Between January 6th and February 24th, 2021, TF1, France’s first private channel and Europe’s first channel in terms of ratings, broadcasts the Italian television series Doc every Wednesday evening in prime time, with two episodes per week. A very rare event in France, a popular RAI drama, which is also a non-American medical drama with a subtle italian flavour, finds its audience and manages to keep them interested throughout the eight weeks of broadcasting: through different methodological issues suggested by the vast field of cultural/television/media studies, with the analysis of the contents and conditions of diffusion, reception and transnational circulation of Doc, the article proposes an reading of a media event in the French audiovisual panorama to try to understand if the programming of the Italian TV series on TF1 allows us to believe in positive perspectives for future transalpine productions on French screens, outside the platforms – traditional or new – of SVOD or niche channels.

This article examines the representation of animals in the drama series Chernobyl (2019). In doing so it evidences anthropocentric narrative; that is, story-telling in which the prioritisation of the human and human-centred matters are normalised. Drawing on specific examples from the programme, it shows how animals are used as representational resources enabling the series’ human-centred narrative to be told, in particular focusing on the depiction of the death of animals, and the use of animals as metaphor. The article draws on approaches arising from the ‘animal turn’, which aims to decentre human-ness as the only form of experience and to critique speciesist hierarchies. Chernobyl is a useful case study for such an analysis precisely because the historical event it depicts is one that had, and continues to have, significant consequences for non-human beings.

In the late 1960s, the Japanese animation inaugurated a prolific science fiction strand which addressed the topic of mediated experience. In a context of transnational reception and consumption of anime, the “robotic” subgenre (particularly the one that will be called “mecha” in the 1980s, i.e., narratives of giant robots piloted by a human within) occupies a strategic place. By highlighting the peculiar synergy between themes, forms of storytelling and “out-of-joint” consumption, the Japanese robotic animation series thematized and popularized content and perspectives on mediated experience that I define as “eco-phenomenological”: “phenomenological” because (i) it reevaluates the quality of the subjective experience in its historical and biocultural context; “ecological” because (ii) it look at the environment as an intelligent system; and (iii) it proposed a multidisciplinary approach between the human sciences and the life sciences. The article proposes an analysis of the forms of narration and reception of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-1996), in its ability to have intercepted, synthesized and internationally popularized in an innovative and almost unparalleled way, the complexity of the eco-phenomenological perspective. Views and epistemological approaches at the center of the contemporary scientific and cultural debate will be reconstructed, discussed and analyzed through the concepts of body, mind, environment and presence which are promoted in the Evangelion series.

Multimodal creativity in popular culture is an area with great potentials for linguistics research, yet the number of analytical frameworks and demonstrations available is very limited. This article adapted a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis approach to the investigation of the co-constructed multimodal creativity-and-power relation in the American TV medical ‘dramedy’ House M.D. Using a combination of Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) systemic functional theory, Bednarek’s (2010) multimodal analysis and Law’s (2020a; 2020b; 2020d) analytical framework for creativity in multimodal texts (AFCMT), the dialogues and videos from two selected scenes were analysed with respect to the interpersonal meanings (i.e., tenor values and speech function), mise-en-scene, nonverbal behaviour and performance at moments of co-constructed verbal repetition/pattern-forming creativity production. This study has found that power equality is construed verbally through the use of pattern-forming creativity and that interpersonal meanings (denoted by tenor values consisting of power, contact and affective involvement) are construed nonverbally through spatial movement and various combinations of facial expression, head movement and body movement. It has also shown that hand/arm gestures and some mise-en-scene elements (e.g., set design, lighting, space, costume, or auditory soundtrack) are unlikely to be correlated to the production of pattern-forming creativity in House M.D.

This article investigates the dramaturgical, aesthetical and ethical implications of making television on the back of a high-profile, internationally appealing and very recent murder case: the Kim Wall murder. During a trip in his self-made submarine, Peter Madsen, a known amateur space rocket and submarine builder, abused and murdered Kim Wall, a young Swedish journalist, who was supposed to do an interview with him. Less than three years later, a range of true crime productions had been made about the case, and this article analyses three of them. Preliminary findings suggest that meta-communication is highly important in high-profile true crime productions such as these, and that creators have to walk a thin line.

