Beyond its oft-praised "realism", The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008) – precisely because of its closeness to non-fiction – explores the modalities and functionalities of fiction and investigates what fiction is and what fiction can do. The series above all reflects on the ethical stakes of fiction-making. In the game it establishes with its non-fiction antecedents, and in its meta-narrative story arc in season 5, the show reflects on the fictional process and on the different media which filter reality to try and represent it. This article analyzes how The Wire explores the moral implications of fiction-making and the different meanings of the term, from fiction as counter-fact, or counter-truth, to fiction as experimentation. Through the case study of the final season, we see how the series plays out its ambivalence toward fictional codes and advocates a mode of critical fictional representation as an alternative to the current, devious modes of safety policy and journalism. This article demonstrates how, by delegating fiction-making to characters as it does, more particularly in season 5, The Wire inscribes itself in what Jacques Rancière calls "fictional democracy".

This paper analyzes how the teenage soap Gossip Girl was crucial to the gendered strategy by which The CW (2006-2012) defined itself in the post-network era. The CW relied on narrowcasting, branding, and transmedia to attract and keep a very specific share of the audience in order to create a viable fifth network. Analyzing The CW’s early years through Gossip Girl casts light on the evolutions that shaped US television industry’s during this period, from the renewed interest in female audiences to economic and technological convergence.

This paper explores the narrative dynamics of the fantasy television series Supernatural (2005-) in order to better understand how this particular program has become a backbone of The CW network. Combining formal and contextual narratologies, it blends a close-reading of the series with an analysis of its writing, production and reception contexts, and divides the long-running series into four eras, each defined by a specific showrunner. It starts by exploring the context of the series’ creation, before cataloguing the shifting dynamics of the storyworld during the four eras: the ‘stealth teleological’ approach of series creator Eric Kripke; the complex reconfigurations of the Sera Gamble era; the ‘mythology reboot’ of the Jeremy Carver era; and the ever-increasing stakes and expansionist dynamics of the Andrew Dabb era. The aim of this paper is to show how ‘periodising’ a long-running series by using close-reading and studying the dynamics of a storyworld can expand and complete analysis focused on audiences and the genesis of the text..

For several years now, the quality of fictional series from Germany has been reflected upon critically in the feuilleton as well as within the television industry there. This paper takes a closer look at this industry discourse and expounds how TV makers from Germany negotiate ‘quality series’ in a transnational manner. Their understandings and attributions of such programmes are accompanied with references to foreign, mainly US-American examples, opposing German TV fiction. These discourses within the German television industry trace the state of German television output – and its arguable lack of quality – back to historical developments and structures. With the historical argumentations, the practitioners identify the ‘local’ and ‘global’, which is why their discourse can be described not only as transnational, but as glocal, too. Transnational and glocal aspects can also be found in their discussion of production cultures. Several voices suggest that specific, historically developed structures would differ from other markets and would complicate the broader establishment of ‘quality series’ and their alleged production modes. In this, much more than TV critics in the feuilleton, the practitioners deal with the quality of production, as well as content, and expand their discourse on ‘quality series’ to a broader negotiations of hierarchies in production networks.

The sitcom Mohawk Girls (2014-2017) calls for a change in racialized and gendered identity models. Mohawk Girls deftly approaches racial issues, often in a serious tone, all the while giving its audience what it expects from a sitcom: witty dialogue, many of which play on issues of gender. Through the analysis of two episodes of the sitcom’s first season, we look at how the show represents issues of race on a reservation and how racialism is part of the community’s unspoken norms. Choosing to produce a sitcom, a genre heavily rooted in white North American culture, comes out as an act of resilience that is manifested by the First Nations’ director and producers. In the analysis of the documentary work of director Tracey Deer, an argument has been made to the effect that this resilience has historical roots in the culture of Hodinohso:ni' nations (once referred to as the Iroquois). In order for these communities to adjust to, at times, abrupt changes in their population, adoption of individuals or groups of individuals has long been an important cultural institution. This can be illustrated by the fact that the integration of a neighboring group to the Hodinohso:ni' is referred to in the group’s own culture as an adoption where an outside eye might see it as the outcome of a political alliance. The show, through exaggeration and grotesque, takes on the issues of gender and its games of seduction, all the while considering the ambiguous interplay of seduction and domination. These borrowings are helpful in breaching a critical indent into the unwearied oppression that white society imposes on First Nations.

This article examines in detail the development of the long-running serial in the UK, from its beginnings on radio in the 1940s, through the move to television in the mid 1950s and then up to the present day. It pays particular attention to language use throughout this period, focusing on the move from Standard English to a wide range of regional dialects during the four decades when these serials were at the height of their popularity, routinely dominating the television ratings. It then examines the development of long-form serials in languages other than English, firstly Welsh from the mid 1970s on, and then Gaelic intermittently from the early 1990s to the present day, and finally Scots, a highly minoritised Germanic language spoken mostly in the Scottish Lowlands. It compares both the current health and the future prospects of Gaelic and Scots with a particular focus on the challenges faced by both. Additional insights into the particular case of Gaelic are provided via interviews with a number of stakeholders.

Quebec is a prime example of a province with a strong attachment to proximity series. Top-rated TV shows in Quebec are almost always of local provenance, and some productions even set world records for market penetration. Moreover, many long-running serialized dramas called teleromans still garner some of the highest ratings in the province. And yet, almost nothing has been written about these contemporary teleromans , since most studies now focus on shorter high-budget TV series—the most legitimated fictions that may appeal to global audiences. In this paper, I provide a textual analysis of L’echappee (TVA, 2016-) and District 31 (Ici Radio-Canada Tele, 2016-), two TV serials that attract some of the highest ratings every week. I shall determine the themes and “local elements” (Dhoest 2013) that may have contributed to their success with local audiences. The pervasive popularity of teleromans in Quebec seems to contradict—or, at the very least, complicate—the general assumption that due to the transnational circulation and digitization of “high end” TV dramas (Nelson 2007), people have lost interest in local/regional productions, and that TV series have therefore ceased to foster local/national forms of identification in smaller communities.

This essay investigates fascinations surrounding glamorized criminals by looking at how recent Italian history and queer bodies are represented, negotiated, and received in Italy’s first made-for-Netflix series Suburra. La serie (2017 - ). In many ways, the series is a distinctly Italian production, especially in terms of the popular mafia-corruption plot that is based upon real life events. However, Suburra. La serie is a transnational production that engages viewers outside of Italy. This essay pays attention to the series’ interesting marketing strategy that flagrantly draws attention to fictional/historical consistencies, before addressing the physical allure and charisma of criminal antiheroes who appear trapped in a perpetual adolescence. Most importantly, I address how Suburra. La serie’s singularity as a transnational co-production allows for a unique representation of gender and sexuality on Italian small screens, as it marks an opening up of a mainstream space on the small screen to tell stories from the perspective of a non-normative sexual orientation. Suburra. La serie engages in a representation of queer masculinity that is distinctive in relation to Italian serial drama as a whole and especially in relation to serial dramas that depend upon sympathetic perpetrators to create relationships with viewers. As I argue, Suburra. La serie is a queer text with an address to viewers spanning continents, cultures, and languages.