253

masculinity into question. Certainly the majority of complex dramas

(like most prime time television) are quite male centered, focused on
men in professional realms of crime, crime fighting, or other profes-
sional endeavors, including important programs such as The Sopranos,
The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. The cable channel FX has made
a profitable brand identity out of complex masculinist dramas such as
The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Rescue Me, and Justified, all of which portray
mostly hypermasculine worlds using serial storytelling — and notably,
FX struggled to find an audience with its female-centered drama Dam-
ages. Yet such masculine series are not simply a contemporary version
of The A-Team, celebrating male bonding, action sequences, and pro-
fessional success, but instead use the emotionally foregrounded story-
telling style of serial melodrama to cover new narrative ground — such
programs are not just male-centric but are ultimately about masculinity
itself in crisis and conflict. As Amanda Lotz argues, the multifaceted
narrative strategies of “male-centered serials enable these shows to inter-
rogate submerged sentiments about gender scripts that lurk beneath the
surface of largely reconstructed masculinities.”37 While few of these
male-centered melodramas are overtly feminist in questioning patriar-
chy, the narrative act of making male privilege an object of dramatic
conflict, as well as encouraging male viewers to experience effeminate
melodramatic affect, can be regarded as progressive steps within the tra-
ditionally hegemonic realm of dramatic television.
As discussed in chapter 4, many complex serials focus on male anti-
heroes as protagonists, often highlighting the emotional suffering that
they both cause and feel as a result of their actions. Breaking Bad ’s Wal-
ter White is certainly a unique case, as his character undergoes drastic
transformations toward villainy rather than starting out as an amoral
figure like most antiheroes. Throughout his journey toward criminal-
ity, he rationalizes his actions to provide for his family, following what
his fellow criminal Gus tells him: “What does a man do, Walter? A man
provides for his family. . . . And he does it even when he’s not appreci-
ated or respected or even loved. He simply bears up, and he does it.
Because he’s a man.”38 Such overtly patriarchal rhetoric, contrasted with
the hideous actions Walt takes toward others and eventually toward his
family itself, articulates the hollow, rotten core of traditional masculin-
ity as portrayed on the series. While we are aligned with Walt and can
254 | Serial Melodrama

sometimes empathize with his struggles, he eventually steps over the

line to pure villainy and becomes an object of narrative contempt (with
the specific point by which he loses sympathy differing among viewers).
Of course, Walt is not alone in his journey, and the role played by his
wife, Skyler, is particularly interesting in light of serial melodrama and
effeminate responses. We perceive Skyler mostly from Walt’s point of
view, which starts as loving affection tempered with growing frustra-
tion as she serves as an obstacle to his self-realization as a “real man” via
his criminal alter ego Heisenberg. If we regard the series as a gangster
drama in which Walt’s success in the drug enterprise is the purported
goal, then Skyler may be an obstacle. But complex serials feature multi-
ple story threads that invite us to follow and shift character connections;
thus if we retell the series focusing primarily on Skyler’s character’s arc,
Breaking Bad becomes a very different type of gendered tale, offering a
melodramatic account of deception, adultery, and ultimately an abusive,
dangerous marriage.
Skyler starts the series in a content and comfortable place, although
not living the life she had dreamed of when she married the older Wal-
ter White, an ambitious and successful scientist. But Walt’s professional
failings, born of stubborn pride and the challenges of having a disabled
son, shifted their life into a more compromised but stable existence: she
gave up trying to be a fiction writer to work as a part-time bookkeeper,
he became a high school chemistry teacher who had to moonlight at a
car wash. A surprise pregnancy changes things, but more abruptly Walt
starts acting erratically around his 50th birthday, which is soon explained
when he reveals that he has terminal lung cancer and is resigned to die
rather than get treatment. In an effort to keep the family together, Sky-
ler convinces Walt to undergo treatment and extend his life. But Walt’s
behavior remains bizarre, including a fugue state causing him to appear
naked in a grocery store, an odd connection with a drug-dealing former
student, numerous unexplained disappearances, strange parenting deci-
sions (such as getting their 16-year-old son drunk on tequila), and hints
of a second cell phone that points toward some deception. Despite being
eight months pregnant, Skyler goes back to work to help pay for their
medical bills, even though her boss’s affections creep her out. And on
top of everything, Walt misses their daughter being born, with a shoddy
excuse. When Walt undergoes cancer surgery, he accidentally confirms
 Serial Melodrama | 255

his second cell phone, leading Skyler to investigate his cover stories to
find a web of deception worse than she had imagined, and thus she
leaves him as soon as he has recovered from surgery.
Soon after their separation, Walt tells Skyler his secret: that he has
been cooking crystal meth. He assures her that it is a safe job, with no
violence or threat of danger, but she is outraged at how his actions and
deceptions risk everything for their family and demands a divorce. Walt
refuses, calling her bluff and moving back in despite her threats to go to
the police. So she lashes out in the only way that she can think of: having
an affair with her boss, Ted, who has his own corrupt business practices
that she becomes embroiled in. Eventually Walt does agree to a divorce,
but Skyler decides to remain married for spousal legal protection. When
her brother-in-law, Hank, is shot and left paralyzed due to circumstances
seemingly related to Walt’s crimes, Skyler agrees to pay for Hank’s medi-
cal costs, devising a cover story for Walt’s riches involving compulsive
gambling and card counting, drawing her deeper into Walt’s criminal
interests to help her family. As Skyler learns more about Walt’s business,
she uses her bookkeeping skills to launder money and purchases a car
wash as a front, rationalizing her decision that helping Walt is better for
the family than breaking the law for Ted. Although their relationship is
still strained, Skyler and Walt reach a balanced arrangement of mutual
benefit, until she learns that one of his drug associates was killed in cold
blood. After expressing concern for their safety, Walt lashes out with
an anger she has never seen before, as he claims to be “the danger” in
a threatening moment. She comes close to taking the newborn Holly
and fleeing but decides she must remain to “protect this family from
the man who protects the family” — how much she honestly fears Walt
versus regarding him as a blowhard out of his depths is uncertain, but
clearly she feels like she can still manage him. Trouble with Ted returns
in the form of an IRS investigation, which she helps skirt by paying him
off and hiring thugs to pressure him. And then a threat to Hank’s life
prompts the family to go into protection, which ends when the drug
kingpin Gus Fring is killed in a nursing-home explosion.
When Skyler realizes that Walt was responsible for the bomb, this is
the first indication she has that he is capable of murder — while viewers
have witnessed his procession of increasingly amoral killings for years
of screen time, to Skyler this revelation means that Walt has suddenly
256 | Serial Melodrama

gone from a meek criminal chemist who seems in over his head to a
scheming murderer willing to blow up a nursing home to take out an
enemy. We imagine what might be going through her mind, positing
what else he might have done that she has yet to discover. Suddenly she
is not only aiding a drug criminal; she is an accessory to murder — and
she soon learns that her efforts with Ted have led to his near demise
and a resulting terrorized paralysis. Skyler is simultaneously repulsed
by her murderous husband, who moves back in and assures her “life is
good,” and horrified that she too has made moral compromises in the
name of protecting her family, taking her down the road that Walt has
already traveled. But unlike Walt, she experiences remorse and horror
at her own actions, placing her in a state of passive paralysis as a bat-
tered spouse, desperate to protect her children from “the danger.” Skyler
finally convinces Walt that they have too much money to be able to ever
spend, and he quits the business and tries to return to a mild-mannered
suburban life.
But just as they adjust to a cash-infused state of seminormalcy, Hank
discovers Walt’s secret, tearing apart Skyler and her sister, Marie, and
forcing Skyler to help Walt threaten and humiliate Hank and Marie. She
gets so wrapped up in protecting herself and her family that she begins
to mimic Walt’s rationalizations, even suggesting that Walt murder Jesse
to eliminate a threat. When Marie tells her that Walt has been arrested,
Skyler aims to reconcile with her sister by cooperating and coming clean
to Walt Jr., but she faces a crisis when Walt returns home, apparently
having killed Hank — their marriage explodes when she cuts him with
a kitchen knife, and Walt runs off into exile with Holly. The relation-
ship culminates with one of the most complex and harrowing telephone
calls ever put onto film, in which Walt bullies Skyler in an over-the-top
rant that is both a performance designed to absolve her of culpability
to the police and an expression of his deep-seated masculinist rage and
resentments. The series ends with Skyler broke and broken, paying for
Walt’s crimes and having lost everything financially and familially, the
tale of a wronged wife destroyed by her husband’s criminal ambitions
and emotional abuse.
Of course, it is not Skyler’s story. Walt is Breaking Bad ’s protagonist,
so we are invited to see his perspective on his marriage and share his
singular knowledge of his actions and motivations. AMC’s branding
 Serial Melodrama | 257

certainly reinforces Walt’s centrality, as the series was promoted primar-

ily as a crime drama, hyping Walt’s dangerous exploits as an emerging
drug kingpin far more than his familial drama or Skyler’s emotional
abuse. Yet Skyler’s story is there, creeping toward the narrative center as
the series progresses, while Walt’s performative iterations of his patriar-
chal role and masculine prowess begin to crumble and erode, in our eyes
if not his. As discussed in chapter 10, Skyler’s presence serves as an irri-
tant for some viewers, but for others willing to consider her perspective,
Skyler’s experiences offer a vital critique of Walt’s damaged masculinity.
By considering Skyler’s perspective, Breaking Bad functions in part as a
“women’s film” in reverse, told through the rationalizing perspective of
the abusive spouse whom we only slowly grow to recognize as the villain.
Many examples of complex television use serialized melodrama to
tell stories of damaged masculinity or recenter a traditionally mascu-
line genre around a female protagonist, but some mix genres to portray
the intersection of traditionally masculine and feminine spheres with a
focus on a larger ensemble of characters. Friday Night Lights overlays the
hypermasculine realm of high school football with family melodrama
focused both on teens coming of age and on life in the small Texas city
of Dillon. While much of the drama involves men trying to use foot-
ball as a lifeboat to escape their dead-end lives or as an anchor to their
past glory days, storylines focused on the gender politics of Eric and
Tami Taylor’s dual-career marriage and Tyra’s attempt to succeed aca-
demically to escape both her poverty and her sexual reputation decenter
masculinity within the drama. Notably, the moments that contain the
greatest degree of melodramatic excess focus on football, especially the
game sequences suggesting that every game is decided in the final sec-
onds with a desperation scoring drive, portrayed with hyperdramatic
slow motion and emotionally wrought musical scoring. Additionally,
one of the program’s most harrowing and acclaimed episodes, “The
Son,” focuses its sentimental core on Matt Saracen grappling with his
father’s death, creating a portrait of a masculine emotional journey so
intense that I cannot help but get a bit weepy just writing about it. The
much-derided second season embraced more conventionally exces-
sive melodramatic plotting with a contrived murder story, a hackneyed
cross-racial adoption, and manufactured romantic complications, while
still using performance and production styles coded as realist, creating
258 | Serial Melodrama

tonal disconnects that repelled most fans and critics. While Friday Night
Lights is erratic in its serial consistency and use of complex poetics, it
melds gendered genre norms through ongoing arcs to complicate any
clear categorization of masculinist or effeminate identification or nar-
rative pleasures.
Another series complicating its gendered appeals through innova-
tive genre mixing and storytelling strategies is The Good Wife. Explicitly
gendered by its title, the premise suggests a melodramatic, effeminate
focus: a political wife is humiliated by a shameful sex scandal and forced
to both establish her own career and publicly redefine her relationship
with her estranged husband. Yet as Alicia Florrick builds a legal career
in her old friend’s firm, the series spins an elaborate, highly serialized
set of interlocking professional and personal storylines, notably with a
huge stable of memorable supporting characters of judges, attorneys,
family members, clients, and political operatives. Although The Good
Wife retains a case-of-the-week episodic structure, it features as com-
plex a cumulative, multi-institutional serialized storyworld that has ever
been seen on network prime time, leading one critic to compare it favor-
ably to cable’s standard-bearer for realist world building, The Wire.39
But unlike The Wire, The Good Wife imbues its complex institutionally
grounded serialization with explicit cross-gender appeals, merging the
familial, professional, romantic, and political, often within a single story
thread, and exploring how these threads connect with the emotional
and rational choices of its female protagonist.
A good example of The Good Wife at its most complex is the fourth-
season episode “Death of a Client.” Primarily set at a St. Patrick’s Day
fund-raising event hosted by Chicago’s Catholic diocese, the episode
focuses on the main ongoing political plotline, the gubernatorial cam-
paign of Alicia’s husband, Peter. But as always, politics merge with the
personal, as Alicia must present herself as both a doting political spouse
and a new partner of her law firm, as well as defending her son against
false accusations from Peter’s opponent and juggling a potential family
crisis concerning her mother’s inappropriate disclosures to her teenage
children. Additionally, her former lover (and still boss) Will’s presence
at the party creates tension with Peter, despite the firm’s political sup-
port of his campaign — as well as Peter’s offer of a potential Supreme
Court appointment to Will’s partner Diane, returning to a long-dormant
 Serial Melodrama | 259

storyline from the first season. The episodic case of the week emerges in
the form of a previously unseen client of Alicia’s being murdered, as the
police bring her in for questioning about the litigious client’s numerous
enemies; we come to know the client and his connection with Alicia
through her recollections, presented via flashback in short nonchrono-
logical bursts. But mixed into this professional episodic plot are per-
sonal arcs, as the assistant district attorney working the case is romanti-
cally interested in Will and asks for Alicia’s advice, prompting Alicia to
recall moments of her affair with Will intermixed with flashbacks of
her murdered client. The episode is narrated via a temporally complex
form encouraging the operational aesthetic and forcing viewers to piece
together a more linear account to ensure comprehension; similarly to
The West Wing episode “Nöel,” as discussed in chapter 1, “Death of a
Client” embeds a diegetic Bach piece that connects to the program’s neo-
baroque storytelling form. Every storyline in this complex episode (and
there are a few others left unmentioned) builds on threads from longer
arcs, provokes an array of emotional responses, and intermixes various
personal and professional plots, suggesting a highly interwoven cloth of
genre and gender mixing via its complex poetics.
Examples such as The Good Wife highlight how complex television
has challenged the gendered norms of serial storytelling. The series is
far removed from Fiske’s polar examples of feminine and masculine
television from the 1980s, and it is distinct from the mixed but sepa-
rated style of serial romances and episodic cases that typified earlier
mixtures such as Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law. Instead, the personal
and professional, effeminate and masculinist, melodramatic and ratio-
nal are fully interwoven and inseparable in terms of both storytelling
structure and affective viewer experience. While some critics suggest
that such mixtures “masculinize” feminine forms and thus marginalize
the female basis of much of television storytelling, I contend that these
recombinations complicate gender dichotomies in ultimately more pro-
gressive ways by inviting viewers to cross-identify and embrace affective
pleasures that are typically nonnormative for their gender identity. Male
viewers weep at the sentimental melodrama of Friday Night Lights or
Lost, female fans celebrate female power and analytic intelligence fea-
tured on Alias or Veronica Mars, and all viewers feel the affective inter-
connections of The Good Wife’s personal and professional realms — such
260 | Serial Melodrama

viewing experiences problematize strict gender dichotomies, offering

sites of fluidity and empathy, however imperfect and partial, that seem
consistent with feminist critiques of gender norms. Warhol argues that
narrative consumption is a constitutive practice of gender identity, with
serial forms promoting particularly powerful reiterations of affect; I
contend that the prevalence of serial melodrama within complex tele-
vision across a range of genres enables a particularly provocative set of
practices to challenge and revise established gender norms.
8

Orienting Paratexts

Throughout the history of American commercial television, we might

consider “accessibility” to be one of its defining features. Per the
medium’s commercial strategies for advertiser-supported programming,
success was judged by the ability to attract, retain, and grow a viewer-
ship, which could then be converted into the currency of Nielsen ratings
and sold to advertisers. The programming strategies that supported this
system of popular appeal have been termed “least objectionable content”
or, more dismissively, “lowest common denominator.” In short, a tele-
vision storyteller’s first job is to avoid alienating potential viewers. At the
base level of narrative comprehension, the industry demands that tele-
vision be easy enough to follow in order to make sense to casual viewers.
However, complex television series often challenge the ease with which
casual viewers might make sense of a program, inviting temporary
disorientation and confusion, allowing viewers to build up their com-
prehension skills through long-term viewing and active engagement, as
I discuss in more depth in chapter 5.
This chapter considers how viewers make sense of complex serial
forms through practices of orientation and mapping, primarily through
the creation of orienting paratexts. Arguably, most orientation practices
involve paratexts, whether in the tangible form of maps and lists or in
more ephemeral conversations, as orienting ourselves in relation to a
narrative world places us outside the core text itself. These paratexts are
distinct from transmedia paratexts that explicitly continue storyworlds
across platforms, discussed in more depth in chapter 9. Instead, orient-
ing practices reside outside the diegetic storyworld, providing a perspec-
tive for viewers to help make sense of a narrative world by looking at
it from a distance — although as with all such categorical distinctions,
actual practices often muddy such neat dichotomies.1 Orientation is not
necessary to discover the canonical truth of a storyworld but rather is
used to create a layer atop the program to help figure out how the pieces

261
262 | Orienting Paratexts

fit together or to propose alternative ways of seeing the story that might
not be suggested by or contained within the original narrative design.
The act of linking a text to a paratext, whether officially sanctioned or
viewer created, changes how we see the original, and thus this chap-
ter maps out many ways that a serial is transformed through the act of
paratextual extension, often with the explicit goal of making “sense” of
the original.
In the Internet era, we are surrounded by an array of paratextual
information, much of which is not designed specifically in support of
a series. In a telling quote, David Simon, the creator of The Wire and
Treme, explains to Emily Nussbaum how he creates television in the
contemporary media environment: “ ‘Fuck the exposition . . . Just be.
The exposition can come later.’ [Simon] describes a theory of television
narrative. ‘If I can make you curious enough, there’s this thing called
Google. If you’re curious about the New Orleans Indians, or “second-
line” musicians — you can look it up.’ The Internet, he suggests, can pro-
vide its own creative freedom, releasing writers from having to over-
explain, allowing history to light the characters from within.”2 While few
observers would point to Simon’s work as demanding or encouraging
robust online paratextual activity, especially as compared to cult series
such as Lost or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, his description of the Internet’s
expositional usefulness highlights how creators can outsource backstory
and cultural references to a preexisting and highly accessible paratex-
tual realm. Additionally, the Internet can host and share vast paratextual
resources designed specifically to help orient viewers of ongoing seri-
als. Television series are thus not treated as stand-alone, self-contained
works by either their creators or their fans but rather exist in a media
landscape where online paratexts are always part of a viewer’s potential
intertextual flow.
The paratexts explored in this chapter are more specifically tied to
their source texts than Simon’s evocation of Googling New Orleans tra-
ditions, traversing the boundary between unofficial fan-created and offi-
cial industrial extensions — while there are obvious differences between
such variants of paratexts, both official and unofficial paratexts are
regarded as part of the same spectrum of viewing practice. After outlin-
ing various orientation practices used by contemporary television view-
ers, I focus on a specific form of orienting paratext, the encyclopedic
 Orienting Paratexts | 263

wiki, before concluding with a consideration of what these paratexts

tell us about television viewing. Throughout this chapter, I use Lost as
a primary case study, in large part because the series stands as a rare
example of a mass hit that features a highly complex story that requires
and enables multiple realms of orientation practice. Due to the size and
passion of Lost’s audience, it offers a huge array of paratexts to explore,
arguably only matched on television by franchises that have spanned
decades, such as Star Trek or Doctor Who.

A Catalogue of Serial Orientation Practices

In thinking about the range of orientation practices that television view-
ers embrace today, we encounter a mass of strategies and paratextual
modes that can be rather disorienting. So to understand the scope of ori-
entation practices, we can organize them by the aspects of narrative that
might invite or require orienting, attempting to guide viewers’ compre-
hension, interpretation, analysis, and intertextual expansion. Returning
to the simple definition of narrative offered in the introduction — a tele-
vision serial creates a sustained narrative world, populated by a consistent
set of characters who experience a chain of events over time — presents
four basic storytelling facets that might require orientation: time, events,
characters, and space. These four elements provide a top-level set of
categories for how viewers make sense of television narratives — to com-
prehend an ongoing story, we need to be able to follow each of these
aspects, and paratexts offer useful resources for viewers to orient them-
selves along these four dimensions.
The first category of time is arguably the most central aspect of serial
narrative, as seriality is defined by manipulating time as a storytelling
variable — we consume the story in installments defined by the produc-
ers and process the narrative within mandatory gaps between episodes
and seasons. The three layers of story time, discourse time, and screen
time, as discussed in chapter 1, each potentially require orientation prac-
tices. The last of these seems most obvious, but it points to a central
issue in viewer orientation: we need to know when episodes are on and
in what order we are supposed to watch them. Traditionally in Ameri-
can television, the order in which episodes aired was a minor concern
for prime time programs, as networks might choose to air episodes in
264 | Orienting Paratexts

unusual time slots or sequence depending on their competition or other

mitigating factors — in some cases, such as Firefly, a network might
change episodic sequence in a way that damages viewers’ comprehen-
sion and enjoyment. Syndicated reruns often aired a series out of its
original sequence, meaning that viewers were likely to encounter a pro-
gram in haphazard order, and thus many storytellers adapted to the lack
of guaranteed sequence by avoiding major story arcs that surpass the
length of a given episode, a practice that still lives on for most episodic
police procedurals and many sitcoms.
With the profusion of cable channels and other viewing technologies
in the past two decades, the industry developed ways to orient viewers’
sense of screen time, notably through the on-screen electronic program
guide. Viewers adapt their own ways of navigating screen time by cata-
loguing episodes and airdates online, using general resources such as
Wikipedia, television-centric websites such as epguides.com, or series-
specific fan sites, and employ technologies such as the digital video
recorder to structure their viewing. Boxed sets, streaming resources,
or downloadable purchases provide technologies to orient viewers to
screen time, as the structure of seasons and episode order are fore-
grounded, often to assert an original intended sequence rather than net-
work reordering. Together, the practice of scheduling as orientation helps
viewers master a base chronology of screen time that, while obvious, is
still essential to being able to comprehend an ongoing complex serial.
While screen time follows a fairly rigid set of boundaries and struc-
tures, discourse time is much more variable and free-flowing, especially
in programs with complex chronology. Understanding the nested flash-
backs, replays, flash-forwards, and other atemporal shifts on series such
as How I Met Your Mother or FlashForward requires dedicated atten-
tion to details and chronicling of markers of temporal continuity, often
through elaborate plot summaries on official network or fan websites.
Lost’s complex chronology inspired numerous graphic and textual repre-
sentations, including both fan-created images and officially sanctioned
paratexts on ABC’s website or in DVD releases. Series do not need to
embrace time travel to warrant such use of chronology as orientation,
as fans of Battlestar Galactica chart its narrative through time lines that
help guide viewers to understand both the sequence of events and the
temporal relationship between various on-screen representations.
 Orienting Paratexts | 265

Discourse time refers to the sequence and selection of the narra-

tive material presented to the audience, while story time comprises
the actual events taking place in the narrative universe. For series with
tight chronology, reconciling between story and screen time can be a
challenge, requiring strategies to orient the program’s time frame. For
instance, Breaking Bad lacks the science-fiction temporal play of Lost,
but remembering its compressed time frame, with the events of the
first four seasons only constituting one year of story time, helps view-
ers grasp the consequences, pacing, and stakes of dramatic events that
remain fresh in characters’ minds. To highlight the historical realism of
Mad Men’s 1960s, fans use time lines to parallel the fictional events with
historical moments that are mentioned in the series or left unsaid in the
subtext. Such use of calendaring as orientation helps us follow an unfold-
ing narrative in a way that foregrounds a realist sense of a persistent
storyworld with consequences and history, a fairly new development in
television narrative.
Even when the storyworld is not realistic in the least, mapping chro-
nology and calendars can be a crucial orientation strategy. Probably the
most complicated time line on television is the “timey-wimey” playful-
ness of Doctor Who, especially in the title character’s ongoing relation-
ship to fellow time traveler River Song, as discussed in chapter 4. Fans
have created numerous visual representations of the bidirectional rela-
tionship experienced by River and the Doctor, attempting to match up
their experiences and chart the key moments in their story, a strategy
that the characters themselves perform on the program by syncing up
their journals and memories whenever they meet. Of course, this is not
the exclusive domain of fans, as the BBC produced its own orientation
material with a video chronicling River Song’s story, narrated from her
own temporal perspective.3 This paratextual video highlights how orien-
tation is an element of both official and unofficial production and can be
presented in a range of media, not just graphic time lines or textual lists.
One of the most interesting ways that fans create orientation para-
texts is via video remixes that recast a text’s temporality, with two Lost
projects exemplifying the varied approaches to fan remixed chronology.
In the online video Lost: The Synchronizing, a fan took footage depict-
ing moments of the plane crash from across three seasons and multiple
perspectives, editing them together via split screen in the style of 24
266 | Orienting Paratexts

to sync the story chronology and highlight how these moments con-
verge into the program’s most important narrative event.4 On a larger
scale, another fan created ChronologicallyLost.com to distribute his
reedited version of the series in chronological order in 45-minute epi-
sodic installments, starting with the origin of Jacob and The Man in
Black from the final season’s “Across the Sea,” moving forward through
the island’s time jumps, character flashbacks, plane crash, escape, and
return, and finally ending with the final season’s flash-sideways as an
epilogue. While I doubt that such extensive remix projects actually
orient confused viewers as a time line or map might, they do serve as
analytic forms of orientation, providing insights via rethinking the pro-
gram’s narrative time frame.5
As with any complex taxonomy, we need more than one axis to cat-
egorize practices of viewer orientation — it is not just “what” is being
oriented (time versus space) but also “how” the orientation proceeds.
One type of orientation practice aims for recapitulation, summarizing
narrative material in a straightforward manner, such as the calendar or
the chronological list of events. Another practice embraces a mode of
analysis, exploring narrative material via a representational mode, typi-
cally a visual map or video, that offers an analytic dimension to the rep-
resentation that goes beyond recapitulation. While analytic orientations
aim to better understand what is happening within the text, expansion
orientations look outward to connect the series with other extratextual
realms beyond the core program, whether it is another fictional series
or aspects of the real world. These three modes, which certainly blur
and blend together, can be applied to the various aspects of narrative
temporality, creating a matrix of orientation practices, such as analytic
calendars or expansionist chronologies.
These three modes of orientation can be applied to other narrative
dimensions beyond time as well. Narrative events are closely linked
to time, as they are typically thought about in terms of “what happens
when,” and attempting to orient oneself to story events often involves
chronology and temporal causation. Plot recapitulations are common-
place orientation tools, whether the “previously on” segments preced-
ing most episodes, as discussed in chapter 5, or write-ups on official
network websites or fan sites aiming to provide a clear summation of an
episode’s narrative events. Such textual recaps are abstractions as well,
 Orienting Paratexts | 267

as the conversion of televisual material into prose descriptions is just as

much of a transformation as visual or video remixes are, and the rise of
humorously tinged recaps on sites such as Television Without Pity sug-
gests how orientation can also be a creative act.6 However, some event
analyses detach narrative events from their chronology to create a dif-
ferent perspective on the story, such as lists of character deaths found
on various series wikis to more visual depictions, such as an infographic
poster documenting Dexter’s dozens of murders, charting weapons,
motives, and interrelations between victims.7 Such analytic reinterpre-
tations take a series of narrative events and explore them for greater
understanding of causality, significance, or even basic comprehension
and can be pursued via various media forms. For instance, Breaking
Bad ’s next-to-last episode of season four, “End Times,” raised the enigma
of who was responsible for poisoning a child; a fan took to YouTube to
offer an interpretation of the narrative events to (correctly) argue that
Walter White was responsible, piecing together scenes from the episode
that provide clues and evidence that proved what would only be revealed
in the next episode.8 Such analytic abstractions and reinterpretations
function as sites of forensic fandom discussed more later, enabling view-
ers to make greater sense of or propose new explanations for the nar-
rative events beyond chronology and recapitulation, a tendency we can
see even more acutely in analyses of The Sopranos’ finale, as discussed
in chapter 10.
Plot expansions aim to contextualize the events of a series into a larger
intertextual web, most typically by connecting what happens in a fic-
tional series to the real world. For instance, Treme depicts life in post-
Katrina New Orleans, with many fictionalized versions of real people
and events; bloggers and journalists, most notably Dave Walker from
the New Orleans Times-Picayune, catalogue and analyze the program’s
cultural references, working to orient viewers to the factual basis of the
fictional events.9 More rare are paratextual examples trying to connect
the narrative events from one series to another fictional world beyond
the moments when a program itself cues its own intertextuality, as with
Happy Days references on Arrested Development — but in the paratextual
realm, no orientation practice is as disorienting as the Tommy Westphall
Universe theory. In the legendary conclusion to the 1980s series St. Else-
where, it was revealed that the entirety of the medical drama existed in
268 | Orienting Paratexts

the imagination of Tommy, an autistic child staring into a snow globe.

Because the series had a number of crossover episodes and intertextual
references with other programs including Cheers, Homicide: Life on the
Street, and The Bob Newhart Show, fans have posited that all of these
other fictions are figments of Tommy’s imagination as well. Fans cata-
logue these crossover events and create elaborate maps of an intertextual
multiverse — as of 2014, the grid lists 375 programs ranging from I Love
Lucy to The Wire.10 While such orientation practices are certainly not
designed to actually help viewers truly make sense of fictional worlds,
as this theory is clearly meant to be taken as playfully ludicrous, I would
argue that fans do take it seriously — they get immersed in the intertex-
tual web and passionately argue about interpretations concerning the
validity of various connections. They know it is not “real,” even within
the fictional worlds of television, but many seriously embrace the prac-
tice of creating expansive paratexts as if it were “real,” playfully under-
taking hypothetical analysis and conjecture similar to recent forms such
as alternate reality games (ARGs).11
The third type of narrative orientation tracks a program’s cast of
characters. For vast, sprawling series such as The Wire, it is hard work
remembering who is who among the dozens of characters, many only
known by nicknames or left unseen for long stretches of episodes. Char-
acter guides, whether those found on official websites and tie-in books
or fan-created wikis and guides, offer convenient overviews of dramatis
personae in a manner common to theatergoers; the baseline goal of such
guides is to orient us to the cast, connecting faces with names and dra-
matic functions. Character analyses typically visualize narrative aspects
via alternative means as a way of mapping relationships, developments,
and personalities. For instance, Lost DVDs contained an interactive
character guide to chart out the often coincidental connections between
characters, and fans made similar maps to highlight intercharacter links
and relationships. Analytic commentary can be mixed with a charac-
ter guide, as in one interactive online Lost guide that features carica-
tures of each character, scalable by season, with pop-up boxes offering
snarky summaries of the character’s actions and death — for instance,
Jin’s recap reads, “Total jerk to his wife when they got to the island, but
later came around to become an all right dude. . . . Dead: Opted to stay
 Orienting Paratexts | 269

with his trapped wife on a downed sub instead of raising their child.
Very romantic.”12
While certainly many fan paratexts aim for character reinterpretation,
as fan fiction and remix vids do, I would not call most of those “orienta-
tion practices” per se, as they are less focused on making sense of the
existing narrative world than expanding them into other possibilities —
or at least such paratexts aim more for emotional and affective orienta-
tion and analysis, a topic worth further examination in the future. A
common mode of such fan creativity is intertextual expansion, bringing
characters from multiple storyworlds together into a shared universe,
a genre known as “crossover fic.” It is fairly rare to see such character
expansion functioning as an orientation practice, although one example
is a fun case of intertextuality: fans have adopted the alignment system
from the classic role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which charts
a character’s morality on dual axes of good to evil and lawful to chaotic,
and mapped it onto the cast of various television series. Examples range
from Arrested Development’s dysfunctional Bluth family to the array
of 1960s businessmen from Mad Men, but probably no series is more
apt for such intertextual orientation than The Wire, given its thematic
emphasis on morality and codes of conduct. Mapping out the characters
on a game-based alignment chart invited discussion over the meaning
of lawfulness and chaos in the context of The Wire and whether char-
acters such as Avon and Omar can be seen as anything but evil because
of their murderous ways.13 Such intertextual expansion is an invitation
to rethink our impressions of the original series, orienting ourselves
to a new way of categorizing and grouping characters, as well as creat-
ing intertextual resonances by connecting contemporary characters to
mythic figures from the game’s fantasy setting.
The final subject of orientation paratexts is the most common to the
practice of mapping: a spatial storyworld. While maps are well suited
to spatial orientation, it would seem that space is the dimension of
television narrative that needs the least outside help for viewer com-
prehension. While temporality, plotting, and characterization have all
become more complex in contemporary television, spatial storytelling
is still fairly conventional and straightforward. Most programs follow
well-established filmic conventions for orienting viewers spatially in
270 | Orienting Paratexts

any scene, with little sense of purposeful ambiguity and playfulness. If

anything, space is the storytelling dimension that television is most will-
ing to cheat on to maximize complexity in other realms; for instance,
24’s dedication to maintaining strict chronology and pseudo-real-time
narration frequently led the series to create spatial implausibilities,
with characters traversing Los Angeles or Washington, DC, traffic and
geography at unrealistic speeds. While many fans will try to parse out
and nitpick muddled chronology or plot continuity, such geographical
incoherence in navigating a story space is typically only recognized by
natives of a given city searching for spatial realism, suggesting that in
the process of consuming serialized television, temporal consistency
trumps spatial coherence. Of course, in the networked environment of
comment threads and Twitter, one local fan’s dismay over spatial inco-
herence can spread to others, leading to greater scrutiny from a broader
array of viewers.
Nevertheless, both viewers and the industry do invest energy in cre-
ating spatially orienting paratexts for television series. For series that
feature a fantasy space, orientation maps are helpful paratexts to ground
viewers in the program’s mythology, a common practice found in previ-
ous media such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels, which included maps of Mid-
dle Earth. We can see a televisual parallel to this in the opening credits
of Game of Thrones, which present an animated map of the series’s fan-
tasy world, Westeros, as inspired by the Tolkien books, with multiple
versions to orient viewers where that specific episode’s action will take
place.14 Additionally HBO’s website provides an interactive map chart-
ing out each episode’s events and linking the map to characters and their
genealogies to integrate various dimensions of character, event, and spa-
tial orientation. Maps are more typically presented outside a program’s
core text, as with Battlestar Galactica publishing a poster-size map of
its cosmos, outlining the Twelve Colonies of Kobol with detailed myth-
ological information and graphic depiction not covered by the series;
the poster was even signed by the Battlestar writer Jane Espenson as a
marker of canonical authenticity. For fantasy and science-fiction series
that do not publish their maps, fans typically fill the gaps, as typified by
the vast array of Star Trek cartography that spans the franchise’s multiple
series. Such fan mapping is part of a larger facet of affirmative fan pro-
ductivity that Bob Rehak has labeled “blueprint culture,” as fans work to
 Orienting Paratexts | 271

document the canonical facts established by a fantastic fictional fran-

chise.15 Many series that expand into videogames use them as platforms
to create navigable virtual versions of their fiction spatial worlds, a vital
pleasure of tie-in game properties discussed more in chapter 9.
For programs based here on Earth, no tool has been more impor-
tant to spatial orientation practices than Google Maps, as both fans and
production teams create custom maps for dozens of series to show both
shooting locations and addresses for fictional story sites, ranging from
The Wire’s realistic Baltimore to Veronica Mars’s fictional Southern Cali-
fornia town of Neptune overlaid with its real San Diego shooting locales.
An interesting example is Seinfeld: even though it was filmed primarily
in Los Angeles, its New York City locale is a powerful part of the pro-
gram’s narrative experience. Thus both Sony, the program’s production
studio, and fans have created their own Seinfeld-themed Google Maps —
while the map on Sony’s site features glossier visuals with embedded vid-
eos, not surprisingly the fan version is more comprehensive, including
more than twice as many locations.16 Such maps then can translate into
embodied practice, as fans explore the locales of their favorite series as
part of the growing realm of media-themed tourism, with popular tours
such as The Sopranos’ New Jersey or the Mad Men “Time Machine” tour
of New York. The Seinfeld case is particularly interesting in blurring fact
and fiction, as Kenny Kramer, Larry David’s old neighbor who was the
inspiration for the Cosmo Kramer character, entrepreneurially created
Kramer’s Reality Tour, which brings fans around New York to see the
real places that inspired Seinfeld ’s fictional version of the city, as filmed
in Los Angeles. Unlike other media tourism such as the New Zealand
tours of “Middle Earth” via the Lord of the Rings filming locations, when
television tourism focuses on an ongoing serial, it adds another expe-
riential dimension, as fans explore a space where they might anticipate
future narrative developments or even hope to see filming on location.
In these cases, maps and tours function less to orient fans to the fictional
worlds than to extend those fictions into their real lives and allow them
to momentarily inhabit their favorite storyworlds.17
An interesting case study of mapping within an ongoing series is Lost,
which created a fantasy setting of a fictitious island whose geography is
central to the narrative and which is also grounded within the interest-
ing real-world island of its Hawaii shooting locale. Given the program’s
272 | Orienting Paratexts

