Six Elements of Serial Narrative

Sean O'Sullivan

Narrative, Volume 27, Number 1, January 2019, pp. 49-64 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2019.0003

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 Sean O’Sullivan

Six Elements of Serial Narrative

ABSTRACT: This essay proposes a set of terms for considering serial narratives
across media, by focusing on the defining quality of seriality: the rhythmic, compo-
sitional, and sequential relationship between one object and a subsequent, apparently
similar object. The six terms—iteration, multiplicity, momentum, world-building, per-
sonnel, and design—address the methods by which serial installments relate to one
another, and build stories, environments, and expectations over time. These elements
operate not as necessities but as options for enunciating the structures and experiences
that serials provide for their audiences; some serials may choose to minimize or work
against these elements. Drawing on examples from television, the novel, cinema, pod-
casts, and comics, the argument makes a case for the centrality of a collection of char-
acteristics that together articulate the narrative strategies that installment-publication
continues to privilege. Serials that resist these six elements most persistently represent
examples of “minimalist seriality”; serials that embrace them most robustly represent
examples of “maximalist seriality.” The essay concludes with the broader claim that all
serials, whatever their era or context, essentially contain both “Victorian” and “Mod-
ernist” energies—the interplay between a sustained, immersive, imaginative invest-
ment and the interruptive, fragmented effect of distinct installments.

KEYWORDS: serial form, installments, narrative design, world-building, television

IS THERE such a thing as serial form? By which I mean: are there formal strategies,
habits, and characteristics that operate in serials across media, contexts, and narra-
tive categories? This remains an open question, even as burgeoning analyses of tele-
vision and comics, the mushrooming of podcasts, the current ubiquity of superhero
franchises, and continuing attention to the productions of nineteenth-century serial

Sean O’Sullivan is an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is the author of
Mike Leigh, a volume in the University of Illinois Press series on Contemporary Film Directors, and of
articles and book chapters on such topics as: The Sopranos and episodic storytelling; modernist structure
in Mad Men; and Deadwood and Charles Dickens.
NARRATIVE, Vol. 27, No. 1 (January 2019)
Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University
50  Sean O’Sullivan

fiction have brought serials to the foreground in recent years.1 For those committed
to the study of narrative as providing transhistorical, transnational, trans-genre un-
derstandings of how stories operate, and how they operate on us, seriality may pose
a limit case, appearing to invite synthetic approaches that privilege a taxonomical
impulse at the potentially significant cost of local properties and effects. We might
define a serial as a continuing narrative distributed in installments over time. Are
those qualities of elongation, dissemination, and duration really sufficient to allow us
to bring together a comic strip, a television series, a blog, a string of silent films—ma-
terials that would not otherwise naturally lend themselves to structural comparison?
The aim of this essay is to posit an initial set of terms and concepts, and to provide
approaches for examining those materials in ways that make interpretive gestures of
formal juxtaposition instructive, by concentrating primarily on the key feature of se-
rials: namely, the rhythmic, compositional, and sequential relationship between one
object and a subsequent, apparently similar object.2
I am far from the first to attempt a broader overview of stories issued in parts.
Frank Kelleter has recently offered “five ways of looking at popular seriality,” which
highlights such processes as recursivity, proliferation, and evolving capitalist self-
reflection that distinguish serials from other narratives, raising central questions of
character continuity and the problem of narrative totality. Perhaps most famously,
Umberto Eco considered serials in the latter half of the twentieth century as hallmarks
of an “era of repetition,” highlighting the “remake,” the “retake,” and the “saga”—
among other manifestations—as processes that evidence the effects and appeals of
repetition-with-difference. Kelleter and Eco helpfully suggest serial engines, features,
and results, while resisting attention to the specific tick-tock dynamics that relate one
installment to its successor—no doubt because the fish they want to fry are leviathans,
rather than herring. Jennifer Hayward and Robyn Warhol—authors of what remain,
somewhat astonishingly, the only two single-author book-length studies of seriality
across media and periods—afford us generous dives into particular serial enterprises:
the novels of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Patrick O’Brien; Milton Caniff ’s
comic strip Terry and the Pirates; and soap operas like All My Children and As the
World Turns (Hayward; Warhol). Hayward and Warhol are especially interested in
affect and the activities of audiences, which have defined the appeal of serial storytell-
ing since at least the unexpected and transformative arrival of The Pickwick Papers in
1836. Their attention to the behaviors and contributions of reading and viewing pub-
lics to how serials are made, and continue to be received, again offers a wider scope
than the kind of operational nitty-gritty that motivates the following pages.
I’ve argued previously that we should consider a specific connection between the
methodology of poetry and the structure of serial television (O’Sullivan 2010). The de-
fining idea for that argument, and the defining characteristic of all serial storytelling,
is “segmentivity”—a term borrowed from Brian McHale and Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
McHale endorses DuPlessis’s proposal that we call segmentivity the defining feature
of poetry, just as we call “narrativity” the defining feature of narrative. McHale and
DuPlessis argue that poetry “involves ‘the creation of meaningful sequence by the ne-
gotiation of gap (line break, stanza break, page space)’; conversely, then, segmentivity,
‘the ability to articulate and make meaning by selecting, deploying, and combining
 Six Elements of Serial Narrative   51

