Story, in progress: considering new methods for the analysis of ongoing television series

• Main Author: Graour, Kristina
• Other Authors: Smit, Alexia
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: Eng
• Published: Faculty of Humanities 2019
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/30366

The formal analysis of ongoing television series brings with it many challenges. And despite significant contributions to this area of inquiry, it still remains an aspect of television studies that receives less critical attention than the analysis of a programme’s content. This thesis hopes to make a contribution to the field by developing flexible and comprehensive analytical tools that will allow scholars to analyse television series that are vast and, often, still in the process of ‘construction’. Specifically, I want to define some of the core structural principles that allow a series to engage in what I term ‘coherent expansion’: that is, the process of multiplying narrative elements such as plotlines, characters and settings, while still attempting to retain a coherent formal identity. I will demonstrate that such coherence emerges not from any immovable arrangement of parts, but rather from a systematic ability to rearrange parts. Governing this process are the show’s serial narrative dynamics – a term I develop to define the shifting relations between individual characters and the collective communities they form. Drawing on discussion of narrative form in relation to television as well as literature and film, I examine how theoretically boundless potential is shaped into a bounded spectrum of possibilities for narrative generation in any given series. Although the foundational characteristics of television narrative have long been acknowledged – their reliance on recurring characters, their extended temporalities and, consequently, their exposure to contingency – less attention is paid to how these characteristics come to operate as they do. And it is precisely the question ‘how’ that is the recurring question of this thesis: how characters’ placements within a community helps to define and delimit the identity of each, including delineating the possibilities of character change; how established dynamics between characters and communities allow for the generation of new plotlines; how hierarchies within the dynamics allow a series to adapt to (sometimes unplanned) change; and how the deconstruction of these dynamics can help achieve closure in a series’ finale. Crucially, the concepts developed in this thesis are intended to be applicable across a wide range of television narratives, both episodic and serial, ‘traditional’ and ‘complex’. In doing so, I hope to transcend the discourses around ‘quality’ and ‘complex’ television that sometimes isolate these modes from more ‘simple’ and ‘traditional’ narratives. Instead, I want to trace a kind of structural heritage that runs through television narratives. Using detailed case studies of Cheers, Glee, Orange is the New Black and Mad Men, as well a broad range of other examples, I wish to demonstrate how the same fundamental structural principles can be shaped into a wide array of possible forms.