ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture Studies Fall 2011 PH 300 M Dr. David Lavery ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture Studies Fall 2011 PH 300 M Dr. David Lavery

Types of Television Series

Traditional/Episodic Series. In a traditional series each episode tells an independent, discrete, stand alone story that adds little or nothing to the cumulative memory of the show over seasons/years.

Continuous Serials. Existing contemporaneously with the episodic series, ghettoized, however, in the very different mediacosmos of daytime television, continuous serials told stories that “were by contrast, deliberately left hanging at the end of each episode; nearly all plots initiated in a continuous serial were designed to be infinitely continued and extended” (33). Linear, as opposed to the episodic series’ inherent circularity, the continuous serial makes narrative change its raison d’etre.

Until the 70s, Dolan observes, the episodic series and the continuous serial were almost inevitably segregated into separate areas of viewing time, the former dominating the prime time hours, the latter dominating the mornings and afternoons. This gave network television a remarkably split personality, with happy love affairs and marriages ruling by night, for example, and infidelity and divorce ruling by day (33).

Episodic serials. Tulloch and Alvarez identify a closely related narrative form which they deem the episodic serial. Episodic serials exhibit continuity between episodes but only for a limited and specified number (ix). The subject of their study, Doctor Who, serves as an example, as does another famous British series, The Prisoner. Horace Newcomb uses a different designation for essentially the same narrative manifestation: "cumulative narrative.” Like the traditional series and unlike the traditional "open-ended" serial, each installment of a cumulative narrative has a distinct beginning, middle, and end. However, unlike the traditional series and like the traditional serial, one episode's events can greatly affect later episodes. As Newcomb puts it, "Each week's program is distinct, yet each is grafted onto the body of the series, its characters' pasts" (Reeves 30).

Flexi-Narratives. The last two decades of television have seen the spread of what Robin Nelson terms “flexi-narratives,” a “hybrid mix of serial and series forms... mixtures of the series and the serial form, involving the closure of one story arc within an episode (like a series) but with other, ongoing story arcs involving the regular characters (like a serial)” (82). The widespread appeal of the flexi-narrative is not difficult to understand, for it “maximises the pleasures of both regular viewers who watch from week to week and get hooked by the serial narratives and the occasional viewers who happen to tune into one episode seeking the satisfaction of narrative closure within that episode” (Nelson 82).