Complex TV

Jason Mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His books include Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, Television & American Culture, and Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, and Narrative Theory and Adaptation. He is project manager for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, and author of numerous video essays.

Complex TVis one of the most exciting books I have ever read.Each chapter contains useful and well-defined terms to put to work in formal analysis, and every argument is backed up with lively, detailed, and entertaining readings of familiar TV texts.The result is a rich and thorough piece of scholarship that will do for television studies what David Bordwells historical poetics has famously done for film. - Robyn Warhol,co-editor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions A lucid and provocative exploration of modern television, from the inside out. - Emily Nussbaum,television critic at the New Yorker Mittell cleverly explores Complex TV on its own terms, favouring a formal analysis investigating the poetics of television series over discussing their cultural impact or interpretation of content. Looking at how television tells stories Mittell shows the contribution of technology, reception, and industry in changing television into a & lived cultural experience where different forms of & cultural engagement, are key to understanding the textuality of Complex TV. (European Journal of Media Studies) []Mittels compelling arguments about topics such as anti-heroes and melodrama help us see the bigger picture when it comes to the small screen. (Seven Days)

• Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Complexity in Context 17 2. Beginnings 55 3. Authorship 86 4. Characters 118 5. Comprehension 164 6. Evaluation 206 7. Serial Melodrama 233 8. Orienting Paratexts 261 9. Transmedia Storytelling 292 10. Ends 319 Notes 355 Index 381 About the Author 391