segments’ is ‘the underlying characteristic of poetry as a genre’” (McHale 14). McHale

posits that segmentivity must always “contribute meaningfully . . . to the structure of
poetic narrative” (McHale 18). I see “segmentivity” as critical to all serial forms; the
juxtaposition of distinct installments is constitutive to serial meaning-making, just
as the juxtaposition of segments of language is constitutive to the designs of poetry.
Segments by necessity imply gaps—and gaps of information within a narrative, and
the gap-filling that an audience must provide, have long preoccupied narratological
examinations of fictional texts, perhaps most prominently in Wolfgang Iser’s The
Implied Reader. But the distributed, structural gaps that define serials—the time gaps
between the publication of installments, the diegetic gaps (and overlaps) that often
occur between one episode and another—have received comparatively less scrutiny.
The six elements of serial narrative that I will propose allow us to consider serials
as a specific narrative technology, one devised from the segmented logic of poetic
construction. By “elements” I mean aspects of the narrative that are shaped by the
recurrence of a gap between one serial installment and another. These gaps, or inter-
ruptions, require the viewer or reader to perform intellectual and imaginative labor;
this labor engages the specific emphases and consequences that each serial, over time,
defines as its distinguishing narrative characteristics. Emphasis and consequence, as
storytelling effects, are relevant not only to individual serials, but to the very processes
of seriality itself. My goal is to create an initial vocabulary that allows us to exam-
ine serial manifestations across the novel, film, television, comics, radio, podcasts,
and online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook—the vast spectrum of media and
genres that serials have infiltrated across times and contexts.
In Consuming Pleasures, Jennifer Hayward argues for “family resemblances”
that operate across Victorian fiction, American comics, and television. These
resemblances include “refusal of closure; intertwined subplots; large casts of charac-
ters . . . ; interaction with current political, social, or cultural issues; dependence on
profit; and acknowledgment of audience response” (Hayward 3). Her project offers
claims about what serials normally do, rather than what serials might do. Whatever
the familiarity of Hayward’s “resemblances” in regard to, say, the specific case of soap
opera, these are not necessary conditions across seriality, especially in a storytelling
landscape that is much more varied than the one Hayward outlined twenty years ago.
We can identify, within the televisual realm, many series that do not refuse closure,
at least not in the radically open-ended sense of soap opera or the daily comic strip;
many series that do not have large casts; and many series that are less invested than
others in foregrounding cultural “issues,” or in acknowledgment of audience response.
Hayward’s list is certainly useful, as one kind of starting point, but it proposes behav-
ioral commonalities—aspects that unite and that are “peculiar to serials” (Hayward
3). By contrast, I will be proposing structural choices or preferences—that is, the nar-
rative possibilities that individual serials may or may not decide to engage. It strikes
me as more responsive to the variety of ways by which serials can be dispersed to
think about common ingredients that makers of narrative can select from, but are not
inevitably bound by. These ingredients might be ignored, almost completely; they may
be used sparingly; they may be essential features. By identifying these elements, not
just within one medium but across media, we might be able to talk together about, say,
52  Sean O’Sullivan

a comic strip like Calvin and Hobbes, a novel like Our Mutual Friend, and a television
series like The Wire. None of the following terms may seem especially revolutionary;
that is, in fact, the point. My purpose is to tease out what is central, rather than what
is obscure.
The six elements I will nominate are iteration; multiplicity; momentum;
world-building; personnel; and design. As the following pages endeavor to demon-
strate, this list is culled from the devices that serials exploit in articulating the rela-
tionships between individual pieces, and across the longer run of a tale. This array
does not replace the familiar foundational terms of narrative analysis, such as time,
space, plot, character, and perspective (including voice and focalization); rather, it
cuts across them. One can productively use those foundational terms to analyze the
construction of serial narrative parts (e.g., episodes, parts of episodes, or wider cross-
episode matters); but that critical language has been developed—whether by Aristo-
tle, Gérard Genette, or more recently the authors of Narrative Theory: Core Concepts
and Critical Debates—with the individual, stand-alone narrative as the default case.
Capturing what is special about serial narrative, I suggest, requires attention to its
essential plurality; and I propose each of my six elements with that plurality in mind.
When I say that these serial elements cut across the traditional narratological ones,
I mean that the latter feature inevitably across serial narrative practice. So: time is
relevant to all six elements, depending on the deployment of temporally-inflected
repetitions, patterns, or disjunctions. Space is most obviously relevant to world-build-
ing, and character is most obviously relevant to personnel; but serial narrative treats
these traditional concepts differently, by adding and withdrawing territories and
bodies in concert with the interstitial delays created by stories issued in parts. Plot
may seem most relevant to momentum, although it can clearly figure into iteration
and multiplicity. Perspective may seem most relevant to multiplicity and personnel,
but it can clearly figure into world-building and momentum. My sixth element, de-
sign, is relevant to all the traditional concepts, in its encompassing attention to the
distinct vocabularies and syntax through which individual serial narratives present
themselves. Again, my project here is not to adapt those concepts to serial narrative
as such; rather, it is to identify the elements that emerge as the central properties of
serial narrative practice.
Loosely speaking, we can divide the six elements I will discuss into two areas.
The first three elements—iteration, multiplicity, and momentum—primarily address
patterns within installments, or explicit discursive connections between installments;
these patterns and connections allow us to understand the local gap-dynamics of a
serial, and particularly its degree of interest in representing itself as a clear sequence
of related objects. The obverse can also be true for these three, as we shall see; some
serials prefer to resist the operations of connection, managing their parts as a loose
collection of segments more than a tightly woven braid. The other three elements—
world-building, personnel, and design—primarily address the varieties of scope that
serials can create as their installments accumulate, changes that shape the world the
serial is describing, the agents in that world, and the audience’s understanding of the
serial’s narrative self-consciousness; these elements alert us to individual installments
as potential shifts in the overall narratives, as moments when the gap is articulated
 Six Elements of Serial Narrative   53

