Before being a tv format, the series is a concept. The importance that the serial format has gained in the new millennium has deep roots, which date back to the advent of modernity, even before the birth of cinema. In the twentieth century, through the diffusion of the media-cultural industry and of mass consumption, it has fully developed.
The series is a form. The form of a relationship in which the recurrence of elements brings with it their own variation: a difference in repetition. The elements placed in a series define a horizontality that removes them from any metaphysics of representation: it is not a question of relating a sign with a content, but of relating the signs with each other (by repeating them), starting from the gap between them and what they are signs of. As Deleuze says, every “serial form is necessarily realized in the simultaneity of at least two series”, it is therefore “multiserial”. We see this in the work of art: the figuration in the pictorial “series”, while maintaining the identification of what it shows (the water lilies in Monet’s series, or the series of views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai) involves, through the variable repetition of shapes, the variation of what is shown (the “sense” of the water lily and that of Fuji). The series is the way in which an identity becomes itself, changing while repeating, escaping all logic and metaphysics. Art is the very context of its implementation.
The series is a format. The serial format, initially designed for the organization and distribution of narrative in the literary field, migrated to cinema, radio, music and finally television. Just think of the heroes of serialized novels, such as Fantômas, Sherlock Holmes, Nick Carter and their film adaptations; of the views of the Lumière brothers and the fantastic journeys of Méliès; of soap operas broadcast by US radio networks such as Painted Dreams (1930-1943), Ma Perkins (1933-1960); finally of the first anthological series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) and episodic series such as Perry Mason (1957-1966) and Bonanza (1959-1973). But the term ‘series’ can also indicate a succession of musical sounds: the twelve note method developed by Schönberg exploits this compositional principle, breaking the hierarchical order between the sounds of the tonal scale in a regime of continuous variation that redefines the space sound, capable of overcoming the traditional distinction between the horizontality of the melody and the verticality of the harmony. Starting from the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, and then establishing itself in the twentieth century, the concept of series and its correlates, including that of repetition and variation, become essential elements for defining the character of technically reproducible artistic objects, of new narrative formats and the methods of their use.
The series is a technologically mediated narrative device. From the end of the twentieth century and into the 2000s, the serial narrative has been renewed, thanks to the definition of new aesthetic and production practices linked to the audiovisual and the media galaxy that has been taking shape with the development of digital technologies and the internet. The serial narrative structure appropriates and reconfigures some characteristic features of cinematographic classicism – including strong narration and the centrality of characters and action – and TV series become cultural objects capable of generating widespread discursiveness, of influencing the construction of collective imaginaries and generating shared affectivity. Much has changed in the last twenty years: the forms of distribution, spectatorial practices, the narrative worlds that series create, but above all the importance and centrality that TV series have acquired with ever greater intensity in our spectatorial habits.
Starting from this theoretical framework, it is possible to identify some directions towards which to orient the reflection on the theme: “Identity/Series”; “Uniqueness/Recursion” “Narrative worlds” (from literature to cinema); “Film/Serial” (cinematic seriality such as the great episodic films like Reitz’s Heimat, but also in the form of sequels); “Quality/Complex TV” (the golden ages of American television and complex seriality, which developed in the new millennium first in the USA and then internationally).