huge participatory fan base, it is not surprising that fans created a

detailed Google Map of Hawaii, with shooting locations catalogued by
season, character, and fictional locale — and it is equally unsurprising
that Hawaiian travel companies offer Lost tours as well. Google Maps
also hosts a collaborative map of every real-world locale referenced on
Lost and its copious transmedia extensions, highlighting the program’s
global reach despite nearly everything being shot in Hawaii. Google
Maps is less helpful in orienting us to the program’s fantastical central
location, although fans have used it to chart potential sites for the mys-
terious island, including charting Lost’s mythological numbers of 4, 8, 15,
16, 23, and 42 as geographic coordinates. But Lost’s forensic fandom is
most active in its attempts to map the internal geography of its fantastic
island, requiring platforms beyond Google Maps.
Unlike Battlestar Galactica, the producers of Lost did not give us a
clear rendering of the program’s fictional geography — although the vir-
tual island created for the videogame Lost: Via Domus, discussed more
in chapter 9, attempted to create such a virtual map — but maps are a
central obsession of various characters and do appear on-screen quite
frequently. Such brief appearances were copiously catalogued by the
forensic fans at Lostpedia and numerous other fan sites dedicated to
decoding the world of Lost, but no map is as indicative of how such
practices straddle the line between orientation and disorientation as
the cultural life of what fans have termed the “blast door map.” In the
season 2 episode “Lockdown,” John Locke found himself trapped in an
underground bunker with his leg pinned under a blast door. For a few
moments, a black light turns on, revealing a hand-painted map on the
back of the door that we see on-screen for no more than six seconds.
The information contained within the map, as decoded collectively
by fans only hours after the episode aired, pointed to deep mythologi-
cal clues that resonated both in the series and across the transmedia
extensions. Locke himself attempts to reconstruct the map’s geographi-
cal revelations but falls far short of what fans accomplished, aided by
freeze-frame screen grabs, image-manipulation software, and collective
discussion forums. The map reappeared in transmedia versions four
times with slight alterations and additional information, outlasting its
role in the series itself, as discussed more in chapter 9. Through forensic
 Orienting Paratexts | 273

fandom, viewers got a preview of future hatches still to be revealed, ref-

erences to the backstory of the Hanso family and the Black Rock ship,
and other minor clues to forthcoming puzzles.
However, I would contend that the blast door map’s least successful
function concerned spatial orientation, as the map provides little sense
of scale or relationship between the outlined stations and the places we
had seen on the island. Instead, the map functions more like a roster
of places, names, and clues scrawled onto a wall, a to-do list for fans
anticipating what might be revealed in future episodes. It also provides
a window into a number of character subjectivities, visualizing the
mental states of the map’s two authors-to-be-named-later, Radinsky and
Inman, who chronicle their limited mythological knowledge and island
explorations under duress, as well as orienting us to Locke’s obsessive
quest to make sense of the briefly seen images. The map also charts nar-
rative time and events, as we try to situate the drawing’s creation into
the island’s backstory and our own limited knowledge of the history of
the DHARMA Initiative. Thus as fans worked to decode the multiple
versions of the map, they arguably were less engaged with questions of
spatial orientation than attempting to understanding the embedded rep-
resentations of a fictional storyworld, refracted by still-to-be-discovered
characters and events.
Lost fans also did create maps to spatially orient the island. A wide
range of fan-created island maps emerged throughout the series, includ-
ing illustrated schematics, topographic charts, and even 3D simulations.
Like the schematics of Star Trek’s Enterprise, these are clearly attempts
to render an unreal fantastic space via the tools and assumptions of sci-
entific realism. While we never saw Lost’s island explicitly change its
shape or topography, we did see it move through time and space in a
manner that suggests that realistic geography was low among the pro-
gram’s priorities. Additionally, the producers added new locations to
the island, such as the final season’s lighthouse, without much concern
for the island’s geographical consistency, which some fans had invested
a great deal of energy in exploring. The program’s commitments were
more to the flexible realm of the fantasy genre than any notion of real-
ism, yet some fans strived to map a consistent geography onto the island;
such conflicts between the rational realms of science fiction and more
274 | Orienting Paratexts

spiritual and irrational concerns of fantasy were an echo of one of Lost’s

main thematic debates between science and faith and became a key
point of contention, which I discuss in chapter 10.
Lost points toward one final dimension of orientation that transcends
time and space: the concept of dimensions themselves. As complex tele-
vision has opened up playful variations of time and space in serialized
storytelling, it has occasionally explored notions of parallel worlds or
multiple dimensions, issues that have emerged more often in com-
plex films such as Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors, and Inception. Multiple
dimensions emerge in specific episodes of series such as Community and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer or as serialized plot arcs, as on Fringe, Life on
Mars, and Once Upon a Time; as discussed in chapter 10, the final season
of Lost was one of the highest profile television examples of multidimen-
sional storytelling. Abandoning the flashback structure typical of the
program’s first three seasons, the fourth season’s flash-forwards, and the
fifth season’s time traveling, the sixth season introduced what producers
and fans called “flash-sideways.” In almost every episode, action toggles
between the endgame playing out on the island and a seemingly paral-
lel dimension where Flight 815 never crashed, most of the characters
had drastically different lives, and the island was sunk at the bottom
of the ocean. Not surprisingly, forensic fans were both frustrated with
and excited by the challenges of orienting themselves to this dimension,
especially since the actual explanation for what the world was and how
it related to the main storyworld was not revealed until the final minutes
of the series finale. Scanning the edit history and discussions on Lost-
pedia on the entry for the “Flash Sideways Timeline” documents dozens
of fans working for months, debating issues of chronology, character,
and even ontology for this aspect of the story — and finally when all was
revealed, arguing over whether to delete the whole article due to the
temporal ambiguities that remain in the sideways dimension.18
The case of Lost’s sixth season points to one of the particular chal-
lenges that emerges at the intersection of narrative complexity and serial-
ity: as storyworlds grow more complicated and challenging, they require
greater attention to ensure comprehension. But orientation practices for
an ongoing serial means mapping a moving terrain, charting out a story-
world that is still evolving as it is being created and consumed. Viewers
watched hours of flash-sideways stories without knowing how to orient
 Orienting Paratexts | 275

themselves to this fictional dimension relative to the core storyworld

that many fans had invested a great deal of time and energy mapping
and documenting. Especially for fans who watched the season in its
original airing, the weekly gaps between episodes provided ample time
for speculation and attempted orientations, aiming to map a coherent
explanation onto the unspecified time and space of the flash-sideways.
While few examples are as acute as Lost, a danger of all complex serials
is that we will not realize what is vital for maintaining our orientation
until all of a program’s mysteries and outcomes are revealed, and by that
time it might be too late for fans to care.
What do these categories of orientation practices teach us about how
we consume complex television? First, it is significant that they are hap-
pening at all, standing as proof not only that viewers do actively engage
in television viewing (which we have known for decades) but that today’s
television outright demands that viewers stretch beyond the time and
space of their initial viewing to try to make sense of what they have seen.
It is not just that audiences are active but that texts are explicitly activat-
ing them — they are designed to stimulate viewers, strategically confuse
them, and force them to orient. As discussed in chapter 1, the rise of
online fan culture has been essential to the success of complex television,
as the tools of collective participation and orientation have enabled such
programs to thrive and engage viewers. These orientation practices also
help us understand how television has embraced narrative complexity
and predict the areas where it might still look to develop. Clearly there
has been much experimentation with complex plots and time schemes,
and character relationships have always been a fertile ground for serial
complexity. However, there is comparatively little experimentation in
terms of innovative spatial storytelling, so if we were to predict where
another wave of narrative innovation might come, we might look to how
serial storytelling plays with space.
While some of these orientation practices fill in textual gaps designed
by creators, most go far beyond that, taking them into the realm of fan
creativity and transformational fandom — such practices highlight the
ways that making maps and diagrams is fun, whether charting a fic-
tional geography onto a real space or positing that the entirety of tele-
vision is happening inside a boy’s imagination. For a serial television
program, orienting paratexts are often serialized as well, growing and
276 | Orienting Paratexts

shifting in dialogue with the original series. In some cases, a program’s

producers might look to fan-created paratexts as markers of viewers’
investment and theorizing that they might respond to, and sometimes
fans might become more invested in expanding and maintaining the
paratext than in consuming the original series itself. We can see the
playfulness and passion that goes into fan engagement with orientation
by looking closely at one site of Lost viewer practice: the encyclopedic
wiki Lostpedia.

Sites of Participation: Fan Wikis as Orienting Paratexts

One important technology that emerged alongside the rise of com-
plex television is the wiki, a system of “read/write” websites allowing
multiple editors to make changes from within their browser directly
without any direct HTML coding. The wiki software, which emerged
in the web’s early days in the 1990s but became popularized by Wiki-
pedia’s unexpected success in the 2000s, displays content to users like
most webpages but allows fast editing and access to revision history at
the click of a button. The ease and growing ubiquity of wiki software
made it a popular option for fan groups to adopt as a collaborative tool
to collect and present information about their favored cultural objects,
whether that be a sports team, a musical genre, or a television series.19
Fan wikis can potentially take many different forms, functioning
as sites of collaborative fan fiction or experimental storytelling media
or even having the vast analytic scope of TV Tropes, which seeks to
catalogue storytelling conventions of nearly every medium and genre
imaginable. However, most fan wikis fall under the long shadow of
Wikipedia, mirroring that site’s encyclopedic approach by striving to
document the storyworld and production information of an original
text, explicitly serving an orienting function. There are dozens of devel-
oped fan television wikis, but I focus primarily on Lostpedia for two
reasons. First, it is one of the higher-profile and larger examples of a wiki
developed for a contemporary series, with most of the other larger fan
television wikis documenting longer-running franchises such as Doctor
Who, The Simpsons, and Star Trek. Second, my knowledge of Lostpedia
runs deeper than that of most users of the site, as I was a frequent editor
 Orienting Paratexts | 277

of the site throughout the program’s run and, for a period of around six
months in 2006, served as one of a dozen rotating site administrators.
Thus I approach my analysis as a participant-observer, looking at the
cultural practices of editing a fan wiki from the inside.20
Lostpedia was launched in 2005 at the start of Lost’s second season by
Kevin Croy, a computer programmer who created the site as a technical
test for how to administer the MediaWiki software, figuring Lost was a
good topic to experiment with. The site’s growth surprised him; it was
supported by dedicated editors adding and supervising content while
Croy and others successfully maintained the invisible but vital back end.
Lostpedia has since grown into a full-fledged Lost portal, with an asso-
ciated forum, blog, IRC chat room, and more than 10 foreign-language
mirrors, although my analysis focuses on the original English-language
wiki. In 2008, Lostpedia migrated from its own independent server to
the wikia.com domain, which is run by the Wikimedia Foundation;
despite the migration, the same community of Lostpedians made the site
one of the most popular fan wikis in the world, generating over 7,000
unique content pages, more than 3 million registered users, over a mil-
lion edits, and over 150 million page views.
My analysis of Lostpedia considers how the site aggregates fans’ cre-
ativity and consumption practices, the limits and boundaries placed on
that fan-generated content, and the rationales for those policies and pref-
erences. These uses of Lostpedia are definitely influenced by the ways
Lost differs significantly from other television programs, with a larger
global viewership and a broad array of Lost transmedia content, includ-
ing multiple games, novels, toys, and extensive web tie-ins, as discussed
in chapter 9. Perhaps even more central to the growth of Lostpedia, the
program’s central narrative framework presents Lost as a puzzle to be
solved, a set of interlocking enigmas that require research materials and
a searchable archive to enable comprehension. Such ludic narrative logic
and transmedia storytelling promote forensic fandom by encouraging
research, collaboration, analysis, and interpretation. As Henry Jenkins
discusses in his early study of online forensic fandom of Twin Peaks, fans
saw the technologies of the VCR and Usenet boards as essential tools to
crack the narrative codes of the early complex series.21 Just as Lost’s nar-
rative architecture pushed the complexities of television storytelling far
278 | Orienting Paratexts

beyond the innovations of Twin Peaks, the decoder rings of today have
similarly evolved to facilitate a more inclusive, faster paced, participa-
tory, and multimedia forensic fandom.
Thus Lostpedia’s core function is as a shared archive of narrative
knowledge, combing the series, its brand extensions, and its cultural ref-
erences to make sense of the program’s mysteries and storytelling web
for viewers seeking orientation. But Lostpedia goes beyond the realm of
collecting information, with elaborated policies on how to treat border-
line material such as speculation, hypotheses, parody, and fan-generated
paratexts. Such forms blur the boundaries between fan creativity and fan
documentation, as the three orienting functions of recapitulation, analy-
sis, and expansion all coexist throughout Lostpedia, often in tension.
How do the users who generate the site’s content make these distinctions
and decide on such policies?
As suggested earlier in this chapter and discussed more in chapter 4,
charting characters and their relationships is a key orientation practice
for complex series with large casts. Productive fans frequently go beyond
recapping existing relationships to speculate about and call for relation-
ships beyond what appears in the text, especially queer readings of char-
acters via fan fiction and remix videos, but a wiki that is primarily used
to document a storyworld seems like an unlikely space for such specula-
tive production. When I first did this research in spring 2008, Lostpedia
had a space for queer readings and shipping fandom (viewers’ desire to
see a romantic couple within the series or paratexts) on the page called
“Pairings.” The page was defined as follows: “Pairings are relationships,
either real or suggested, that fans enjoy and would love to see consum-
mated. The desire for love to blossom on the Island between several
pairs of characters, to varying degrees of commitment and affection is
explored further in fan fiction.”22 Beneath this brief disclaimer, the page
listed a wide array of romantic relationships included in the series and
their playful fan shorthand terms, such as Sawyer and Kate (“Skate”)
and Charlie and Claire, whose multiple monikers include “PB&J,” for
“Pregnant Babe and Junkie.” This page also included relationships more
imagined than enacted, such as Sayid and Kate (“Kayid”) and Claire and
Ethan (“Eclaire”). Same-sex pairings were also included equally in this
list, such as Kate and Juliet (“Juliate”) and Locke and Sawyer (“Lawyer”),
with links to related fan-created projects that explore these relationships,
 Orienting Paratexts | 279

such as the satirical fanvid Brokeback Island portraying a Jack-Sawyer

romance. On this page, all romantic relationships, from canonical to
slash (slang for homoerotic fan fiction) to extratextual, such as the
mashup of producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse into “Darlton,”
were given equal billing, seeming to exist without hierarchy within the
Lostpedia universe.
One of the hazards of researching wikis is that the object of analysis is
potentially always in flux. On January 2, 2009, the “Pairings” page trans-
formed without discussion, when a Lostpedia administrator removed all
noncanonical relationships from the page, offering only the explanation,
“removing fan wished relationships. non-encyclopedic cruft.” A link to
a page about fan-made names remained, but the shipping content there
was far less prominent and extensive. This edit suggests how oftentimes
wiki content can appear or go missing by a single user’s preferences,
rather than by consensus or debate, even when a clear policy remains in
place — and often such changes are left in place simply because nobody
within the community notices the edit or because people assume that
the administrator speaks for the entire community when it may just be
his or her own preferences. While any wiki does reflect a version of con-
sensus among the editing community at a given time, it is important to
note that oftentimes it is a passively accepted status quo rather than an
actively negotiated agreement, with active and vocal editors trumping
broader-based opinions of less forceful or frequent users.
While wikis can be frustrating to study for their instability, the flu-
idity also allows direct engagement by researchers when appropriate.
Although as an academic I would not want to impose a single vision
of proper fan practice, the wiki platform allows interventions to be
transparent and impermanent. Because I disagreed with the decision
to eliminate imagined relationships from the site, I created a page titled
“Pairings (fanon)” on March 27, 2009, to restore the “cruft” (excessive,
detailed material) that had been edited out, albeit within its own fanoni-
cal space as dictated by Lostpedia policy. No users have protested this
change, and there have been more than a dozen additions to the page
since. I made this direct intervention into the site as a fan and dedi-
cated user, informed by my analysis of the site’s practices — the lack of
response suggests that wikis are often transformed not by a unified com-
munity but by individual decisions passively accepted by the user base.
280 | Orienting Paratexts

The “Pairing” page’s discussion tab reveals an older history with more
drama and conflict, less around slash content and more questioning the
basic point of shipping fandom, often with an aggressive and belittling
tone toward shipper fans. Such discussions highlight how Lostpedia can
function as a space of debate over what is appropriate use of the site, as
well as how best to watch the series itself. In my own experiences, any
bullying behavior coming from some editors is not tolerated for long,
with well-respected prominent editors regularly weighing in to defend
a broad array of fandoms and ways of using the site, not asserting a
singular norm of how best to watch Lost or to use Lostpedia. How-
ever, Lostpedians do maintain some important but debatable bound-
aries about how best to organize and categorize the various types of
content contained on the site, inspiring conversation that echoes how
many viewers parse out various reactions to and engagements with a
series — just as fans debate whether they want Lost to be rational sci-
ence fiction, magical fantasy, or melodramatic adventure, they weigh in
as to what type of knowledge and creativity Lostpedia should include
and exclude.
Lostpedia categorizes pages into a number of broad types of content,
including canon, theory, fanon (fan-produced content), and parody.
These categories are central to the organization of Lostpedia but are far
from self-evident for a transmedia narrative such as Lost. The canon
page in Lostpedia has undergone a series of significant revisions — ini-
tially, it offered two categories of canon and noncanon, marked by the
presence or absence of official endorsement from the program’s cre-
ators. After the ARG The Lost Experience and tie-in novel Bad Twin
complicated the boundaries of the storyworld, as discussed in chapter
9, Lostpedians began to debate various levels of canonicity. One dedi-
cated editor proposed a complex and highly Catholic set of canonical
levels — Canon, Deuterocanon, Ex cathedra, and Apocrypha. While the
community ultimately rejected these gradients, due to both their lack of
simplicity for casual users and their religious connotations that put off
some editors, the ensuing discussion forced Lostpedians to engage with
fairly complex notions of narrative medium, transmedia authority, and
intentionality — for instance, if a deleted scene appears on a DVD, does
it count as a canonical event in the storyworld? As one active editor
philosophically posited, “If Claire had coffee with the pilot and someone
 Orienting Paratexts | 281

deleted that scene, did they have coffee?” The canon policy that stands
today is more straightforward, with three levels of canon, semicanon,
and noncanon, resting ultimate authority with the series authors, both
creative and industrial — if it comes out via ABC or from the mouths of
producers, it is canonical. Usually.
One of the central ways this policy impacts Lostpedia’s users is
that canonical content is presented as the site’s unspoken standard or
norm, which fits with Lostpedia’s typical encyclopedic form of writ-
ing — a page containing canon is unmarked, simply existing as one of
hundreds of entries in Lostpedia’s archive of the program’s narrative
universe. By contrast, most other modes of information contained on
the site are clearly labeled as noncanonical, creating a clear hierarchy
between creator-endorsed truth and fan-created paratruth, or perhaps
“truthiness,” in Stephen Colbert’s wiki-friendly term. The most inte-
grated of these noncanonical modes are theories — since the site’s incep-
tion, Lostpedia has served as a venue for mulling possible explanations
for the island’s enigmas, with a variety of different ways of separating
the canonical known from theoretical speculation and musings. Unlike
other encyclopedias and even Wikipedia, Lostpedia has always allowed
for original research and analysis, incorporating fan-created knowledge
alongside the more encyclopedic acts of collecting, organizing, and dis-
tilling canonical information.
Lostpedians do try to mark differences between various forms of
theory. Some broad-based theories as to the nature of the island garner
their own individual articles, such as the Garden of Eden Theory or the
Black Hole Theory — these macrotheories are expected to offer compel-
ling evidence and links to external sources for underlying ideas and to
present a persuasive case for their potential accuracy. Discussion pages
for such theories tend to be robust debates over the merits and incon-
sistencies of such ideas, a model of collective engagement that many
scholars highlight as one of the most participatory and exciting aspects
of fan culture.23
For some Lostpedians who view the wiki as an authoritative docu-
ment of the canonical storyworld, theories and speculations belong on
the site’s discussion forums, not within the wiki itself. To enforce this
distinction between verified storyworld “fact” and conjecture, a wiki
architecture was developed for including theories in Lostpedia’s archive:
282 | Orienting Paratexts

the “theory tab,” a separate subpage on each article that allows for non-
canonical possibilities. Lostpedians work to ensure that such theory
tabs are not simply discussion forums and speculative musings but
more elaborated attempts to posit and prove interpretations. The the-
ory tab emerged in late 2006 out of a frustration that individual article
pages were being overwhelmed with speculation and theories and thus
detracting from canonical information. The discussion about the theory
tab recognized that theorizing was unusual for most other wikis mod-
eled after Wikipedia but also that such analysis is crucial for the nature
of Lost’s narrative mode and forensic fan base.
In many ways, the creation of the theory tab served to further can-
onize the site’s authorial-endorsed factual content. As one anonymous
editor wrote to endorse the theory tab, “Not only do I feel it will keep
things organized, and give more room for elaborated canon-based
justifications of each theory, but also think the explicit separation of
Theories from the facts articles, will be of a great effect on debunk-
ing any claims of Lostpedia being a fiction-based project.” Placing aside
the definitional contortions evoked by attempting to deny the fictional
roots of a Lost encyclopedia, such comments highlight how the site’s
architecture is designed to allow spaces for noncanonical fan produc-
tion as a means of prioritizing canonical authorized content, a marked
separate sphere of unofficial knowledge that helps make canon seem
more official by comparison. The site’s theory policy also stipulates that
canon trumps theory — when a theory is disproved, either via producer
denials or conclusive storyworld evidence, such theories are deleted
from the theory tab. While the policy allows discredited theories to be
archived on a page’s discussion tab, it is clear that the goal of theories
is to arrive at fact, not to serve as an ongoing realm of fan creativity
or speculation or an archive of noncanonical imagination of different
narrative possibilities.
The discussion over the place of theories cuts to the very heart of
the definition of Lostpedia and wikis in general. One active editor, who
offered the initial proposal for theory tabs, highlights that theories
potentially muddy the waters of the site’s goals: “Wiki editors, IMHO
[in my humble opinion], should seek to be recorders, rather than edito-
rialists, otherwise we risk biasing others with our opinions. I’ve noticed
many newer editors don’t edit anything *but* theories nowadays.” Other
 Orienting Paratexts | 283

users take a more pluralist approach to including theorizing within

the purview of Lostpedia, highlighting how much postepisode traf-
fic is editing theories more than filling out canonical information and
that not every user references the site as an encyclopedia. Even Lost’s
cocreator Damon Lindelof highlights this coexistence of theory and
canon in a 2009 interview conducted on Lostpedia; after explaining
the official series bible maintained by the story editor Gregg Nations,
Lindelof suggests,

What differentiates Gregg from what Lostpedia does, is that Lostpedia

is speculative. That is to say, it has to assume something, because it’s not
run by us. So, you know, I think there is sometimes a perception out
there that Lostpedia is kind of branded by the show, as opposed to a sepa-
rate fan community, and we find ourselves having to differentiate those
two things. That being said, when we’ve visited the site we are incredibly
impressed with sort of the level of detail. There are occasions where we
basically say “What was Juliet’s husband’s first name?,” and if Gregg is not
sitting in his office we will log into Lostpedia to get that answer.24

Thus for Lost’s production staff as for many of its fans, Lostpedia’s pri-
mary function is as a repository of canonical fact, supplemented — and
made questionably valid — by the associated noncanonical speculation
and theories.
In many ways, the tensions between Lostpedia’s canonical and non-
canonical information stem from the slippage between the software plat-
form of wikis and its most well-known iteration in Wikipedia — there is
no platform-determinate reason that wikis are suited more for docu-
menting than editorializing, and many wikis have been used as sites of
collaborative creativity, collective brainstorming, and other potentials
beyond gathering and organizing facts.25 But for most people, the word
wiki evokes Wikipedia and its assumed objective model of writing — for
instance, a commenter on Sarah Toton’s article about Battlestar Wiki
offers the following dubious claim as fact: “A wiki, by definition, is an
encyclopedia.”26 This connection between wikis and encyclopedias is
further emphasized by Lostpedia’s name, evoking the objective -pedia
rather than collaborative wiki- aspect of Wikipedia’s portmanteau name;
although its name and platform do evoke an encyclopedic factualism,
284 | Orienting Paratexts

Lostpedia’s orienting practices include a broader array of creative and

analytical production than do most Wikipedia-style wikis.
Fan production goes far beyond the realm of collecting and recording
narrative orienting information, and Lostpedia does have ample space
for fanonical modes of contribution. Initially, the site allowed for origi-
nal parody pages, allowing editors to create pages that tweaked many of
the conventions of both Lost and Lostpedia. One of my personal favor-
ites of such pages was “Box,” a parodic theory positing that a cardboard
box made by the company owned by Hurley and employing Locke was
the essential powerful force that caused all of the island’s enigmas — the
page documented every image of a box appearing in the program and
included such enigmatic clues as “Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse
have described a new lead character in Season 3 as ‘cubical, hollow,
brown, and corrugated.’ ” This fanonical page faced a bit of a crisis of
faith in season 3, when Ben Linus referred to a “magic box” that allowed
him to transport Locke’s father to the island — editors had to clarify the
links to “Box” to separate the canonical (although probably metaphoric)
magic box from the parodic Lostpedia box, while some editors felt that
Ben’s reference to the box was a shout-out to Lostpedia from the produc-
ers, a theory that remains unsubstantiated.
In the summer of 2007, Lostpedia had a collective change of heart
about parodies. As numerous parodic pages emerged to less-than-
enthusiastic reactions, the community debated how to deal with bad
parodies and whether embracing parodies creates a slippery slope. As
one Lostpedian wrote, “If we accept parodic articles, how do we feel
about slash [fiction]? I could argue, and possibly successfully, that the
only difference between slash and parody is the intended audience.
Opening the door to one would therefore open the door to the other,
and . . . I don’t think slash belongs in Lostpedia. I’m questioning whether
fanon does, either, and now I wonder about parody. Thoughts?” The
consensus was that neither parody nor slash belongs in Lostpedia, at
least as the site of origin. Parody and fanon became markers used to
point to fan-produced content that resides outside Lostpedia, such as
fanvids, fanfic, parodies, and fan sites, but Lostpedia removed all pages
composed of original fan content, including “Box.” This is consistent
with Lostpedia’s role as orienting paratext, serving to point to other non-
orienting works but not hosting them directly.
 Orienting Paratexts | 285

But we should not take this decision to ban original content creation
as a disavowal of the wiki architecture as a site to enable collaborative
creativity. One fanonical page that remains is “Jackface,” a gallery of
images of Matthew Fox, the actor who portrays Jack Shephard, making
hyperemotional facial expressions. “Jackface” works as a site of wikified
creativity because the community shares the basic parameters of what
constitutes a Jackface and a common appreciation for the form — the
collective intelligence of Jackfacers makes the page a definitive resource
for sharing a parodic wink about one of the program’s lead actors, while
feeling like we are contributing to something a bit more creative than
cataloguing canon.
Lostpedia also allows for a mode of writing that we might think of as
creative nonfiction, with the caveat that this “nonfictional” gaze is aimed
at the fictional storyworld of Lost. Pages categorized as literary devices,
such as “Archetype,” “Plot Twist,” and “Symbolism,” all offer original
analysis and research, synthesizing elements of the series to demonstrate
its use of particular storytelling devices and representational strategies—
such original research is strictly forbidden on Wikipedia, marking a key
difference for how Lostpedia can work counter to its encyclopedic label.
One interesting example of this mode of collaborative research is the
page “Economics.” Originally drafted in June 2006 by a doctoral stu-
dent in economics, the page initially read like a term paper exploring
how the allocation of resources on the island mirrored various eco-
nomic models. Dozens of editors dived in, expanding, deepening, and
rethinking the original article, leading to its being awarded Featured
Article of the Week status in late 2006, the first time such an analytical,
non-encyclopedic page was highlighted on the site’s front page. While
academics are prone to thinking of analysis as a solitary extension of
single mind, the original creator embraced the collaborative output of
the community: “Wow. When I started working on this entry around 8
months ago, I never dreamed the community of viewers would trans-
form it into this. This entry is really spectacular as a result of what every-
one has contributed. The weakest parts of it, I now see, are the original
sections I wrote! Seriously, this is phenomenal.” The “Economics” page,
like other such analytical pages on Lostpedia, are not tagged as fanon
or otherwise marked as noncanonical. This distinction was noted in
July 2007 by a user who had just joined Lostpedia: “In what sense is
286 | Orienting Paratexts

analysis, in the sense you’re using it, not fanon? ‘Analysis’ like Econom-
ics is non-canonical (I don’t think the word ‘socialism’ has ever even
been used in the show), fan-created, and is based on, but not a part of,
actual canon. Something doesn’t need to be far-fetched or outlandish
to be fanon, after all.” Years have passed with no reply, suggesting that
distinguishing analysis from canon is a far less pressing concern among
Lostpedians than demarcating or eliminating more explicitly creative
modes such as parody and fanfic. While the wiki architecture allows
for multiple modes of collaborative creativity, the Lostpedia community
seems to have embraced a hierarchy of perceived value differently than
Wikipedia, by allowing original research, analysis, and theories but still
embracing core distinctions in fan culture that privilege canonical con-
tent and extensions from more explicitly noncanonical modes of creativ-
ity, a distinction that certainly connects with the gendered differences
noted by Toton and many fan scholars.
Lostpedia’s dual function as a catalogue of canon and a site of origi-
nal creativity found an interesting point of synergy surrounding The
Lost Experience in the summer of 2006, as discussed in more depth
in chapter 9. This alternate reality game extended the program’s nar-
rative universe beyond the confines of the television screen and into
the real lives of viewers. Fans could attend events to receive compli-
mentary Apollo Bars (a candy featured in season 2), watch a fictional
representative of the mysterious organization the Hanso Foundation
appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to denounce the misinformation spread
by Lost, and witness a live event at Comic Con in which the ARG’s
main character, Rachel Blake, accused Lost producers of having “blood
on [their] hands.” Clearly the blur between real life and fictional uni-
verses was part of the game’s appeal, a disorienting blur that extended
into Lostpedia.
A key part of The Lost Experience was a hunt for 70 pieces of a larger
code that could be entered into a website to reveal a hidden video offer-
ing key mythology about both the ARG and the in-series DHARMA
Initiative. These codes were primarily linked to graphic glyphs that were
embedded in a variety of websites or posted in real-life locations. In
August, the “puppet masters” of the ARG contacted a number of fan
sites to embed glyphs, including Lostpedia. The site administrator
Kevin Croy received a request to embed a glyph in Lostpedia, and Croy
 Orienting Paratexts | 287

subsequently contacted me as the designated Lost Experience system

operator. The two of us devised a puzzle using wiki protocols that was
designed to pay back dedicated Lostpedians through their knowledge
of the site by giving them their own glyph. While it took a few days for
users to discover the trail of links, the puzzle began when they found
the new user account of Rachel Blake posting on Lostpedia. Once the
glyph was found, one Lostpedian commented on Blake’s page, “Awww.
This is so exciting! I feel like Lostpedia is getting a little reward! :).” How-
ever, the way we placed the material on Lostpedia probably violated the
community’s policies on posting original content and properly labeling
noncanonical contributions, policies that both players and administra-
tors happily overlooked. Not only did this event create an interesting
loop with my own participation as researcher, ARG player, community
member, and momentary puppet master, but it also highlights how the
encyclopedic thrust of Lostpedia can be punctured to create spaces of
ludic engagement and fictional role-play, even as it still functions as an
authoritative and reliable source of Lost information.
I want to conclude this analysis by highlighting the potential of the
wiki architecture to overcome and blur boundaries and hierarchies
between fiction and truth, canon and fanon. Even though Lostpedia’s
structure privileges canon and the authority of Lost’s creators, it also
offers many spaces for unauthorized content, creative experimentation,
and blurring boundaries between categories. Except for an occasional
rant by an aggressive user, the site is impressive for its collegial discourse
across different realms of fandom: shippers and cataloguers, theorists
and vidders. The open platform of the wiki allows for constant remaking
of the site’s parameters and policies, and Lostpedians use other platforms
to include content not appropriate to the main wiki — in the program’s
hiatus after season 3, the site sponsored a fan fiction contest to map
out the arc of the following season, hosted on the Lostpedia discussion
forum. While the site’s hierarchies and attitudes matter, they are fluid
and ever changing (even in the dormancy following Lost’s end in 2010),
reshaping as the community develops. Although hierarchies between
different modes of practice, engagement, and identity persist within
various spheres of fandom, the structural possibilities of wikis such as
Lostpedia provide a paratextual site where differences within a fandom
can be ironed out, one edit at a time.
288 | Orienting Paratexts

