TV Fiction Under Discussion.

Abstract

Multi-million sagas based on theme park attractions, ad infinitum adaptations and readaptations of pseudochildren’s adventure novels, sword and sorcery, films based on comics, graphic novels, computer games, old rescued cinema myths, prequels, sequels, trilogies, remakes… Nowadays all this nearly fills up movie theatres all over the world. Is there a crisis of ideas in contemporary mainstream cinema? Are we somehow paying success on delivery? Are we witnessing the death of narrative while hunting for the spectacularity of the artefact, as the first cinema did? Or, indeed, is cinema dead? Coinciding with its recent centenary many voices have been reflecting for some years on this fact, trying to provide an answer to these questions. Although there has been an obvious change at both the discourse and audience level, and aspects such as digitization or the influence of new technologies has frequently cropped up, no in-depth study has been made of the hybridization and entwining that cinema is currently experiencing with other discourses, such as those of TV or advertising. In this aspect, American dramatic TV series of the new millennium incorporate many of its formal and narrative aspects, subverting some of them and feeding them back, which results in a situation that becomes an attractive and suggestive object of study.