Interactive cinema is one of the most interesting areas of experimentation with storytelling form. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), a stand-alone episode of the acclaimed British television series available on Netflix, has restarted the debate around this genre. This article offers a discussion of several critical elements inherent to the experience of viewing Bandersnatch, specifically those related to its interactive, meta-reflexive, and ludic character. The tension between interactive and interpretative cooperation, between actuality and virtuality, between self-reflexivity and self-referentiality, between free choice and control, between co-authorship and authority, and between gaming and gambling, bring out the contradictions of a product characteristic of the current transmedial landscape.

The power of episodic television shows such as Columbo (NBC, 1968-1978; ABC, 1988-2003) in which each episode tells a full story, has been highlighted by Jean-Pierre Esquenazi (2017: 107-28), who compares them to cubist works, whose universes become denser over time. Yet, surveys evidence that audiences generally prefer watching serial television shows whose narrative arcs develop over numerous episodes (Glevarec 2012; Combes 2015). Series such as E.R. (NBC, 1994-2009), Angel (The WB, 1999-2004), LOST (ABC, 2004-2010), Person of Interest (CBS, 2011-2016) and Awake (NBC, 2012), which are the focus of this essay, negotiate a “balance between episodic and serial demands” (Mittell 2015: 20), as they include episodes that both stand on their own and advance various long-term narrative arcs. These semi-serial shows display a writing which, season after season, feeds on the very tension between their episodic and serial aspects, between short-term and long-term features. This tension raises ethical stakes, particularly an ethics of care, which this essay will attempt to bring to the fore, drawing from the work of Sandra Laugier (2014: 261). Laugier’s work invites us to understand how television shows, through their durations and the various kinds of attachment they elicit, may educate viewers morally and make them attentive to what seems to be unremarkable within ordinary life. Her recent work on TV series (2019) focuses on their representational contents – situations, dialogues, gestures, dilemmas, identity politics and (political or moral) choices made by (groups of) characters – but it does not take into account the way specific narrative structures may encourage spectators to adopt a particular ethical view. The purpose of this essay is precisely to focus on the ethics of care invoked through serial narrative structures. By analyzing several examples, we will show that semi-serial shows thematize their own narrative negotiations within the story world and, even if they construct strong serial arcs, maintain the importance of the episodic form as a metaphor of human beings in their very individualities and specificities.

South Korean television drama often employs ghost stories as a medium for social critique, as in the series Dokkaebi: The Lonely and Great God (2016-17), Let’s Fight, Ghost (2016) and Oh My Ghost (2015). Blending ghost story with other genres, these series foreground the plight of characters who are either ghosts or young people able to see ghosts. Both are isolated by their liminal condition and the multiple personalities it entails, the ghosts because they cannot communicate with the living and the ghost seers because their uncanny ability has set them apart since childhood. Both lack immediate families, which further isolates them in a society with communal values centred on family. Both thus readily symbolize people marginalized because of gender, social status or restricted economic access, but also serve as a commentary on the disintegration of the family in contemporary South Korea. The viewing audience is positioned to align and empathize with ghost and/or seer in their struggles with lost identity and the quest for justice which will free the ghost from its liminal state, and is thereby implicated in a crisis of subjectivity and prompted to reflect upon its own position in society.

Strictly designed with distinct narrative characteristics to accommodate the thirty day schedule of the holy month of Ramadan, Kuwaiti television dramas broadcast in a proliferated television landscape confined by the Arabic language and consists of television institutions operating from various Arab countries that compete for the vast pan-Arab audience. These unique broadcasting conditions inform the programme-making practices that shape the construction of narratives across the pan-Arab region. Like American network dramas, Kuwaiti dramas depend on advertising and syndication to generate revenue but the pan-Arab region’s technological adaptation transformed the production conditions and the commissioning processes of these dramas. By comparing the commissioning process of Kuwaiti television dramas with American network dramas, this article examines the development of the storytelling practices involved in shaping their narrative conventions and illuminates the manifestation of their industrial specificities in their narrative designs. The analyses of primary interviews with writers and representative dramas suggest that the unique shared broadcasting conditions of the pan-Arab region, accompanied by the particular operations of a television industry within the region, contribute to the commissioning process and designs of television dramas, and the challenges of this competitive language-confined environment underpins the prominent and intense implementation of serialized elements in Kuwaiti television dramas.