Orienting and Drilling: Forensic Fandom as

Mode of Engagement
Throughout this chapter, I have focused on ways that viewers engage
with television by digging into its content, exploring its form, and ori-
enting themselves to their favorite storyworlds. This approach to digging
into a fictional text runs counter to one of the dominant trends found
in contemporary media culture: the “viral video” or, more accurately,
“spreadable media” that suffuses social networks.27 While the ephem-
eral “video of attractions” model that is common to YouTube, sharing
links and offering brief comments during downtime at work, is certainly
an important and prevalent mode of contemporary media consump-
tion and dissemination, complex serials offer a countering approach to
online engagement. They spread less through exponential linking and
sharing for quick hits than via proselytizing by die-hard fans eager to
hook friends into their shared narrative obsessions. Even when they
are enabled by the spreadable technologies of online distribution, both
licit and illicit, the consumption patterns of complex serials are typically
more focused on the core narrative text than are the proliferating para-
texts and fan creativity that typify spreadable media.
We need a different metaphor to describe viewers’ engagement with
complex television and its paratextual extensions, thinking of such
texts as drillable rather than spreadable. Complex television encourages
forensic fans to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand
the complexity of a story and its telling. Such programs create mag-
nets for engagement, drawing viewers into the storyworlds and urg-
ing them to drill down to discover more. As this chapter documents,
complex series encourage viewers both to consult and create maps and
guides, generating orienting paratexts to help comprehend and engage
with select programs, and to fill the gaps between episodes with deeper
and more wide-ranging engagement. Drillability as a metaphor suggests
that viewers are mining to discover something that is already there,
buried beneath the surface, but many examples of forensic fandom
are invested in using analytic techniques to posit a way of looking at a
series regardless of the perceived intent or design of the creators, as with
the Tommy Westphall Theory or the Dungeons & Dragons alignment
charts — such expansive paratexts drill to create new playful realms of
 Orienting Paratexts | 289

narrative experience, even if the end result does not increase viewers’
canonical orientation.
Drillable engagement and forensic fandom are not entirely new phe-
nomena but rather have accelerated by degree in the digital era. Highly
serialized genres such as soap operas have always fostered fan archi-
vists and textual experts, while sports fans have a long history of drill-
ing down statistically and collecting artifacts to engage with a team or
player. Fan cultures in ongoing fictional series have long invested energy
in chronicling, analyzing, and documenting franchises ranging from
Sherlock Holmes to Star Wars.28 However, contemporary examples are
notable for both the digital tools that have enabled fans to collectively
apply and share their forensic efforts and the demands that mainstream
network programs make on their viewers to pay attention and connect
the narrative dots. Additionally, as discussed in chapter 9, many contem-
porary series are dispersing their narrative content across media forms,
providing opportunities or even actively requiring viewers to drill down
into various sites to fully comprehend their storyworlds.
A single text can inspire fans to both drill and spread. For instance,
Battlestar Galactica features a highly complex narrative that encour-
ages fans to drill into the mythology on Battlestar Wiki and countless
blogs and online forums. As the level of depth increases, fewer fans are
actively engaging, but their intensity rises in positing theories and inter-
pretations about the storyworld and its potential outcomes or debating
the program’s representational politics or social commentary. This type
of engaged drilling requires concentration and motivation by fans, mak-
ing it a realm for the most dedicated and die-hard viewers — Battlestar
Wiki boasts almost 8,000 registered users, although only a fraction of
them actively contribute to the site, suggesting a small niche of the mil-
lions of television viewers who consume the series.29
However, even a complex serial in which every aspect of the narra-
tive is potentially interconnected can inspire spreadable offshoots more
akin to the bulk of shared video on YouTube. One such example comes
from season 4 of Battlestar, in which a character unexpectedly and bru-
tally kills herself. Forensic-minded drilling fans took this moment as
an opportunity to explore motivations, rationale, and repercussions,
but one fan saw a spreadable opportunity. Posting a video on YouTube
called “Worst Commercial Placement Ever,” the clip shows the moment
290 | Orienting Paratexts

of the suicide, ending with the body lying in a pool of blood, and then
continues into the advertisement that followed the scene on Canadian
television: a cracker commercial with slow-motion shots of splashing
tomato soup (resembling blood via this juxtaposition) and set to an
upbeat song with the lyric, “I just want to celebrate another day of liv-
ing!” This clip fits YouTube’s attraction model, with a clear moment of
spectacular humor requiring no depth of storyworld knowledge — it is
not surprising that the clip has been seen more than 250,000 times and
linked to on numerous blogs and social networks. Even after the clip
was blocked for copyright infringement, fans posted numerous copies
to continue the spreadable moment.30 (Alas, I have no information as to
how successful this ad was in promoting the cracker brand, but clearly
many more people have seen the commercial via this spread.)
The opposition between spreadable and drillable should be thought
of not as a hierarchy but rather as different but complementary vectors
of cultural engagement. Spreadable media encourages horizontal rip-
ples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-
term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people but
occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text’s
complexities. As discussed more in chapter 6, privileging depth over
breadth is a knee-jerk response bred in the humanities, where complex-
ity is a marker of quality over surface pleasures of sensation and surprise
that are more typical in spreadable media. However, we need to dis-
miss our normative stance of valuing one mode over another, allowing
that both spreadable attractions and drillable complexity are legitimate
forms of cultural engagement, differently appropriate depending on a
viewer’s context and goals — and being open to other vectors and modes
of engagement beyond this binary as well.
And certainly for many television viewers, a text that demands drill-
ing into transmedia, creation of maps or reference materials, or other-
wise requires orienting paratexts to ensure comprehension sets too high
of a bar to entry to attract audiences sufficiently large enough to sustain
itself within the commercial television marketplace, with rare excep-
tions such as Lost. Given that television has traditionally been regarded
(if not actually functioned) as a medium suited for low engagement
and passive attention, the rise of complex programming that encour-
ages paratextual play and expansiveness does not meet many people’s
 Orienting Paratexts | 291

expectations for how they watch television and what they hope to take
away from it. There are certainly viewers who avoid complex series for
fear of the implied time commitments and need for external “home-
work” that counter their goals of television offering relaxing and low-
impact pleasures, especially when compared to other media that are
regarded as more serious (literature, some music) and/or participatory
(games, other music). But as discussed in chapter 6, we need to recog-
nize the particular viewing possibilities offered by complex series, not to
hierarchize complexity over conventionality but to highlight how con-
temporary television broadens the possible textual pleasures and cor-
responding modes of engagement available to viewers, fostering a mode
of forensic fandom that appears to be an essential type of 21st-century
media consumption.
9

Transmedia Storytelling

Few storytelling forms can match serial television for narrative breadth
and vastness. A single narrative universe can continue onward for years
or even decades in the case of daytime serials, with cumulative plotlines
and character backstories accruing far beyond what any dedicated fan
could reasonably remember. Even a series that fails to find an audience
typically airs for a comparatively long time — for instance, the single-
season Terriers is viewed as a commercial failure, but it still offered 13
episodes of serial storytelling, with a combined running time of over
nine hours that eclipses the scope of most novels and nearly every fea-
ture film. In short, of all the challenges that face the creators of television
fiction, the lack of screen time to tell their stories is hardly an issue.
Given serial television’s temporal vastness, it would seem unlikely that
producers would want to expand a story into other venues, as manag-
ing the single-medium realm of a television series is more than enough
work for a creative team. However, the 21st century has seen the rise
of innovative narrative extensions grouped under the term transmedia
storytelling, significantly expanding the scope of a television series into
an array of other media, from books to blogs, videogames to jigsaw puz-
zles. To understand the phenomenon of transmedia television, we need
to examine the strategies used by various series, the motivations behind
such narrative extensions, and the tactics employed by viewers to make
sense of such expanded serialized vastness.1
Any thoughtful study of contemporary transmedia must acknowl-
edge that transmedia is not a new phenomenon but predates the digital
age. Even if the term is new, the strategy of adapting and expanding
a narrative into other media is as old as media themselves — think of
paintings dramatizing biblical scenes or iconic 19th-century characters
such as Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes whose narrative scope tran-
scends any single medium. Early television employed transmedia strate-
gies as well, as one of the medium’s first hits, Dragnet, spanned multiple

292
 Transmedia Storytelling | 293

media: starting as a radio program, the more popular television series

spawned a number of novels; a feature film; a hit record for its theme
song; tie-in toys such as a board game, a police badge, and a whistle; and
even a television reboot of the 1950s original in the late 1960s.
Highlighting the history of transmedia is not to suggest that nothing
new is happening in recent years, as the proliferation of digital forms has
certainly led to transmedia techniques that are both greater in degree
and different in kind. Technological transformations have helped enable
such proliferations, as digital platforms such as online video, blogs, com-
puter games, DVD supplements, and new forms such as alternate reality
games (ARGs) are widely accessible avenues for expanding a narrative
universe. Television producers use social networks and platforms to
enable engagement across screens, creating opportunities for narrative
expansions through viewer-driven conversations and sharing within
so-called second-screen experiences. Additionally, industrial shifts that
have shrunk the relative size of any one program’s television audience
and expanded competition across numerous cable and broadcast outlets
have encouraged producers to experiment with transmedia as a way to
get noticed and to build viewers’ loyalty in an increasingly cluttered tele-
vision schedule. We might characterize this as a shift in norms: in previ-
ous decades, it was exceptional for a program to employ a significant
transmedia strategy, while today it is more exceptional for a high-profile
series not to.
Despite the growing ubiquity of transmedia, we need to avoid con-
fusing general transmedia extensions with the more particular mode of
transmedia storytelling. Nearly every media property today offers some
transmedia extensions, such as promotional websites, merchandise, or
behind-the-scenes materials — these forms can be usefully categorized
as paratexts in relation to the core text, whether a feature film, a video-
game, or a television series. As Jonathan Gray has argued in his defining
work on the topic, we cannot view any text in our media-saturated age
in isolation from its paratexts — for instance, films come preframed by
trailers, DVD covers, and posters, and once any text enters into cultural
circulation, it becomes part of a complex intertextual web.2 However, we
can follow Gray’s lead by distinguishing between paratexts that function
primarily to hype, promote, introduce, and discuss a text and those that
function as ongoing sites of narrative expansion, which I explore here;
294 | Transmedia Storytelling

I would add a third category of orienting paratexts that serve to help

viewers make sense of a narrative, as discussed in chapter 8. This chapter
focuses on paratexts whose prime goal is to expand the storyworld and
to extend narrative engagement with the series and that are not designed
primarily to chronicle, reflect on, or promote a program.
Transmedia storytelling thrives in ongoing narrative paratexts,
through a strategy best captured by Henry Jenkins’s comprehensive and
influential definition of the form: “Transmedia storytelling represents a
process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically
across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified
and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes
it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.”3 This definition
of transmedia storytelling problematizes the hierarchy between text and
paratext, for in the most ideally balanced example, all texts would be
equally weighted, rather than one being privileged as “text” while others
serve as supporting “paratexts.” However in the high-stakes commer-
cial media industry, the financial realities demand that the core medium
of any franchise be identified and privileged, typically emphasizing the
more traditional television or film form over newer modes of online
textuality. It is useful to distinguish between Jenkins’s proposed ideal of
balanced transmedia, with no one medium or text serving a primary role
over others, with the more commonplace model of unbalanced trans-
media, with a clearly identifiable core text and a number of peripheral
transmedia extensions that might be more or less integrated into the
narrative whole, acknowledging that most examples fall somewhere on
a spectrum between balanced and unbalanced. Most prime time tele-
vision programs serve as the core text of their transmedia franchises,
with the unusual example of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a rare
exception pointed toward a more balanced approach in which comics
and films are seemingly more central to the narrative. In this chapter, I
focus on examples in which the originating television series is the core
text, with transmedia extensions serving as paratexts in clearer cases of
unbalanced transmedia.
This issue of relative emphasis and priority across transmedia is cru-
cial to both the industrial and storytelling logics of serial television.
American commercial television’s core business model is predicated
on attracting viewers to a television program, aggregating them into
 Transmedia Storytelling | 295

measurable audience segments, and selling that viewership to advertis-

ers in the currency of Nielsen ratings. Even as television’s industrial
structures shift toward more flexible measures of audience practices
and engagement, the emphasis still remains on generating high ratings
to generate the majority of revenues used to fund both television and
its associated forays into transmedia storytelling. The industrial edict
to protect and strengthen the core business of watching commercial
television creates a creative imperative as well: any television-based
transmedia must protect the “mothership,” Lost producers Damon Lin-
delof and Carlton Cuse’s term for the central television series at the
heart of their armada of transmedia extensions. For the industry, some
transmedia extensions might provide an additional revenue stream,
but their primary function is to drive viewers back to the television
series; for creators, transmedia storytelling must always support and
strengthen the core television narrative experience. These goals are
particularly important within a serial form, as the gaps between epi-
sodes and seasons provide time for viewers’ attention to wander — for
many people within the industry, transmedia is optimistically regarded
as a magnet to sustain viewers’ engagement and attention across these
periodic gaps.
This imperative creates challenges to mesh Jenkins’s definitional ideal
of balanced, distributed transmedia as a “unified and coordinated enter-
tainment experience” with the reality that television storytellers must
privilege the mothership by designing experiences that viewers can con-
sume in a wide range of ways without sacrificing coherence or engage-
ment, regardless of how aware they may be of the paratextual exten-
sions. This challenge of differential engagement plays a crucial role in
one of this chapter’s case studies, as Lost embraced a wide range of trans-
media strategies that tried both to protect the mothership for television-
only viewers and to reward participation for transmedia-savvy fans.
The chapter’s other case study, Breaking Bad, considers an alternative
approach to paratexts that treats canonicity and narrative continuity
quite differently, suggesting varying ways that transmedia storytelling
might work within extended storyworlds. But before turning to these
detailed examples, it is important to chart out some of television’s earlier
transmedia experiments to clarify precisely what is meant by “storytell-
ing” when discussing transmedia.
296 | Transmedia Storytelling

Precedents of Transmedia Television

Storytelling typically suggests the centrality of narrative events, where
a story consists of “what happens.” Certainly events are crucial ingre-
dients of any story, but as discussed in the introduction, narratives are
also composed of characters and settings, two additional components
that are crucial to transmedia storytelling. Complex television treats
these facets as cumulative and consistent within the storyworld, with
everything that happens and everyone we see as part of this persistent
narrative universe. As discussed throughout this book, such cumula-
tive persistence is one of the chief ways that serial storytelling is defined
against episodic television — an episodic drama or sitcom may have the
same characters and storyworld, but such characters rarely remember
previous events and there is little sense of continuity between episodes,
enabling viewers to watch intermittently and out of chronology.
For fans of serial television, charting the canonical events, charac-
ters, and settings featured in a storyworld is a central mode of engage-
ment, with viewers striving for both narrative comprehension and
deeper understanding of a fictional universe, often through the orien-
tation practices discussed in chapter 8. The rising prevalence of trans-
media television alongside the increase in complex seriality has com-
plicated this question of cumulative canon, forcing producers to make
difficult choices about how transmedia serial storytelling situates its
paratexts in relation to the core television canonical mothership. We
can see the important precedents for these issues playing out through
older examples of transmedia television in the forms of tie-in books
and videogames.
Books have a long history as paratexts to moving-image media, both
in conventional prose and comic-based graphic forms, but their role is
typically derided as nonessential add-ons rather than integrated trans-
media. For many film properties, the most common books are noveliza-
tions, direct retellings of the story events, characters, and settings previ-
ously seen on-screen and typified by uninspired mass-market paperback
novelizations and their comic-book counterparts. Although such nov-
elizations are far from the model of coordinated, dispersed transmedia
storytelling as envisioned by Jenkins, they frequently do add material
to the storyworld by filling in gaps in the story, whether it be events not
 Transmedia Storytelling | 297

seen on-screen or internal character thoughts or backstories that are far

easier to convey by the written word — I remember first watching Raid-
ers of the Lost Ark and wondering how Indiana Jones survived the sub-
marine going underwater, only to have a friend point me to the noveliza-
tion for the answer. Strict novelizations that retell on-screen stories are
much rarer for series television, with most examples found in the realm
of cult television classics such as the original 1960s-era Doctor Who and
Star Trek, both of which saw many of their episodes adapted to the nov-
elized format. In these television franchises and others in film, such as
Star Wars, the novels can become part of the canonical storyworld, with
details and characters that have been expanded in the novels sometimes
appearing in future on-screen installments.
The narrative form of series television encourages another, more
common form of tie-in novel, with a book functioning like a new episode
of an ongoing series. This approach makes sense for highly episodic pro-
grams, as established characters and settings can easily host a new set of
narrative events without much need to police canonical boundaries —we
see this type of tie-in novel frequently in series that connect to popular
fiction genres, such as police procedurals from Dragnet to Columbo to
CSI. In such episodic narratives, the books function mainly to stay true
to the characters, tone, and norms of the narrative universe — the actual
plots are frequently irrelevant to larger continuity, and thus questions of
canonicity rarely matter. For the cult realm of science fiction, tie-in nov-
els are quite common, but the questions of canon are more fraught. The
original Star Trek featured dozens of tie-in new-episode novels in addi-
tion to novelized retellings; while most were regarded as noncanonical
by the franchise’s creative team, many fans embraced them, especially
in the decades between the original series leaving the air and the emer-
gence of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the late 1980s. Doctor Who
similarly used novels to fill the era between 1989 and 2005 when there
was no television series in production, with novels sometimes serving to
inspire story elements in the rebooted television series.
Novelistic extensions from more contemporary serials often fall in
the awkward realm of semicanon: endorsed by the program’s creative
team but not fully integrated into its complex serial arcs. Examples of
this include 24, whose novels typically predate the program’s continu-
ity by telling tales from characters’ backstories, and Buffy the Vampire
298 | Transmedia Storytelling

Slayer, which features both novelized retellings and new-episode novels

(in both prose and comic forms) exploring a broad chronology in the
franchise’s mythology. Such tie-ins are usually written independently
from the program’s core writers but based on story outlines that are
approved by showrunners and production studios — except for notable
instances when a program’s producer pens his or her own canonical tie-
in, as with Buffy creator Joss Whedon writing an arc of comic books that
came to be known as “Season 8,” continuing the series continuity after it
left the air. Such print extensions of beloved series can be quite popular
among fans, who often have a love/hate relationship with the books, as
they try to police boundaries of canon, seek tonal consistencies, and
otherwise explore the borders of their favored fictional storyworlds.
While fans typically judge print extensions on how well they capture
the tone, setting, and characters of the mothership, the type of integrated
transmedia that Jenkins explores in the example of The Matrix franchise
places more emphasis on narrative events, so that the plot is distrib-
uted across media.4 Few television series have attempted to create trans-
media extensions that offer such canonic integration, with interwoven
story events that must be consumed across media for full comprehen-
sion. This is surely in large part due to the industrial demands of a com-
mercial television system that depends on revenue from selling eyeballs
to advertisers, which mandatory transmedia might seem to undermine.
Additionally, the broad (if erroneous) cultural assumption that television
is a low-commitment, passive, “lean back” medium would argue against
experiments that demand more from viewers beyond just sitting and
watching an episode. As complex narratives have demonstrated, view-
ers will actively engage with challenging television, and thus producers
have been willing to try more overtly canonically integrated transmedia
storytelling, albeit with very mixed results.
One of the first examples of a canonically integrated tie-in book came
from the complex television pioneer Twin Peaks, with the publication of
The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer in 1990 between the broadcast of the
first and second seasons. Secret Diary, written by series cocreator David
Lynch’s daughter Jennifer, functions as a distinctive form of transmedia:
a diegetic extension, in which an object from the storyworld gets released
in the real world. Most diegetic extensions are objects that do not bear
much storytelling weight, such as Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap or items
 Transmedia Storytelling | 299

bearing the logo of an in-story brand, such as a Dunder Mifflin mug

from The Office. Secret Diary was a reproduction of Laura’s diary as fea-
tured on the series, with pages ripped out to obscure crucial narrative
revelations still to come, making it both an object from the series and an
early experiment in integrated transmedia storytelling. The diary, which
sold quite well at the peak of Twin Peaks’ cultural relevance, provided
numerous clues about Laura’s murder and her hidden dark past. While a
viewer need not read the diary to comprehend the program’s plotlines —
although with Twin Peaks, comprehension is always an elusive goal —the
diary provided relevant canonical story information about both events
and characters, material that was later explored in the prequel feature
film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The series followed up the diary
with two other diegetic tie-in books, an autobiography of Agent Dale
Cooper, transcribed from his iconic dictated tape-recorded notes to
“Diane,” and a travel guide to the town of Twin Peaks, but neither were
particularly popular given the program’s deflated ratings and second-
season cancellation.
Diegetic extensions are no guarantee of integrated transmedia, as
they can also be noncanonic. For instance, the hit 1980s mystery Mur-
der, She Wrote released numerous novels — the 42nd book in the series
was released in 2014, almost two decades after the television series
concluded in 1996 — attributed as cowritten by main character Jessica
Fletcher (along with actual writer Donald Bain), mirroring Jessica’s
career as a mystery novelist on the series. However, unlike the diegetic
novels that are framed as fully fictional on the television series, the real-
world novels star Jessica Fletcher as a mystery writer who solves mur-
ders, making them function like new episodes of the television series.
Yet with the authorial label of Fletcher attached to the books, they also
function as diegetic extensions, albeit with somewhat muddled consis-
tency as to exactly where the boundaries between characters on the TV
series, novels, and authorial branding may lie. But presumably, given
the huge success of both the television and book series, Murder, She
Wrote fans did not care about canonical coherence but rather embraced
the series across media because they offered consistent tone and famil-
iar characters within the well-established norms of the mystery genre.
While few people would point to Murder, She Wrote as a pioneering
innovator of transmedia, it offers a good reminder that success can be
300 | Transmedia Storytelling

measured in a number of different ways, not just in achieving Jenkins’s

integrated definition.
Although tie-in videogames do not have as long of a history as
television-based novels, they offer another window into the strate-
gies and challenges of transmedia television. Again, these are not new
phenomena of the 21st century, as Star Trek games date back to 1970s
text-only adventure games and 1980s flight simulators, and Doctor Who
similarly had tie-in games from early on (not to mention even earlier
precomputerized board games). However, we can see a set of strate-
gies emerging in games tied into recent contemporary television serials
in terms of how they negotiate the elements of characters, events, and
storyworld and tackle the question of canon. While most of these games
are not part of larger transmedia narrative campaigns, they do highlight
the challenges of extending an ongoing serial across media.
Nearly every tie-in game foregrounds the storyworld of its original
television franchise, allowing players to explore the universe as pre-
viously only seen on television. With settings as diverse as the mean
streets of The Shield ’s Los Angeles, the suburban cul-de-sac of Desperate
Housewives, or the deep-space exploration of Battlestar Galactica, tele-
vision tie-in games fulfill Henry Jenkins’s suggestion that game narra-
tives function primarily as spatial storytelling — we explore the virtual
representations of the storyworlds created in serial television as a way
to extend the narrative experience and participate in the fictional uni-
verse.5 The tie-in games that seem most popular are those that re-create
their television universes with vivid and immersive storyworlds, such as
the virtual Springfield found in a number of Simpsons games, with game
worlds often surpassing the televisual versions in their level of detail and
breadth. While such games need not relay vital narrative information
through their spatial reconstructions, one key criterion that fans use to
judge the merits of such games is the accuracy with which they re-create
the storyworld and the degree to which they feel consistent with the
fictional spaces viewers have come to know over the years of a television
series; in this manner, such games can function as interactive maps, as
suggested in chapter 8.
The treatment of characters within tie-in games has proven to be
trickier to navigate. While the digital animation of games enables devel-
opers to re-create television settings with depth and fidelity, the creation
 Transmedia Storytelling | 301

of robust and engaging people is still a technical challenge and an area

where games clearly lag behind television production. Adding to the
challenge is the frequent problem of games not featuring the original
actors voicing their parts, widening the gap between a television char-
acter and its game avatar for viewers. Arguably the most intense bond
that fans of a television serial has with the program is their affection for
and connection with the characters; thus a game that fails to re-create
a beloved, well-known character often alienates fans. Even when origi-
nal actors are used, players often bristle at how limited game versions
of beloved characters become, often reducing complex character depth
into a set of quirks or a limited menu of actions. For instance, the game
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds allows you to play many different
characters from the series (some with original voices and others with
sound-alikes) but limits what you can do as each character to navigat-
ing virtual Sunnydale, fighting monsters, and spouting wisecracks — for
Buffy fans, this is an oversimplification of beloved figures whom view-
ers feel they know personally. The desire to try on the skin of a favorite
television character is certainly a core appeal for licensed games, but
seemingly no television tie-in game has been able to re-create the core
pleasure of spending time with fully realized characters in a television
serial, an issue discussed more later in the chapter.6
One common strategy to overcome this gap between television and
game characterizations is to focus a tie-in game on a new protagonist
placed within an already established storyworld. For example, in The
Sopranos game Road to Respect, you play as Joey LaRocca, the never-
before-mentioned son of the late gangster Big Pussy, exploring fiction-
alized New Jersey locales from the television series, such as the Bada
Bing and Satriale’s, and interacting with core characters including Tony,
Christopher, and Paulie Walnuts. Even though Joey is a new charac-
ter unburdened by the need to accurately re-create a television version,
the action of the game reduces the storytelling scope to focus solely
on the violent life of a mobster, thus eliminating the interplay between
Tony’s dual “families” that helped define the series as a television land-
mark. Similar examples of tie-in games using new characters include
The X-Files Game, Prison Break: The Conspiracy, and Lost: Via Domus,
which use new characters as a way to navigate an existing storyworld
and interact with established television characters. Thus whether tie-in
302 | Transmedia Storytelling

games are exploring established or new characters, they are marked

by a narrowing and simplification of characters, contrasting with how
they frequently expand on the original in creating an immersive and
expanded storyworld.
Issues with tie-in characters often stem from lack of fidelity to the
original, but the third facet of story events suffers more from issues of
confounded coordination with the serialized source material. Tie-in
games typically follow the two options outlined for novels for what nar-
rative events will be told. The first is to retell events from the source
material, allowing players to participate in the original core narrative —
this strategy is common for film tie-ins, as most games from franchises
such as The Lord of the Rings and Toy Story vary little from the original
films’ narrative events, although I have yet to find a television-based
game using a retelling strategy comparable to novelizations. More com-
mon to television tie-ins is treating the game as a new episode in the
series, depicting events that could feasibly function as an episode from
the series but have not. Thus the 24 and Alias tie-in games both place
our heroes in situations very similar to an arc from the original series,
interacting with core characters in familiar locales, but the plots are
essentially stand-alone stories amid highly serialized narratives. At their
worst, such “new episode” tie-in games are merely conventional, for-
mulaic games in a typical genre such as espionage or action, with a thin
veneer of another diegetic world and cast of characters ported from a
television series, not fully realized games that capture the tone or spirit
of the original narrative. At their best, in games such as The Walking
Dead, television tie-ins offer new stories from an established world that
allow players to navigate storyworlds and interact with established char-
acters, but such successes are comparatively rare.
Even when television tie-ins are enjoyable gaming experiences, most
fail to provide a transmedia storytelling resonance. Sometimes such
games are peppered with mythological information allowing a die-hard
fan to recognize a reference to the program’s backstory or ongoing mys-
tery, but I have yet to find a television tie-in game that delivers an inte-
grated narrative payoff that feels tied to a serial canon in a significant
rather than superficial way, aside from creating a navigable storyworld.
I do not attribute this to any lack in the videogame medium, as many
stand-alone games create compelling narrative experiences, deep and
 Transmedia Storytelling | 303

nuanced characters, and engaging plotlines. And Jenkins’s example of

The Matrix franchise demonstrates how a videogame can offer canoni-
cal integration into a series narrative, even though Enter the Matrix itself
was seen by most players as a less-than-satisfying game-play experience.
This lack of an effective television-based integrated game speaks to a
creative challenge that plagues the entire transmedia enterprise: how
do you create narrative extensions from an ongoing core franchise that
reward fans seeking out canon but do not become essential consump-
tion for single-medium fans, especially when the core narrative experi-
ence is serialized over time and requires a sustained investment in time
and attention? In other words, the constraints of the television industry
and norms of television consumption insist that transmedia extensions
from a serial franchise must reward those who partake in them but cannot
punish those who do not. This delicate balance comes to the foreground
in the case of Lost, arguably complex television’s most ambitious trans-
media storytelling franchise.

Lost in Transmedia Television

While individual transmedia extensions such as novels or videogames
can exemplify some general strategies that storytellers use to expand
their narrative horizons, it is useful to look at how a particular series
mounts an extensive transmedia campaign to get a sense of the scope
that a television serial might embrace. There are significant research
challenges to exploring transmedia storytelling, as many paratexts are
hard to access after their initial release, whether they are websites that
are taken offline, ephemeral objects that disappear from circulation, or
emergent practices that change over time. In many cases such as ARGs,
the paratext itself is experiential more than textual, making it impossible
to re-create the narrative moment of participation. Thus as researchers,
we must rely on either our own experiences or secondhand accounts
of transmedia consumption rather than being able to revisit a story for
analytical purposes.
There are a number of expansive transmedia television landmarks
that might prove effective as a primary case study, including Heroes, 24,
and The Office, but I have chosen to focus on Lost for two main rea-
sons. First, it is undoubtedly one of the most extensive and expansive
304 | Transmedia Storytelling

examples of both complex television narrative and transmedia story-

telling, with extensions sprawled across nearly every medium through-
out the program’s six-season run.7 Second, I study Lost’s transmedia as
a participant-observer, having been highly involved in following and
documenting the first ARG and consumed most of the other paratexts
in real time as they were released, as discussed in chapter 8. Many of
these transmedia texts no longer exist in accessible form, so I hope to
use my personal consumption as a source for critical reflection on how
the series used transmedia storytelling within the context of an ongoing
serial narrative.8
Lost’s approach to transmedia storytelling is expansionist, not only
working to extend the narrative universe across media but introducing
many new characters, settings, plotlines, time periods, and mythological
elements. While few viewers would accuse Lost’s television mothership
of being too simplistic in its narrative scope, the series used transmedia
to extend itself into tales that surpassed the wide scope of the series
itself. This expansionism led Lost to augment its six television seasons
with five alternate reality games, four novels, a console/PC videogame,
multiple tie-in websites, two series of online videos, DVD extras, and an
array of collectible merchandise. Due to both its fantasy genre and its
storytelling commitments to a create rich mythological universe, Lost is
well suited to this expansionist approach to transmedia, using paratexts
to extend the narrative outward into new locales and arenas through an
approach we might term centrifugal storytelling, as discussed more in
chapter 6.
Lost was ripe for transmedia extensions in large part due to its unique
locale in a mysterious place with a rich history. The unnamed island had
been inhabited for centuries by various factions of people, dating back
at least to ancient Egyptian times, and offers a deep well of backstory
to be drilled into. Showrunners Lindelof and Cuse have used the meta-
phor of an iceberg to represent the storyworld — the material appear-
ing on the series is what is visible above the waterline, but there are
underwater depths and layers beneath the surface that are never seen on
television. Like other deep mythologies, such as Tolkien’s Middle Earth
or the Star Wars universe, Lost’s producers tapped into a wide range
of styles, characters, and eras to extend the narrative universe to other
media, following a trend that Jenkins notes in transmedia franchises of
 Transmedia Storytelling | 305

focusing on world building more than event-driven storytelling.9 And

such transmedia extensions helped encourage viewers to engage with
the series and its paratexts as forensic fans, drilling into paratexts to
crack their hidden meanings and discover secrets, and to collaborate to
create extensive databases and orienting paratexts of story information.
Throughout Lost’s run, the television series created openings to invite
viewers to explore the storyworld in more depth. Such invitations,
sometimes called “Easter eggs” if they are bonus features or moments
that lead no further or “trailheads” if they open up to larger narrative
pathways, rarely were central to Lost’s core narrative but typically pro-
vided a bit of backstory, cultural references, or deep history of the island.
Lindelof and Cuse have discussed in interviews and podcasts that they
had a specific litmus test for what mythology to reveal and explore on
television versus in the transmedia extensions: if the main characters
care about it, it will appear on television; if the characters do not care, it
will not. While we might quibble as to how precisely Lindelof and Cuse
followed their own edict, it is instructive in establishing the program’s
orientation toward character-centered drama rather than mythological
fantasy. The blast door map discussed in chapter 8 is a telling case of
both the opportunities and the pitfalls of using transmedia to expand
the program’s mythological universe. In the aftermath of its first appear-
ance in “Lockdown,” the character Locke cared deeply about the map,
attempting to re-create the image and discover its secret, until the bun-
ker is destroyed and the map’s origins are revealed in a flashback during
the second-season finale; the blast door map was not directly referenced
on the television series again. However, the map reappeared within a
number of paratexts, including in the videogame Lost: Via Domus, as a
hidden, glow-in-the-dark image on the back of the official Lost jigsaw
puzzles, as a pull-out poster in the official Lost magazine, and hidden
within the final complete series collectible DVD box set, with each ver-
sion offering slightly different details and encouraging further forensic
fan decoding. But to what ends? The transmedia versions of the map
detach it from Locke’s character motivations and the core island nar-
rative events, making it a fun puzzle to play with deriving from Lost’s
story but offering little integrated storytelling payoff. Yet the continued
transmedia circulation of the map, even after the series ended, helped
create the expectation of narrative rewards on the mothership, feeding
306 | Transmedia Storytelling

a hungry fan base eager for additional mythological revelations where

there were none to be found.
Lost, in large part due to its centrifugal use of transmedia, offered
a wide range of genres, styles, and appeals simultaneously within the
core television text: a puzzling science-fiction mystery, a dimension-
spanning romance, a rip-roaring outdoors adventure, and a religious
parable about letting go of the past and finding fellowship. As discussed
in chapter 10, the television finale downplayed the puzzle-box trailheads
it had left throughout its journey and, in doing so, betrayed the expecta-
tions of many of its most hardcore fans. Lost always struggled to manage
the rabid fan base’s divergent expectations: viewers were invested in a
wide range of the program’s narrative facets, from the complex mythol-
ogy to romantic relationships, heady time-traveling science fiction to
adventure-driven action sequences. While at times fans split on the rela-
tive merits of particular plotlines, episodes, or characters, as a whole the
series did an admirable and arguably unprecedented job of servicing
such a broad array of appeals and fan bases. A key strategy for accom-
plishing this storytelling breadth was to center the core television series
around characters, their adventures and dramas, and how they encoun-
ter the mythology and to allow the more in-depth mythological explora-
tions and explanations to flower in transmedia properties.
The majority of Lost’s transmedia extensions prioritize storyworld
expansion and exploration instead of building on the program’s emo-
tional arcs and character relationships, with some narrative events pos-
ited in an awkward relationship to the narrative canon. Two high-profile
paratexts, the videogame Lost: Via Domus and the novel Bad Twin,
which was posited as a diegetic extension authored by the deceased Oce-
anic 815 passenger Gary Troup, were initially framed as canonical exten-
sions but later were partially recanted by the showrunners as not fully
connected to the core story. In both cases, Lindelof and Cuse highlighted
that the outsourced creators of these extensions took the plotlines they
outlined in new directions that contradicted the core canon from the
television program; instead, both fell into familiar traditions of “new
episode” storytelling that is outside the core canonical arc but trouble-
some for a highly serialized program in which episodes always add to
larger arcs. One of the chief challenges for creating canonically inte-
grated transmedia for an ongoing serial is that the demands of running
 Transmedia Storytelling | 307

a complex series already tax the energies of producer-managers, as dis-

cussed in chapter 3, leaving paratexts in the hands of hired-gun writ-
ers who frequently fail to meet the expectations of producers — creating
coherent complex transmedia narratives requires a degree of storytelling
control that the current system of television production seems unable to
fully meet, and given reduced production budgets in recent years, it is
hard to imagine that future programs will have the personnel to success-
fully manage such integrated narratives.
Aside from the video minisodes that appeared online and on DVDs
(which were produced by the standard television production personnel),
the transmedia paratext that was most controlled by the core writers’
room was arguably its most innovative: the first ARG, The Lost Experi-
ence. Running in the summer of 2006, The Lost Experience (TLE) was the
first extensive ARG to emerge during an ongoing, mainstream, hit tele-
vision series, filling the hiatus between the program’s second and third
seasons. Lasting four months and spanning an array of media across the
world, including websites, podcasts, television appearances, voicemail,
live events, and merchandise, it is also arguably the most ambitious and
extensive ARG yet attempted for a television series and thus established
many of the industry’s assumptions about the form, its possibilities, and
its limitations. TLE was conceived by Lost showrunners Lindelof and
Cuse, with leadership from staff writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, making
the ARG an integrated aspect of the program’s narrative canon and core
production team.
Lost’s producers have suggested that TLE had three main goals: to
offer narrative revelations for hardcore fans that would not be addressed
in the series itself, to experiment with innovative forms of storytelling,
and to keep the program active in press coverage and the public con-
sciousness during its summer hiatus.10 The last of these was clearly a
success — the experiments of TLE generated a good deal of press cover-
age, including a June Entertainment Weekly story teased on the maga-
zine’s cover, effectively avoiding a summer slump of waning enthusiasm
and placing ARGs in the mainstream consciousness like never before.
As an innovative form of narrative, TLE provided lessons from storytell-
ing mistakes and problems, outweighing any compelling formal innova-
tions. TLE consistently had to balance the desires of ARG players to be
challenged with innovative puzzles and the clamoring of television fans
308 | Transmedia Storytelling

for more direct narrative payoffs. The in-game story of Rachel Blake
investigating the Hanso Foundation rarely resonated as much more than
a skeleton on which to hang clues, and the game did not stand apart
from the storyworld established on the television series as a compelling
narrative experience. The game play and immersive engagement was
too erratic in quality and sophistication for hardcore ARGers, driving
many of them away after the first few weeks and leaving less experi-
enced players to try to work through subsequent puzzles. Additionally,
the integrated marketing with sponsors such as Jeep, Verizon, and Sprite
struck many players as crass and intrusive, violating the playful spirit
that ARGs aim to capture.11
As to the goal of revealing narrative mythology for the ongoing
television series, the ARG proved to be more frustrating than reward-
ing — the canonical narrative content was not sufficiently integrated
into the television series as a whole, making some players feel like they
had wasted their time on “trivia,” rather than getting a head start on
what was to come during Lost’s third season. TLE’s biggest revelations
were in the so-called Sri Lanka Video, which included an “orientation
film” featuring Alvar Hanso, explaining the origins and mission of the
DHARMA Initiative, the meaning of the “numbers” (which had been a
central mystery from the program’s first two seasons) as being part of
an equation predicting the end of the world that was being researched
by the DHARMA Initiative, and numerous other clues that connected
directly with the television canon. However, these revelations never
appeared in the series itself, and the numbers were given a different (but
not contradictory) explanation in the program’s final season. For fans
who participated in the ARG, the mystery of the numbers was already
solved, and the new explanation felt like a slap in the face undermin-
ing fans’ engagement by placing the narrative events uncovered in the
ARG into an ambiguous paracanonical status. In contrast, some of TLE ’s
revelations were considered “unanswered questions” by television fans
who were left unsatisfied with Lost’s lingering mythological ambiguity —
for such fans, knowing that the numbers and DHARMA were further
explained in the ARG increased frustration over the television program’s
narrative, as they wanted to be able to comprehend the series fully with-
out requiring “online research.” Even for TLE players who learned the
secrets of the Sri Lanka Video (which has received over one million
 Transmedia Storytelling | 309

views on YouTube, still a small fraction of the program’s global tele-

vision audience), the fact that the television series never addressed, and
subsequently contradicted or displaced, its revelations made the game
play more frustrating in retrospect, feeling more like a waste of time
than a storytelling bonus.
The scaled-down efforts to use ARGs in the Lost franchise in sub-
sequent years suggest that many of these lessons were in fact learned,
as the producers moved to create transmedia experiences that were
less ambitious and complex but ultimately less disappointing to their
target audiences. Lindelof and Cuse found the challenges of running
a narratively integrated ARG within the already complicated television
production process far too daunting to try again, and thus they scaled
back the subsequent ARGs to be less integral to the program’s canon.
No matter how enjoyable such games and extensions were to fans, they
often fell short in rewarding the core edict of adding to the franchise’s
storytelling without taking away from the main television experience.
One of the great contradictions of Lost is that the series built as robust
a mythological universe as has ever been devised for television but then
undermined the importance of its own mythology by relegating many of
its mysteries to transmedia extensions that it deemed as “bonus content”
rather than core storytelling. The series was unmatched in its ability to
posit mysteries and encourage fans to immerse themselves expansively
into clunky alternate reality games and poorly paced videogames and
novels with the hope of uncovering answers. Yet by the final season, the
series offered emotional character resolutions and thrilling adventure
storytelling but left many mythological questions unaddressed within
the television series itself or ambiguously vague in its answers. On its
own, I found Lost’s emotional payoffs and sweeping character arcs suf-
ficiently engaging and entertaining; however, its use of transmedia and
cultivation of a forensic fandom encouraged us to expect more, leading
many fans to revolt against the series in its final hours for not deliver-
ing its answers in a clearly marked package, a tension I discuss more in
chapter 10.
This dichotomy between forensic fans watching (and playing) for
coherence and emotional viewers getting swept up in the adventure and
romance, as discussed in chapter 7, mirrors one of the program’s main
thematic structures: the contrast between rational and supernatural
310 | Transmedia Storytelling

outlooks, embodied by the battle between Jack Shepard’s “man of sci-

ence” and John Locke’s “man of faith.” Even though neither survives
the narrative, it is clear by the program’s conclusion that faith trumps
science, with Jack sacrificing himself to the island’s mystical forces and
endorsing John’s vision of fate and spiritual meaning. In choosing faith
over science, and in turn privileging the genre of fantasy adventure
over science fiction, Lost was willing to let many dangling mysteries go
unexplained within the context of the television series, offering instead
a spiritual celebration of Jack’s (and, by extension, our) “letting go” of
the need for rational understanding in the program’s closing moments.
And yet the program’s transmedia strategy still sided with the rational
exploration of island mythology, despite its frequently frustrating inco-
herence — the final DVD release contained a bonus 12-minute “epilogue”
video that provided a flood of answers to dangling questions about the
island, DHARMA, Walt, and various other mythological mysteries. The
playful video winks at viewers, with a DHARMA worker chastising Ben
by saying, “Wait. You can’t just walk out of here. We deserve answers!”
tweaking fans’ dissatisfaction with the finale, as discussed in chapter 10.
And even though the answers resolve some ambiguity, it becomes clear
that this additional content is canonical but nonessential, relegated to a
paratext simply to appease those hardcore forensic fans who would not
follow the finale’s advice, to let go.
Thus Lost’s transmedia tries to follow some clear parameters: use
paratexts to expand access to the storyworld and island mythology but
keep character arcs and core events centered on the television mother-
ship. While this might reward hardcore fans willing to expand their
narrative consumption across media, it does create frustrations for both
transmedia consumers underwhelmed by the payoffs and television
fans who do not want to have to do “homework” to understand their
favorite series. Although most Lost fans who were left frustrated by
the finale probably had not been transmedia consumers, the program’s
reliance on transmedia to parcel out answers did set up expectations
that answers would be found via forensic rationality rather than the
spiritual acceptance that the finale offered. Lost’s commercial and cre-
ative successes have established the series as a model for transmedia
television, inspiring numerous clones in both television and transmedia
formats, including Heroes, FlashForward, and Revolution. But another
 Transmedia Storytelling | 311

case study suggests a more modest approach to television transmedia

that might ultimately be more successful.

