Platformized Seriality: Chinese Time Travel Fantasy from Prime-time Television to Online Streaming

Abstract

While seriality has long been associated with broadcast and cable television, the global rise of online streaming has brought development of what I call platformized seriality: assemblages of online platform infrastructure design, content regulation, generic convention, and experimentation. The notion of platformized seriality points to a complex refiguration of specific media content and genre forms that are usually overlooked in platform studies. This essay analyzes time-travel serials—now immensely popular in the context of China’s growing video-streaming industry, convergence culture, and the financial boom of digital platforms. Analyzing the trope of the female time traveler in historical romance, this essay examines how chuanyue, or the Chinese time-travel genre, subtly unsettles contemporary gender-related anxiety and the dominant discourse on development and progress, something that partly explains the pleasure it generates. The genre of chuanyue benefited from the rise of platform infrastructure designs such as bullet screens and pay-on-demand-in-advance services that direct new forms of audience engagement and new practices of binge-watching. Focusing on the fantasy genre and the mutability of the time traveler’s gender, sexuality, and class, I explore how the trope of traveling backward marks a reconfiguration of conceptions of time, space, and history and thus opens a space to negotiate with the neoliberal narratives of linear and progressivist temporality.