rather than disguised. Likewise, resistance to change can serve as the hallmark of
some serials’ desire to turn scope inward, rather than feed the sprawl with which
serials are so frequently associated.

Discursive Connections

The first element is “iteration.”3 By iteration I mean, in concert with Eco’s key char-
acteristic, something other than the patterns of repetition or parallelism by which a
lot of art, and a lot of narrative, is organized. Those kinds of patterns are certainly
relevant, but they can connote the discovery of commonality within difference—say,
the narrator using the same phrase at two distinct moments in the text. In seriality,
iteration points to something whose repetitive aspect is a definitional, recognizable
feature of the narrative. So, we might consider the “old green cover” in which Charles
Dickens’s serials appeared—a phrase (“old green cover”) that Dickens used in 1841,
a mere five years into his career as a novelist, already sensitive to the ritual quality of
iteration that was so important both to the advertisement and consumption of his
novels (Dickens, preceding p. 409). Or we might consider the voiceover—“Like sands
through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives”—that always accompanies the
title sequence of the American soap opera Days of Our Lives. The iterated announce-
ment, like Dickens’s green cover, operates as a familiar and identical (or near-iden-
tical) threshold, one that makes the portal of iteration vital to the experience of the
installment itself. Some recent shows have played with their iterative thresholds. The
FX series Fargo repeats the manifestly false claim that “This is a true story” at the start
of each episode, across a restless variety of visual environments: in the case of the first
season, an office building, a fish tank, a factory, and the tongue of a dental patient
(among others). In its second and third seasons, Weeds provided a different musical
artist’s rendition of the opening theme song, “Little Boxes,” every week.
More broadly, recaps and summaries serve to iterate scenes we have seen be-
fore, as in nighttime television serials, and repeated musical motifs across a series can
re-orient us each time not only to a particular character or situation but to the very
ritual of seriality itself—such as the famous Mission Impossible theme, first ritualized
in the original TV program, later re-ritualized in a continuing film series. We might
think of the familiarity of sets—such as Walter and Skyler White’s house in Breaking
Bad or the Comedy Cellar, Louie’s workplace in Louie. There are also semi-synonyms
of iteration, such as structural parallels or storytelling habits. One example would be
the stratagem of the cold open, or pre-credits sequence, in television; the purpose of
the cold open is to immerse us in the storyworld, before the different re-initiation
process of the opening credits. The cold open is a narrative unit that repeats both
within a single series and across a range of narrative forms. The opening sequence of
each James Bond film provides an extended mini-adventure often completely separate
from the primary narrative of the movie. That act of familiar repetition, of ushering
and reminding, not only brings us back to the diegesis of James Bond; it brings us
back to the memory and experience of watching every other James Bond film we have
watched.
54  Sean O’Sullivan

But it is crucial to consider low-iteration serials as well—since I am claiming

that these elements, while perhaps highly active and visible in many serials, represent
options rather than inevitabilities. One example of a low-iteration serial would be
James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was issued in 23 installments in The Little Review from
1918 to 1920—although never serialized in full, due to an obscenity trial that shut
down publication. Ulysses is certainly full of repetition and parallelism, but it is hardly
iterative—if by iterative we mean the almost mechanical devices of formal remind-
ing that make the powerfully familiar the organizing experience of a serial. Moving
between the styles and structures of the episodes of Ulysses makes variation a much
more prominent instrument, in this case, than iteration. Another example of a low-
iteration serial is the television comedy Party Down, a show that follows a catering
company through a series of food-service events, with each event taking place at a
different location; there are no fixed places to create iterative memory, such as the bar
in Cheers or the Central Perk coffee shop in Friends. In cases such as Ulysses and Party
Down, the active resistance to the iterative—either as a formal quality or as a diegetic
element—marks the serial’s self-presentation.
The second element is “multiplicity”—a characteristic that might seem to function
in explicit contrast with the first element, iteration. Many serials have internal mech-
anisms of the multiple, such as the several interlocking storylines that typically struc-
ture a television episode, ranging from prominent “A” or “B” stories—which have the
most scenes, or “beats”—to less-prominent “C” or even “D” stories. In terms of mul-
tiplicity in the relationships between installments, we have the example of American
serials of the 1910s, such as The Perils of Pauline—serials that feature individual in-
stallments dedicated to single narratives, narratives that are in fact quite iterative in
their design, as a dangerous situation is overcome or a problem is solved. The mul-
tiplicity here comes in the genre shifts from episode to episode. The Perils of Pauline
moves with each “chapter” from adventure story to Western to crime drama, in effect
repositioning its recurring cast within a different set of storytelling parameters each
time. The multiple in this case indicates the serial’s flexibility in staging itself across
spaces and contexts. I would suggest that the serial is fundamentally inclined, if not
quite mandated, to do more than one thing. One “multi” item typically associated
with serialization is the Victorian “multi-plot” novel (though not all multi-plot novels
were serials, certainly). An explicit version of this might be the multiple (i.e., two) nar-
rators of Dickens’s Bleak House; or George Eliot’s most famous novels—Middlemarch
and Daniel Deronda—each of which represents the merger of two stories, originally
conceived of as separate projects, into one continuing serialized narrative. Two stories
may seem a relatively minimal version of the multiple; but the reading experience of
these three colossal novels is crucially tied to the negotiation of one set of experiences
and events as we are aware of another set of experiences and events.
Multiplicity also relates to the fact that single views or experiences are precisely
what the serial operates against. In televisual terms, we might think about two blatant,
high-stakes series of multiplicity: The Wire and Lost. The Wire had many strategies of
the multiple, but the most explicit may have been its conscious relocation to a new
environment with each new season—from the projects and drug war in season 1, to
the Baltimore docks in season 2, to political and reform movements in season 3, to
 Six Elements of Serial Narrative   55

