Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television by Trisha Dunleavy

Author:Trisha Dunleavy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

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COMPLEX SERIALS AND NARRATIVE INNOVATION

Introduction

Noticing the media industry’s historic deployment of serial fiction as a way to encourage the consumption of new media services, Roger Hagedorn (1995: 41) argues that, “when media industries decide to target a new sector of the population in order to expand their market share, they have consistently turned to serials as a solution”. In American television, examples of this strategy can be found in the 1950s, when broadcast networks and their commercial sponsors used daytime soap operas to target housewives, and from the late 1970s, when these networks commissioned high-budget mini-serials to provide an ‘event television’ boost to the allure of their schedules. A more recent instance of the pattern outlined by Hagedorn is evident in the deployment of high-end serials by American non-broadcast networks (cable and internet) as a means to increase the profile and allure of their brands in an emerging multiplatform era.

Prior to the expansion of original serials on cable television, the high-end serials commissioned for American television were dominated by two main forms. One was the ‘supersoap’, a high-end form of soap opera,1 a form exemplified by CBS’s Dallas (1978–1991), Fox’s Melrose Place (1992–1999) and ABC’s Desperate Housewives (2004–2012). The other was the ‘mini-serial’, a form with a limited number of episodes, exemplified by ABC’s Rich Man, Poor Man (1977) and HBO’s Band of Brothers (2001). Beyond these, and with the exception of such inventive dramas as Twin Peaks (1990–1991) and Lost (2004–2010), high-end serials have been more of rarity on American television than they have internationally, which helps to foreground the risk-taking and innovation of the complex serial form that HBO pioneered and other non-broadcast networks have since emulated.

The label ‘complex serial’ refers not to drama serials broadly, but to a specific type of serial whose design for longevity is a major departure from the historic tendency of high-end serials (outside of ‘supersoaps’) to develop and conclude within a limited number of episodes. Three related characteristics, which complex serials deploy in tandem, underline their break with longstanding narrative traditions in American TV drama. First, this form deploys seriality rather than episodicity (whose contrasting narrative modes will be examined in this chapter), its basis in serial form establishing a narrative matrix in which it is possible to maximize complex storytelling. Second, again enabled by serial form, the concepts for these dramas eschew the institutions (police stations, hospitals and lawyer’s offices) of American long-format drama tradition. As this chapter explains, complex serials are conceived in terms of a central ‘overarching’ story rather than a story-generating ‘problematic’, an approach that allows their narratives to investigate morally conflicted primary characters as opposed to investigating situations in which conflict is a regular occurrence. With both these features underpinning the approach that this chapter calls ‘complex seriality’, these dramas gain additional potentials for narrative complexity from a third characteristic. Designed to progress the brand ambitions of non-broadcast networks and to exploit the new potentials of multi-platform delivery and consumption, complex serials are conceived to foster a

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