Contemporary TV Series: Narrative and Genre Metamorphoses

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the shaping and development pf narrative models in modern industry of television series viewed as a specific phase of global escalation of sociocultural reflection that is characterized by a specific manner of influence on the mass audience.
Productive process on television plays the role of a powerful culture modeling instrument that allows for cataloguing massive information layers, which are in the state of a continuous exponential transformation of cultural and historical experience, in the form of narrative figures.
This article rationalizes the hypothesis of explicit-implicit principle of constructing genre diegesis for TV series that allows for the creation of a specific kind of viewing intentions.
The author emphasizes that explicit genre formants are replicated in virtually identical and easily recognizable invariants, while implicit (mostly communicative, less often contextual) formants are either not replicated at all, or with large distortions and reduction.
The article studies the process of spectator infantilization and a special way of perception that is formed in relation to serial content.
With reference to Giles Deleuze’s cultural concepts, the author substantiates the thesis that the narrative nature of a television series is determined by the principle of cultural self-reproduction, a process that on the one hand organizes and maintains cultural community and integrity in the modern world, and on the other, leads to the perception of differences in figurative nuances and details.
The article considers three types of national serial industries - British, Korean, and Turkish-that demonstrate a high degree of generativity of plot models, which gives them the opportunity to dynamically and consistently expand their audience, overcome the purely ethnic features of the serial narrative and integrate into the world screen process.