public schools in season 4, to the world of the media in season 5. In subject matter,
tone, and structure, The Wire and Lost are as different as any television series of recent
years. And yet Lost also makes multiplicity its most recognizable attribute, from the
multiple versions of events that we see, to the multiple back stories that the show
teases out across its episodes, to the multiple time frames among which both we and
the characters move. Arguably, the supposed “failure” of the final season of Lost, or
perhaps just of the final episode, had to do with the difficulty of turning the multiple
into the single—which might be one way of describing closure in fiction. Multiplicity,
I would suggest, is what makes satisfactory closure in serials not just almost impos-
sible but perhaps undesirable. Serials, even at their most “successful,” are genetically
predisposed to end messily, because multiples have the inclination to split off, rather
than reunite.
The third element is “momentum.” I use this term as a way of considering the dy-
namic storytelling relationship between one serial episode and another—in particular,
that part of the story that explicitly demands that we keep watching or reading. The
most famous deployment of momentum is the cliffhanger, especially as practiced in
the 1930s in the United States by Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers—comic strips that in
turn spawned weekly film serials. The often literal suspense created at the end of each
installment—a character suspended or hanging over some fatal situation—speaks to
the most basic economic imperative of serial construction: the need to bring back
customers each week, or each month. In the case of earlier, silent serials, again such
as The Perils of Pauline, or its French near-contemporary Les Vampires, momentum
points vaguely to some way in which each installment is part of a continuing quest—
in Pauline’s case, her desire to experience life to its extremes before settling down into
the narrative black hole that is marriage, and in the case of Les Vampires, the attempt
to track down a notorious gang. These large narrative arcs allow for both sagging
and tautness along the way, as locally required; momentum can be a highly visible
propellant at some moments, or it may function instead as the implicit energy of the
genre that the serial inhabits. Momentum may often be intertwined with the effects
of suspense, and anxious anticipation—such as the kinds described by Lev Grossman
and Julie Snyder in the roundtable conversation featured in this issue. Snyder, one
of the producers of the Serial podcast, in particular expresses concern about the po-
tential creative limitations created by the “mechanics” of suspense, which “try and
draw people through” a serial narrative across installments—mechanics frequently
present at the end of Serial’s first-season episodes, when host Sarah Koenig shifts from
the ruminative, elliptical paths produced by the show’s true-crime investigations to
a closing, burning question that is advertised as the inviting focus of the subsequent
installment (Grossman 114).
If some serials depend on a considerable degree of episode-to-episode momen-
tum, others may define themselves through various forms of resistance to that energy.
I borrow again here the language of poetry—and in particular the distinction between
enjambed and end-stopped lines of verse. Enjambment indicates moments where the
syntax of the thought rushes past the end of one line, spilling into the next—as op-
posed to a more obedient relationship between expression and poetic form, where the
meaning stops itself, through punctuation, at the end of the line. The direct equivalent
56  Sean O’Sullivan

of enjambment in our case is a series featuring significant installment-to-installment