Breaking Bad as Character-Driven Transmedia

If Lost uses transmedia to expand its narrative universe outward to the
breaking point, Breaking Bad demonstrates the alternate vector, creating
transmedia to fold in on itself via centripetal storytelling. As discussed
in chapter 6, Breaking Bad is an intense character study of a chemistry
teacher gradually turning into a drug kingpin, mixing riveting sus-
pense and pitch-black comedy to most closely resemble a television
serial as made by the Coen brothers. Most television series that have
embraced transmedia aggressively are in fantastic or comedic genres,
such as Heroes and The Office. Fantasy and science-fiction programs can
use transmedia to create more expansive and detailed versions of their
storyworlds, which typically are a core appeal within the genre — the
emphasis on world building through paratexts is a time-honored strat-
egy for narratives set in universes with their own scientific or magical
properties that beg further investigation and exploration. For come-
dies, transmedia can be a site to develop additional gags or to highlight
throwaway plotlines for secondary characters without disrupting the
plot and character arcs of the television mothership.
While Breaking Bad was modest in its use of transmedia compared
to programs in these other genres, its strategies offer an interesting
contrast. If Lost’s expansive transmedia offered new narrative events
and broadened the storyworld, Breaking Bad ’s focus was primarily on
character. This use of character-based transmedia makes sense given
Breaking Bad ’s genre and narrative strategies: there is no underlying
mythology or complex mystery to parse, so the transmedia extensions
offer virtually no narrative events that seem particularly relevant to the
story as a whole. As discussed more in chapters 4 and 6, Breaking Bad ’s
focus is firmly on characters and their transformations, so its transme-
dia strategy is well matched to the program’s core narrative tone and
scope. Breaking Bad ’s storyworld is a fairly realistic version of Albu-
querque, New Mexico, so its transmedia give almost no attention to the
setting itself. This deemphasis on setting and plot arcs within its trans-
media is partly tied to the program’s genre of serious drama, but even a
312 | Transmedia Storytelling

similarly dramatic series such as Mad Men grounds its small excursions
into transmedia within its periodized world, such as its online Cocktail
Guide and Fashion Show sites.
Instead, Breaking Bad ’s transmedia extensions focus on character
over setting or plot, providing additional depth to a series that already
features highly elaborated characters. Most of this transmedia character
development focuses on secondary figures rather than the main pro-
tagonist, Walter White, and highlights the program’s comedic rather
than dramatic tone, with additional videos and websites illuminating
the amusing backgrounds of Hank, Marie, Badger, and Saul, some of
the least serious characters in the series — one enjoyable example is the
diegetic extension promotional website for Saul Goodman’s law firm,
bettercallsaul.com, serving as a dual parody of both ambulance-chasing
lawyers and cheesy website design, and more recently as a promotion
for the 2015 spin-off series Better Call Saul. Even when the program’s
dark main character, Walter, is featured in a minisode, it paints him
in a more comedic light, with short videos that show him listening to
his future brother-in-law Hank’s prewedding sexual hijinks or carry-
ing out a bungled breaking-and-entering with a drugged-out Badger.
These minisodes do not contradict the program’s plot arcs but offer a
different but compatible comedic tone that tends to be secondary on the
darker mothership.
Although Breaking Bad lacks the mythological expanses that encour-
age tie-in games to explore the storyworlds, the series has spawned two
online minigames that point to another direction for game-based trans-
media. Both were created for AMC’s website with direct coordination
from the program’s producers, featuring motion-comic-style graphics
with an interactive narrative design; the first, The Interrogation, was
launched during the third season in spring 2010, while the follow-up,
The Cost of Doing Business, was released for both the web and mobile
devices prior to season 4 in summer 2011. The Interrogation places us in
the shoes of DEA agent Hank as he interrogates a suspect member of a
drug-smuggling organization; in The Cost of Doing Business, we play as
Jesse, trying to get paid what he is owed from a drug customer. Neither
plotline is canonical to the series, but both feel like plausible moments
for the characters in the new-episode model common to tie-in games;
Gordon Smith, the series writer’s assistant who scripted the games,
 Transmedia Storytelling | 313

suggests about each game, “Hopefully [it] is true to the characters as

they are on the show, but it’s not stories that literally take place in the
timetable of the series. We feel like they’re part of the show that some-
body could have experienced at some point, [with events that] had the
same feel of something on the show.”12 This emphasis on creating exten-
sions that coordinate character identities and consistent tone with the
series points to a strength of Breaking Bad ’s transmedia: by downplaying
plot, the extensions work by allowing viewers to spend time with the
characters without encouraging the forensic attention to story as with
most canonic extensions.
The minisodes featuring Jesse are indicative of this approach: his
storylines on the series can frequently be quite dark and serious, but his
minisodes focus comedically on his fledgling band and artistic creations,
rather than his struggles with addiction, quest for self-discovery as Walt’s
surrogate son, or search for moral clarity in the face of his criminal acts.
Most interestingly, one video previews a hypothetical animated series,
Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E., featuring superhero versions of the characters as
created by Jesse and transformed into a crime-fighting team rather than
a burgeoning criminal enterprise.13 Not only does this video offer an
amusing take on the program’s characters for die-hard fans, but it also
provides a compelling look into Jesse’s psychology via how he narrativ-
izes and rationalizes his own experiences and positions his impressive
artistic skills in relation to his criminal actions. Nothing that happens in
this video is canonical, as it is clearly outside the storyworld — perhaps it
could be read as a diegetic extension of something Jesse would make if
he had the time, expertise, and dedication, but more likely it is a hypo-
thetical game of speculation, playing with genre, tone, and production
mode while retaining a consistency of character. Like most of Breaking
Bad ’s transmedia, such videos draw you into the core television series
and offer some additional depth rather than expanding the storyworld’s
scope and breadth. All of the program’s extensions seem like they could
easily be canonical, if only due to their modest scope that rarely inter-
sects with the main thrust of the television story, but they do not invite
the type of intense dissection of plotlines typical of Lost’s transmedia.
None of Breaking Bad ’s transmedia extensions reward viewers with
trailheads into deeper narrative experiences, flesh out the fictional
universe, or relay any seemingly vital story events. Instead, they allow
314 | Transmedia Storytelling

us to spend more time with characters whom we have grown close to

over the course of the television serial, extending the parasocial rela-
tionships I discuss more in chapter 4. While these paratexts may not
seem as innovative or immersive as Lost’s, they might even work better
as extensions to the core narrative by playing to the strengths of serial
television: establishing connections to characters. Nobody exploring
Breaking Bad ’s transmedia would have his or her expectations of the
series transformed or misdirected, as they are clearly positioned as sup-
porting, nonessential “extras” rather than vital transmedia plotting. But
in their modest success, I think they more successfully accomplish the
goal of rewarding viewers who consume them but not punishing those
who do not. And as we see further experimentation and innovation with
transmedia storytelling, Breaking Bad and Lost both offer valuable les-
sons to how to balance viewers’ expectations, canonical concerns, and
the relative importance of events, storyworld, and characters.

“What Is” versus “What If?” Transmedia

In the contrast between Lost’s and Breaking Bad ’s paratextual strategies,
we can see two larger tendencies that typify the practices of transmedia
storytelling, dueling approaches that we might label “What Is” versus
“What If?” The former is embodied on television by Lost and fits with
Jenkins’s definition of the form as exemplified by The Matrix. “What
Is” transmedia seeks to extend the fiction canonically, explaining the
universe with coordinated precision and hopefully expanding view-
ers’ understanding and appreciation of the storyworld. This narrative
model encourages forensic fandom with the promise of eventual revela-
tions once all the pieces are put together — the emblematic example of a
“What Is” paratext might be Lost’s jigsaw puzzles, which literally require
the assembly of all the pieces of four separate puzzles to reveal extra nar-
rative information hidden within its glow-in-the-dark image of the blast
door map. If one goal of consuming a story is mastery of its fictional
universe, then “What Is” transmedia scatters narrative understanding
across a variety of extensions to be collectively reassembled by a team of
die-hard fans to piece together the elaborate puzzle.
The majority of official storytelling extensions seem designed to fulfill
the goals of “What Is” transmedia, and the measuring stick that critics
 Transmedia Storytelling | 315

and fans use to assess those paratexts typically defines success through
canonical coordination and narrative integration. However, an opposite
mode of transmedia points to different narrative goals and markers of
success: the “What If?” extension as suggested by Breaking Bad ’s Team
S.C.I.E.N.C.E. This approach to transmedia poses hypothetical possibili-
ties rather than canonical certainties, inviting viewers to imagine alter-
native stories and approaches to storytelling that are distinctly not to
be treated as potential canon. The goal for “What If?” transmedia is to
launch off the mothership into parallel dimensions, foregrounding tone,
mood, character, or style more than continuity with canonical plots and
storyworlds. We are never meant to believe that Jesse really created a
comic and animated series fictionalizing his friends as a superhero team,
but we are presented with the possibility that he could have and invited
to imagine “What if he did?” This style of hypothetical narrative paratext
highlights the fictionality of all narrative, as there is nothing more “real”
in the characterization of Walter White as accidental drug dealer than
Jesse’s reinterpretation of him as Doctor Chemistry, fighting off zombies
“for the right to be awesome,” as both are equally artificial works of fic-
tion, albeit with one clearly marked as subsidiary to the other. Just as we
embrace serial narrative for its creation of compelling storyworlds in
which we can immerse ourselves, “What If?” transmedia multiplies the
possibilities of those fictions into the realm of hypothetical variations
and transmutations.14
Both “What Is” and “What If?” transmedia can best be seen as vec-
tors or tendencies rather than distinct categories, with fluidity and blur
between the dual approaches — for instance, we might think of the Lost
tie-in novel Bad Twin as conceived as a “What Is” diegetic extension
that transformed through its troubled production process into a “What
If?” hypothetical paratext. Many tie-in novels and games function as
noncanonical “What If?” paratexts but lack the playful variation and
imagination of Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E.; instead, they often appear as failed
“What Is” extensions, setting up viewers to futilely search for narrative
continuities and canon only to come up empty. Both transmedia tenden-
cies embrace a ludic narrative quality but draw on different styles of play,
as influentially categorized by Roger Caillois as a contrast between rule-
driven ludus and free-play paidia.15 “What Is” transmedia extensions
work more like ludus puzzles with proper solutions and final revelations,
316 | Transmedia Storytelling

while “What If?” paratexts feature more of a sense of paidia dress-up or

performative role-play, spinning off scenarios with no “real” outcome or
canonical narrative function.
We can see important precedents for both of these transmedia modes
in the realm of fan productions and consumption practices. Some fan
cultures produce paratexts clearly in the “What Is” realm, typified by the
detailed schematics of the technology in the Star Trek universe, analyzed
by Bob Rehak as “blueprint culture.”16 Such orienting paratexts provide
definitive guides to both canonical motherships and various transmedia
extensions, all driven by the goal to arrive at the singular, correct account
of complex narrative material. This strategy of mapping and cataloguing
fictions has seen a boom with the rise of wikis, as fans can collaborate in
creating encyclopedic documentation of a storyworld, as with Lostpedia
or Star Trek’s Memory Alpha, as discussed in chapter 8. Such modes of
affirmational fan engagement prioritize canonical authenticity, seek nar-
rative mastery, authorize the role of controlling showrunner, and search
for connections and theories to fill narrative gaps — all facets prioritized
by “What Is” transmedia and discussed more in chapter 3.
The best-known models of fan productivity follow the “What If?”
paradigm, with fan fiction, remix videos, and other forms of fan creativ-
ity that make few claims to canonical authenticity but playfully posit a
range of hypothetical narrative possibilities. Such paratexts are valued
for their transformational expansiveness, thinking beyond the terrain
of canon by positing possibilities that clearly could not be “real” within
the fictional universe — whether building on subtexts that could never
be explicitly represented, offering intertextual crossovers to other fran-
chises or real life, or creating parodies that playfully revise a program’s
genre, style, or tone. Some “What If?” fan creations tell stories that strive
to seamlessly fit within the canonical mothership or offer alternative
interpretations that fans may view as in keeping with the spirit of their
vision of a series — sometimes even more faithfully than the canonical
ongoing narrative does. However, such fan creativity nearly always posi-
tions itself as outside the core canon and embraces its hypothetical pos-
sibilities, even when it might be regarded as more satisfying than the
official narrative canon.
An interesting case of fan-produced transmedia that plays with both
of these vectors is an unofficial alternate reality game for Alias, produced
 Transmedia Storytelling | 317

in 2005 and generally referred to as the Omnifam ARG. Launching

during the program’s third season and after ABC had produced offi-
cial ARGs during the first two seasons, the Omnifam game did not
announce itself as an unofficial paratext but, in keeping with ARG style,
presented itself as part of the “real world” without reference to the tele-
vision series as fiction — it only became clear over the course of game
play that it was not licensed by ABC and was instead created and run by
fans. Interestingly, the unofficial ARG was much more faithful to Alias’s
spirit of conspiratorial complexity than were the official ARGs, which
featured more stand-alone, web-based minigames using the program’s
iconography and storyworld. The Omnifam game appeared to offer
“What Is” integrated story information about the overarching Rambaldi
mythology — except it was distinctly unofficial and unsanctioned by
the program’s creative team, making its pseudocanon decidedly “What
If?”17 This tension speaks to both the desire of some fans to have trans-
media experiences that pay off with significant narrative integration and
the urge of other fans to create their own stories that mimic the canoni-
cal, regardless of authorial endorsement or in-series confirmation.
If fans step in to create pseudocanonical “What Is” transmedia as in
the Omnifam case, there is potentially tension in the opposite direc-
tion as well. As the terrain of “What If?” has been occupied primarily
by fans, there is legitimate concern that the industry producing such
extensions could work to co-opt fannish creativity and close down the
realm of the hypothetical to fan producers. For instance, Sci-Fi Network
offered an online video site for Battlestar Galactica fans to create their
own remixes, but only within the channel’s chosen clips and usage poli-
cies, effectively constraining the free play of “What If?” creativity.18 But
I would contend that the official production of a video such as Team
S.C.I.E.N.C.E. celebrates the fannish “What If?” impulse without closing
down possibilities and validates it by using the official talent of the pro-
gram’s cast members to make the hypothetical feel more fully realized.
While fans cannot get Aaron Paul to record voice-over for their creative
work, the video opens up new raw materials and hypothetical direc-
tions for future fan transmedia without enforcing a hierarchy between
licensed and unlicensed material around the question of canon.
Jenkins’s model of “What Is” balanced transmedia in which plot
coherence is distributed across media is an exciting possibility for
318 | Transmedia Storytelling

storytellers and deserves the attention it has gotten. But for transmedia
properties with a clear mothership in serialized television, it may be an
untenable model, as the commercial system cannot effectively sustain
a franchise that risks eroding television ratings points for viewers who
are uninterested in straying beyond a single medium, not to mention
the storytelling challenges of crafting complex plots that can function
both over time and across media. I would point to the comparatively un-
explored (at least via official paratexts) realm of “What If?” transmedia
storytelling as a potentially more productive avenue for serial television
to develop, building on the medium’s strengths of character and mood
over plotting and mythology and tapping into the clear fan interest in
imagining noncanonical possibilities. The proliferation of hypotheti-
cal transmedia narratives offers its own “What If?” scenario of another
dimension of complexity that has yet to be discovered.
10

Ends

Every television series begins, but not all of them end — or at least not
all series conclude. Endings are not quite a parallel part of the narrative
frame to beginnings, a distinction that carries over linguistically. Begin is
solely a verb, needing to be transformed into the noun beginning, while
end and ending work as both nouns and verbs — in this chapter, I explore
the dual meanings of end as both “the final part of something” and “a
goal or result that one seeks to achieve.”1 In the case of serial television,
the ending is often the ends, or the ultimate target that a series extends
toward, at an unplanned future date. We can learn much about how
complex serials work by considering how they strive toward their final
episodes and what happens when they manage to reach them. Similarly,
this chapter concludes by reaching the book’s end, exploring the ends of
serial criticism as a practice of academic writing, offering an appropri-
ately meta conclusion for Complex TV.
Every series that is no longer in production has a final episode, but
actual finales are quite rare for American television series, with a range
of other, much more common techniques of ending. The most prevalent
form of ending is the stoppage, an abrupt, unplanned end to a series
when the network pulls the plug midseason (usually in the series’s first
season). A stoppage is always extratextually motivated, usually when a
network loses faith in a series’s ratings or potential for growth or some-
times when a personnel issue with a creator or cast member creates a
crisis, resulting in a premature cessation of a series without narratively
motivated closure or finality. Fox’s 2005 series Reunion is a good example
of the perils of stoppage, with an abrupt cancellation after the airing of
nine episodes that left the central murder mystery unresolved. Fox exec-
utives were asked to explain the planned resolution in press interviews
to satisfy fans’ demands, but they refused to fully reveal what would
have happened because the writers still had not decided how to resolve
the open-ended set of possibilities.2 This unresolved enigma became

319
320 | Ends

a cautionary example for both network executives and fans about the
dangers of complex serialization, as the fear of a premature stoppage
might create reluctance among viewers in sampling a new serial, wor-
ried that it might be canceled without closure or even sufficient narra-
tive development.
The next category in this spectrum of closure is the wrap-up, a series
ending that is neither fully arbitrary nor completely planned. Typically,
wrap-ups come at the end of a season, when producers have come to a
natural stopping point but without planned series finality. For programs
with seasons that are crafted with a planned unity and internal struc-
ture, such as Veronica Mars, each season’s end could serve as the series
wrap-up, but none offer a clearly conclusive end to the story — the fact
that season 3’s final episode was the last of the series was not narratively
motivated, as a teaser was even shot for a potential fourth season, set in
the FBI academy, and years later a feature film was produced to continue
the story, disregarding the FBI plotline as noncanonical. Cable programs
with shorter seasons often treat every season finale as a potential series
wrap-up, as single-season programs such as Terriers and Rubicon both
ended with a degree of closure but not outright finality. On such series,
the majority of a season’s episodes have typically been written before
the series begins to air, so a single season of 10 – 13 episodes is treated as
a narrative unit with a possible wrap-up but with enough open-ended
threads that potential renewal feels desirable and motivated. As Greg
Smith describes such seasons, they wrap up with “punctuation marks” of
climactic narrative events and partial resolution but with “game chang-
ers” that set up the possibility for a new narrative direction if the series
gets renewed.3
Less common still is the conclusion, when a program’s producers are
able to craft a final episode knowing that it will be the end. Sometimes
a conclusion is planned in advance by the producers, and sometimes
it is thrust on them — compare Joss Whedon’s pair of programs, with
Buffy’s seventh season planned as its last from the season’s beginning,
while Angel was canceled in midseason, leaving Whedon to rework the
final set of episodes to offer a somewhat rushed last-minute conclusion.
For the single-season series Last Resort, the producers were told that it
would be canceled with enough lead time to make a final episode with a
 Ends | 321

good deal of narrative finality, while Pushing Daisies was merely able to
tack on a concluding epilogue to the season-ending episode upon notice
of cancellation. Conclusions offer a sense of finality and resolution, fol-
lowing the centuries-old assumption that well-crafted stories need to
end; however, such resolutions are comparatively rare for American
television; the industry equates success with an infinite middle and rel-
egates endings to failures. This tension between narrative and economic
impulses can create conflicts, as with Lost’s challenges in early season 3,
as the producers reflected that they were forced to “tap-dance” to delay
narrative progress without a sense of when they could start implement-
ing their planned endgame — midway through the season, they negoti-
ated an unprecedented specified end date three seasons into the future,
allowing them to plan toward an eventual finale and craft a noninfinite
middle for the remaining seasons.4
There are a few variations on these possibilities. One is a cessation,
which is a stoppage or wrap-up without a definite finality that it will be
the end of the series. It is fairly common for a series to go on hiatus mid-
season, leaving its narrative future in limbo until it either returns to the
air or disappears from next year’s schedule. Less common is the series
that wraps up at the end of the season but is left ambiguously uncertain
about future return; the most high-profile example of such a cessation is
Deadwood, which was denied its planned final fourth season, morphing
into unmade-for-TV movies that were long discussed as if they might
someday be produced. A cessation is lodged at the crosshairs intersect-
ing creativity and commerce, as storytelling progress is held in check by
the bottom line of profitability, leaving the narrative world in a state of
perpetual limbo and awaiting a possible return.
The inverse of a cessation is a resurrection, when an already con-
cluded series returns, either on television or in another medium. Some
programs are resurrected after being cut short through cancellation
after stoppages or wrap-ups, as with Firefly being reborn as the feature
film Serenity, while other series return postconclusion as ongoing com-
ics, as with Whedon’s other programs Buffy and Angel — in all of these
instances, the motivation seems to be having more stories left to tell and
the freedom to tell them differently in another medium. Commercial
imperatives can also override creative goals when a series is resurrected
322 | Ends

despite the wishes of the producers, as with Scrubs’ return for a ninth
season despite the conclusiveness of season 8’s episode “My Finale.” A
series can also hover in between cessation and resurrection, as wrapped-
up programs such as Arrested Development and Veronica Mars had been
frequently discussed as spawning feature films for years after their can-
cellations, but it was not until 2013 that both were resurrected, with the
former getting a fourth season on Netflix and the latter leveraging Kick-
starter to produce a feature film.
Finally, we have the finale, which is a conclusion with a going-away
party. Finales are defined more by their surrounding discourse and hype
than any inherent properties of the narrative itself, as they feature con-
clusions that are widely anticipated and framed as endings to a beloved
(or at least high-rated) series. Finales are not thrust on creators but
emerge out of the planning process of crafting an ongoing serial, and
thus the resulting discourses center around authorial presence and the
challenges of successfully ending a series. Such conclusions are often
presented embedded within a set of paratexts, with high-profile press
features and interviews, televised specials offering retrospectives, and
the promise of eventual DVD extras that will add even more weight to
the final episode. Such discursive prominence of finales raises the nar-
rative stakes of anticipation and expectation for viewers, and thus finales
frequently produce disappointment and backlash when they inevitably
fail to please everyone.
As with most aspects of American television, public awareness of
industry practices of ratings, scheduling, and seasonal renewal or can-
cellation has grown more prominent in the Internet era, as fans can
track the potential futures of their favorite programs as well as consume
hype around a planned finale. The knowledge of a series’s upcoming
finale recasts fans’ expectations for the final season and potentially
serves to overshadow the various ways fans have engaged throughout a
long-running season, with the enormous weight of needing to “stick the
landing” for a final conclusive episode. Three high-profile finales and
their corresponding final seasons provide key insights into some of the
strategies of conclusion that complex television uses to come to an end
and the ways that viewers engage with such endings: The Wire, Lost, and
The Sopranos.
 Ends | 323

Preparing for the End: Metastorytelling in the

Final Seasons of The Wire and Lost
Arguably, Lost and The Wire had as much hype and pressure to conclude
successfully in their final seasons as any series in American television
history. The pressure on The Wire related to discourses of quality and
sophistication — going into its fifth and final season in 2008, it had been
hailed by many critics as not only the best series American television
had ever produced but a program that transcended its medium to be
considered the contemporary equivalent of a Dickens novel or Greek
tragedy. For such aesthetic accolades to be justified, The Wire needed
to conclude in a way that met centuries-old standards of narrative unity
and tragic endings, as well as paying off creator David Simon’s long-
standing claims that the series functioned rhetorically as dissent and
made cogent arguments about American social conditions.
Few critics would elevate Lost to such timeless standards of cross-
media aesthetics or lofty social pronouncements, but its final season bore
other burdens that surpassed the norms of the television medium. Many
analyses, including this book, argue that Lost functioned as much as a
game as a serial narrative, positing questions and puzzles that demanded
answers.5 This framework was reinforced by showrunners Damon Lin-
delof and Carlton Cuse’s active public presence that regularly assured
fans that every mystery had an answer and that they were not making it
up as they went along. Throughout the final season, Lost’s hyperactive
online fan base generated to-do lists of unanswered questions and even
questioned whether new answers might be yet more enigmatic red her-
rings. Additionally, the end of Lost had been hyped for years through
its innovative industrial precedent of negotiating a planned end date,
meaning that many viewers had been scanning the horizon for this
finale for years of anticipation and hype, knowing full well that the pro-
ducers had a clear timetable to work toward a satisfying end.
In light of these heightened expectations, the final seasons of both
Lost and The Wire disappointed many viewers. For Lost fans, too many
questions were left unanswered, and the series failed to deliver on its
ludic promises, shifting in the end to a faith-based approach to its nar-
rative enigmas — both offering religious faith as an ultimate thematic
324 | Ends

conclusion and asking for viewers’ faith in the series’s creators that the
resulting ambiguities were ultimately more satisfying than a litany of
explicit answers. The Wire’s final season is seen by most fans and critics
as a step down from the heights of seasons 3 and 4, as its hyperreal-
ism is overshadowed by overtly unrealistic tales of fake serial killers and
lying newsmen. But the narrative strategies used to conclude both series
bear some important similarities and highlight a key technique used
in many serial endings: the inward turn toward metafiction. This strat-
egy highlights a series’s own storytelling strategies and frequently offers
moments that address the audience more directly than is typical within
otherwise realist modes of narration. We can see such tendencies play
out in previous generations of television finales, typically through trick
endings such as on St. Elsewhere or Newhart that rip the rug out from
our long-standing storyworlds by positing them as a fantasy or a dream,
respectively. Even programs that are less overtly metafictional frequently
design their final episodes to culminate with a final act of saying good-
bye to offer overt closure for both the characters and the audience, as
with M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore, and Cheers.
Among contemporary serials, key examples of meta finales include
Arrested Development, Seinfeld, and Six Feet Under. Arrested Develop-
ment’s final moments (at least in its original Fox airing prior to its 2013
resurrection) pay off the program’s many layers of reflexivity as Maeby
pitches her family’s story as a television series to Ron Howard, the nar-
rator and producer of the actual series; he rejects the pitch but suggests
that it might make a good movie, setting up the unrealized possibilities
of cinematic resurrection (but not predicting its actual serialized return
via Netflix). On Seinfeld, the main characters are put on trial for their
antisocial ways, providing a parade of old characters to testify against
their years of moral misconduct as chronicled on the series and thus
impaneling viewers as a jury to judge the virtue of misanthropic char-
acters we have spent years observing and potentially rooting for. Sein-
feld also offers a circular final moment echoing Jerry’s opening dialogue
from the pilot about the location of a shirt button, but now located in a
jail cell rather than a diner, providing a narrative special effect for atten-
tive viewers. For Six Feet Under, the powerful final minutes dramatize
the program’s underlying themes of mortality and grief by flashing for-
ward to the deaths of every character. Even though it lacks the overt
 Ends | 325

reflexivity of Newhart or Arrested Development, the finale places us in a

position both to emotionally engage with the characters’ final moments
and to reflect on the spectacular storytelling used to witness all of the
characters’ deaths in a style evoking the program’s long-standing “death
of the week” intrinsic norm. Such balance of attention between the
storyworld and the storytelling is typical of the operational aesthetic
of contemporary complex serials, and thus it is not surprising when a
series finale exhibits such tendencies.
Neither Lost nor The Wire use such overt reflexivity and narrative
play, but the metafictional elements within their final seasons might
retrospectively reframe some disappointments. One strategy that both
Lost and The Wire employ is what Carlton Cuse refers to in a DVD com-
mentary as “curtain calls.” With viewers having spent years with charac-
ters and in a fictional setting, final seasons offer a last chance to check in
with the people and places we have come to know, whether in the clunky
cameos featured in Seinfeld ’s final trial or in the more artful callbacks
gracing Six Feet Under’s final montage. On The Wire, the plot is stretched
to provide excuses to deliver single encore scenes for Avon, Prez, Nick
Sobatka, Randy, Namond, Bunny Colvin, Poot, and Cutty, as well as to
visit locales from earlier seasons, such as the docks, Edward Tilghman
Middle School, and the boxing gym. Callbacks can also be used more
subtly as rewards for viewers paying close attention, as with the dock
worker Johnny Fifty appearing briefly as a homeless man. While such
scenes and moments are far from organic to the season’s main storylines
or character arcs, the pleasures of recognition and remembrance can
outweigh the longing for tight plotting, as many season 5 viewers high-
light such curtain calls as one of the season’s high points.
Curtain calls highlight a series’s storytelling mechanics via the opera-
tional aesthetic without taking us away from the dramatic pleasures of
seeing characters reappear, often with great emotional resonances, as
with Randy’s return as a hardened bully. Lost embraces a similar empha-
sis on returning to past people and places as part of the final season’s
thematic emphasis on remembering and letting go. Thus we get a guided
tour of the island, returning to locations such as the caves, the beach,
the Hydra cages, and “New Otherton,” but framed by the characters
themselves articulating their memories of such places. These moments
are designed to remind us of where we have been over the years of the
326 | Ends

series, as well as to offer a bit of closure paralleling the characters’ expe-

riences of coming to terms with their pasts and future fates — we wit-
ness characters remembering their past experiences in each locale as a
reflected proxy of our own narrative memories.
On both The Wire and Lost, many old characters are deceased and
thus unavailable for a traditional curtain call. The former uses the genre-
appropriate device of a quick montage of crime photos in the opening
credits to offer split-second curtain calls for many deceased characters,
a strategy similarly employed by Breaking Bad ’s montage of Hank look-
ing at mug shots of deceased characters in the final season. Mixed in
with these photos in The Wire’s credits is a portrait of Officer Ray Cole,
a minor character on the series but played by executive producer Robert
Colesbury, who died during preproduction for the third season; Cole’s
continued visual presence in the credit sequence is both an homage
from the producers and a shout-out to knowledgeable viewers who both
remember the minor character and know about Colesbury’s off-camera
role in the series.
Lost takes advantage of its broader generic palette to bring back fallen
characters in a variety of ways. Hurley’s inexplicable ability to speak to
the dead allows Michael to return as a ghostly cameo on the island, serv-
ing as a spectral source of mythological answers concerning the role of
whispers and spirits on the island. But the bulk of the dead cameos occur
off-island through the sixth season’s new narrative device of the “flash-
sideways” world, as more than 15 previously dead characters appear in
this universe, whose relationship to the main storyworld remains mys-
terious until the finale’s final moments. It is this sideways world where
Lost’s final season most directly embraces its brand of metafiction. For
the entire season, the sideways stories function as a new mystery for a
series already burdened with layered enigmas; however, the sideways
mystery is of a different order than the identities of Adam and Eve or
the origins of the four-toed statue. For most of season 6, the sideways
realm poses an epistemological enigma as to what the world is and how
it relates to the storyworld where we have spent five years, with the most
widely held hypothesis being that the detonation of a nuclear bomb at
the end of the fifth season created a parallel alternative universe where
the island was destroyed in 1977. However, at the end of “The End,” we
learn that the sideways realm is actually a transitional afterlife for the
 Ends | 327

characters. As Jack’s dead father, Christian, explains to him in Lost’s final

scene, “This is the place that you all made together, so that you could
find one another. The most important part of your life was the time
that you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here. Nobody
does it alone, Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you . . . to
remember and to let go.” As an emotional denouement to the series, this
resolution worked well for me and many others to provide closure and
help us viewers let go. But as a coherent explanation for what we had
spent the past season watching, it requires a bit more unpacking.
For most of season 6, the sideways stories function as an extended
narrative game of “What If?” giving us a chance to imagine different
narrative arcs for our beloved castaways had they never crashed on the
island and been swayed by Jacob’s mystical influence. As discussed in
chapter 9, Lost’s transmedia extensions typically operated with a “What
Is” logic of canon or pseudo-canon, but it is within the series itself that
Lost most directly explores a “What If?” impulse via this sideways realm.
Many of these parallel possibilities are fun hypothetical storyworlds —
fans were quick to imagine a spin-off series with Miles and Sawyer as
rogue cops, as inspired by the episode “Recon” — but it is unclear how
such playful narrative alternatives might help characters who are rec-
onciling their pasts and coming together as a community to move on
to the afterlife, per Christian’s final explanation. Some stories are more
thematically relevant than others, as Jack becoming a father as a means
to reconcile his own “daddy issues” makes more thematic sense than
Kate continuing to be a fugitive on the run. But they all provide viewers
an opportunity to see a long-beloved character in a somewhat new light,
and often playing out fantasy scenarios concerning relationships with
other characters, such as Ben Linus serving as a loving mentor for Alex,
his daughter whom he sacrificed in the main time line. As discussed
in chapter 4, even though Lost is most renowned for its elaborate enig-
mas and ludic plotting, its producers consider its characters and their
relationships as the program’s core appeal, and thus it is not surprising
that the final season’s narrative innovation prioritized emotional payoffs
regarding characters over plot coherence.
An unsympathetic reading is that Lost’s sideways storyline is a cheat,
designed to mislead the audience into assuming it was a parallel universe
in which the island did not exist but revealed in the end to be internally
328 | Ends

incoherent without resorting to a higher power. My more sympathetic

reading acknowledges that it is a cheat but views the payoff as more the-
matically coherent than narratively motivated. As viewers, we hope that
we got to spend the most important parts of these characters’ lives with
them and want to believe that our connection to them mattered. We also
enjoyed spinning theories in search of coherence within a fantasy narra-
tive that often made little logical sense, and the sideways world was our
last opportunity to play such interpretive games. The sideways world
is Lost’s embedded metafiction, the rumination on why we enjoyed
spending time with these characters, a celebration of the series’s shaggy
mélange of genre influences and diverting puzzles, and a delivery system
of moments of emotional engagement to pierce through its silly but fun
pulpy narrative. Looking back from the finale, it becomes clear that the
entirety of season 6 worked to refocus our attention on the characters
and away from the mythology, for both the characters themselves and
the viewers, providing the wish fulfillment of a happy ending and the
joy of returning departed friends and reunited relationships without the
baggage of the island’s mysteries. In the finale’s closing moments, Chris-
tian Shephard is talking to us viewers, saying that this world is what we
would make if we imagined new “What If?” tales for our heroes, func-
tioning as a form of embedded fan fiction. The fact that it cheats to let us
spend more time with dead characters and debate possible theories on
Lostpedia does not matter — and ultimately the purpose of fiction is not
to pass a test of logical coherence but to keep us emotionally engaged
and entertained.
Fans and critics reacted to the hyped Lost finale with a huge range of
responses. A vocal contingent decried the overtly sentimental episode,
protested the lack of overt answers, and scoffed at the religious cop-out
to explain the sideways universe. The critic Emily Nussbaum sums up
fans’ disenchantment, calling the sideways world “a mystical way sta-
tion, like weak fan fiction with a therapeutic kick,” and accusing the
series of becoming too involved with itself: “But by the end of its run,
Lost, for all its dorm-room chatter about good and evil, had become
something different: It was a hit series about the difficulties of finding
an ending to a hit series. Cuselof [i.e., Cuse and Lindelof] had a dead-
line for years, which should have allowed them to pace out their puzzle’s
solutions. Instead, we got cheesy temple vamping and a bereavement
 Ends | 329

