A Storytelling Machine: The Complexity and Revolution of Narrative Television

Abstract

This article analyses how TV fiction, in the last fifteen years, has become one of the most stimulating and successful vehicles to narrate complex and daring stories. The article is divided into two parts. In the first, armed with narratological and poetic elements, we will define the serial story, stripping away the husk of its principal forms and explain why it is now the best media for telling lengthy stories. In the second part we will pause to examine specifically variations on the traditional story: alternate universes, time jumps, coincidence between diegetic time in the story and real time and other mechanisms that have made television fiction the most daring way for telling stories.