momentum, most precisely when one installment picks up directly where its prede-
cessor left off, as might occur in soap opera. A more conceptual enjambment links
the later installments of Great Expectations, which are propelled by Pip’s continuing
anxiety and dread regarding the potential discovery of Magwitch. In the case of The
Wire, momentum may be very gradual, even as it is one of the show’s defining mech-
anisms. The show’s creator, David Simon, has frequently discussed its deliberate fail-
ure to behave like traditional television, favoring long-term incremental payoffs over
short-term pleasures (Simon). In that case, momentum may seem to be hidden; often,
when I teach The Wire, some students will report only moderate interest in continuing
to watch after one episode, because they perceive the show as “slow”—suggesting that
the ability to create momentum, at least by recognizable tropes or guises, is highly de-
pendent on expectations, as much as the organization of story. By contrast, a show like
Mad Men resists momentum mightily; each episode is typically end-stopped, both
in story and tone, sealing itself off from its predecessor and successor. Mad Men’s
overall pace is sometimes deemed glacial, an effect due in part to the absence of a
“Big Bad”—that is, the menacing, momentum-spawning, season-long antagonist that
shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Sopranos provide. I would argue that a
studied organization of the cultural past—the way that Mad Men regularly conveys
the month and year of each episode, and the way that the inherent mechanics of a
period drama fix our eyes on historical transformation—serves in Mad Men as a sub-
stitute for more recognizable storytelling momentum. So, considering this particular
show in the context of the first three serial elements: Mad Men defines itself through
a deliberate resistance to iteration and momentum, favoring strategies of the multiple
over the unified, preferring gaps to connections. Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad
Men, has often said this about the show: “I don’t want people to know what to expect
ever when they turn the show on”—signaling a clear preference for serial interruption
(Sepinwall).
There are two important variables connected to these first three elements: the
size of each serial installment, and the temporal distance between installment issues.
The larger the installment, the more weight is shifted to the narrative operations of
any single issue of the serial project, diminishing in turn some of the magnetic or
anti-magnetic energies between installments; by contrast, a daily comic strip—typi-
cally compact in four panels—represents a more quickly consumable instance of the
serial, one that may seem only scarcely independent from its predecessors and suc-
cessors. So, in the case of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, where each
installment is several hundred pages long, the iterative may recede into the back-
ground—since the percentage of the overall serial borne by any one installment is
relatively high, and we are more likely to invest in the particular qualities of any one
part. By contrast, a comic strip like Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is more likely to highlight
the iterative familiarity and distribution of attention across installments—since each
installment is consumable relatively quickly and has a far smaller share of the entire
serial.
In a parallel way, the distance between installments, which can alert us to an ex-
tended or unpredictable production cycle, or a very regular one, will likewise under-
 Six Elements of Serial Narrative   57

score the degree of individuality, or of dependence, of any one installment. In the case
of the Star Wars ennead, Episode VII arrived ten years after the preceding film; earlier
in the cycle, there was a fifteen-year gap between the third and fourth productions.
Those significant temporal distances destabilize our sense of the gap-rhythms of the
serial; there are also variations within the sub-trilogies, as the three-year patterns that
punctuated the first two clusters have now been compressed into two-year rhythms.
Conversely, a weekly serial, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South from 1854 to
1855, will signal experiential iteration quite clearly, and generate a certain predict-
ability of structural momentum; even if some stories don’t explicitly carry over from
installment to installment, there is a regularity to their appearance that conditions our
experience of gaps, and serial time, into one of recognized habit and ritual. My point
is that we can understand the defining effects of size and distance as byproducts of the
interplay of iteration, multiplicity, and momentum. These basic numerical markers of
length and time—size and distance—shape the frames and effects by which we make
narrative meaning of serials.

Varieties of Scope

The fourth element is “world-building.” At this point, as noted earlier, I shift to ele-
ments that highlight changes that serials create over time, or that they potentially cre-
ate. Serial narratives are positioned, more than any other publication method, to grad-
ually map out, fill in, and then re-expand a diegetic universe. The world of comics does
this regularly through the incorporation of new spaces and stories—as, in its own way,
does a series of novels like A Song of Ice and Fire, or its televisual incarnation Game of
Thrones. In television, that world may be a kernel that expands—as with The Sopranos,
where a narrative initially constructed, in its pilot, as one gangster’s weekly report to
his psychiatrist grew to inhabit not just a range of people and environments but also
a constellation of storytelling options. A show like Deadwood—a Western set during
the Black Hills gold rush of the 1870s—is literally about building a world, in this case
the transformation of a place called a “camp” into a place called a “town,” where the
idea of Deadwood “existing” and then becoming a nexus of world capital drives the
series. We might also think of world-building in terms of authors, like J. K. Rowling
and the Harry Potter universe, or television showrunners, like Joss Whedon of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, whose serial franchises are seen as reflections of a world associated
with a single constructor. World-building, while explicitly referring to space, may also
reflect the clearest relationship to time among the six elements, because the nature of
many serials is to build gradually; in effect, our understanding of the places created by
a serial is a record of our temporal engagement with the narrative.
I’ve argued previously that Ingmar Bergman, in the two television serials he made
in the 1970s and 1980s, explicitly staged a conversation between world-building on
the one hand and world-narrowing on the other (O’Sullivan 2014). The later series,
Fanny and Alexander, revels in the exploration and proliferation of spaces from in-
stallment to installment, using new locations to incorporate new genres into a sprawl-
ing family drama; the series’ topic, arguably, is the relationship between new and old
58  Sean O’Sullivan

