Super Size Stories. Narrative Strategies in Contemporary TV Series

Abstract

The amount of narrative time employed is one of the distinctive features by virtue of which TV series are treated as a self-standing appreciative kind in contemporary culture. We argue that this employment of time can conflict with the structural constraints of formulaic narrative, especially from an Aristotelian perspective, according to which a narrative basically is a knot to be untied. We show that, in relation to this issue, contemporary TV series primarily face two options, which we will call the super-knot and the super-knotty rope. We argue that these two options are not sufficient in order to fill the amount of time that is available to TV series and that further strategies are needed. We present what we consider to be the two main strategies that are employed in contemporary TV series to fill these gaos, namely the flash strategy and the strand strategy.