Holodeck. It became a show about placating, even sedating, fans, con-

vincing them that, in the absence of anything coherent or challenging,
love was enough.”6
But for many fans, love was enough, especially when peppered
with speculative metafiction. The finale used the “What If?” sideways
realm to deliver moments that many fans yearned for but the “reality”
of the narrative denied: Charlie and Claire reuniting over the birth of
Aaron; Sawyer reconnecting with his dead lover, Juliet; Ben apologizing
to Locke for killing him. The sideways world is an extended bit of fan
service, delivering character confrontations, romantic pleasures, and a
sandbox for theoretical speculation as a reminder of what made us love
Lost for years and highlighting how in the end (and “The End”), it was
not about resolving the mysteries as much as enjoying the time spent
watching together. Lost’s ludic, enigma-driven approach to storytelling
turned out to be less central than was typically thought. Instead, the
series was about how flawed people could establish relationships and a
community to discover themselves, to explore their beliefs, and to ulti-
mately make choices that were noble and/or damaging to themselves
and others. The mythology was the backdrop for this human drama, and
it provided much fun for fans to puzzle out over six seasons; however,
ultimately the mysteries of the island were designed not to be answered
but rather to facilitate the character arcs and to maximize Lost’s enter-
tainment value.
The Wire had grander purposes beyond just entertainment, working
as fictionalized journalism to shine a light on urban conditions that are
rarely explored in any medium. The metafiction of The Wire is both
more clearly articulated and less likely than on Lost, as the program’s
realist ethos and avoidance of self-conscious storytelling techniques
would seem to make it an unlikely candidate for any form of overt
reflexivity. Yet the fifth season featured two major intertwined plotlines
focusing on the theme of storytelling and the lines between fiction and
truth: the lying journalist Scott Templeton and Jimmy McNulty’s fake
serial killer. For many critics of the final season, this focus on unrealistic
and unlikely scenarios seemed like a distraction from The Wire’s tradi-
tion of realist storytelling and social engagement. But through the lens
of metafiction, these plotlines reinforce the series’s function as a site of
social realism and critique.
330 | Ends

For McNulty, the big lie of the serial killer is a necessary fiction to gain
the attention and resources needed to address the truth of the drug boss
Marlo Stanfield’s orchestrated killing spree, and we watch as he experi-
ments with various narrative strategies to hook his bosses on his whop-
per of a tale. For the newsroom storyline, Templeton’s escalating lies
reveal the commercial and editorial pressures that cause journalism to
miss the real news and focus on either simplistic or sensational stories,
regardless of their social importance or actual truth value. Together, the
two storylines of the season ask us to think about the boundary between
truth and fiction and, more centrally, to question how we know what we
know. It is clear that if we only relied on the Baltimore Sun, we would not
know the stories of the how drug dealers organize distribution and exert
political influence, how the dockworkers’ union fights to sustain itself in
the wake of deindustrialization, how a rigged system against urban kids
creates casualties out of the most promising students, or how corrup-
tion at City Hall jukes the stats for political gain. It is only through the
fiction of The Wire that these true stories (or at least stories grounded in
larger truths) of Baltimore are told, and we watch the newspaper miss
the truths that matter.
Season 5 asks us to reflect on the process of storytelling and our own
culpability in privileging the big lie. The season’s most meta moment,
from the episode “Unconfirmed Reports,” portrays the newspaper edi-
tors debating how best to tell the story of the city’s failing schools. The
heroic editor Gus Haynes argues for a series of articles showing the
interconnectedness between institutions rather than just “beating up”
on the schools, saying, “I think you need a lot of context to seriously
examine anything,” a line that could serve as a mission statement for The
Wire itself. But the villainous publisher James Whiting warns against
ending up with “an amorphous series detailing society’s ills,” a succinct
negative gloss on what some skeptics might say the series amounts to.
This metacommentary extends as McNulty’s serial killer stands in for
the sensationalist crime dramas that get ratings buzz, with allusions to
series such as CSI and Dexter peppered throughout the season, while
Bunk’s Wire-like “real police work” goes unnoticed and underfunded.
Meanwhile Templeton wins awards for his lies while Gus and Alma are
demoted for their refusal to play along, a not-so-veiled commentary
 Ends | 331

on The Wire’s lack of Emmys and other industry accolades that had
been given to more conventional fictions. The final season portrays the
downfalls of the gangsters Proposition Joe and Omar Little, while the
Sun misses both stories and chooses not to cover their deaths. The sea-
son’s most emotionally powerful story, Bubbles’s recovery, is highlighted
by the rare act of quality journalism in the form of a long-form narrative
feature, but we can appreciate his understated triumph in climbing his
sister’s stairs only through the lens of fictional drama.
Thus the unrealistic exaggerations of season 5 only make sense in
the context of the series’s metafictional ruminations on how television
drama can serve a journalistic function in today’s media environment.7
Clearly David Simon is not arguing that this is a good thing, as his back-
ground as a newspaperman suggests that he yearns for the good old
days of well-staffed newsrooms doggedly pursuing stories, as evoked
through references to H. L. Mencken and stories shared by grizzled old
journalists. Thus The Wire frames its own journalistic acumen within
the realm of farce, mocking the excesses that McNulty and Templeton
must go through to create their fictions, while winking at the audience
for recognizing the extremities: the only way to get anyone to notice a
crime story is to make it stretch beyond credulity, a critique aimed at
both newspapers and television fiction. The Wire always was willing to
stretch the bounds of credulity for the sake of addressing a larger truth,
whether in Stringer’s attempt to run drug meetings via Robert’s Rules
of Order or Major Colvin’s outlandishly maverick move in creating
Hamsterdam. The series embraces such hyperbole for grand statements
but always ties them to the human costs — the drawn-out sequence of
McNulty kidnapping and relocating a disabled homeless man in the
reflexively named episode “The Dickensian Aspect” is shocking in
its extremity but ultimately demonstrates how much Jimmy and Les-
ter have fallen, dehumanized by their attempts to fight the good fight
against an intractable system.
While Lost’s final episode foregrounds its own storytelling mechanics
and possibilities, The Wire’s finale avoids breaking its realist frame for
anything so overtly metafictional. Yet it still highlights storytelling as a
crucial facet of social engagement, offering numerous moments when
characters are forced to reckon with their own narrative arcs and the
332 | Ends

stories that people tell about them. Bubbles learns to accept the news-
paper profile that Fletcher wrote about him, allowing it to be published
as an act of humility and acceptance on his road to recovery. Daniels
sacrifices his police career because of his unwillingness to buy into the
fabrications of the “stat game,” drawing the line on what stories he is
willing to tell. Marlo attempts to move forward under the new character
of a legitimate businessman but finds that he is unable to break from his
corner-based story, falling back into his old patterns. McNulty leaves
the police force with a staged wake, with Landsman colorfully retell-
ing his story as “natural police.” And finally the cyclical nature of Balti-
more’s institutions and crises sees the same stories being replayed with a
new generation of characters, with Sydnor as the new McNulty, Michael
taking over Omar’s role, Fletcher getting Gus’s old job, and most tragi-
cally, Dukie following in Bubbles’s drug-using tracks. While The Wire
never overtly acknowledges its own storytelling mechanics, it clearly is
self-consciously concluding and working to offer closure that themati-
cally resonates with its own meditations on storytelling, journalism, and
using fiction to portray truths.
For both Lost and The Wire, the atypical storylines and structures of
their final seasons are best appreciated as reflections in their own nar-
rative mirrors. But why do serials seem to embrace the meta so often in
their final seasons? In part, creators seem to become hostages to their
own storyworlds, so embedded in the process of storytelling that they
feel the need to use fiction as an outlet to explore their own processes
of letting go of their narratives, as well as to offer closing arguments for
the relevance and missions of their programs. This connects to the role
of hype in promoting finales and generally fueling ongoing serial nar-
rative — unlike stand-alone fictional forms such as films or novels, the
creative processes of serial television occur in parallel with viewers’ and
critics’ reaction. Hype and reception discourses help shape expectations
for both viewers and creators, and thus the pressure to stick the landing
seems to matter more for an ongoing serial. The metafictional finale is
a key example of how producers come to terms with the ends of their
storyworlds as shaped by years of cultural circulation and conversation
that are unique to the serial form. And no finale generated more conver-
sation and debate than the landmark HBO series The Sopranos.
 Ends | 333

He’s Dead to Me: Debating the Ending of The Sopranos

On June 10, 2007, The Sopranos legendarily ended with a scene of Tony’s
immediate family eating in a diner and listening to the Journey song
“Don’t Stop Believin’,” before cutting to a silent black screen for 10 sec-
onds preceding its final credits. This edit is a narrative special effect
played in reverse, an antispectacle offering a moment of spectacular
storytelling. If traditional special effects push screen and sound sys-
tems to their limits, this cut to black suggested technological failure,
inviting many viewers to surmise that their cable had gotten discon-
nected or their televisions had died at the least opportune moment. This
moment of dead air was certainly the most analyzed and debated edit in
the program’s history and one of the most contentious endings in tele-
vision history. Looking at the sequence and the debates it inspired helps
explain the functions of finales and The Sopranos’ role in contemporary
television storytelling.
As a whole, The Sopranos is less immersed in the culture of forensic
fandom and online television debate than many other programs dis-
cussed in this book. In large part, this stems from its casual attitude
toward serial plotting; as discussed in chapter 1, the series embraces
more episodic plots than most prime time serials and often allows
itself to pursue digressions and fantasy sequences in lieu of narrative
enigmas, mysteries, or even plot-driven curiosity questions. More than
most complex television series, The Sopranos invites interpretation for
theme or symbolism but not the mysteries, structural games, or serial
builds toward narrative climaxes that typify many comparable dramas
with more robust online fan bases. Thus it is quite surprising that the
last scene in the entire series prompted such an outpouring of forensic
fandom trying to discern what it meant in terms of both basic narra-
tive comprehension and thematic significance. And appropriately as this
book’s conclusive case study, the analysis takes us back to the most basic
concept of narrative analysis that was discussed in the introduction: the
distinction between story and narrative discourse.
Much of the motivation to understand the finale was driven by the
episode’s status as a highly hyped finale, with viewers knowing full well
that the series was ending and thus expecting a conclusive sense of
334 | Ends

finality or at least some closure, rather than the ambiguous and open-
ended cut to black that “Made in America” delivered. It was not surpris-
ing that the final scene took place over a family meal, as the first three
season of The Sopranos similarly concluded with somewhat anticlimac-
tic moments of familial dining; what was surprising was that rather than
fading to black or offering a memorable final image, the only violence
portrayed was to the typical formal devices of television editing, as the
midmoment cut to silent blackness felt like a violation of the medium’s
norms and expectations. Since serial storytelling thrives on the gaps
between episodes to encourage conversation and interpretation, the lack
of a next chapter after such an unusual moment encouraged viewers to
fill the lack of forthcoming storytelling and authorial explanation with
their own speculations and analyses. Even though the final season of
The Sopranos did not embrace metastorytelling as much as Lost and The
Wire did, this final moment encouraged viewers to reassess how the nar-
rative had led to this point and what it might mean at the level of both
story and discourse.
Viewers developed a range of explanations to make sense of this
unconventional ending. The most immediate reaction seems to have
been an assumption of technical failure, such as broken televisions or
disconnected cable; while obviously incorrect, this is also a justified
reaction, as such an extreme violation of media norms leads people to
assume that it was some sort of error, not a choice to intentionally break
the rules. Of course, it is an intentional edit, not an arbitrary one, occur-
ring precisely as Tony looks up to see Meadow entering the diner (pre-
sumably) and as the Journey song offers the lyrics “don’t stop” one last
time. Notably, creator David Chase wanted to end the episode with 30
seconds of blackness, eliminating all credits until the final HBO bum-
per, but both HBO and the Directors Guild vetoed the idea of forgoing
closing credits.8 Instead, the 10 seconds of black served as enough of a
gap to create technological panic among viewers but without eliminat-
ing all vestiges of a normal episode ending. Chase’s desire to extend the
black screen does suggest that the blackness signifies something, not just
demarcating the end of the story — a distinction that becomes crucial for
subsequent debates over the ending.
Once a viewer realizes that the black screen is not a technical glitch
but an artistic choice, the key question in order to make sense of The
 Ends | 335

Sopranos’ ending is whether the cut to black signifies anything within

the storyworld itself or just at the level of storytelling. There is no doubt
that it is significant at the level of narrative discourse, signaling the end
of the program’s active narration and manifesting an absence of audio
and visual information to cue viewers that there will be no more story-
telling to come. This absence is so provocatively asserted that it needs to
be understood and analyzed as a shot itself, a presence of nothingness
rather than a default null state lacking content and form. In the abrupt
shift from Tony to blackness, from Steve Perry’s singing voice to silence,
nothing happens overtly at the level of story; however, at the level of
storytelling, this “nothing” happens actively and insistently — we notice
this nothingness, with the sequence rubbing our noses in the intermi-
nable gap between images of Tony and the first credit. So what does the
nothingness mean?
Following ideas explored in chapter 3, we might attribute this moment
to a distinct message from David Chase, or at least our notion of Chase
as the text’s inferred authorial function, to his viewers: many took the
ending as a direct attack on viewers’ desire for closure, justice, or a moral
message, providing instead a lack of a conclusion out of a spiteful con-
tempt for norms of narrative pleasure and television viewing expecta-
tions. Although Chase has been oblique in discussing the finale, he has
vehemently denied that he would use his final moment to be contemp-
tuous or audacious toward the audience but rather has insisted that his
goal was always to “entertain them.”9 Nonetheless, the choice to violate
the norms and expectations of television storytelling was interpreted by
many people as an audacious and aggressive “screw you” to viewers and
their preconceived notions of closure, rather than providing what fans
had come to expect throughout the series.
A variant on the reading of the abrupt cut as an act of aggression
against fans is to frame it as a rupture to viewing norms, not out of con-
tempt for viewers but to get them to feel the ending as a sudden demise
through the episode’s sudden cessation. As critic Matt Zoller Seitz sums
up this position, “The lack of resolution — the absolute and deliber-
ate failure, or more accurately, refusal, to end this thing — was exactly
right. It felt more violent, more disturbing, more unfair than even the
most savage murders Chase has depicted over the course of six sea-
sons, because the victim was us. He ended the series by whacking the
336 | Ends

viewer.”10 Under this interpretation, any concluding moment in a story

is as arbitrary as the next. There is always more story to tell, and any
conclusive ending is an illusion; thus the decision to end in the midst
of the diner sequence is as valid as any other: abrupt and jarring but
ultimately no less conclusive than any other arbitrary “resolution.” In
other words, it is a way of stopping, but not ending, the story, via an
abrupt end to the storytelling. Taken to a broader level, this is a bold
critique of the arbitrary structures of serial narration and a refusal to
comply with the medium’s expectations and norms, a skeptical attitude
toward television that The Sopranos consistently offered. The ending’s
arbitrariness stems from how the narrative stoppage is not connected to
any event in the storyworld, as the scene is framed as uneventful despite
the sense of menace and danger produced by taut editing coupled with
viewers’ expectations that the final moment is pending. The key action
is at the level of narrative discourse, where the violent act is commit-
ted at the cost of viewers’ knowledge and comprehension — Tony’s story
could continue in a wide range of possibilities, but we are not able to
experience it anymore after we are “whacked.” It is an act of aggressively
ambiguous storytelling, refusing any clarity or motivation concerning
what happens subsequently in the story.
Of course, another widespread interpretation does argue that the cut
to black is motivated by story events: namely, that we are witnessing
Tony’s death from his point of view. This analysis has been promoted
by many viewers, most notably in copious detail by the pseudony-
mous “Master of Sopranos” in his epic forensic fan blog called “Defini-
tive Explanation of ‘The End.’ ” In more than 45,000 words, Master of
Sopranos attempts to prove, without any ambiguity, that “Tony’s death
is the only ending that makes sense.”11 This argument relies primarily
on formal analysis of continuity editing to suggest that the cut to black
is Tony’s point of view upon being shot in the diner, supported by the-
matic and symbolic markers found throughout the episode and numer-
ous cues earlier in the season that frame death as a surprise absence,
such as Bobby’s twice-repeated line “You probably don’t even hear it
when it happens.” The argument is so detailed and well supported that
it is hard to imagine reading it and not being convinced that if there is
a story motivation for the final edit, it is only explicable as Tony’s final
moments of life.
 Ends | 337

The reason why the debate continues years after the episode aired is
because some people find the attempt to be so “definitive” in an expli-
cation to be working against the ambiguity that Chase seems to have
designed as the finale’s legacy — as the critic Todd VanDerWerff sug-
gests, accepting this interpretation “robs the mystery out of a series that
was always replete with it, and it forces things that could mean many
things to mean only one thing.”12 The series as a whole embraces ambi-
guity and openness to thematic interpretation and occasionally a lack
of narrative clarity as to what precisely happened, so attempting to be
definitive does seem counter to its intrinsic norms. However, the final
moments of any finale are clearly atypical, as a conclusion always begs
further reflection, contemplation, and, in the case of such ambiguity,
analytical interpretation. There is no doubt that the final sequence is
designed to be nonobvious in its meaning; the lingering question is
whether it can be read as obliquely suggesting a conclusive set of nar-
rative events (Tony’s death) or must remain openly ambiguous with the
cut to black belonging solely to the level of narrative discourse.
Personally, I do interpret the final sequence as portraying Tony’s
death, although not with the “definitive” weight that some forensic
fans insist on, but with the oblique presentation adding to its narrative
effect. For advocates of ambiguity, such as VanDerWerff and Seitz, the
moral ethos of The Sopranos points away from the rendering of a final
death. Seitz writes, “Chase spent eight years railing against films and
TV shows about violent criminals that absolved viewers of feelings of
guilt and complicity by showing the hero being led away in handcuffs
or shot down in the street. Why would he then reverse course in the
final moments of the final episode and kill Tony? And if what we were
looking at was indeed a killing of that specific character, why was it pre-
sented in an arty, confusing way?”13 However, I contend that the scene’s
oblique narrative form of presenting Tony’s murder works to avoid this
moral conundrum by distancing viewers from such emotional reactions,
which Chase clearly worked to avoid.
The “arty, confusing” presentation avoids the trap that Seitz articu-
lates: if we saw Tony’s death, we could absolve ourselves from years of
witnessing his atrocities and even revel in the blood lust as a sense of ret-
ribution. If we saw Tony’s body, some viewers might feel moral superior-
ity over the fallen criminal, while others might experience grief for our
338 | Ends

protagonist or pity for his family witnessing the assassination —but none
of these emotional responses fit with the ambiguous attitude the series
had fostered toward the main character. Instead, we feel no emotional
reactions to Tony’s death because we do not even realize that it happens
until after analytic reflection and analysis. We arrive at the realization of
his death at an analytic distance so that we are not emotionally tied up in
the storyworld: we are not present in the diner with the family and thus
do not experience their moment of loss. We have already had a moment
of mourning, but the grief is over the loss of the series, not the character.
Viewers experience The Sopranos as less morally ambiguous than the
character of Tony Soprano, and thus we can feel grief and loss over the
end of the series without either being complicit in or feeling moralisti-
cally superior toward Tony’s crimes.
The abrupt termination of the series and Tony’s life distances us from
the storyworld by keeping us at the meta level of narrative discourse,
and it is there that we experience the five stages of grief: we deny the
ending by blaming it on the cable company; we grow angry at Chase for
denying us closure; we bargain by seeking out clues and rational expla-
nations; we become depressed that there is no clear answer forthcoming;
we accept the inevitable that the series has ended and that life (and tele-
vision) must go on. Our emotions are focused at the level of the inferred
author Chase and his storytelling, not Tony and his story. This is Chase’s
ultimate victory, as he managed to kill off his hero without allowing the
audience to fall into any conventional emotional traps, but still create a
visceral and engaged emotional reaction to the finale.
Or perhaps he did not, and Tony’s story continued after the storytell-
ing stopped. The risk of The Sopranos’ experimental ending was that it
teased the possibility that conclusions do not matter, that they are arbi-
trary and ambiguous rather than final and conclusive — HBO threw a
party for the series finale, but the guest of honor disappeared before
the celebratory toast. Some viewers embraced that openness and refusal
to conclude, while others sought a sense of narrative clarity amid the
ambiguity. Either way, the finale highlights the degree to which endings
matter in serial television, serving as the lasting image (or lack thereof)
that will be remembered and discussed long after the rest of the series
fades from memory.
 Ends | 339

The Ends of Serial Criticism

Reflecting on ends is quite an appropriate topic for the conclusion of
this book, serving as another example of a serially authored text turning
inward upon arriving at its end. As argued earlier, television creators
seem to become hostages to their own storyworlds by the final season,
so embedded in the process of storytelling that they feel the need to use
fiction as an outlet to explore their own experiences, as well as offering
closing arguments to prove the relevance and mission of their series.
The metafictional finale is one way that producers come to terms with
the ends of their storyworlds, which have been shaped by years of cul-
tural circulation and conversation that are distinctive to the serial form.
While the conclusion to Complex TV is far less hyped or even noticed
than a television finale, I do feel like I am being held captive by my proj-
ect, and the only way out is through the mirror of the meta.
So what are the ends of serial criticism? For most scholars analyzing a
media text, typical core research questions are “what does it mean?” and
“why does it matter?” Such analyses explore the political meanings of a
text in terms of representations, ideologies, and competing positions on
issues of cultural importance. Those textual meanings can be contextu-
alized within the larger cultural field of contemporary capitalism, class
struggle, identity categories, and political power to highlight why such
moments matter beyond just representations within a television series.
As discussed in the introduction, these are important issues of culture
and politics that certainly do matter and deserve their central place in
the field of media studies. However, these are not the questions that have
motivated my work in Complex TV.
Instead, I have focused on two related but distinct questions: “how
does it mean?” and “how does it matter?” To answer the first question,
I use historical poetics to understand the formal storytelling techniques
employed by television series, placing those choices in the contexts of
the industry and its creative personnel to understand why meaning
making happens the way it does in these televisual texts. The second
question focuses on the cultural circulation of these programs, consider-
ing how critics, viewers, and fans continue serial television’s signification
beyond the texts themselves — at times, such circulation makes series
340 | Ends

“matter” in the explicitly material sense, creating paratexts that further

the processes of meaning making. By fusing historical poetics and cul-
tural studies, I have tried to offer a better understanding of how serial
television programs work as both aesthetic texts and cultural practices.
For some critics, these questions are sufficient, providing ample room
to explore issues of form and function that seem significant for tele-
vision seriality. However, many media scholars conceive of the field as
exclusively dedicated to uncovering meaning and analyzing cultural pol-
itics, and thus a project that focuses on the “how” as its end goal is insuf-
ficient unless used as a means toward answering other questions. I find
myself at a middle ground in this debate — I am sufficiently interested
in the “how” to dedicate this book to studying poetics and practices but
believe that questions of meaning and power are important enough to
want them to be part of my scholarly equation. I see the historical poetic
approach I have been exploring as both an end in itself and a means to
get toward different ends.
So in the book’s final pages, I want to shift goals to consider how we
might apply some of the ideas I have explored in the rest of the book to
address questions of power and politics. Thus I will shuffle these ques-
tions into two new ones: “what does it mean through how it means?”
and “why does it matter through how it matters?” In other words, how
can we use historical poetics and cultural circulation to explore ques-
tions of political meaning and social significance? Uncontroversially, I
believe that having a more robust account of how television storytell-
ing works should give us a deeper understanding of its meanings and
cultural power, but as I will demonstrate, accounting for the formal
mechanics and cultural practices of seriality makes politicized textual
analysis much more complex.
To explore political interpretation, consider the opening segment
of Homeland ’s first-season finale, “Marine One,” which aired on the
premium cable channel Showtime on December 18, 2011. The episode
begins with a single-take video testimonial that Sergeant Nick Brody is
making to explain why he plans to die as a suicide bomber while kill-
ing numerous American politicians and military personnel as part of a
conspiracy led by a radical Middle Eastern terrorist. Staring directly into
the camera, he says the following:
 Ends | 341

My name is Nicholas Brody and I’m a sergeant in the United States

Marine Corps. I have a wife and two kids, who I love. By the time you
watch this, you’ll have read a lot of things about me, about what I’ve done.
And so I wanted to explain myself, so that you’ll know the truth. On May
19, 2003, as part of a two-man sniper team serving in Operation Iraqi
Freedom, I was taken prisoner by forces loyal to Saddam Hussein. Those
forces then sold me to an Al-Qaeda commander, Abu Nazir, who was
operating a terrorist cell from across the Syrian border, where I was held
captive for more than eight years. I was beaten, I was tortured, and I was
subjected to long periods of total isolation. People will say I was broken, I
was brainwashed. People will say that I was turned into a terrorist, taught
to hate my country. I love my country. What I am is a Marine, like my
father before me and his father before him, and as a Marine, I swore an
oath to defend the United States of America against enemies both foreign
and domestic. My action this day is against such domestic enemies: the
vice president and members of his national security team, who I know
to be liars and war criminals responsible for atrocities they were never
held accountable for. This is about justice for 82 children whose deaths
were never acknowledged and whose murder is a stain on the soul of
this nation.

The video then cuts off as the episode continues onto a conventionally
shot and edited scene.
To try to make sense of this sequence, we need to consider it in mul-
tiple contexts, as that is certainly how it might be variably consumed.
For a few viewers, this may have been the first episode of Homeland
they had seen, making for quite a confusing viewing experience.
Assuming that such a novice viewer recognizes it as belonging to a
fictional program, the clip is still marked as “authentic” via excessive
mediation — visible viewfinder symbols, a red “Record” indicator, the
black-and-white image, and the direct address to the camera all con-
note that this is actuality footage being made within the storyworld.
Brody’s tone and emotional intensity convey that he is telling the truth
or at least what he believes to be true. And if true, it is quite a radical
political statement: accusing the vice president of being a war criminal,
responsible for mass killing children and covering up their deaths, and
342 | Ends

claiming that the patriotic duty of a U.S. Marine is to commit an act of

violent retribution.
Of course, most viewers saw (or will see) this footage in a broader
context following 11 hours of storytelling, stretched out over two months
of screen time (or less if consumed after its initial airing). Throughout
the season leading up to this moment, we questioned whether Brody
had been turned to work for his captors, witnessed his conversion to
and faithful practice of Islam, saw via flashback the brutality inflicted on
Brody during his captivity, and eventually discovered his plot to become
a suicide bomber against Vice President Walden. Most importantly for
this sequence, we witnessed the event that turns him firmly against his
government via flashback: a U.S. drone bombing that destroys a school
in Syria and kills 82 children, including the terrorist leader Abu Nazir’s
son Issa, whom Brody had lived with as his teacher and friend. After the
attack, Nazir shows Brody the vice president’s news conference where he
denies that any children had been wounded in the bombing, thus inspir-
ing Brody’s act of vengeance. For viewers like myself, this serial context
validates Brody’s statements and beliefs such that his video declaration
of patriotism through terrorism rings emotionally true in a fashion that
seems utterly out of place on commercial American television.
The original airing of Homeland ’s first season in fall 2011 marked the
first time that many of its viewers had seen the issue of drone strikes
debated on American television — press coverage of the issue was quite
marginal within U.S. media, growing some in frequency and depth of
coverage in late 2011 after one high-profile strike, but it still remained a
specialized “fringe” issue reaching only dedicated news consumers until
it became more openly debated in 2013.14 By dramatizing a drone strike,
visualizing the deaths of innocent children, and having a sympathetic,
white American character empathize with the Arab victims, Homeland
offers dramatic fuel for a dissenting view against American military
action that was typically found only on the extreme antiwar left and
never on mainstream television.
In this context, what is the political meaning of this clip? As it begins
the episode, it is a shocking moment of emotionally motivated outrage,
giving legitimacy to the perspective of terrorists who see themselves
as victims of terrorism carried out by the American military. We have
come to care about Brody as a character, seeing him as deeply flawed
 Ends | 343

and (despite his denial in the video) broken but also justified to take
extreme action against a corrupt and arguably criminal administration,
thus marking this video as a radical statement that viewers are invited
to endorse or at least consider as valid. However, the episode contin-
ues: Brody leaves the memory card containing his confessional video
for his terrorist allies and then carries out the plan to become a suicide
bomber to kill the vice president, the secretary of defense, CIA leaders,
and numerous other politicians, military personnel, and civil servants
within a military bunker. Brody does attempt to trigger the bomb, but
it fails; after repairing the bomb in the bathroom, he gets a phone call
from his teenage daughter, Dana, who inspires him to abandon his plan
in the name of family, as he realizes what his suicide attack would do
to his wife and children. The episode ends with Brody shifting plans
to become an agent of Nazir from within the government, rather than
violently disrupting it. This development serves the dramatic needs of
seriality, as it allows Brody to reappear next season as well as sustain-
ing the dual espionage and romance plots between Brody and Carrie
Mathison, the CIA agent who is convinced that he is a traitor. But it also
shifts the terms of Brody’s dissent away from the political and toward the
personal, as his familial connection to Dana eclipses his ties to his surro-
gate son, Issa. If the opening video frames an act of anti-American vio-
lence as the duty of a patriotic Marine, the episode’s conclusion counters
such radicalism to reframe Brody’s dissent as a simpler act of revenge
for a loved one’s death and shifts our allegiance back to Carrie and her
unquestionably patriotic pursuit of Brody and Nazir.
But season 1 is not the only context for this video, as it returned
nine months later (as originally aired) in Homeland ’s second season.
The video appears in five of that season’s 12 episodes, creating a serial-
ized ripple effect for everyone who watches it. In the season’s second
episode, the CIA division chief Saul Berenson discovers the video hid-
den among the belongings of a suspect in Beirut and shows it to Car-
rie in the next episode, who reacts with flooding emotion as she real-
izes that her discredited accusations against Brody were correct. The
fourth episode begins with Saul showing the video to his boss at the
CIA, David Estes, to confirm that Brody, who is now a congressman and
likely vice presidential candidate, is a traitor. In these reiterations of the
video, its meaning transforms from a statement of political dissent into
344 | Ends

a piece of evidence for U.S. agents fighting terrorism — the sentiments

that Brody expresses are irrelevant and not repeated on-screen, as all
that matters for the CIA is how they prove that Brody is a traitor who
must be stopped. The video’s radical politics are erased as it becomes
an object within the investigation, and the drama focuses on how the
agents will catch Brody and what the consequences of his betrayal
might be. In Robert Allen’s use of the terms, the video switches from
being a “syntagmatic” element that moves the plot forward to serving
as a “paradigmatic” element to trigger characters’ reactions and emo-
tions — and notably these reactions never consider Brody’s arguments
that resisting American military hegemony might be viewed as a form
of patriotism.15 The serial succession of characters viewing the video
invokes Homeland ’s reflexive impulse as established in early episodes, in
which viewers saw themselves mirrored in Carrie’s video surveillance of
Brody, emphasizing the central role that the act of watching characters
watch other characters in their most intimate and unguarded moments
plays in Homeland; regular viewers learn that such scenes depicting one
character watching another on a screen matter.
The fourth appearance of Brody’s video in the second season is when
Brody himself sees it in episode 5, “Q&A.” Captured by the CIA and
interrogated to learn what he knows, he is forced to watch his own con-
fession after denying any involvement with Abu Nazir or knowledge
of Issa; the scene is visualized here via the appropriately meta device
of surveillance cameras as we watch Carrie in the observation room
watch Brody watch himself on video. Viewing the video serves both as
a paradigmatic trigger for Brody’s emotional reaction to his own past
actions and as a plot device to create a compelling procedural game
for the rest of the episode to see how Brody and Carrie attempt to out-
manipulate each other. “Q&A” completes the video’s depoliticization, as
Carrie frames Brody’s betrayal within the realm of the personal, both
in his love for Issa and in Walden’s individual monstrosity for order-
ing and covering up the drone strike, but avoids the political debate of
whether the United States itself is culpable for such military action and
whether resisting such American dominance can be seen as noble. By
the end of the dramatically compelling episode, it is clear that Carrie and
her CIA colleagues are the good guys, Brody wants to redeem himself
by helping them, and the violence that should be decried is the acts of
 Ends | 345