environments. The earlier series, Scenes from a Marriage, focuses tightly on a wife
and a husband in claustrophobic interiors, bringing us back again and again to the
internal, both architecturally and emotionally; the series actively resists the very idea
that a world might exist beyond a few circumscribed rooms. HBO’s In Treatment is
a similarly claustrophobic series. Each week, it aired in five (later four) half-hour in-
stallments, all involving a psychiatrist and a patient; the final installment showed the
psychiatrist visiting his own therapist. In Treatment, like Scenes from a Marriage, is a
show about world-narrowing, about burrowing—not just into the mind and memory
of the patient but into the increasingly and inescapably familiar space of a doctor’s
office. On those occasions where the show depicted different locations, In Treatment
seemed almost to be faking an interest, or belief, in any universe beyond the closed
one of the analytical space. World-building represents a specific, sometimes literal,
diagram of a serial’s narrative scope, and the degree of engagement it requires of its
audience across the gaps of each segment.
The fifth element is “personnel.” This may simply appear to be another way of
saying “character”; but my choice of term deliberately aims for a broader category,
one concerned with how characters are organized and distributed across a series. We
might use “personnel” to indicate the deployment of a new character within a series; by
charting such choices of deployment over a long sequence of installments, we can de-
termine if patterns emerge for introducing new members of the diegesis, and whether
these patterns suggest correspondences among characters that might otherwise seem
unrelated. A heavily populated series like Game of Thrones inevitably encourages us to
think about such fluctuations of numbers—as the additions and subtractions to each
episode’s opening credits signal to us, on a weekly basis. We might also use personnel
to target the narrative consequences of the quantity of characters in any one episode,
especially in relation to a normative headcount that we may have grown to expect
from the series. In the case of a “bottle episode”—the term for an episode of television
that is made with very few characters on just one set or location—we register the dra-
matic decline in personnel as, by itself, a different kind of narrative focus. One famous
example is the “Fly” episode of Breaking Bad, where Walter White and his assistant
Jesse Pinkman are confined to a drug-making laboratory for the entire hour, and the
intensity of that confinement registers in an intensity of exchange—not only between
the two characters, but between the episode and its audience.
Personnel can also designate a shift of attention to a character that has heretofore
been marginalized; such a shift forces us to re-consider the narrative balance of the
series, across its collection of characters, if only for one hour or half hour. One in-
stance of this strategy is the eighth episode of the Serial podcast, “The Deal with Jay,”
where an individual who has served as a shadowy antagonist—essentially deployed
as a component of serial plot—receives the full concentration of an installment, con-
verted however temporarily into a distinct individual, around whom a very different
version of the narrative might orbit. A parallel instance, with different effects, is the
“Consider Helen” episode of the TV series Enlightened, where we follow the mother
of the series’ main character, as she goes shopping and does chores around the house.
To this point, the mother has been a very limited character; we know her only as a
small-minded person who constantly reprimands her daughter. This unexpected shift
 Six Elements of Serial Narrative   59

in focalization enacts the famous question posed by the narrator of Middlemarch:

“Why always Dorothea?” In other words: Why do we privilege the consciousness and
experience of a protagonist, over the consciousness and experience of the many other
inhabitants of a storyworld? Serial universes, especially the larger they grow, always
have the option of availing themselves of these lateral maneuvers—maneuvers that
may be temporary, or that may establish new patterns.
Personnel may indicate many other choices and effects as well. These choices
and effects can include information about a character’s past or privilege elements of
a character’s mind. The latter option is somewhat different from the focalization shift
illustrated by “Consider Helen”—since while we follow Helen in that episode, our
access to her manner of thinking, and its causes, remain essentially opaque to us.
We might link the issue of a character’s mind, or interiority, to the matter of minor
characters in a serial. Alex Woloch has argued for the vital role of minor characters
in realist fiction, as necessary contexts for the development of the protagonist, and
as potential centers of attention that need to be marginalized in order for the fiction
to develop or progress (Woloch 34). In serials, however, the system is often different,
since progression may be very temporary or perpetually deferred, and development
is far more erratic. The negotiations between minor and major can play out at the
micro level of the installment, or at the macro level of the universe, in ways distinct
from the middle ground of the arc. Serials have potentially very sophisticated and
subtly shaded palettes for depicting minorness, and the glimpses of interiority that an
episode may give us can create a shift in our understanding not only of the character
herself but of the possible dynamics across characters in a series. Personnel, in other
words, speaks both to cold calculations of character absences and presences, and to
the governing systems and principles of populations within a serial diegesis.
The sixth and final element is “design.” If world-building alerts us to the de-
ployment and organization of space, and if personnel alerts us to the deployment
and organization of agents and subjects, design alerts us to the machinery of serial
construction. It is the element most closely associated with the presence of author-
ship—whether authorship is located in a movie studio or a publishing house, in a
collaboration of artistic partners or in a single individual. Our attention to design de-
pends on our familiarity with the particular shape and infrastructure that a serial has
chosen for its basic narrative unit, or segment. In the case of Charles Dickens, readers
soon came to expect each monthly number to feature two illustrations followed by 32
pages of written narrative. This very regular pattern would be broken at the very end
of the serial, when a “double number” would begin with four illustrations followed
by (roughly) 48 pages of written narrative. That different balance between illustration
and language, and that different proportion of narrative within the installment, regis-
ters as an alteration of design—of how the segment works. Even at a relatively modest
level of alteration such as this one, the change makes clear that the apparently very
strict conventions by which installments choose to operate are in fact highly contin-
gent; the serial segment becomes transparent to us as a cluster of rules to be followed
or disobeyed. The end matter that accompanied each issue of Alan Moore and Dave
Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen highlighted issues of segment design by offering
different kinds of putative paratextual materials from the narrative’s storyworld—ex-
60  Sean O’Sullivan

