Time, Technology and Narrative Form in Contemporary US Television Drama by JP Kelly

Author:JP Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

‘To Be Continued’: From Segmentation and Stacking to Narrative Accumulation

In an essay in Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser’s edited collection, 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Networked Society, Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2007) describes the phenomena of stacking and continuity —a dichotomy which he argues underpins the temporal regimes of contemporary popular culture. As he explains, ‘the close cousins of acceleration and exponential growth leads to vertical stacking […] this means that since there is no vacant time to spread information in, it is compressed and stacked in time spans that become shorter and shorter’ (2007: 147). In illustrating this tendency, Eriksen refers primarily to the internet , but argues that this process is affecting almost all media. Indeed, he begins his analysis with reference to Dynasty , a prime time serial that pre-dated later narratively complex series such as those discussed throughout this book. ‘ Dynasty ’, he explains, ‘was tailored for the multichannel format. It was produced in the awareness that viewers would restlessly finger their remote control while watching, ready to switch channels at the first sign of inertia’ (2007: 141).

From this perspective, texts are profoundly shaped by their industrial, economic, and technological contexts—a point that I have made several times already in this book. Facing competition from an ever-expanding broadcast spectrum, Eriksen argues that the writers of Dynasty felt compelled to accelerate the narrative in response to these numerous other distractions. Following this logic, the TVIII context of Prison Break provides further insight as to why its narrative moves at an even more accelerated pace. In the current television landscape, competition comes not just from other channels but also from other media such as the internet . Thus, writers and producers of contemporary series must try even harder to keep viewers tuned in, and the use of real-time and accelerated narratives in series such as 24 and Prison Break—along with more recent iterations of this narrative mode such as CR:IT:IC:AL—is a particularly effective way of retaining the audience’s attention. In these narratives, every second really does count.

There is other evidence to suggest that the format of prime time drama is changing in response to this growing competition. The lengthy pre-credit sequences that feature in early TVIII series such as Prison Break, Lost and Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–2010), and are still commonplace today, is one such example. In Prison Break, episodes begin with short recaps lasting between one and two minutes in duration, before moving seamlessly into the narrative. The title sequence only appears after a further seven or eight minutes, by which point the episode is well underway and, as the network hopes, viewers will be less inclined to switch channels so far in. If anything then, this kind of narrative acceleration can help retain attention and thus lead to a more structured sense of continuity and linear story development.

Although I agree with Eriksen’s thesis that a highly accelerated economy and an increasingly diversified mediasphere have resulted in a general acceleration and fragmentation of narrative, I

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