individual “monsters” such as Vice President Walden and Abu Nazir, not
the broader military action of drone strikes.
The video’s final appearance in the second-season finale restores its
political function, but reinscribed into dominant hegemony: after the
CIA headquarters is bombed, Al-Qaeda releases the video to the U.S.
media to frame Brody for the attack, marking its radical sentiments as
clearly villainous and foreign by dissociating them from the sympathetic
character of Brody himself. This dissociation is reinforced as we watch
Brody’s family view the clip on television; his daughter Dana’s shock
and denial underscores the sense that this is not who Brody is now, if
he ever really had been. Brody himself, on the run with Carrie, sees
the video on television, reminding viewers of Brody’s current innocence
and ultimate refusal to undertake his original plan, while reinforcing
that the “real” terrorists are the foreign Arabs who released the video,
not the white Marine voicing dissent. The video does not appear in the
third season, which concludes Brody’s story arc by making him a secret
martyr in service of American intelligence but known publicly as the
terrorist responsible for destroying the CIA building.
So within these broader serial contexts, what is the political mean-
ing of Brody’s video? Is it a radical critique of American military policy,
an irrational statement by a grieving and broken man that might later
be retracted, or the ventriloquized voice of Arab terrorists speaking
through a brainwashed soldier? Each of these interpretations could be
correct, depending on when you ask — Homeland ’s serial time frame
changes the video’s meaning, even though the video itself remains static.
And this is the challenge of trying to analyze meaning in a serial text: it
changes as you watch it, or how it means shapes what it means. Its past
is not undone, for despite the later reframing of Brody’s video, its ini-
tial airing still conveyed a radical critique that does not fully disappear,
either within the storyworld or in the minds of viewers. Yet any attempt
to account for Homeland ’s political meanings must remain open and
unfinished until the series concludes, as it has demonstrated a willing-
ness to revisit and revise its politics quite drastically.
This need to wait for an end is not equally true of all series — it seems
pretty clear after the first season of The Wire or 24 which side of the
political fence each will be pitching its tent, but both do shift somewhat
over time concerning particular issues, such as gender representations
346 | Ends

or the role of ethnicity. But for a series like Homeland, whose politics are
more ambiguous and thus more in need of interpretation, any analysis
before it ends must be contingently grounded only within that moment
of storytelling, not an overall perspective. Such a need to wait for finality
is not because a conclusion provides ideological closure and thus resolu-
tion but because it simply means that there is no more time to revise and
resubmit its positions.16
We can understand these serial instances of political reframing
through the concept of articulation, as defined by Stuart Hall as both dis-
cursive utterances and politicized connections between distinct cultural
elements.17 Dominant forms of political ideology are forged by the con-
tingent linking of social practices to cultural meanings, which frequently
shift and transform within new contexts — Brody first articulates a ter-
rorist bombing to American patriotism, then Homeland rearticulates
the video to antiterrorist pursuits and eventually to condemn terrorism
and frame Brody as wrongly accused, solidifying the dominant notion
that terrorists are Arab foreigners, not white Marines. Serial articulation
depends on the practice of reiteration, in which repeating and refram-
ing helps define which linkages are maintained and discarded over the
course of a series, highlighting how the political interpretations of any
series are always subject to revision and recontextualization.
This mode of altering and revising a political perspective through
serial reiterations is not the only way that a meaning can be rearticulated
throughout a series. Another important factor is how distance reshapes
a narrative event over time. Take another serialized moment critiqu-
ing U.S. military policies: in the second-season Lost episode “One of
Them,” a flashback portrays Sayid’s service during the Persian Gulf War.
While we have known that he was in the military and functioned as a
torturer, in this episode we learn that he was trained, encouraged, and
paid to torture by the U.S. Army. When this episode aired in 2006, as
details of U.S. torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq were still coming to
light, mainstream media representations of the U.S. military condoning
torture were quite controversial and taboo, made even more so by the
suggestion that such policies dated back to the 1990s. Future episodes
of Lost never retracted, contradicted, or revised such political meanings
but simply ignored them: Sayid’s alliances with the U.S. military were
never referenced again, and that aspect of his history simply receded
 Ends | 347

into the background over the next 82 episodes. Most Lost fans likely
view this bit of narrative history as simply another detail in a vast sea of
character information, not a lasting political critique that significantly
shapes their view of either the series or U.S. military policy, suggesting
that serial storytelling can emphasize or ignore particular meanings sim-
ply by the amount of attention afforded to them through serial reitera-
tions and articulations.
The Homeland and Lost examples focus on the question of “how does
it mean?” as a factor in shaping a program’s politics, such that serial
poetics impact interpretation. To explore “how does it matter?” or the
ways that a program’s cultural circulation over the course of a series
shapes political significance, I return to an issue discussed in chapter
7: the gender politics of Breaking Bad. As argued in that chapter, focus-
ing our attention on the character of Skyler highlights the underlying
melodramatic cues running throughout the series, with Skyler slowly
revealing herself to be an abused spouse fearfully trying to protect her-
self and her kids from her monstrous husband, Walt. This perspective
comes into focus most clearly in the fifth season, such as in the episode
“Fifty-One,” in which she fakes a breakdown as a pretext to get her kids
out of the house and cowers from an aggressive, domineering Walt in
their bedroom. It is not a stretch to interpret such sequences and story
arcs as clearly inviting us to side with Skyler and to condemn Walt’s long
slide into amorality as destroying any sense of love and compassion he
may have once had for his wife.
However, the long arc of Walt’s perspective has inspired a large por-
tion of Breaking Bad ’s fans to dislike or even hate Skyler, treating her
as the series’s true villain — for one of many instances, a Facebook page
called “Fuck Skyler White” has more than 31,000 fans, with posts and
comments dripping with violent, misogynistic hatred. For such viewers,
their Skyler hate seems unwavering in the face of serial rearticulations,
prompting vitriolic comments in which they seem to be rooting for Walt
to abuse Skyler or worse and even extending such violent fantasies to
the actress Anna Gunn. Breaking Bad ’s creator Vince Gilligan has stated
his perspective on this issue, calling the Internet’s den of Skyler haters
“misogynists, plain and simple,” and suggesting that he sees no other
way to justify such antipathy toward a character who is often a voice
of reason in the face of Walt’s amoral selfishness.18 Anna Gunn took
348 | Ends

her defense a step further via the unprecedented step in writing a New
York Times editorial decrying the anti-Skyler vitriol and calling out the
misogyny expressed via such fan hatred. As Gunn suggests, “Because
Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female,
she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our
attitudes toward gender.”19 The series itself critiques Skyler hate by
putting the misogynistic words of these viewers in Walt’s mouth, hav-
ing him perform them at the character’s peak of evil and hatred in the
nuanced phone call from the episode “Ozymandias.” This mirror found
its reflection on anti-Skyler Facebook pages, with comments such as, “I
climaxed when Heisenberg called Skyler a stupid bitch. I’ve been waiting
five seasons for that.” Needless to say, not all fans perceived the phone
call as multilayered.
However, we cannot dismiss anti-Skyler sentiments as simple mis-
readings, whether driven by misogyny or more reasonable perspectives.
We must acknowledge that the ways people make meaning around an
ongoing serial do matter, even if they seem to be “wrong” by standards
of textual design, authorial intent, moral judgment, or even basic human
decency.20 Hating Skyler is a significant part of Breaking Bad ’s cultural
circulation and thus an aspect of its gender politics as articulated, if
not textually intended or justified. Seriality is constituted by the gaps
between episodes, when contingent meanings come to matter in often
material ways, and we cannot ignore such in-process interpretations
and paratextual traces — such serial practices of articulation, however
contingent or loathsome, are how a series matters, which shapes why it
matters. Although I find these cultural practices of hating Skyler both
deplorable and unjustified by the text, they still matter.
So what are the gender politics of Breaking Bad? I would never call
it a misogynist text and could even argue that it critiques deep-seated
assumptions of patriarchy in keeping with an antisexist, if not femi-
nist, politics. But whatever intents we might attribute to the series, it
is a text that has prompted misogyny, both by attracting such people
to its audience and by triggering hateful reactions among a significant
subset of viewers, and such cultural practices cannot be simply over-
ridden or invalidated by a nuanced textual analysis. We must acknowl-
edge such material practices of interpretation, no matter how distasteful
 Ends | 349

and irrational, as part of the series’s “matter,” notably significant and, in

a word, complex.
It is telling that I have left these questions of cultural politics to the
end of the book, despite how central they are to the field at large, as they
highlight how such analysis is both too easy and too hard. It is fairly
straightforward to interpret a television program using the field’s well-
established critical tools, isolating the particular episodes and moments
that best support your argument and opinions without leading to much
beyond labeling a text ideological and/or progressive. But once you
account for how serial television works over time and across various cul-
tural sites, it becomes hard to say anything about an ongoing program’s
politics with any conviction that is not draped in contingency, partiality,
and competing perspectives, leaving me with that most shameful con-
clusion for an academic: “I don’t know.” That is not to suggest that we
ignore issues such as Homeland ’s presentation of patriotism or Breaking
Bad ’s perspective on patriarchy, but such questions require us to reframe
what we mean by “interpretation” itself as a serial endeavor — always in
flux, replete with gaps and ellipses, inclusive of endless contexts and
paratexts, and frustrating in its incompleteness. Writing serial criticism
requires the critic to accept such potential shifts and open-ended con-
tingency as part of the terrain, giving up the certainty that is typically
asserted in academic arguments.

Ending Serial Criticism

This book offers no broad arguments about the politics of serial tele-
vision but rather focuses on the poetic and cultural practices that
constitute the mode and medium of storytelling. Arguably the most sig-
nificant way that the book is “political” is at the meta level concerning
publishing practices; this is a case of small-scale politics, looking not
to overturn capitalism or to renounce patriarchy but to affect a change
in how scholarly knowledge circulates. By posting drafts of the book
chapters online in serial succession, it allowed more people of all kinds
to access it, invited readers to serve as peer reviewers providing feed-
back on a draft, and hopefully can inspire other scholars to undertake
their own innovative publishing projects — and in that way, it seeks to
350 | Ends

rearticulate how scholarship circulates. The online version of Complex

TV is “serial criticism” in two ways: it is a critical work about serial texts,
and it is criticism that was published serially. Keeping with the theme of
this chapter, I conclude the book by returning to the meta level about the
ends of this latter aspect of serial criticism.
I began posting the book to MediaCommons Press in March 2012,
posting a new chapter every two weeks or so until June, posting the
eighth chapter in August, and taking an unplanned hiatus until May
2013, when I overcame scheduling overload and writer’s block to com-
plete the ninth chapter. The final chapter was posted in July 2013, mark-
ing a conclusion to that part of the serial publication process. However,
all academic writing is implicitly serialized, with installments developed
for presentations, teaching, articles, and chapters to eventually build up
into a larger project and often continuing thereafter into new spin-offs
and reiterations. As mentioned in the introduction, this book was writ-
ten serially, emerging over the course of 10 years of thinking through
its ideas, researching various case studies, and presenting parts in vari-
ous lectures, essays, and blog posts. Gaps between such installments are
hopefully productive for authors, incorporating feedback and further
reflection into the next iteration, which I certainly tried to do through-
out the process. The main difference in my approach was clearly bun-
dling each chapter as part of a whole and releasing the chapters openly
in succession, allowing anyone who was interested to follow the book’s
development as an explicit serial.
I chose to serialize the open-access draft of the book largely in
response to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s experiences publishing her manu-
script all at once on MediaCommons Press, as she found the later chap-
ters generated far fewer comments and page views than the early ones
did.21 I had hoped that serializing would build momentum and interest
rather than having it dwindle, but it fell short of that goal: both page
views and comments declined as publishing progressed. But of course
the more than 35,000 unique visitors to the site (as of September 2014)
surpass the number of people typically browsing an academic book,
although I have little way of knowing how much of the book those
visitors read, aside from the 50 people or so who commented. Regard-
less of the effectiveness of the serial release, the open-access publish-
ing of the draft manuscript accomplished the core goal of making the
 Ends | 351

material available to a much wider readership than is typical for aca-

demic publishing.
A secondary goal for serial publishing was to better understand the
serial creative process itself, as I wanted to experience what it is like
to have part of a work released while still writing later installments. I
had hoped that the feedback from early chapters would both help me
revise those parts for final publication, which is distinctly unlike what
serial television creators do, and inspire improvements and changes in
subsequent chapters, which is more common on television — and both
outcomes proved to be true. I also hoped that having chapters circulat-
ing when they were ready to be read rather than waiting for the entire
book to be done would help gather interest and impact other scholar-
ship, and this has been the most successful part of the process. Chapters
of the book-in-progress have been taught in at least 15 different courses,
were listed on at least one graduate student’s preliminary examinations,
and even got cited in The New Yorker.22 Since writing an academic book
is typically an isolated and lonely process, this publicly circulating model
has definitely made me feel more like I was part of an ongoing conversa-
tion and community.
Writing serially in public required a degree of flexibility and willing-
ness to make changes to my initial plan. In some cases, this resulted in
“outsourcing” my own analysis to other scholars who admirably covered
issues that I had originally planned to address. Thus in the original pro-
posal, I included a chapter on television temporality — but then had the
chance to read Paul Booth’s book Time on TV, which built on some of
my early work to tackle some topics I had hoped to address with more
detail than I would have managed, and thus I relegated such issues to
citing Booth’s work, highlighting how scholarship can work as produc-
tive dialogue between academics in a more compressed (and circular)
time frame than is traditionally possible via the pace of scholarly pub-
lishing.23 Another chapter similarly got excised within the serial writ-
ing and prepublication process: a chapter on the history of television’s
narrative complexity prior to the landmark year of 1999. That chapter
would have traced the history of prime time television’s narrative form,
looking at key precedents such as the two-parter, the recap, and the cliff-
hanger as they developed within earlier programs and the critical reac-
tions they triggered, exploring the gradual development of television’s
352 | Ends

complex narrative strategies, and positing some explanations for why

the 21st century has seen such an acceleration of storytelling innovation.
In retrospect, that is a book in and of itself, so I cut it from the chapter
plan before completing the manuscript, while incorporating some of the
ideas into various chapters; however, the plan for these eliminated chap-
ters endures in the online versions of the book proposal and introduc-
tion. Such accessible in-process writing has the added benefit of provid-
ing an open record of how at least one author develops a monograph,
offering perspective on academic writing processes that are typically
invisible and obscured.
Of course, this openness also meant that when I ran into trouble,
anyone could see it. Had I not been posting chapters online, I probably
would have finished writing the book a year earlier, as I could have dedi-
cated the time that I spent formatting the website, responding to com-
ments, and revising old chapters toward finishing the final sections. And
my nine-month hiatus felt like a very public failure, letting down readers
through my stalled momentum and providing visible evidence of the
all-too-common instance of an academic missing publishing deadlines.
But such failure can be extremely productive, as the chapter I was strug-
gling with transformed radically during my break, shifting from being
broadly about genre to more specifically focused on serial melodrama,
in reaction to new scholarship that was published during my long, dor-
mant winter; had I finished writing the chapter back in 2012, it would
not have worked as well as (I hope) the new version does. The pub-
lic versioning of the book allows readers to see the improvements that
hopefully have occurred through feedback, revisions, and rethinking
from the proposal to online drafts to final print manuscript, and hope-
fully such visibility will lead other scholars and publishers to embrace
similar serial and open-access experiments to make the academic pub-
lishing ecosystem more transparent, open, and accessible. The online
comments were quite helpful in addressing specific details and suggest-
ing nuances, new examples, clarity of wording, and counterarguments,
while the traditional press reviewers of the full manuscript focused more
on the book as a whole, considering structural and conceptual issues.
Together, my commenters have helped make the book much stronger
than I could have written on my own.
 Ends | 353

So facing the end, and getting appropriately reflexive about my own

ends, I am left wondering how best to conclude the book. I am tempted
to look to my subject matter and take inspiration from television finales.
I could follow Lost and offer some grand moral statement or mimic Six
Feet Under and flash-forward to the future demise of complex television.
Or I could ape The Sopranos and cut off in the middle of a sentence. But
instead, I will look for inspiration from the finales of programs such
as Homeland, Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, and Louie, which as of
this writing exist only in the realm of infinite possibilities and poten-
tial, dodging the inevitable disappointment of finality by remaining still
unfinished. While this book does end, the practice of serial scholarship
pauses rather than concludes, as we find ourselves revisiting material,
revising arguments, and spinning off in new directions. And thus I
end my book with the three sweetest words for a scholar of seriality:
to be continued.
This page intentionally left blank
Notes

Introduction
1. According to Nielsen ratings, The Agency ranked number 49 out of prime time
broadcast programs for the 2001 – 2002 season, with 10.3 million estimated average
viewers per episode, while Alias was at number 60 with 9.7 million and 24 was
number 76 with 8.6 million; see “How Did Your Favorite Show Rate?,” USA Today,
May 28, 2002, http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/2002/2002-05-28-year-end
-chart.htm.
2. See David Lambert, “24’s TV-on-DVD Success Leads to New DVD Concepts,”
TVShowsOnDVD.com, October 22, 2003, http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/
24/764.
3. See Michael Kackman, “Conclusion: Spies Are Back,” in Citizen Spy: Television,
Espionage, and Cold War Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005), 176 – 190, for a fine example of such cultural analysis.
4. See Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown, Investigating “Alias”: Secrets and Spies
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); and Steven Peacock, Reading “24”: TV against the
Clock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), for representative ranges of scholarship on these
two series.
5. For important earlier explorations of television’s narrative form, see Horace
Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974); John Ellis,
Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1982); Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985); Horace Newcomb, “Magnum, Champagne of Television?,”
Channels of Communication, May – June 1985, 23 – 26; Jane Feuer, “Narrative Form in
American Network Television,” in High Theory / Low Culture, ed. Colin MacCabe
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 101 – 114; Sarah Kozloff, “Narra-
tive Theory and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C.
Allen, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 61 – 100;
Christopher Anderson, “Reflection on Magnum, P.I.,” in Television: The Critical
View, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112 – 125; Thomas Schatz,
“St. Elsewhere and the Evolution of the Ensemble Series,” in Television: The Critical
View, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 85 – 100; Marc Dolan, “The
Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What Happened to/on Twin Peaks,” in Full of
Secrets: Critical Approaches to “Twin Peaks,” ed. David Lavery (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1995), 30 – 50; Greg M. Smith, “Plotting a TV Show about Nothing:
Patterns of Narration in Seinfeld,” Creative Screenwriting 2, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 82 – 90;

355
356 | Notes

Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From “Hill St. Blues” to “ER”
(New York: Continuum, 1996); Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active
Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1997); Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and
Cultural Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Robyn R. Warhol,
“Feminine Intensities: Soap Opera Viewing as a Technology of Gender,” Genders,
no. 28 (1998), http://www.genders.org/g28/g28_intensities.html.
6. For more recent examples of such work, see Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry:
Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2003); Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2003); Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the
Small Screen (London: BFI, 2004); Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s
New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 93 – 112; Michael Hammond and Lucy
Mazdon, eds., The Contemporary Television Series (Edinburgh: University of
Edinburgh Press, 2005); Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How
Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead
Books, 2005); Michael Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of
Television Narrative,” Velvet Light Trap, no. 58 (Fall 2006): 16 – 28; Sean O’Sullivan,
“Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: Deadwood and Serial Fiction,” in Reading “Dead-
wood”: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006),
115 – 130; Greg M. Smith, Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of “Ally McBeal”
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Sean O’Sullivan, “Broken on Purpose:
Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season,” StoryWorlds 2 (2010): 59 – 77; Shawn
Shimpach, Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action
Hero (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2010); Paul Booth, “Memories, Temporalities, Fictions:
Temporal Displacement in Contemporary Television,” Television & New Media 12,
no. 4 (July 2011): 370 – 388; and Anthony Smith, “Putting the Premium into Basic:
Slow-Burn Narratives and the Loss-Leader Function of AMC’s Original Drama
Series,” Television and New Media 14, no. 2 (March 2013): 150 – 166.
7. I explore this model more fully in Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
8. See David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text:
Methods and Approaches (New York: AMS, 1989), 369 – 398; Henry Jenkins,
“Historical Poetics and the Popular Cinema,” in Approaches to the Popular Cinema
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); David Bordwell, Poetics of
Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2007).
9. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985); Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film
Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Peter
Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002).
10. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985).
 Notes | 357

11. See Will Brooker, “Living on Dawson’s Creek: Teen Viewers, Cultural Convergence,
and Television Overflow,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4
(December 1, 2001): 456 – 472; Jonathan Gray, “New Audiences, New Textualities:
Anti-Fans and Non-Fans,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003):
64 – 81; Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media
Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010); Matt Hills, “The Dispersible Television
Text: Theorising Moments of the New Doctor Who,” Science Fiction Film &
Television 1 (April 1, 2008): 25 – 44; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old
and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006).
12. This vision of textuality was convincingly argued decades ago by John Fiske,
“Moments of Television: Neither the Text nor the Audience,” in Remote Control:
Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power, ed. Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele
Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth (New York: Routledge, 1989), 56 – 78. See Derek
Kompare, “More ‘Moments of Television’: Online Cult Television Authorship,” in
Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. Michael Kackman, Marnie
Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, and Bryan Sebok (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 95 – 113, for an update for the digital era. Frank Kelleter, “Toto, I
Think We’re in Oz Again (and Again and Again): Remakes and Popular Seriality,”
in Remake/Remodel: Film Remakes, Adaptations, and Fan Productions, ed. Kathleen
Loock and Constantine Verevis (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2012), offers a
compelling model of such “sprawling textuality” for the study of serial media.
13. See Lostpedia, “Statistics,” http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Statistics
(accessed March 24, 2012).
14. We have no specific metrics on Lostpedia’s readership during the show’s original
airing, but Benjamin Mako Hill, “Editor-to-Reader Ratios on Wikipedia,” Copy-
righteous (blog), February 6, 2011, http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20110206-00,
calculates that an average of 0.025% of Wikipedia readers have made at least five
edits. If we were to extrapolate this ratio to the 10,000 Lostpedians with at least five
edits, it would place the site’s readership at around 40 million; this figure is
undoubtedly high but clearly points to the likelihood that a good percentage
of Lost viewers were actively reading Lostpedia or other fan sites without
being tabulated.
15. For more on television style, see Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style (New York:
Routledge, 2009); and G. Smith, Beautiful TV.
16. For a chronicle of this device and its use across television and other media, see the
TV Tropes entry “How We Got Here,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
Main/HowWeGotHere (accessed March 24, 2012).
17. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American
Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Chapter 1: Complexity in Context

1. My use of “narrative complexity” bears some resemblance to Robin Nelson’s term
“flexi-narrative,” especially as Glen Creeber employs it. However, my emphasis is
358 | Notes

less on quick-edited segmentation than Nelson’s, and my analysis was developed

independent from his work. See Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms,
Values and Cultural Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Glen Creeber,
Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI, 2004).
2. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985), 155.
3. Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
4. For more on conventional episodic and serial norms, see Jason Mittell, Television
and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 227 – 234.
5. Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in
Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan
Olsson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 93 – 112.
6. I use the concept of storyworld as developed by David Herman to suggest a viewer’s
mental construct of a fictional universe containing the setting, events, people, and
rules of any given narrative; see David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and
Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
7. Louis C.K. posted this comment on The A.V. Club review for the “God” episode,
http://www.avclub.com/articles/god,44549/.
8. Quoted in Matt Webb Mitovitch, “Heroes Creator Solves Finale’s Biggest Mystery,”
TV Guide, May 23, 2007, http://www.tvguide.com/news/heroes-creator-solves
-16552.aspx.
9. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
10. For more on the role of gaps in serial storytelling, see Sean O’Sullivan, “Old, New,
Borrowed, Blue: Deadwood and Serial Fiction,” in Reading “Deadwood”: A Western
to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 115 – 129; Sean
O’Sullivan, “Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season,”
StoryWorlds 2 (2010): 59 – 77.
11. It is telling that in recent years, network and cable programs that contain advertis-
ing breaks are less likely to feature lengthy title sequences, as producers feel
squeezed by limited screen time, while the longer and less strictly timed premium-
cable series on Showtime and HBO are free to create lengthy and imaginative title
sequences that help define the series and shape our expectations.
12. Stephen V. Duncan, A Guide to Screenwriting Success: Writing for Film and
Television (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 220.
13. See Paul Booth, Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television (New
York: Peter Lang, 2012), for a fuller discussion of temporal play in complex
television.
14. See Sean O’Sullivan, “The Sopranos: Episodic Storytelling,” in How to Watch
Television, ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013),
65 – 73; and Dana Polan, The Sopranos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009),
 Notes | 359

for more on Chase’s approach to serialization and the program’s episodic and
seasonal structure.
15. For a less positive take on this transformation, see Michael Z. Newman and Elana
Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York:
Routledge, 2011).
16. For more on the key industrial and technological transformations of television in
the 1990s and 2000s, see Jennifer Gillan, Television and New Media: Must-Click TV
(New York: Routledge, 2010); and Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be
Revolutionized (New York: NYU Press, 2007).
17. See Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, for more on this shift in
television’s cultural legitimation.
18. See Warren Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary
Cinema (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
19. For an overview of television’s production processes, see Mittell, Television and
American Culture.
20. This claim was stated by Carlton Cuse in a personal interview with Cuse and
Damon Lindelof, March 23, 2010.
21. It is important to note that beyond the first airing on American television, a cable
channel’s brand identity matters little to viewers who watch a series on DVD or
Netflix or see it through global distribution. As these alternative models become
even more prominent, we could see the goal of establishing a cable brand becom-
ing less prominent, although such transformations are hard to predict.
22. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is
Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005).
23. See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(New York: NYU Press, 2006), for an influential take on these shifts in participa-
tory culture.
24. Another important technological development in recent years is the rise of HDTV
and digital television, allowing for higher-resolution images and more “cinematic”
production styles and genres. This shift has less impact on narrative form than do
recording technologies such as DVDs; for more on HDTV’s impact on television’s
cultural legitimacy, see Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television.
25. See Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media
Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
26. I discuss The Wire’s cross-media comparisons in Jason Mittell, “All in the Game:
The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic,” in Third Person: Authoring and
Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2009), 429 – 438; see also Frank Kelleter, Serial Agencies: “The Wire” and
Its Readers (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).
27. Derek Kompare, “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of
Television,” Television and New Media 7, no. 4 (2006): 335 – 360.
28. For more on Lost’s issues with the perception that there is no master plan, see Ivan
360 | Notes

Askwith, “ ‘Do You Even Know Where This Is Going?’: Lost’s Viewers and Narrative
Premeditation,” and Jason Mittell, “Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative
Television (and Television Studies),” both in Reading “Lost”: Perspectives on a Hit
Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 119 – 138, 159 – 180.
29. See Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions
from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).
30. O’Sullivan, “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue.”
31. Sconce, “What If?”
32. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981).
33. See Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief
Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy,
ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995),
87 – 105; and Lisa Trahair, “The Narrative-Machine: Buster Keaton’s Cinematic
Comedy, Deleuze’s Recursion Function and the Operational Aesthetic,” Senses of
Cinema, no. 33 (October 2004), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/33/
keaton_deleuze/, for examples of the operational aesthetic applied to film comedy.
34. See Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
35. Such narrative special effects have a literary analogue in “unnatural narratives,” in
which the storytelling mechanics deviate from mimetic realism in a manner to call
reader attention to the narrational mechanics. See Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik
Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratol-
ogy: Beyond Mimetic Models,” Narrative 18, no. 2 (2010): 113 – 136.
36. Alan Sepinwall, “ ‘Parks and Recreation’ Mike Schur on the Eventful Season
Finale,” HitFix, April 24, 2014, http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/
parks-and-recreation-mike-schur-on-the-eventful-season-finale.
37. For more on the Baroque influence on complex television, see Angela Ndalianis,
Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2004); and Angela Ndalianis, “Television and the Neo-Baroque,” in The Contempo-
rary Television Series, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (Edinburgh:
University of Edinburgh Press, 2005), 83 – 101.
38. For more on the procedural logic of games, see Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An
Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
39. See Buckland, Puzzle Films.
40. Quoted in Jace Lacob, “The Good Wife: Robert and Michelle King on Alicia,
Kalinda, Renewal Prospects, and More,” The Daily Beast, March 12, 2012, http://
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/09/the-good-wife-robert-and-michelle
-king-on-alicia-kalinda-renewal-prospects-and-more.html.

Chapter 2: Beginnings
1. I discuss pilots more in Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010); see pages 46 – 52 for a discussion of the industrial
 Notes | 361

practices of pilot production and pages 258 – 267 for a detailed analysis of
Lost’s pilot.
2. Television pilots often forgo opening credits until they are prepared for broadcast,
although producer Mark Frost recalls that Twin Peaks’ iconic credit sequence was
produced for the original pilot. See my Twitter conversation with Frost, May 27,
2014: https://twitter.com/mfrost11/status/471406258021355520.
3. A copy of the Alias pilot script was posted online, but was removed from the
website since I downloaded it.
4. For more on the series, see Rhonda V. Wilcox and Sue Turnbull, eds., Investigating
“Veronica Mars”: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2011).
5. See the Television Without Pity recap for a description of the originally aired pilot,
at http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/veronica_mars/pilot_84/.
6. See Rob Thomas’s site, at http://www.slaverats.com/.
7. The permanent status of this version is complicated by the fact that the version
available on iTunes and Amazon as of May 2014 is the shorter broadcast edit. Even
though DVDs are becoming less central to the television aftermarket, they still do
serve more of an archival permanence than do downloadable or streaming files,
which can be altered or withdrawn.
8. Rob Thomas, interview on Television Without Pity, March 8, 2005, http://www
.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/veronica_mars/the-rob-thomas-interview-part/.
9. The line “that’s where I come in” is distinctly featured in the 1967 relaunch of
Dragnet, although it probably appears in episodes of the program’s 1950s radio or
television run, which are less widely available now. Interestingly, the line also
appears in the 1955 pilot of Gunsmoke, a Western featuring a Dragnet-style
introductory voice-over by Marshall Dillon.
10. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang,
1975).
11. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985).
12. Noël Carroll, “Narrative Closure,” Philosophical Studies 135, no. 1 (2007): 1 – 15.
13. Showrunner Rob Thomas describes these contractual obligations in his interview
with Television Without Pity, March 8, 2005, http://www.televisionwithoutpity
.com/show/veronica_mars/the-rob-thomas-interview-part/10/.
14. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

Chapter 3: Authorship
1. See Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974);
Horace Newcomb and Robert S. Alley, The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with
Creators of American TV (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
2. See Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010), for more on the pilot production process.
362 | Notes

3. This room-based model is less common in other national television systems, where
individual episode authors frequently have more independence; see Matt Hills,
Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating “Doctor Who” in the Twenty-First Century
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), for a discussion of authorship in the British case of
Doctor Who.
4. Quoted in Brett Martin, Difficult Men: From “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” to
“Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 258.
5. Quoted in Tim Molloy, “Damon Lindelof ’s History of Lost (a Show He Longed to
Quit),” The Wrap, September 23, 2011, http://www.thewrap.com/tv/print/31281.
6. For more on Lost’s authorship, see Denise Mann, “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Manage-
ment,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer,
Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2009),
99 – 114.
7. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 29 – 43; Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays against
the American Grain (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011).
8. See Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, eds., Production
Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009).
9. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).
10. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984).
11. See Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media
Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011), for a discussion of
television’s authorship and cultural legitimation.
12. Newman and Levine frame television authorship’s evaluative function solely as a
process of legitimation (ibid.), which is too narrow of an understanding of the
various ways authorial identity can brand a program’s aesthetic roles.
13. Emily Nussbaum, “Roux with a View,” New Yorker, October 1, 2012, http://www
.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2012/10/01/121001crte_television_nussbaum.
14. Quoted in Jonathan Kirby, “Not Just a Fluke: How Darin Morgan Saved The
X-Files,” PopMatters, October 29, 2007, http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/
not-just-a-fluke-how-darin-morgan-saved-the-x-files.
15. For more on these validating discourses around The Wire, see Jason Mittell, “All in
the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic,” in Third Person:
Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-
Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 429 – 438.
16. These interviews can be extremely popular, as with the showrunner “walkthrough”
series on The A.V. Club — according to the site’s former TV editor Todd VandDer-
Werff (personal email), these multipart interviews received high readership in 2011
for showrunners including Community’s Dan Harmon (over 163,000 hits), Parks
and Recreation’s Michael Schur (92,000) and Louie’s Louis C.K. (81,000).
 Notes | 363

17. See Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with “Babylon 5”: Fan Performance in a Media
Universe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
18. See Myles McNutt, “Replying with the Enemy: Showrunners on Twitter II,”
Antenna (blog), November 11, 2010, http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2010/11/11/
replying-with-the-enemy-showrunners-on-twitter-ii/.
19. See Carlton Cuse, “Lost’s Carlton Cuse Relives Dealing with the Modern Celebrity
of the TV Showrunner,” Vulture (blog), New York, October 19, 2012, http://www
.vulture.com/2012/10/carlton-cuse-lost-showrunner-celebrity.html.
20. Suzanne Scott, “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in
Transmedia Storytelling,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron
Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 43 – 52. For
more on the fan-friendly author, see Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord; and Derek
Kompare, “More ‘Moments of Television’: Online Cult Television Authorship,” in
Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. Michael Kackman,
Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, and Bryan Sebok
(New York: Routledge, 2010), 95 – 113. See Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately:
Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), for
more on authorial paratexts.
21. Kompare, “More ‘Moments of Television.’ ”
22. See the semiannual Hollywood Writers Report released by the Writers Guild of
America, West, http://www.wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=922; the last
available statistics were that women writers were only 30% of the television writing
workforce in 2013.
23. For more on the strike and its public circulation, see Miranda J. Banks, “The Picket
Line Online: Creative Labor, Digital Activism, and the 2007 – 2008 Writers Guild of
America Strike,” Popular Communication 8, no. 1 (2010): 20 – 33.
24. For more on Dr. Horrible, see Anouk Lang, “ ‘The Status Is Not Quo!’: Pursuing
Resolution in Web-Disseminated Serial Narrative,” Narrative 18, no. 3 (2010):
367 – 381.
25. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983); for a compelling history and synopsis of the various ways the implied
author has been used, see Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, The Implied Author:
Concept and Controversy (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006).
26. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 130.
27. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985), 62.
28. Jan Alber offers a similar model for cinema under the term “hypothetical film-
maker,” although that model seems less derived from reception practices and
contextual discourses. See Jan Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism: Cinematic
Narration Reconsidered,” in Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, ed.
Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010),
163 – 185.
364 | Notes

29. Kindt and Müller, Implied Author, 152 – 154.

30. Torben Grodal, “Agency in Film, Filmmaking, and Reception,” in Visual Author-
ship: Creativity and Intentionality in Media, ed. Torben Grodal, Bente Larsen, and
Iben Thorving Laursen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005), 15 – 36.
31. Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).
32. Quoted in Nathan Rabin, “Louis C.K. Walks Us through Louie’s Second Season
(Part 3 of 4),” The A.V. Club, September 21, 2011, http://www.avclub.com/articles/
louis-ck-walks-us-through-louies-second-season-par,62050/.
33. See Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions
from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), for a
historical account of such serial consumption practices.
34. Dan Harmon, “Mea Culpa for Those Needing One. Onward and Gayward,” Dan
Harmon Poops (blog), November 5, 2011, http://danharmon.tumblr.com/post/
12377752020/mea-culpa-for-those-needing-one-onward-and-gayward.
35. See Ivan Askwith, “ ‘Do You Even Know Where This Is Going?’: Lost’s Viewers and
Narrative Premeditation,” in Reading “Lost”: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show,
ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 159 – 180.
36. Quoted in Alan Sepinwall, “Interview: Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan
Post-mortems Season Three,” HitFix, June 13, 2010, http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/
whats-alan-watching/posts/interview-breaking-bad-creator-vince-gilligan-post
-mortems-season-three. See also Noel Murray, “Vince Gilligan,” The A.V. Club,
June 13, 2010, http://www.avclub.com/articles/vince-gilligan,42064/.
37. Todd VanDerWerff, “Alex Gansa Walks Us through Homeland ’s First Season (Part 1
of 4),” The A.V. Club, January 24, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/alex-gansa
-walks-us-through-homelands-first-season,68143/.
38. obsession_inc, “Affirmational Fandom vs. Transformational Fandom,” Dreamwidth
(blog), June 1, 2009, http://obsession-inc.dreamwidth.org/82589.html.
39. For more on authorial practices and affirmational versus transformative fandoms,
see Suzanne Scott, “ ‘And They Have a Plan’: Battlestar Galactica, Ancillary
Content, and Affirmational Fandom,” in How to Watch Television, ed. Ethan
Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 320 – 329; Louisa Stein
and Kristina Busse, “Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext,
and Context,” Popular Communication 7, no. 4 (2009): 192 – 207.