cerpts from newspapers, journals, memoirs whose variances of visual and verbal style
made visible the array of available authorial options in toggling between the iterative,
repeated space subsequent to the narrative “itself ” and the multiple, potentially end-
less possibilities of excavated documents from the diegetic universe.
The explicit invitation to the viewer or reader to examine serial form has recently
become more prominent in American television—an invitation that Jason Mittell
has discussed as the “operational aesthetic” (Mittell 35). The comedy series Seinfeld
offered a radical invitation with an episode entitled “The Betrayal,” which ran back-
ward in time. This choice did not simply upset general expectations of a half hour of
television narrative; it explicitly required us to rely on what we expected a half hour
of Seinfeld to do in order to decode it. More globally, series such as Lost and Orange
Is the New Black have made design their governing element. In both cases, each epi-
sode typically moves back and forth between the backstory of an individual character
and the continuing adventures of the group of characters stuck on an island or in a
prison. This double narrative strand makes us aware of how each episode functions,
but the vast freedom of storytelling options and genres available in the backstory
means that the properties of the design can create very different shapes each week.
In other cases, design can appear by stealth. The “Love’s Labor Lost” episode of
the medical drama ER relied on the fact that, deep into the first season, the audience
understood that the first two stories introduced in each episode typically carried the
dramatic weight of the hour, and that the third or fourth served as lighter counterparts.
In this installment, however, the fourth story, involving a pregnant woman, not only
turned from light to dark; it engulfed the entire second half of the episode, excluding
every other story, including unresolved threads about the series regulars’ personal
lives. This radical move exploited our reliance on ER’s established design conventions,
and then shattered them. Design is the element that alerts us to the particularity of
a series, its specific systems of habits, preferences, and protocols. Design relies most
on the audience’s understanding of the preceding five elements; our sensitivity to it
depends on our awareness of how any one serial chooses to operate narratively, and
how it chooses to operate poetically. It may seem therefore different in kind from the
others, in that it becomes visible as an informed engagement with the recognizable
ingredients of each one.
But design can also be more immediately apprehended. ER again provides a
helpful illustration: the fourth-season opening episode (“Ambush”) was aired live,
with the premise that a documentary crew was shooting the doctors as they went
about their hospital business. A spare black-and-white list of the principal actors,
artists, and creators replaced the cold open and iconic opening credits sequence; the
characters spoke directly to the camera, breaking the hard fourth wall of the series
to this point; and the use of videotape rather than film—a necessity of the unusual
broadcast context—gave the familiar sets and faces very different textures. By contrast
with the deep knowledge of the series required to produce the effects of “Love’s Labor
Lost,” “Ambush” made the show’s audience instantly aware of design as a dramatically
highlighted element—just as enjambment in other situations might make us instantly
aware of momentum, or the return of a long-lost individual might make us instantly
aware of personnel.
 Six Elements of Serial Narrative   61

Design may be more capacious than the other five elements, and it may seem
to rely on our sensitivity to their typicalities within a series. But it can announce it-
self from the installment’s opening move—such as the storytelling presence of either
first-person Esther Summerson or the third-person narrator of Bleak House at the
start of each monthly number, where the range of potential worlds, personnel, and
multiplicities is advertised by the implementation of one of the novel’s two orien-
tations of narrative design. Or, in a paratextual light, the humorous MailChimp ads
that preceded every episode of the first season of Serial became conjoined with the
experience of the narrative “itself,” producing a collection of commentaries about this
narrative threshold (see, for example, Parkinson). When the sponsorship contract
disappeared, and late adopters downloaded the podcast with a different prefatory
commercial, the design of an episode of Serial essentially changed. Design is both
seriality at its most microcosmic and its most systemic.
Two current televisual narrative experiments make design, and its relationship
to the other elements, central to the viewing experience in radically different ways.
The FX series Atlanta presents an extended investigation of what we might call mini-
malist seriality, by vigorously attenuating the elements that can seem the most prom-
inent hallmarks of seriality—such as iteration, momentum, and world-building. The
show initially centers on Earn Marks, a Princeton dropout who has returned to his
home town and stumbled into the fraught position of business manager for his rap-
per cousin. While the broad situation of the principals obtains throughout, Atlanta
obsessively alters its style, attention, and mood from episode to episode. Among its
most infamous moves are the destabilization of the rules of personnel, by having an
African American actor play the apparently actual Justin Bieber; major design shifts
such as “B.  A.  N.,” an episode that compresses within a single installment a wide
swath of programming, including commercials, from a fictional television channel;
and genre dislocations such as “Teddy Perkins,” an episode that detours into a haunt-
ed house social horror about race and the culture industry, and which itself aired
initially on FX (by contrast with the fake ads of “B. A. N.”) with no commercial inter-
ruptions of any kind—a radical refusal of the rules of basic cable television.
The NBC series The Good Place has staked out a diametrically opposite territory,
which we might call maximalist seriality, where every one of the six elements I have
outlined announces itself in hyper-drive at all times. The situation at the heart of the
comedy involves four characters who have died and been sent to the apparently heav-
enly “good place.” The characters and the viewers alike discover at the end of the
first season that this quartet has in fact landed in the “bad place,” or more precisely a
newly invented mode of infernal torture, to wit a sustained and maddening deferral
of blissful expectation. The show is obsessively momentum-driven, typically ending
each episode on a cliff-hanger, which is then enjambed with the subsequent episode,
and the problem of world-building is especially thematized, as the crypto-demonic
“architect” of the “neighborhood” constantly has to fix or reboot the community as
disasters ensue. The variety of its serial maximalism comes into spectacular bloom
in the second season, once the secret is revealed, as the multiplicity of reboots spirals
into hundreds of iterations, and the very nature of the subjective particularity of the
personnel is called into question as their memories are erased, or as they feign that
62  Sean O’Sullivan

erasure in trying to escape their predicament. The fundamental viewing pleasures

of The Good Place are coterminous with the narrative permutations of design—both
within the diegesis, and through the multifarious designs of the show itself. But as dif-
ferent as the serial experiences of Atlanta and The Good Place may be, they represent
two sides of the same storytelling preoccupation: the playful deployment of the six
elements I have outlined, from aggressive abstinence to full-on excess, to explore the
contours and effects of seriality.

