film art by david bordwell and kristin thompson

I find this claim to be very credible, but I think it both needs some more bolstering and some further thought given the developments of the past 20 years. She claims that the concept of seriality has become so embedded in the public consciousness that it has influenced film and literature, leading to a resurgence of sequels, prequels, and saga style storytelling.

She also, in the third essay, argues that the prevalence of TV has changed the way that we tell stories overall. To focus more on how that storytelling works, she notes that film is reliant upon redundant storytelling that uses dangling hooks and multiple narrative threads, and that TV weaponizes those concepts to ensure that viewers understand what is happening in an episode, season, and series. Her mode has become the standard, but TV scholarship is still relatively new, and it is very possible that the time between her argument and now has been shaped by that very argument. While this argument may seem somewhat unnecessary, I’d wager it only really seems that way now, in 2020, almost 2 decades after Thompson first made this argument.

Opposing Williams’ idea of flow where viewers are basically unable to distinguish between what is the programming and what is the interruption (in terms of ads or even changes of show or channel), Thompson suggests (rightly) that viewers are not only able to make such distinctions, but that the storytelling, which aligns with her conception of the classical Hollywood storytelling structure, helps viewers make this distinction and forms the fundamental argument for her desire to focus on shows in every scale as the objects of study for television scholars. Kristin Thompson spends most of the four essays (collected from a speaking series given about a year earlier) here arguing for the value of looking at individual episodes, seasons, or series as objects of analysis. Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Film art by david bordwell and kristin thompson