Chapter 4: Characters
1. Quoted in Lorne Manly, “The Laws of the Jungle,” New York Times, September 18,
2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/arts/television/18manl.html.
2. For the limited scholarship on film and television characters, see Murray Smith,
Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995); Murray Smith, “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or
Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and
Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
 Notes | 365

University Press, 1999), 217 – 238; Michael Z. Newman, “Characterization as Social

Cognition in Welcome to the Dollhouse,” Film Studies: An International Review 8
(Summer 2006): 53 – 67; Greg M. Smith, Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of
“Ally McBeal” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Roberta Pearson, “Anato-
mising Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the Televisual Character,”
in Reading “CSI”: Crime TV under the Microscope, ed. Michael Allen (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2007), 39 – 56; Roberta Pearson, “Chain of Events: Regimes of Evaluation
and Lost’s Construction of the Televisual Character,” in Reading “Lost,” ed. Roberta
Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 139 – 158; Jens Eder, “Understanding Charac-
ters,” Projections 4, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 16 – 40; Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Rolf
Schneider, eds., Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in
Literature, Film, and Other Media (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010); Murray Smith, “Just
What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?,” in
Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 66 – 90; and Robert Blanchet and Margrethe Bruun Vaage,
“Don, Peggy, and Other Fictional Friends? Engaging with Characters in Television
Series,” Projections 6, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 18 – 41.
3. Eder, “Understanding Characters,” 18.
4. TV Tropes, “Real Life Writes the Plot,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
Main/RealLifeWritesThePlot (accessed March 24, 2012).
5. M. Smith, Engaging Characters, 110 – 118.
6. Quoted in James Hibberd, “HBO Defends Game of Thrones Shocker,” EW.com,
June 13, 2011, http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/06/13/game-of-thrones-reaction/.
7. While other programs such as The Wire and Deadwood did kill off main characters
in first seasons, these were not figures who might be viewed as central protago-
nists, as with Ned Stark.
8. “The Lostpedia Interview: Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof,” Lostpedia, April 17,
2009, http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Lostpedia_Interview:Carlton_Cuse_
%26_Damon_Lindelof.
9. See Abigail De Kosnik, “One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling,” in How to
Watch TV, ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013),
355 – 363.
10. See Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Parasocial
Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,” Psychiatry 19 (1956): 215 – 229.
For a more recent discussion, see David C. Giles, “Parasocial Relationships,” in
Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature,
Film, and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Rolf Schneider (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 2010), 442 – 456; Blanchet and Vaage, “Don, Peggy, and Other
Fictional Friends?”
11. M. Smith, Engaging Characters.
12. Ibid.
13. Other examples of restricted first-person series are rare — the British Life on Mars
follows such restriction, but its short run of 16 episodes minimizes the production
366 | Notes

issues. Louie always features the title character in every scene, but given that Louis
C.K. directs and writes every episode, production is already centered around
his presence.
14. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010); see also Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction:
Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
15. Pearson, “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom,” 55 – 56.
16. See also Scott Meslow, “As TV Evolves, a Glaring Problem: Characters Who Don’t
Change,” Atlantic, February 22, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/
archive/2012/02/as-tv-evolves-a-glaring-problem-characters-who-dont-change/
253454/.
17. Roberta Pearson, “Chain of Events: Regimes of Evaluation and Lost’s Construction
of the Televisual Character,” in Pearson, Reading “Lost,” 139 – 158.
18. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985).
19. See Gaby Allrath, “Life in Doppelgangland: Innovative Character Conception and
Alternate Worlds in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel,” in Narrative Strategies in
Television Series, ed. Gaby Allrath and Marion Gymnich (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), 132 – 150.
20. See M. Smith, “Gangsters,” for relative morality in film.
21. Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Blinded by Familiarity: Partiality, Morality and Engage-
ment with So-Called Quality TV Series,” in Cognitive Media Theory, ed. Ted
Nannicelli and Paul Taberham (New York: Routledge, 2014), 268 – 284, makes the
compelling argument that tight alignment can “blind us with familiarity” by
making us feel a kinship with Tony despite our moral disgust, even in cases where
the character’s actions are relatively immoral.
22. See M. Smith, “Just What Is It”; and Noël Carroll, “Sympathy for the Devil,” in
“The Sopranos” and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am, ed. Richard Greene and Peter
Vernezze (New York: Open Court, 2012), 121 – 136, for discussions of the program’s
antiheroic sympathies.
23. M. Smith, “Gangsters,” 236.
24. Vermeule, Why Do We Care, 86.
25. For more on the series, see Douglas Howard, “Dexter”: Investigating Cutting Edge
Television (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).
26. Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Fictional Reliefs and Reality Checks,” Screen 54, no. 2
(June 1, 2012): 218 – 237.
27. For more on television’s gender norms concerning antiheroes, see Amanda Lotz,
Cable Guys: Television and American Masculinities in the 21st Century (New York:
NYU Press, 2014). For an early discussion of the limits of television’s portrayal of
unsympathetic women, see Julie D’Acci, Defining Women: Television and the Case
of “Cagney & Lacey” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). For
more on the comedic figure, see Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, The Unruly Woman:
Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
 Notes | 367

28. Vince Gilligan, from Nerdist Writers Panel podcast, recorded January 20, 2012,
http://www.nerdist.com/2012/03/nerdist-writers-panel-28-vince-gilligan-julie-plec
-josh-friedman-jeff-greenstein/.
29. Brett Martin, “Bryan Cranston on Becoming Walter White and the Final Season of
Breaking Bad,” GQ, August 2013, http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/
201308/bryan-cranston-walter-white-breaking-bad-season-6.
30. Quoted in Melissa Locker, “Bryan Cranston Talks Malcolm in the Middle, Breaking
Bad and the Meaning of Underwear,” IFC.com, October 28, 2011, http://www.ifc
.com/fix/2011/10/bryan-cranston-talks-malcolm-in-the-middle-breaking-bad
-underwear.
31. Jeremy Egner, “On Character: Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad,” ArtsBeat (blog),
New York Times, March 19, 2010, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/
on-character-bryan-cranston-in-breaking-bad/.
32. Quoted in Matthew Belloni, “Why the Dad from Malcolm in the Middle Knows So
Much about Meth,” Esquire, March 4, 2009, http://www.esquire.com/features/
television/breaking-bad-0409.
33. Daniel Fienberg, “HitFix Interview: Bryan Cranston Discusses the Breaking Bad
Season,” The Fien Print (blog), HitFix, June 13, 2010, http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/
the-fien-print/posts/hitfix-interview-bryan-cranston-discusses-the-breaking-bad
-season.
34. See Anthony N. Smith, “Putting the Premium into Basic: Slow-Burn Narratives
and the Loss-Leader Function of AMC’s Original Drama Series,” Television & New
Media 14, no. 2 (March 2013): 150 – 166.
35. Vermeule, Why Do We Care, 93.
36. See Lotz, Cable Guys, for a compelling discussion of Walter in the context of
contemporary masculinity within television drama.

Chapter 5: Comprehension
1. Quoted in Brett Martin, “The Men behind the Curtain: A GQ TV Roundtable,”
GQ, June 2012, http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201206/
roundtable-discussion-matthew-weiner-vince-gilligan-david-milch.
2. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985); David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in
the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); David
Bordwell, “Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred
Pierce,” in Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 135 – 150.
3. Beyond Bordwell, see David Herman, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences
(Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003); Patrick
Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists
(New York: Routledge, 2003); Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 2002).
4. For a rare example of cognitive poetic television studies, see Margrethe Bruun
Vaage, “Blinded by Familiarity: Partiality, Morality and Engagement with
368 | Notes

So-Called Quality TV Series,” in Cognitive Media Theory, ed. Ted Nannicelli and
Paul Taberham (New York: Routledge, 2014), 268 – 284.
5. Bordwell, Narration, 30.
6. Ibid., 37.
7. Ibid.; Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
8. See Noël Carroll, “Toward a Theory of Film Suspense,” in Theorizing the Moving
Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94 – 124.
9. Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, “Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative
Consumption, and Rethinking Textuality,” Particip@tions 4, no. 1 (2007), http://
www.participations.org/Volume%204/Issue%201/4_01_graymittell.htm. Thanks to
Jonathan for allowing some of that work to be repurposed here; see also Jonathan
Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New
York: NYU Press, 2010).
10. For more on multiple passes through a narrative, see Matei Calinescu, Rereading
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex:
Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006); Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television
(New York: Routledge, 2005).
11. David Bordwell, “This Is Your Brain on Movies, Maybe,” in Minding Movies:
Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking, by Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 96 – 102.
12. Quoted in Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction
and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 60.
13. Bordwell, Narration, 57 – 61.
14. See Bordwell, “Cognition and Comprehension.”
15. For seminal work on television’s glance aesthetic, see John Ellis, Visible Fictions:
Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
16. For an overview of cognitive theories of memory, see Henry L. Roediger, Yadin
Dudai, and Susan M. Fitzpatrick, eds., Science of Memory: Concepts (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
17. See Ethan Thompson, “Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets
the Televisual Sitcom,” Velvet Light Trap 60 (Fall 2007): 63 – 72.
18. Matt Hills, “Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variation on a Narrative Theme:
Doctor Who (2005 – 2008) as Cult/Mainstream Television,” in Third Person:
Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-
Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 333 – 342.
19. See Virginia Heffernan, “Gotta Minute? So, There’s This Guy Tony . . . ,” New York
Times, April 6, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/arts/television/06sopr
.html.
20. Bordwell, Narration, 40 – 47.
21. For more on the role of awkwardness in Curb, see Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness
(Hants, UK: O Books, 2010).
 Notes | 369

Chapter 6: Evaluation
1. See Jason Mittell, “Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and
Television Studies),” in Reading “Lost”: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed.
Roberta Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 119 – 138. For other discussions of
evaluative television criticism, see Charlotte Brunsdon, Screen Tastes: Soap Opera
to Satellite Dishes (London: Routledge, 1997); Sarah Cardwell, “Is Quality Tele-
vision Any Good? Generic Distinctions, Evaluations and the Troubling Matter of
Critical Judgement,” in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond,
ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 19 – 34; Christine
Geraghty, “Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama,” International
Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 25 – 45; Jason Jacobs, “Issues of Judgment
and Value in Television Studies,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4
(2001): 427 – 447; Jason Jacobs, “Television Aesthetics: An Infantile Disorder,”
Journal of British Cinema and Television 3, no. 1 (May 2006): 19 – 33; Greg M. Smith,
Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of “Ally McBeal” (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2007); Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock, eds., Television Aesthetics and Style
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
2. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communi-
ties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 365 – 368.
3. See Daniel Chamberlain and Scott Ruston, “24 and Twenty-First Century Quality
Television,” and Steven Peacock, “24: Status and Style,” both in Reading “24”: TV
against the Clock, ed. Steven Peacock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 13 – 34, for more
sympathetic takes on the program’s style and aesthetics.
4. See Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi, MTM: “Quality Television” (London:
BFI, 1984); Philip W. Sewell, “From Discourse to Discord: Quality and Dramedy
at the End of the Classic Network System,” Television & New Media 11, no. 4 (July
2010): 235 – 259; and Dorothy Collins Swanson, The Story of Viewers for Quality
Television: From Grassroots to Prime Time (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2000).
5. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and
Beyond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). See also Mark Jancovich and James Lyons,
Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (London: British Film
Institute, 2003); and Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age:
From “Hill St. Blues” to “ER” (New York: Continuum, 1996), for other corpus-
defining efforts.
6. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age, 13.
7. Cardwell, “Is Quality Television Any Good?,” 29 – 30.
8. See Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies (Malden, MA: Polity,
2011), for an account of the field’s push away from questions of aesthetics.
9. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), for the landmark work on the topic;
John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010),
offers an influential application of Bourdieu to television and other popular media.
370 | Notes

Arguably, Bourdieu’s own theory is more complex and multifaceted than how it
has been adopted within American media studies, with his notion of fields
complicating the interplay between production and consumption. However, his
work’s influence on television scholars has primarily been through the lens of
Fiske, who reads him as a rebuke to aesthetics and as a warning to ward off
evaluative criticism.
10. See Antoine Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste,” in The Blackwell Companion to the
Sociology of Culture, ed. Mark Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 131 – 144, for an elaboration of this critique of Bourdieu.
11. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence
and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011), 7.
12. See Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste.” See also Sudeep Dasgupta, “Policing the
People: Television Studies and the Problem of ‘Quality,’ ” NECSUS European
Journal of Media Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 2012), http://www.necsus-ejms.org/
policing-the-people-television-studies-and-the-problem-of-quality-by-sudeep
-dasgupta/, for a strong critique of Newman and Levine and such celebration of the
“popular” within television studies.
13. Gray and Lotz, Television Studies, 54.
14. Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (New York: Pantheon Books,
1965); Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart
Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson,
1980), 128 – 140.
15. See Brunsdon, Screen Tastes; Jacobs, “Issues of Judgment”; Geraghty, “Aesthetics
and Quality”; Michael Bérubé, The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2005); Jacobs, “Television Aesthetics”; Alan McKee, Beautiful Things in
Popular Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006); G. Smith, Beautiful TV; John
Corner, “Television Studies and the Idea of Criticism,” Screen 48, no. 3 (September
21, 2007): 363 – 369; Matt Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating “Doctor Who”
in the Twenty-First Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010); and Matt Hills, “Television
Aesthetics: A Pre-structuralist Danger?,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 8,
no. 1 (April 2011): 99 – 117.
16. See Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Greatest TV Drama of the Past 25 Years, the Finals: The
Wire vs. The Sopranos,” Vulture (blog), New York, March 26, 2012, http://www
.vulture.com/2012/03/drama-derby-finals-the-wire-vs-the-sopranos.html.
17. For more on The Wire’s visual style, see Erlend Lavik, Style in “The Wire,” video
essay, Vimeo, 2012, http://vimeo.com/39768998.
18. See Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style (New York: Routledge, 2009), for a discussion
of zero-degree style. I offer the term maximum-degree style as its opposite, bearing
some similarity to John Caldwell’s historically grounded notion of “televisuality,”
which emphasizes visual excess that can (like Breaking Bad) evoke cinematic
traditions or embrace a video-centered aesthetic. See John Thornton Caldwell,
Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1995).
 Notes | 371

19. I discuss The Wire’s approach to simulating urban systems more in Jason Mittell,
“All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic,” in Third
Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah
Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 429 – 438. See also Tiffany Potter
and C. W. Marshall, “The Wire”: Urban Decay and American Television (New York:
Continuum, 2009); and Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, eds., “The Wire”:
Race, Class, and Genre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
20. For an influential take on television’s realism, see John Fiske, Television Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1987).
21. See Linda Williams, On “The Wire” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
22. See Anmol Chaddha, William Julius Wilson, and Sudhir Venkatesh, “In Defense of
The Wire,” Dissent, Summer 2008, http://dissentmagazine.org/article/in-defense
-of-the-wire, in which the authors write, “Quite simply, The Wire — even with its
too-modest viewership — has done more to enhance both the popular and the
scholarly understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of
urban inequality than any other program in the media or academic publication
we can think of.” See also Frank Kelleter, Serial Agencies: “The Wire” and Its
Readers (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), for an analysis of this realist
reading strategy.
23. Jason Mittell, “On Disliking Mad Men,” Just TV (blog), July 29, 2010, http://justtv
.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/on-disliking-mad-men/; as of September 2014, the
post has been viewed over 16,000 times and has received more than 100 com-
ments. The anthology it was slated to appear in is Lauren Goodlad, Lilya
Kaganovsky, and Robert A Rushing, eds., “Mad Men,” Mad World: Sex, Politics,
Style, and the 1960s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
24. Carl Wilson, “Let’s Talk about Love”: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York:
Continuum, 2007), 156.
25. Mark Grief, “You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel,” London Review of Books,
October 23, 2008, 15.
26. Todd VanDerWerff, “ ‘Look! They’re Doing Math!’: Mad Men,” South Dakota Dark
(blog), October 12, 2007, http://southdakotadark.blogspot.com/2007/10/look
-theyre-doing-math-mad-men.html.

Chapter 7: Serial Melodrama

1. See Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American
Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).
2. For influential takes on film melodrama, see Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is
Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British
Film Institute, 1987); Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring
American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998), 42 – 88; Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melo-
dramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002).
372 | Notes

3. Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003).
4. See Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985).
5. See Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922 – 1952 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), for a detailed discussion of this and other
radio serials.
6. Frank Kelleter, “Trust and Sprawl: Seriality, Radio, and the First Fireside Chat,” in
Media Economies: Perspectives on American Cultural Practices, ed. Marcel Hartwig,
Evelyne Keitel, and Gunter Suess (Trier, Germany: WVT, 2014), 46 – 65.
7. See Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media
Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011), 83, for an account of
this early history.
8. Such formats could span these categories, as with The Jackie Gleason Show, which
offered a variety-style set of new sketches each week, alongside the embedded
series of “The Honeymooners,” whose consistent setting and characters eventually
spun off into a more typical “episodic” sitcom.
9. Jane Feuer has been one of the more high-profile advocates of this position, but
more in brief asides than in a fully fleshed-out argument. For instance, in her
account of Six Feet Under, she mentions that HBO “quality drama was always . . .
a peculiar elevation of soap opera narrative structure,” with no further elaboration.
Jane Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” in Quality TV: Contemporary
American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2007), 155.
10. For a telling instance, Jane Feuer recounts a female-centered television conference
where someone critiques male scholars who claim that “narrative complexity did
not occur in television until Lost” : “There was a big laugh from the audience when
we gals all agreed that these men do not realize the shows they are fetishizing are
soap operas.” Jane Feuer, “Conference Report: Television for Women: An Inter-
national Conference,” Television & New Media 15, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 83.
11. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas.
12. See Laura Stempel Mumford, Love and Ideology in the Afternoon: Soap Opera,
Women, and Television Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 33 – 35.
Even though daily viewing is essential for soap fans, they do have techniques for
filling narrative gaps that might arise from missed episodes, including elaborate
communities of home taping and trading, the intergenerational sharing of
narrative knowledge, and the use of paratextual publishing with magazines such as
Soap Opera Digest and detailed fan sites.
13. Caryn Murphy, “Selling the Continuing Story of Peyton Place: Negotiating the
Content of the Primetime Serial,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
33, no. 1 (2013): 115 – 128.
14. See Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 82 – 84, for more on primetime
serials in the 1960s and 1970s.
 Notes | 373

15. For more on Mary Hartman, see Elana Levine, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual
Culture of 1970s American Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007),
202 – 207.
16. I discuss Soap’s genre mixing and Harris’s own claims of the program’s connection
to soap operas in Mittell, Genre and Television, chap. 6.
17. Linda Williams, “Mega-Melodrama! Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the
‘Classical,’ ” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (2012): 526.
18. Williams uses “suspense” to describe the narrative impulse of melodrama,
following a broader notion of the term that is closer to what I call “anticipation” in
chapter 5.
19. Williams, “Mega-Melodrama!,” 529.
20. See Williams, “Mega-Melodrama!”; Linda Williams, On “The Wire” (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2014). For another take on The Wire’s use of melodrama,
see Amanda Ann Klein, “ ‘The Dickensian Aspect’: Melodrama, Viewer Engage-
ment, and the Socially Conscious Text,” in “The Wire”: Urban Decay and American
Television, ed. Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2009),
177 – 189.
21. For one of many examples of such distinctions, see Jane Feuer, “The Lack of
Influence of thirtysomething,” in The Contemporary Television Series, ed. Michael
Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2005),
27 – 36.
22. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 82.
23. Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003). See also Kristyn Gorton, Media
Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2009).
24. Note that Warhol uses the term “antieffeminate,” as she argues that there is no real
antonym to “effeminate”; however, I prefer the not-quite-parallel term “masculin-
ist” because it has less of an oppositional connotation than “antieffeminate,” as I am
trying to explore how the dual modes can coexist.
25. See Sue Turnbull, “ ‘Nice Dress, Take It Off ’: Crime, Romance and the Pleasure of
the Text,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2002): 67 – 82,
for a revealing account of female fans of crime fiction.
26. See Williams, On “The Wire.”
27. Such genres have always had an active female fan base, and many viewers of both
genders frequently worked to highlight sentimental and affective subtexts that were
often buried within more overtly masculinist programs, such as Star Trek or Man
from U.N.C.L.E., but are more overtly central today.
28. Michael Kackman, “Quality Television, Melodrama, and Cultural Complexity,”
Flow, March 5, 2010. http://flowtv.org/2010/03/flow-favorites-quality-television
-melodrama-and-cultural-complexity-michael-kackman-university-of-texas
-austin/.
29. Warhol, Having a Good Cry, 41 – 50.
374 | Notes

30. Ibid., 43.

31. Ibid., 47.
32. Ibid.
33. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 98.
34. Ryan McGee, “Lost, ‘The Constant,’ ” The A.V. Club, December 24, 2011, http://
www.avclub.com/articles/lost-the-constant,66980/.
35. John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987).
36. Many scholars have explored such recent paradigms of television gender represen-
tation — see Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture
Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010);
Amanda D. Lotz, Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2006); Amanda D. Lotz, Cable Guys: Television and
American Masculinities in the 21st Century (New York: NYU Press, 2014).
37. Lotz, Cable Guys, 57.
38. Breaking Bad, “Más,” season 3, episode 5, originally aired April 18, 2010.
39. Todd VanDerWerff, “The Good Wife Has Proven Itself a Worthy Successor to The
Wire,” The A.V. Club, May 17, 2011, http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-good-wife-
has-proven-itself-a-worthy-successor,56168/.

Chapter 8: Orienting Paratexts

1. See Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media
Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), for a comprehensive analysis of media
paratexts.
2. Emily Nussbaum, “Pugnacious D: The Wire Creator David Simon on His New
HBO Series, Treme,” New York, April 4, 2010, http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/
65235/.
3. This video aired on the BBC program Doctor Who Confidential in the United
Kingdom on October 1, 2011, and is described in Charlie Jane Anders, “River Song’s
Chronology on Doctor Who, from River’s Own Point of View,” io9, October 3, 2011,
http://io9.com/5845981/river-songs-chronology-on-doctor-who-from-rivers-own
-point-of-view.
4. See pyram1dhead, “Lost: Flight 815 Crash in Real Time,” YouTube, September 12,
2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKcKtjrL5bc.
5. See Dave Itzkoff, “In a Twist on the Remix, Fans Recut TV Series,” New York Times,
June 9, 2013, C1, for a discussion of such analytic remixes, including remixes of Lost
and Arrested Development.
6. See Mark Andrejevic, “Watching Television without Pity: The Productivity of
Online Fans,” Television & New Media 9, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 24 – 46.
7. Shahed Syed, “Dexter’s Victims,” last updated September 27, 2013, http://www
.shah3d.com/dexters-victims-season-8-update/.
8. jcham979, “Breaking Bad Finale Theory: A Case for Walt Poisoning Brock,”
YouTube, October 5, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BROfhjCycY.
 Notes | 375

9. See Dave Walker’s “Treme Explained,” posts at NOLA.com, May – June 2011, http://
topics.nola.com/tag/treme-explained/index.html.
10. See The Tommy Westphall Universe, “The Master List,” http://thetommywestphall
.wordpress.com/the-master-list/ (accessed June 15, 2014).
11. See Paul Booth, Digital Fandom (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), for a discussion of
the ARG style of fan engagement.
12. Steve Murray, “Loved & Lost,” National Post, May 21, 2010, http://www.nationalpost
.com/arts/lost/index.html.
13. See MGK, “Alignment Chart Week! The Wire,” MightyGodKing.com, December 9,
2010, http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2010/12/09/alignment-chart-week-the
-wire/.
14. Tim Appelo, “Secrets behind Game of Thrones Opening Credits,” Hollywood
Reporter, April 9, 2011, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/secrets-game
-thrones-opening-credits-179656.
15. See Bob Rehak’s Graphic Engine blog for his in-process writing on the topic: http://
graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu/?tag=blueprint-culture.
16. Neither of these online maps is available any longer, but both were online in 2012
when I was researching this chapter.
17. For more on media tourism, see Nick Couldry, “On the Set of The Sopranos:
‘Inside’ a Fan’s Construction of Nearness,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities
in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington
(New York: NYU Press, 2007), 139 – 148; David Crouch, Rhona Jackson, and Felix
Thompson, The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures (New
York: Routledge, 2005); Leshu Torchin, “Location, Location, Location,” Tourist
Studies 2, no. 3 (December 1, 2002): 247 – 266.
18. “Timeline: Flash-Sideways Timeline,” Lostpedia, http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/
Timeline:Flash-sideways_timeline (accessed March 24, 2012).
19. For more on wikis as participatory culture, see Jason Mittell, “Wikis and Partici-
patory Fandom,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche
and Jennifer Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 35 – 42; and Booth,
Digital Fandom.
20. See Jason Mittell, “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia,”
Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (Fall 2009), http://journal.transformative
works.org/index.php/twc/article/view/118/117, for a more detailed analysis of
Lostpedia. All Lostpedia content referred to can be found on http://lostpedia.wikia
.com.
21. Henry Jenkins, “ ‘Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?’: alt.tv
.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery,” in Full of Secrets: Critical
Approaches to “Twin Peaks,” ed. David Lavery (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1995), 51 – 69.
22. Because of the fluid nature of wikis, quotes from Lostpedia might change over
time. Whenever appropriate, I cite a date on which the page did include the
376 | Notes

material; if not otherwise noted, the quotes were part of Lostpedia on March 20,
2009.
23. For more on collective online fan engagement, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence
Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006); Booth,
Digital Fandom.
24. “The Lostpedia Interview: Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof,” Lostpedia, April 17,
2009, http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Lostpedia_Interview%3ACarlton_
Cuse_%26_Damon_Lindelof.
25. See Christy Dena, Jeremy Douglass, and Mark Marino, “Benchmark Fiction: A
Framework for Comparative New Media Studies,” Proceedings of the Digital Arts
and Culture Conference, December 2005, 89 – 98; and Bruce Mason and Sue
Thomas, “A Million Penguins” Research Report (Leicester, UK: Institute of Creative
Technologies, De Montfort University, April 24, 2008), for examples of more
creative uses of wikis.
26. See Sarah Toton, “Cataloging Knowledge: Gender, Generative Fandom, and the
Battlestar Wiki,” Flow 7 (January 2008), http://flowtv.org/?p=1060.
27. See Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value
and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2012).
28. See Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington, Fandom, for an array of fan practices across
historical eras and media.
29. See http://en.battlestarwiki.org/.
30. As of this writing, the clip is still available on YouTube: jkh9005, “Incredible
Commercial/Product Placement,” March 19, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CEDjAFi7oJ4.

Chapter 9: Transmedia Storytelling

1. See Paul Booth, Digital Fandom (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); M. J. Clarke,
Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production (New York:
Continuum, 2012); and Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New
Media, and Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 2011), for in-depth accounts of
transmedia television.
2. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts
(New York: NYU Press, 2010).
3. Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan
(blog), August 1, 2011, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_
further_re.html, emphasis in original.
4. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New
York: NYU Press, 2006).
5. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New
Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 118 – 130.
6. Note that I do not believe that this gap of characterization is inherent to the
videogame medium, as numerous games such as Red Dead Redemption and the
 Notes | 377

Final Fantasy series have created vivid and compelling characters. This issue arises
more when attempting to port established characters from television to games, as
the latter medium typically fails to re-create the depth and breadth of an ongoing
television character.
7. See Ivan Askwith, “TV 2.0: Turning Television into an Engagement Medium”
(master’s thesis, MIT, 2007), http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses/IvanAskwith2007
.pdf; Aaron Smith, “Transmedia Storytelling in Television 2.0” (honors thesis,
Middlebury College, 2009), http://sites.middlebury.edu/mediacp; and Frank Rose,
The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison
Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories (New York: Norton, 2011), for other accounts
of Lost’s transmedia strategies.
8. See Jason Mittell, “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia,”
Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (Fall 2009), http://journal.transformative
works.org/index.php/twc/article/view/118/117, for more on my role within Lost
fandom.
9. Jenkins, Convergence Culture.
10. Personal interview with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, March 23, 2010.
11. See Jason Mittell, “Lost in an Alternate Reality,” Flow, June 16, 2006, http://flowtv
.org/2006/06/lost-in-an-alternate-reality/, for a discussion of playing The Lost
Experience.
12. From the Breaking Bad “Insider Podcast” for episode 409, September 13, 2011,
http://www.amctv.com/shows/breaking-bad/insider-podcast-season-4.
13. AMC, “Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E.: Breaking Bad Animated Webisode,” http://www
.amctv.com/breaking-bad/videos/team-s-c-i-e-n-c-e (accessed March 2010).
14. See Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in
Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004), 93 – 112, for a discussion of the “What If?” impulse within television
serials.
15. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (1961; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2001).
16. Bob Rehak, “Franz Joseph and Star Trek’s Blueprint Culture,” Graphic Engine
(blog), March 11, 2012, http://graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu/?p=1602.
17. See Henrik Örnebring, “Alternate Reality Gaming and Convergence Culture,”
International Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 4 (December 1, 2007): 445−462, for
a detailed discussion of the Alias ARGs.
18. See Julie Levin Russo, “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Videos in the Age of
Convergence,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 125 – 130.

Chapter 10: Ends

1. From New Oxford American Dictionary, on Apple Macintosh computers.
2. See “Reunion,” TV Series Finale, http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/reunion/
(accessed March 24, 2012), for details.
3. Greg M. Smith, “Caught between Cliffhanger and Closure: Potential Cancellation
378 | Notes

and the TV Season Ending” (paper presented at the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies conference, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2011).
4. Personal interview with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, March 23, 2010.
5. See also Steven E. Jones, The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual
Strategies (New York: Routledge, 2008).
6. Emily Nussbaum, “A Disappointed Fan Is Still a Fan: How the Creators of Lost
Seduced and Betrayed Their Viewers,” New York, May 28, 2010, http://nymag.com/
arts/tv/reviews/66293/.
7. See Linda Williams, On “The Wire” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), for a
compelling discussion of The Wire’s journalistic functions.
8. See Bill Carter, “Fans Online Sift for Clues in the Sopranos Finale,” New York Times,
June 16, 2007, for reference to Chase’s desire to extend the blackness.
9. For one of many places where Chase denies showing contempt for viewers, see
Alan Sepinwall, “David Chase Speaks!,” NJ.com, June 11, 2007, http://blog.nj.com/
alltv/2007/06/david_chase_speaks.html.
10. Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Episode 21, ‘Made in
America,’ ” The House Next Door (blog), Slant, June 11, 2007, http://www.slant
magazine.com/house/2007/06/the-sopranos-mondays-season-6-ep-21-made-in
-america/.
11. See Master of Sopranos, The Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of “The END” (blog),
last updated June 19, 2013, http://masterofsopranos.wordpress.com/the-sopranos
-definitive-explanation-of-the-end/.
12. Todd VanDerWerff, “The Sopranos — ‘Made in America,’ ” The A.V. Club, Decem-
ber 19, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/made-in-america,89671/.
13. Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Sopranos,” Sight & Sound 23, no. 9 (September 2013): 112.
14. Tara McKelvey, “Media Coverage of the Drone Program” (discussion paper, Joan
Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, February 2013), http://
shorensteincenter.org/2013/02/media-coverage-of-the-drone-program/.
15. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985).
16. For more on the role of serial narrative and ideological closure, see Laura Stempel
Mumford, Love and Ideology in the Afternoon: Soap Opera, Women, and Television
Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
17. Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with
Stuart Hall,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 45 – 60.
18. Quoted in Lane Brown, “In Conversation: Vince Gilligan on the End of Breaking
Bad,” Vulture (blog), New York, May 12, 2013, http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/
vince-gilligan-on-breaking-bad.html.
19. Anna Gunn, “I Have a Character Issue,” New York Times, August 23, 2013.
20. To be fair, not all Skyler hating is misogynist; see Kelli Marshall, “I Don’t Like
Skyler White, but Probably Not for the Reasons You Think,” MediAcademia (blog),
August 7, 2012, http://www.kellimarshall.net/television/skyler-white/, for an
example of feminist anti-Skyler sentiments.
 Notes | 379

21. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future
of the Academy (New York: NYU Press, 2011).
22. Emily Nussbaum, “Tune in Next Week,” New Yorker, July 30, 2012, http://www
.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2012/07/30/120730crte_television_
nussbaum?currentPage=all.
23. Paul Booth, Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television (New
York: Peter Lang, 2012).
This page intentionally left blank
Index

Abbott, Stacey, 355n4 Babylon 5, 4, 35, 101

ABC Network, 1 – 2, 92 – 94, 125, 192, 193, Ball, Allan, 31, 97
240, 242, 262, 317 Baltimore, 100, 129, 192, 219 – 221, 245,
Abrams, J. J., 31, 60, 92 – 94, 97, 103, 119 271, 330
Absolutely Fabulous, 143 Banks, Miranda, 362n8, 363n23
academic publishing, 11 – 12, 349 – 352 Barnum, P. T., 42 – 43
Adaptation, 51 Barthes, Roland, 74, 96
Adorno, Theodor, 95 Battlestar Galactica, 23, 25, 44 – 45, 49, 99,
aesthetics. See evaluation; poetics; tele- 101 – 102, 105, 139, 150, 167, 168, 182, 185,
vision style 189 – 191, 193, 264, 270, 283, 289 – 290,
Agency, The, 1, 4, 355n1 300, 317
Akass, Kim, 369n5 Baywatch, 43
Alber, Jan, 360n35, 363n28 BBC, 265
Alias, 1 – 4, 11, 28, 43 – 44, 47, 49 – 50, 52, Bernie Mac Show, The, 49
60 – 61, 75, 92, 120, 139, 169, 206, 208 – Bérubé, Michael, 370n15
209, 251, 259, 302, 316 – 317, 355n1 Better Call Saul, 312
Allen, Robert, 6, 136, 237, 344, 355n5, Bewitched, 120
372n4 Blackadder, 143
All in the Family, 49, 143, 211 Blanchet, Robert, 365n2, 365n10
Allrath, Gaby, 366n19 blogs, 7, 11, 35, 59, 104, 110 – 111, 114 – 115,
AMC, 17, 34 – 35, 91, 151, 218, 256 – 257, 312 128, 206, 227 – 228, 267, 293, 336, 350
Americans, The, 150 Boardwalk Empire, 97
Amos ’n’ Andy, 234 – 235 Bob Newhart Show, The, 268
Anderson, Christopher, 355n4 Bogost, Ian, 360n38
Angel, 19 – 20, 31, 46, 47, 99, 116, 120, 123, Boomtown, 17, 48, 49, 186
124, 139, 141, 169, 320, 321 Booth, Paul, 351, 356n6, 358n13, 375n11,
antiheroes, 119, 142 – 163, 203, 231, 253, 376n23, 376n1
366n27 Booth, Wayne, 105 – 106
Arrested Development, 17, 21, 38, 41, 42 – Bordwell, David, 5 – 6, 17 – 18, 74, 106, 113,
43, 45, 49, 52 – 53, 58, 99, 137, 184, 204, 115, 164 – 165, 167 – 168, 170, 175 – 177, 194
267, 269, 322, 324 – 325, 374n5 Bourdieu, Pierre, 213, 214 – 215, 216, 226,
Askwith, Ivan, 360n28, 364n35, 377n7 228, 369 – 370n9
A-Team, The, 251, 253 Braun, Lloyd, 92 – 94
authorship, 31 – 32, 86 – 117, 119, 149, 151, Breaking Bad, 9, 17, 24, 25, 34, 46, 61, 91,
196 – 197, 218, 262, 281, 298, 299, 306 – 102, 105, 112 – 114, 132, 142, 150 – 163, 171,
307, 312 – 313, 332, 334 – 335, 339, 347, 351 191, 206, 217 – 226, 231, 232, 253 – 257,
A.V. Club, The, 35, 101, 114, 358n7, 362n16 265, 267, 295, 311 – 315, 317, 326, 347 – 349,
Awake, 64 – 67 367n36