Conclusion

We could say that serial narrative has at its core two defining and apparently anti-
thetical impulses: a Victorian energy and a Modernist energy. By a Victorian energy,
I mean such qualities as diegetic immersion; attention to psychological and moral
stakes; narrative pieces that, immediately or eventually, fit together; a comfort with
genre expectations; an embrace of the teleological; and a commitment to the whole.
By a Modernist energy, I mean such qualities as readerly self-consciousness; an aware-
ness of characters as constructs; a willingness to make narrative pieces work against
each other; a penchant for genre frustrations; an intense focus on the moment rather
than the eventual; and a commitment to the part. I use “Victorian” and “Modernist”
as shorthand, with the understanding that the period denotations may imply a dia-
chronic transformation of seriality, rather than characteristics inherent to serial
storytelling. My definitions above correspond simply to familiar properties that we
associate with the Victorian and the Modernist, to illustrate an array of tensions that
we often connect to distinct moments in narrative history. But my fuller claim is that
Victorian and Modernist energies are inherent to all serials, from Nicholas Nickleby
to Twin Peaks. In some cases, one force may seem to assert itself over the other, and
stories that consistently privilege one tendency may become associated primarily if
not exclusively with that branch of the serial family. Nonetheless: the interruptive,
fragmented, installment-focused nature of seriality makes all serials potentially
Modernist. And the sustained investment in the ripples made and possibilities gener-
ated by fictional people and events, no matter how avant-garde the trappings, results
in our orbiting a social world and its meanings in the welcoming and immersive ways
advertised by the Victorian novel. These potential alternations may occur as defining
elements of a specific serial, or they may manifest themselves within an installment,
or between installments. The Good Place represents a particularly vivid commingling
of the two, as its earnest thematic and psychological investment in learning to be good
and living together empathetically arrives to us through a self-consciously fractured
narrative jumble, which makes an apparent nonsense of sustained identities and be-
liefs; it may be as explicit a blend of the Victorian and the Modernist as the medium,
and perhaps seriality itself, has yet provided us.
By way of closing, I would note that my preceding catalogue of choices and em-
phases, predicated on approaching serial form as a relationship between installments,
would seem to operate in tension, if friendly tension, with Kathryn VanArendonk’s
accompanying article in this cluster—which contests the translatability of one par-
 Six Elements of Serial Narrative   63

ticular serial object, namely the television episode. Her argument insists that the
distinctive abilities and affordances of the episode resist absorption into other serial
forms, despite the now-commonplace comparison of episodes with installments of a
novel. VanArendonk’s case asks us to understand the satisfying separateness of the
television episode as its glory, regardless of the narrative ambition of the accompa-
nying series, or even of degree of seriality itself. One could say that the episode, as
portrayed by VanArendonk, manifests its serial-ness precisely through that collision
of the Victorian (the satisfying) and the Modernist (the separate). The elements I
have proposed here are ultimately agnostic about such claims for medium specificity,
or claims for the effects of parts as potentially distinct from and not fully resolvable
into the forces of the narratively continuous. Or, one might say, the six elements are
interested bystanders in regard to such proposals. My own claim is that these six
properties are those that have most frequently and variably signaled both creators’
and audiences’ engagements in the capacities of serial narrative at both local and
infrastructural levels. The serial is the art of the between. These six elements show us
the particular colors and shapes that the between most recognizably and imaginative-
ly uses to unfold itself.

Endnotes
1. See, for example, the many publications generated by the Popular Seriality research unit, based at
the Free University of Berlin; the journal Series, launched in 2015 with a focus on TV narratives;
and the “Screen Serialities” book series from Edinburgh University Press.
2. This concentration on the relationship between two objects within a sequence may certainly recall
the arguments for the operations of comics outlined by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics.
While I share with McCloud a focus on the narrative interaction between specific pieces, his
work hinges on a visual gap—the gutter—while mine hinges on a temporal gap—the publication
hiatus between installments; successive panels of comics do not constitute in and of themselves a
serial. Furthermore, McCloud’s emphasis on “transitions” of “closure” that comics require of their
readers differs from my emphasis on the relationships between systems of parts—parts that we
call episodes or installments. That said, there is absolutely an investigative sympathy between Mc-
Cloud’s engagement with the effects of interruption and my own. See especially McCloud 70–72.
3. The core of what follows represents a significant expansion and elaboration of a first stab at this
topic—couched within an analysis of two Ingmar Bergman television shows—as referenced on
pp. 57–58 (O’Sullivan 2014).

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