381
382 | Index

Brooker, Will, 357n11 Chicago Code, The, 98

Brotherhood, 149 Chuck, 137, 169
Brown, Simon, 355n4 C.K., Louis, 22, 109 – 110, 362n16, 366n13
Brunsdon, Charlotte, 369n1, 370n15 cognitive poetics, 6, 70, 131, 132, 136,
Buckland, Warren, 359n18, 360n39 145, 164 – 205. See also narrative
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1, 4, 19 – 20, 29, comprehension
34, 35, 43, 46, 47, 86 – 87, 94, 95, 97, 99, Columbo, 297
115 – 116, 123, 137, 139, 141, 169, 192, 211, comics, 33, 37, 110, 111, 125, 234 – 236, 238,
251, 274, 297 – 298, 301, 320, 321 243, 294, 296, 298
Burns, Ed, 100 Community, 23, 35, 46, 101, 110 – 112, 274
Busse, Kristina, 364n39 Cook, Dane, 110
Butler, Jeremy G., 357n15, 370n18 Corner, John, 370n15
Cosby Show, The, 52, 89
cable channels, 9, 17, 34 – 35, 36, 89, 91, Cougar Town, 67
98, 149, 161, 192, 218, 238, 253, 264, 320, Cranston, Bryan, 90, 152 – 153, 156, 161 –
358n11, 359n21 163, 223 – 224
Cagney and Lacey, 120, 211, 251, 366n27 credit sequences, 27, 57, 62, 68, 73, 81, 90,
Caillois, Roger, 315 – 316 91 – 92, 93 – 94, 96, 99 – 100, 123, 124,
Caldwell, John Thornton, 362n8, 370n18 129, 191 – 192, 218, 270, 326, 334, 358n11,
Calinescu, Matei, 368n10 361n2
Cardwell, Sarah, 212, 369n1 Creeber, Glen, 356n6, 357 – 358n1
Carroll, Noël, 75, 366n22, 368n8 crime drama, 1, 22, 29 – 30, 34, 48, 64, 66,
Carter, Bill, 378n8 68 – 74, 78 – 79 84 – 85, 98, 100, 127, 129,
CBS Network, 1, 59, 99, 109 142, 147 – 148, 150, 151, 154 – 160, 162, 172,
Chaddha, Anmol, 371n22 178, 186, 218 – 224, 248, 251, 252, 254,
Chamberlain, Daniel, 369n3 257, 311, 329
characters, 22 – 23, 59, 70, 80 – 81, 84, Crossing Jordan, 92
86 – 87, 118 – 163, 166, 173 – 174, 178 – 179, CSI franchise, 1, 103, 127, 186, 211, 297, 330,
187, 189 – 191, 192, 196, 201, 219 – 223, 365n2
229 – 231, 241, 249 – 250, 254, 268 – 269, cultural hierarchies, 32, 37, 39, 98, 210 –
273, 278, 300 – 302, 305 – 306, 311 – 314, 212, 213 – 214, 216 – 217, 235, 239, 241 –
327 – 329, 331 – 332, 347 – 348, 376 – 377n6; 242, 246, 250, 323
alignment, 129, 134, 142, 144, 146 – 147, cultural politics, 3 – 4, 52, 115, 206, 209,
153 – 154, 156, 158, 162, 178 – 179, 185 – 186, 213 – 215, 230, 246 – 247, 289, 339 – 349
203, 253 – 254; allegiance, 134 – 135, 138, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 17, 21, 34, 42, 108 –
141, 142 – 144, 146 – 148, 154, 155 – 160, 109, 143, 194 – 205
162, 163, 203, 220, 244, 253 – 254, 337 – Cuse, Carlton, 93 – 94, 102 – 103, 105, 279,
338, 347; change, 133 – 142, 253; mind 284, 295, 304 – 307, 309, 323, 325, 328,
reading, 132, 136, 156, 157, 161, 199, 203, 359n20, 363n19
220, 224; recognition, 122 – 123, 125 – 126, CW, The, 252
133, 139 – 140, 167, 181, 198, 200 – 201.
See also antiheroes; performance D’Acci, Julie, 366n27
Chase, David, 29, 334 – 335, 337 – 338 Daily Show, The, 211
Chatman, Seymour, 23 – 24, 106 – 107, 175 Dallas, 149, 243
Cheers, 89, 243, 268, 324 Damages, 61, 75, 160, 186, 251, 253
Chekhov, Anton, 24 Daniels, Greg, 97, 98
 Index | 383

Dasgupta, Sudeep, 370n12 Evans, Elizabeth, 376n1

David, Larry, 108 – 109, 143, 196 – 205, 271 Event, The, 17, 25, 66, 94, 126
Day Break, 17, 28, 48, 66 Everybody Loves Raymond, 216
Deadwood, 28, 34, 41, 99, 211, 321, 365n7
De Kosnik, Abigail, 365n9 Family Guy, 187
Dern, Laura, 119 fandom, 213, 373n27; affirmational vs.
Desperate Housewives, 2, 49, 52, 300 transformational, 114 – 115, 248, 270,
Dexter, 17, 52, 143, 145 – 149, 178 – 180, 188, 275, 281, 316 – 317, 364n39; shipping,
192, 231, 267, 330 103, 128, 278 – 280, 287. See also forensic
Dickens, Charles, 37, 40 – 41, 110, 323, 331 fandom; participatory culture; viewing
Dick Van Dyke Show, The, 49, 97, 216 practices
Diff ’rent Strokes, 49 Fawlty Towers, 143
digital video recorders (DVRs), 36 – 37, Feuer, Jane, 355n4, 369n4, 372n9 – 10,
165, 174, 190, 192, 198, 238 – 239, 264 373n21
Doctor Who, 52, 55, 99, 120, 140, 172, 186, Fey, Tina, 89, 103, 119
263, 265, 276, 297, 300, 362n3 film: as compared to television, 2, 18, 31 –
Dolan, Marc, 355n4 32, 37, 43, 46, 50, 88, 94, 96, 119, 165, 175,
Dollhouse, 67, 97 180, 191, 194, 212, 214, 218, 236, 244 –
Donahue, Ann, 103 245, 249, 274, 292, 294; film theory, 4 – 7,
Douglas, Susan J., 374n36 17 – 18, 74, 88, 96, 106 – 107, 118, 122 – 123
Dragnet, 22, 49, 71, 73, 78, 89, 129, 292 – film noir, 68 – 74, 183, 251
293, 297, 361n9 Firefly, 17, 31, 32, 53, 143, 264, 321
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, 104 Fish, Stanley, 207
Duchovney, David, 99 Fiske, John, 251, 259, 357n12, 369 – 370n9,
Duncan, Stephen V., 358n12 371n20
Dunham, Lena, 103 – 104, 119 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 350
DVDs, 2, 8, 26 – 27, 36 – 41, 54 – 56, 67, 68 – FlashForward, 17, 25
69, 101, 104, 165, 177, 187 – 188, 190, 238, forensic fandom, 43, 52, 59 – 60, 65, 66 – 67,
264, 268, 280 – 281, 293, 310, 322, 359n21, 103, 108, 112 – 113, 114, 126, 247 – 249, 250,
361n7 266, 267, 272 – 273, 274, 277 – 278, 282,
Dynasty, 243, 245, 251 288 – 291, 305, 308 – 309, 310, 314 – 315,
333, 336 – 337
Eder, Jens, 118, 365n2 Foucault, Michel, 96, 107
Elementary, 173 Fox Network 67, 97, 98, 319
Ellis, John, 355n5, 368n15 Friday Night Lights, 24, 137, 257 – 258, 259
Enlightened, 91, 119, 150 Friends, 60, 192
episodic form, 1, 18 – 23, 27 – 29, 32 – 34, 36, Fringe, 31, 52, 139, 274
42, 45, 46, 63 – 64, 79 – 80, 82, 99, 127, Frost, Mark, 361n2
129, 130, 138, 169, 235 – 238, 243, 251, Fury, David, 99
258 – 259, 296 – 297, 333, 372n8 FX, 17, 34 – 35, 98, 193, 253
ER, 211
Espenson, Jane, 99, 270 Game of Thrones, 17, 99, 124 – 125, 137, 197,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 51 270, 353
evaluation, 2, 31, 32, 37, 39, 98, 105, games, 51, 108, 126, 140, 145, 269, 288,
206 – 232, 239, 246 – 247, 323, 362n12, 300 – 303, 323, 360n38; alternate reality
369 – 370n9 games, 268, 280, 286 – 287, 293, 303,
384 | Index

games (continued ) Harper’s Island, 25, 66, 94, 126, 216, 264,
304, 307 – 309, 316 – 317; tie-in games, 310
35, 271, 272, 277, 292, 293, 300 – 303, Harris, Neil, 42 – 43
304 – 305, 306, 312 – 313, 315; videogames Harris, Susan, 242, 373n16
as compared to television, 51, 53 – 54, Harry Potter, 183 – 184
57, 291, 371n19, 376 – 377n6. See also Harsh Realm, 25
forensic fandom; paratexts; transmedia Hayward, Jennifer, 356n4, 360n29, 364n33
storytelling HBO, 17, 28 – 30, 34, 91, 124, 146, 218, 270,
Gamson, Joshua, 108 334, 358n11, 372n9
Gansa, Alex, 114 Hebdidge, Dick, 215
gender representation, 3, 68, 71 – 72, 84 – Heffernan, Virginia, 368n19
85, 103 – 104, 111, 115, 149 – 150, 162, 206, Hennion, Antoine, 370n10, 370n12
213 – 214, 230, 233 – 234, 246 – 260, 286, Herman, David, 358n6, 367n3
345, 347 – 349, 366n27, 373n27, 374n36 Heroes, 23, 26, 124, 138, 206, 216, 303, 310,
General Hospital, 25, 242 311
Geraghty, Christine, 369n1, 370n15 Hills, Matt, 186, 357n11, 362n3, 363n20,
Giles, David C., 365n10 370n15
Gillan, Jennifer, 359n16 Hill Street Blues, 211, 243, 245, 251, 252,
Gilligan, Vince, 90, 102, 112 – 114, 119, 151 – 259
152, 218, 347 Hilmes, Michele, 372n5
Gilmore Girls, 99, 103, 137 Hitchcock, Alfred, 46, 175, 177
Girls, 103 – 104, 129 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 367n3
Gledhill, Christine, 371n2 Homeland, 9, 17, 108, 114, 135, 191, 251,
Goddard, Drew, 99 340 – 347, 349, 353
Goldbergs, The, 89 Homicide: Life on the Street, 218, 268
Good Wife, The, 53, 122, 258 – 260, 353 Honeymooners, The, 372n8
Gordon, Howard, 114 Horton, Donald, 365n10
Gorton, Kristyn, 373n23 House, M.D., 123, 143
Gray, Jonathan, 174 – 175, 215, 293, 357n11, House of Cards, 41
359n25, 363n20, 368n9, 369n8, 374n1 Howard, Douglas, 366n25
Grey’s Anatomy, 103 How I Met Your Mother, 17, 48, 49, 58 – 60,
Grief, Mark, 229 136, 264
Grillo-Marxuach, Javier, 307 Hurwitz, Mitchell, 99
Grodal, Torben, 108, 356n9
Groundhog Day, 28 I Love Lucy, 89, 97, 120, 217, 235, 268
Guiding Light, The, 234 Inception, 32, 51, 274
Gunn, Anna, 347 – 348 intertextuality, 7, 87, 100, 114, 122 – 123, 146,
Gunning, Tom, 360n33 151 – 152, 173 – 174, 184, 226, 262, 267 –
Gunsmoke, 235, 361n9 268, 269, 293, 316. See also paratexts;
transmedia storytelling
Hall, Michael C. 146, 179 – 180 Invasion, 94
Hall, Stuart, 215, 346 It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 21, 42,
Hammond, Michael, 356n6 143
Hannibal, 173 – 174
Happy Days, 267 Jack and Bobby, 48, 49, 186
Harmon, Dan, 101, 110 – 112, 362n16 Jacobs, Jason, 369n1, 370n15
 Index | 385

Jancovich, Mark, 369n5 literature: as compared to television, 2, 18,

Jenkins, Henry, 277, 294, 295, 296, 298, 37, 40 – 41, 87 – 88, 111, 119, 124 – 125, 130,
300, 303, 304 – 305, 314, 317 – 318, 356n8, 183 – 184, 191, 212, 214, 236, 240, 249,
357n11, 359n23, 376n23 270, 292, 323, 332; literary theory, 4 – 5,
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, 286 6, 96, 105 – 106, 107, 118, 145, 216, 246 –
John from Cincinnati, 99 247, 249 – 250; tie-in books, 280, 293,
Johnson, Steven, 35, 356n6 296 – 299, 302, 306, 309, 315
Jones, Steven E., 378n5 Lord of the Rings, 270 – 271, 302, 304
Justified, 17, 34, 67, 119, 157, 253 Lorre, Chuck, 98
Lost, 8, 9, 17, 20, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 38 – 40,
Kackman, Michael, 249, 355n3 43 – 44, 45, 46, 47, 49 – 50, 51 – 52, 53, 60,
Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe, 366n27 63 – 64, 92 – 94, 99, 102 – 103, 105, 108,
Kelleter, Frank, 235, 357n12, 359n26, 118, 121 – 123, 125 – 126, 130, 136 – 137, 138,
371n22 139, 140, 168 – 170, 172, 174 – 175, 178,
Kennedy, Liam, 371n19 181 – 182, 186, 189, 191 – 193, 206, 211,
Killing, The, 52, 150, 172, 251 248 – 250, 259, 262, 263 – 266, 268 – 269,
Kindt, Tom, 107, 363n25 271 – 290, 295, 301 – 302, 303 – 311, 313 –
King, Robert, 53 316, 321, 323 – 329, 331 – 332, 346 – 347, 353,
King of the Hill, 98 372n10
Kingpin, 149 Lostpedia, 8, 272, 274, 276 – 287, 316, 328,
Klein, Amanda Ann, 373n20 357n14
Klinger, Barbara, 368n10 Lotz, Amanda, 215, 253, 359n16, 366n27,
Kohan, Jenji, 103 367n36, 369n8, 374n36
Kompare, Derek, 37 – 38, 102, 357n12, Louie, 22, 108 – 110, 353, 365 – 366n13
363n20, 368n10 Lynch, David, 31, 298
Kotsko, Adam, 368n21 Lyons, James, 369n5
Kozloff, Sarah 355n4
Kring, Tim, 23 Macdonald, Dwight, 95
Mad Men, 17, 34, 91, 97, 136, 137, 143, 144 –
L.A. Law, 259 145, 151, 164, 181, 206 – 207, 218, 227 – 232,
Lancaster, Kurt, 363n17 246, 253, 265, 269, 271, 312
Lang, Anouk, 363n24 Malcolm in the Middle, 21, 49, 152 – 153
Larry Sanders Show, The, 143 Mamet, David, 99
Last Resort, 320 – 321 Man from U.N.C.L.E., 373n27
Lavik, Erlend, 370n17 Mann, Denise, 362n6
Law and Order franchise, 22, 29, 127 Marshall, C. W., 371n19
legitimation. See cultural hierarchies; Marshall, Kelli, 378n20
evaluation Martin, Brett, 362n4, 367n29
Levine, Elana, 213 – 214, 246 – 247, 248, 250, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 294
359n15, 359n17, 359n24, 362n12, 370n12, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, 240 – 243,
372n7, 373n15 373n15
Lieber, Jeffrey, 92 – 94 Mary Tyler Moore Show, The, 97, 242, 324
Life on Mars, 274, 365n13 M*A*S*H, 122, 324
Lindelof, Damon, 92 – 94, 102 – 103, 105, Matrix, The, 51, 298, 303, 314
118, 279, 283, 284, 295, 304 – 307, 309, Mayer, Vicki, 362n8
323, 328 Mazdon, Lucy, 356n6
386 | Index

McCabe, Janet, 369n5 narrative events, 23 – 25, 167, 172, 177, 236 –
McGee, Ryan, 250 238, 266 – 268, 273, 296 – 298, 302 – 303,
McKee, Alan, 370n15 311, 313
McKelvey, Tara, 378n14 narrative hypotheses, 25 – 26, 70, 131 – 132,
McNutt, Myles, 363n18 161 – 162, 169, 170 – 173, 175 – 176, 197, 199,
MediaCommons, 12, 350 201, 278; anticipation, 60 – 61, 84, 105,
Medium, 66 113, 121, 135, 139 – 140, 148, 168, 171 – 173,
melodrama, 20, 22, 57, 68, 209, 233 – 260, 175 – 179, 189, 191, 197 – 200, 202 – 203,
280, 347, 352, 373n20 205, 273, 322, 323, 373n18; curiosity,
Melrose Place, 11, 149, 243 26, 106, 154, 170 – 171, 172, 175, 178 – 179,
Memento, 51 201, 333; suspense, 26, 49, 73, 74, 139,
memory, 6, 22, 23, 120, 122, 131, 133, 136, 171 – 172, 175, 176 – 177, 179, 204, 209, 237,
139, 140, 156 – 158, 161, 170, 177, 179, 180 – 244, 373n18; theorizing, 26, 27, 40, 86 –
194, 195, 198, 200, 202, 203, 223, 265, 87, 113, 173, 276, 281 – 283, 326. See also
325 – 326, 347, 368n16; surprise memory, narrative comprehension
191 – 192 narrative norms: extrinsic, 17, 19, 32, 34,
Mendelsohn, Carol, 103 42, 74, 91, 119, 124 – 125, 150, 167 – 168,
Meslow, Scott, 366n16 171 – 172, 175 – 176, 221, 239 – 240, 242,
Miami Vice, 73, 99 245, 258, 259 – 260, 334 – 335; intrinsic,
Mike and Molly, 98 21, 23, 28, 44 – 45, 48, 56 – 66, 74, 76, 82,
Milch, David, 99 85, 105, 125 – 126, 130, 167, 168 – 169, 186,
Moore, Ron, 101, 102, 105, 190 199, 201, 204, 224, 229, 325, 337
Morgan, Darin, 99 narrative space, 269 – 274, 275, 300,
Müller, Hans-Harald, 107, 363n25 304 – 305
Mumford, Laura Stempel, 372n12, 378n16 narrative statements, versus enigmas, 24 –
Murder, She Wrote, 299 – 300 25, 59 – 60, 65 – 66, 83 – 84, 86 – 87, 170,
Murphy, Caryn, 240 171, 178, 267, 327
mysteries, 19, 25 – 26, 28, 38, 44, 48, 51 – 52, narrative techniques: cliffhangers, 21, 28,
57 – 58, 60, 61, 65 – 67, 68, 70, 74, 76, 78, 39, 73, 74, 168, 188, 208, 209 – 210, 237,
82, 83 – 85, 102, 103, 108, 170, 172 – 173, 351; cutaways, 58, 187; erotetic narra-
175 – 176, 178, 189, 252, 308 – 310, 323 – tive, 75, 83 – 84; fantasy sequences, 49,
324, 326 – 327, 329 131; focalization, 49, 72, 77 – 78, 124,
185 – 186, 249; multiple dimensions,
narrative complexity, 3, 4, 11, 17 – 22, 26, 64 – 66, 130, 250, 266, 274 – 275, 326 – 329;
28, 41 – 54, 74 – 75, 179, 195, 204 – 205, narrative special effects, 43 – 45, 168 –
216 – 226, 228, 249, 251, 259, 290 169, 324 – 325, 333, 360n35; retelling, 26,
narrative comprehension, 6, 21, 23 – 24, 49, 77, 181 – 182, 184 – 185, 186, 236 – 237,
38, 50 – 52, 60 – 61, 62, 65 – 67, 69, 70, 242, 296 – 297, 302; split screens, 2,
74, 75 – 76, 78 – 79 , 82, 105 – 110, 115 – 117, 28, 59, 62, 209, 265 – 266; voice-over
122 – 124, 130 – 132, 140, 161, 164 – 205, narration, 10, 43, 49, 58 – 60, 61, 62,
249, 259, 261, 263 – 264, 274 – 275, 277, 68 – 79, 85, 131 – 132, 146, 154, 178, 183 –
288 – 289, 290, 296, 299, 333, 336; and 186, 188, 193, 361n9. See also narrative
surprise, 51 – 52, 121, 123, 139 – 140, 168 – temporality
169, 172 – 173, 176, 177, 179, 190 – 191 narrative temporality: analepses, 26,
narrative endings, 33 – 34, 148, 159 – 160, 48 – 50, 58 – 61, 68, 154, 169 – 170, 186,
267, 310, 319 – 349 219, 264 – 266; ellipses, 26, 44 – 45, 48,
 Index | 387

62, 237; flashbacks, 10 – 11, 20, 22, 25, 104 – 105, 107, 108, 110 – 116, 121, 128, 140,
26, 48 – 49, 50 – 51, 58, 59, 63 – 64, 74 – 80, 166, 175, 181, 193 – 194, 197, 239, 261 – 291,
85, 93, 113, 123, 126 130, 136, 137, 146, 292 – 318, 322, 332, 339 – 340, 348, 349,
156, 168 – 169, 184 – 187, 190 – 191, 223, 372n12
237, 249, 259, 264, 265 – 266, 274, 305, Parks and Recreation, 45, 67, 97, 121
342, 346; flash-forwards, 43, 48, 68 – 69, participatory culture, and online fandom,
112, 121, 130, 168 – 169, 175, 264, 274, 353; 8 – 9, 35 – 36, 40 – 41, 43, 101, 110, 115, 116,
story vs. discourse vs. screen time, 2, 127, 181, 193, 239, 265 – 266, 268, 269,
26 – 28, 48, 62, 168, 239, 263 – 266; time- 270, 272 – 275, 277 – 289, 291, 300, 303,
travel, 26, 47, 130, 140, 172, 250, 265. See 308 – 309, 316 – 318, 359n23
also narrative techniques Peacock, Steven, 355n4, 369n1, 369n3
narratology, 5, 10, 52, 106 – 107, 118, 249, Pearson, Roberta, 133 – 134, 136, 141, 365n2
333 performance, 22, 51, 67, 72, 81, 88, 90,
Nations, Gregg, 283 97, 109, 118, 119 – 122, 124 – 125, 135 – 136,
Ndalianis, Angela, 360n37 144 – 145, 152 – 153, 156, 161, 163, 178, 179,
Nelson, Robin, 356n4, 357 – 358n1 200, 201, 220, 224, 231, 256 – 257
Netflix, 38, 41, 322, 324, 359n21 Peyton Place, 240, 241, 243
Newcomb, Horace, 355n5, 361n1 Plec, Julie, 103
Newhart, 324 – 325 podcasts, 101 – 103, 105, 111, 112, 114 – 115,
Newman, Michael, 213 – 214, 246 – 247, 128, 305, 307
248, 250, 356n6, 359n15, 359n17, 359n24, poetics, 4 – 9, 18 – 31, 41, 53 – 54, 55 – 68, 119,
362n12, 365n2, 370n12, 372n7 142, 164 – 166, 180, 195, 207, 237 – 238,
Nine, The, 186 339 – 340, 347, 356n8. See also cognitive
Nurse Jackie, 150 poetics; narrative techniques
Nussbaum, Emily, 99, 262, 328, 379n22 Polan, Dana, 358n14
NYPD Blue, 29 Potter, Tiffany, 371n19
Prestige, The, 51
obsession_inc, 114, 364n38 Pretty Little Liars, 120
O.C., The, 243 Prison Break, 301
Office, The, 9, 24, 49, 97, 98, 143, 168, 299, procedural: as episodic form, 1, 22, 32, 66,
303, 311 67, 127, 142, 251 – 252, 264, 297; logic, 51,
Once Upon a Time, 274 53 – 54, 218, 248
operational aesthetic, 41 – 53, 60, 80, 108 – Psycho, 46
110, 125 – 126, 128, 148, 163, 167, 168 – 170, psychology. See cognitive poetics; narra-
171, 172, 174 – 175, 176 – 178, 196 – 197, 200, tive comprehension
202 – 205, 231, 248 – 249, 259, 324 – 326, Pulp Fiction, 51
329 – 332, 338, 360n33 Pushing Daisies, 20, 61, 66, 183 – 184, 321
Orange Is the New Black, 20, 41, 103, 136
Örnebring, Henrik, 377n17 quality television, 210 – 212, 214 – 215, 216,
O’Sullivan, Sean, 40 – 41, 356n6, 358n10, 228, 232, 290, 323
358n14
Oz, 143 racial representation, 3, 114, 206, 209, 345,
346
parasocial relationships, 124, 127 – 128, 130, radio, 234 – 235, 293, 361n9
141 – 142, 148 – 149, 314, 365n10 Radway, Janice, 84
paratexts, 7 – 8, 27, 37, 40, 59, 101 – 103, Raiders of the Lost Ark, 297
388 | Index

realism, 11, 43 – 44, 66, 109, 147, 148, 204, 142, 148 – 149, 172, 173, 180 – 181, 234 –
208 – 209, 221 – 222, 244 – 246, 247 – 248, 239, 243, 244, 251, 295, 319, 333, 336, 339,
265, 270, 273, 311, 324, 329, 330 – 331, 351 – 352
360n35, 371n20, 371n22 series reboots, 47 – 48, 169, 297
reality television, 9, 31, 32, 92, 98, 187 Sewell, Philip W., 369n4
Rear Window, 46, 194 Sex and the City, 150
recaps, 27, 187 – 191, 193 – 194, 198, 242, Shapiro, Stephen, 371n19
266 – 267, 351 Sherlock, 173
reception studies, 6 – 9, 165, 276 – 277, Sherlock Holmes, 173, 289, 292
303 – 304 Sherman-Palladino, Amy, 99, 103
reflexivity. See operational aesthetic Shield, The, 17, 34, 90, 98, 143, 148, 149,
Rehak, Bob, 270 – 271, 316 155, 157, 253, 300
Rescue Me, 122, 143, 193, 253 Shimpach, Shawn, 356n6
Return of Jezebel James, The, 99 showrunners, 87, 90 – 92, 93 – 94, 99, 101 –
Reunion, 17, 25, 48, 126, 319 – 320 104, 109, 110 – 117, 118, 119, 298, 304 – 307,
Revenge, 10 – 11, 25, 61, 75, 150, 154, 170 – 316, 323, 362n16, 363n19
171, 243, 244 Showtime, 17, 340, 358n11
Revolution, 310 Simon, David, 99, 100, 114, 115, 218, 221,
Rhimes, Shonda, 103 262, 323, 331
Roediger, Henry, 368n16 Simpsons, The, 21, 34, 35, 46, 51, 55, 276,
Romano, Ray, 119 300
Rose, Frank, 377n7 sitcoms, 11, 20, 31, 32, 34, 42, 49, 58, 67, 98,
Roseanne, 49, 120 109 – 110, 120, 126, 143, 152, 183, 184, 187,
Rubicon, 320 204, 235, 240 – 242, 264, 296, 311, 372n8
Run Lola Run, 51, 274 Six Feet Under, 11, 17, 24, 31, 45, 49, 63,
Running Wilde, 108 – 109 137, 146, 168, 191, 211, 244, 324, 325, 353,
Russo, Julie Levin, 377n18 372n9
Ruston, Scott, 369n3 Sixth Sense, The, 32, 51
Ryan, Shawn, 90, 97, 98, 101 Sliding Doors, 274
Smallville, 173
Scandal, 103 Smith, Aaron, 377n7
Schatz, Thomas, 355n4 Smith, Anthony, 356n6, 367n34
Schur, Michael, 97, 362n16 Smith, Greg, 320, 355n5, 356n6, 365n2,
science fiction, 53, 93, 101, 120, 167, 183, 369n1, 370n15
247, 248, 250, 265, 270 – 271, 273, 280, Smith, Murray, 122 – 123, 127, 129, 134, 142 –
297, 306, 310, 311 143, 145, 364n2, 365n2, 366n20, 366n22
Sconce, Jeffrey, 19, 42, 356n6, 377n14 Soap, 11, 240, 242 – 243
Scott, Suzanne, 102, 364n39 soap operas, 6, 9, 11, 22, 25, 32, 41, 55, 110,
Scrubs, 46, 49, 51, 122, 131, 187, 211, 322 120, 126 – 127, 136, 149, 168, 181, 233 – 246,
Seinfeld, 4, 17, 20 – 21, 41 – 42, 46, 51, 53, 67, 247 – 248, 250, 289, 372n10, 372n12
89, 109, 123, 143, 148, 195 – 196, 198 – 199, social media: and television producers,
204, 271, 324, 325 101, 103 – 104, 111 – 112, 293; and tele-
Seitz, Matt Zoller, 335 – 336, 337, 370n16 vision viewers, 35, 206, 293, 347 – 348
serial articulation, 3, 346 – 347, 348 Sons of Anarchy, 101, 143, 253
serial form, 18 – 23, 27 – 28, 29 – 30, 40 – 41, Sopranos, The, 4, 17, 28 – 30, 34, 49, 97, 120,
46, 76, 82 – 83, 88 – 89, 105, 110, 130, 136, 135 – 136, 137, 143, 144, 148, 149, 150, 151,
 Index | 389

155, 162, 164, 191 – 192, 193 – 194, 211, 218, television industry: labor and contract
231, 244, 253, 267, 271, 301, 332 – 338, 353 issues, 81, 88, 104, 119 – 120, 123, 176, 334,
Sorkin, Aaron, 31, 91, 97, 98 361n13; program development and pro-
South Park, 23 duction, 32 – 33, 56, 89 – 95, 97 – 99, 261,
Spartacus, 120 271 – 272, 294 – 295, 319 – 322; scheduling,
Spelling, Aaron, 89, 98 4, 26, 33, 36, 41, 165, 192 – 193, 233, 234 –
spoilers, 6, 8, 140, 166, 174 – 175, 176 – 178, 243, 263 – 264, 293, 322
180, 190 television pilots, 10 – 11, 39, 56 – 85, 89, 92 –
Sports Night, 31 93, 125, 151 – 152, 154, 178, 188, 219, 319,
spy programs, 1 – 4, 47, 208 – 209, 248, 251, 324, 361n2
302, 343 television studies, 3 – 4, 35 – 36, 95, 96, 164,
Star Trek, 52, 123 – 124, 263, 270, 273, 276, 166, 196, 205, 206, 210 – 216, 251, 339 –
297, 300, 316, 373n27 340, 349 – 350, 367n4, 370n12
Star Wars, 289, 297, 304 television style, 1 – 2, 18, 44, 50, 57 – 58,
Stein, Louisa, 364n39 61, 62, 65, 69 – 74, 76 – 78, 90, 113,
St. Elsewhere, 49, 211, 243, 267 – 268, 288, 177, 185, 187, 208 – 209, 218 – 219, 221 –
324 222, 229, 241 – 242, 245 – 246, 249,
Sternberg, Meir, 170, 171 257 – 258, 334 – 335, 336, 337 – 338, 341,
Stockwell, Peter, 356n9, 367n3 370nn17 – 18
storytelling, definition of, 10, 263 Television Without Pity, 35, 267
storyworld, 10, 12, 19, 20 – 23, 24, 26, 27, television writers. See authorship;
29, 30, 35, 39, 42, 48, 52, 56, 61, 74, 78 – showrunners
79, 108, 111, 116, 120, 126, 129, 140, 166 – Terriers, 62 – 63, 90, 111, 136, 302, 320
167, 171 – 172, 176 – 177, 184, 194, 222 – 223, 30 Rock, 89, 103, 119, 187
235, 258, 261 – 262, 265, 269 – 270, 273, Thomas, Rob, 69 – 70, 73, 81, 361n13
274 – 275, 280 – 282, 288 – 290, 294, 296 – Thompson, Ethan, 368n17
297, 298, 300, 302, 304 – 306, 308, 310, Thompson, Kristin, 18, 356n6
311 – 313, 314 – 316, 324 – 325, 326 – 327, 332, Thompson, Robert, 211, 356n5, 369n5
335, 338, 345, 358n6 Toton, Sarah, 283, 286
Straczynski, J. Michael, 101 Toy Story, 302
Strauven, Wanda, 360n34 Trahair, Lisa, 360n33
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, 108 transmedia storytelling, 10, 59, 93, 249,
Supernatural, 46 261, 272, 277, 280, 290 292 – 318, 327
Survivor, 92 Treme, 99, 115, 262, 267
suspense. See narrative hypotheses True Blood, 31
Sutter, Kurt, 101 Turnbull, Sue, 361n4, 373n25
Swanson, Dorothy Collins, 369n4 TV Tropes (wiki), 43, 119, 167, 276, 357n16
24, 1 – 4, 25, 28, 39, 48, 52, 62, 108, 114, 171,
teen dramas, 48, 68 – 69, 71, 73 – 75, 81, 84 – 206 – 210, 227, 270, 297, 302, 345 – 346,
85, 86, 137, 183, 251 – 252, 257 355n1
television genres, 4, 6, 10, 18, 31, 32, 46, Twilight Zone, The, 51, 142, 183
53, 56, 66, 68 – 69, 71, 73 – 74, 84 – 85, 86, Twin Peaks, 4, 18, 25, 28, 31, 52, 57 – 58, 241,
97, 98, 120, 126 – 127, 150, 167 – 168, 169, 246, 277 – 278, 298 – 299
176, 183, 209, 212, 233 – 252, 257 – 260, Twitter, 35, 101, 103, 111, 128, 163, 166, 206,
273, 276, 289, 297, 302, 304, 306, 310, 270
311 – 312, 316, 326, 328, 352 Two and a Half Men, 22, 35, 98, 121
390 | Index

Unit, The, 99 Walking Dead, The, 35, 302

United 93, 176 Wallace, David Foster, 142
UPN, 34, 68 – 69, 71, 73 – 74, 252 Warhol, Robyn, 234, 246 – 250, 252, 260,
Usual Suspects, The 51 356nn5 – 6, 373n24
WB, The, 34, 94
Vaage, Margrethe Bruun, 148, 365n2, Weeds, 150, 152
365n10, 366n21, 367n4 Weiner, Matthew, 91, 97, 164
Vampire Diaries, The, 103 West Wing, The, 4, 11, 31, 34, 49 – 51, 75, 91,
VanDerWerff, Todd, 231, 337, 362n16, 98, 122, 211, 244, 259
364n37, 374n39 Whannel, Paddy, 215
VCRs, 36 – 37, 239, 277 Whedon, Joss, 31, 32, 67, 87, 94, 95,
Venkatesh, Sudhir, 371n22 97 – 98, 99, 104, 115 – 116, 119, 298, 320,
Vermeule, Blakey, 132, 145, 160 321
Veronica Mars, 11, 17, 20, 34, 39, 49, 52, wikis, 6, 7, 8, 40, 60, 166, 264, 267, 268,
53, 55, 61, 68 – 85, 120, 129, 137, 150, 154, 276 – 287, 289, 316. See also Lostpedia;
175 – 178, 183, 185, 187 – 188, 206, 251 – 252, TV Tropes
259, 271, 320, 322 Wilcox, Rhonda, 361n4
video, online and streaming, 26, 38, 40 – Williams, Linda, 244 – 245, 248, 250,
41, 104, 165, 239, 264, 289 – 290, 293, 371n21, 371n2, 373n20, 378n7
307, 308 – 309, 312 – 313, 322, 324, 359n21, Williams, Raymond, 215
361n7. See also DVDs; digital video Wilson, Carl, 227 – 228, 232
recorders (DVRs); VCRs Wilson, William Julius, 371n22
viewing practices: binge viewing, 39, 40, Winter, Terence, 97
41, 165, 180 – 181, 189, 238 – 239; paratex- Wire, The, 9, 17, 24, 25, 28 – 30, 34, 37,
tual engagement, 105, 107 – 108, 110 – 115, 39, 99, 100, 114, 115, 129, 130 – 131, 133,
128, 130, 166, 173, 174, 181, 195, 197, 239, 137, 138, 143, 148, 172, 181, 192, 193,
247, 261 – 291, 294 – 295, 303, 347 – 348; 206, 217 – 226, 232, 244 – 245, 248, 253,
rewatching, 2, 36, 38, 44, 140, 165, 171, 258, 268, 269, 271, 323 – 326, 329 – 332,
175, 177 – 178, 180, 192; serial engage- 345 – 346
ment, 79 – 80, 132 – 133, 165 – 166, 173, 191, Wohl, Richard, 365n10
195, 201, 238 – 239, 241 – 242, 246 – 247, Wonder Years, The, 49
250, 274 – 276, 295, 319 – 320, 325, 328, Writers Guild of America, 93, 104,
341 – 342, 344 – 345. See also forensic 363n22
fandom; evaluation; memory; narrative
comprehension; narrative hypotheses; X-Files, The, 4, 17, 19, 21, 25, 29, 46, 52, 53,
participatory culture; spoilers 60, 99 – 100, 128, 211, 218, 301
voice-over narration. See narrative
techniques Zunshine, Lisa, 366n14
About the Author

Jason Mittell is Professor of Film and Media Culture and American

Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author of Genre and Television:
From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (2004) and Television
and American Culture (2009) and coeditor of How to Watch Television
(NYU Press, 2013), as well as author of numerous essays about media
studies. He runs the blog Just TV.

391