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The aim of this study is to characterize the structures and terminology used in a corpus of tennis narratives. To achieve this, we constituted a corpus of three television narratives of tennis. Based on studies on sports discourse, we identify the terminology and syntactic structures that characterize the tennis discourse in the television narratives of our corpus. Once we identified the structures, we determine their configuration in order to identify certain syntactic patterns in the discourse of this sports discipline and contrast these patterns with those used in other sports narratives. With this article, we intend to contribute to research focused on sports discourse, in particular studies centred on the syntax of television narratives of tennis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I scrutinize the much-discussed "walrus scene" from Netflix's nature documentary Our Planet (2019) for its formal and thematic similarities to weird fiction. I argue that these similarities reveal tensions in how we conceptualize the environment, the human, and the nonhuman. By comparing the narrative strategies in the walrus scene to similar strategies in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (2014), I problematize the emergent crosstalk between the weird and the Anthropocene, and the ways in which it mediates the environmental crisis, via concepts such as "Anthropocene horror," "worldwithout-us," and "global weirding.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a criticism of the Norwegian television program "SLAM." She mentions the use of social media both within and regarding the program about the lives of teenagers, how the narrative strategy works to include the audience, and the sense of group belonging as a theme in the show.

Westworld (2016-present) is one of the most popular and complex television narratives in recent years. Based on the classic 1973 science fiction film of the same title, the show's first two seasons are set in a technologically advanced Western-themed Park where human guests pay to interact in any way they wish with the hosts/androids that populate its world. Yet, unlike the robots of the 1973 version who easily betrayed their mechanical origin, this time the hosts blur the boundaries between human and machine, real and fabricated, thus posing significant questions about posthumanism. Furthermore, the depiction of the hosts as specifically embodied and gendered artificial beings, also raises questions surrounding postfeminism. These two concepts, namely posthumanism and postfeminism, are interwoven in the representation of two of the show's main protagonists, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton), two female androids that begin to realize their fabricated reality and develop a new subjectivity. The article argues that despite the emancipating possibilities that an emergent posthuman subjectivity suggests, the show's posthuman heroines are finally constrained by the text's humanist and postfemininst limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opening sequences has been suffered from a transformation process until becoming an integral and integrating part of fictional story. The present text collects a study of the opening of Isabel, Víctor Ros and El Ministerio del tiempo, created by Javier Olivares. A research developed from four main points of work, analysis of formal, narrative, typographic and sound aspects. Through common and dissimilar traits shared with credit titles, it is about proving the relationship with the building process of identity and brand of the audiovisual product as an independent unit from its creator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outlining key elements of folk horror, this article discusses the influence of British 1970s television upon post-2000 folk-horror revivalists, arguing that television is of vital importance to social and cultural folklore. With reference to Mikel Koven's 'mass-mediated ostension', this study brings together folkloristics and screen studies, and proposes 'wyrd' as a term to apply to eerie, hauntological media with folkloric themes. Supernatural tropes are examined alongside a case-study analysis of the BBC series Ghost Stories for Christmas to illustrate how folkloric content is represented on screen, and how the eerie atmosphere of 1970s television was created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how audience members relate to and vicariously interact with multiple characters while viewing a narrative. Under the framework of the theory of situation models, we applied a real-time thought-listing technique that incorporated Twitter and focused on three debuting TV dramas to explore how the participants followed multiple characters while watching prime-time television dramas. We examined 3,274 tweets across the three TV series and found that monitoring a greater diversity of characters is associated with an increased number of questions asked and more accurate predictions of future events. The participants who made more accurate predictions had higher narrative engagement. In addition, the participants who had more thoughts about the self tracked a greater diversity of characters and made more accurate predictions about the plot. The results are discussed in terms of the developing literature on narratives in mass communication and entertainment research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tagline for Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story: Freak Show (AHS: Freak Show) is 'Wir Sind Alle Freaks', a German phrase that clearly signals the show's 'freaktopic' intention. 'We are all freaks' introduces a narrative that promises to collapse boundaries between the self and other, allowing viewers to see themselves as more like the freakish characters at the heart of Elsa Mars' Cabinet of Curiosities than the outsiders threatening their lives. However, this invitation, combined with the narrative focus on normate characters instead invokes the countercultural appropriation of 'freak' as an anti-establishment rebellion. These narratives provide not a 'freaktopia', but rather an escape, both temporary and permanent, from 'normative' values for non-freakish characters, and an outright rejection of those norms. While this choice seems in some ways informed by contemporary notions of social justice, access, and inclusion, in which the 'normative' characters act in alliance with their underprivileged 'freak' peers, Ryan Murphy's AHS: Freak Show ultimately troubles its very tagline. Through an analysis of the AHS: Freak Show's narrative structures surrounding capital, family, and consumption, I argue that the myth of a 'freaktopia' collapses under the weight of its own neo-liberal dream, and is ultimately consumed by mainstream capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a criticism of Australian films and television programs depicting World War I. He discusses the focus on the campaign in Gallipoli, Turkey, the issue of masculinity as representing the nation in the films and programs, and the sense of subversion in the narrative form.

The author discusses the Norwegian teen television program "Skam." He mentions the production and storytelling of the program which is formatted to be viewed on smart phones, how the program fits into the social media you of teenagers, and the development of new media habits.

To speak about the horror of the Holocaust is still extremely difficult. An exploration of our data, a video testimony of a female survivor of the Ghetto in Łódź, showed that she employs certain styles of narration (narrative motifs). This paper first examines some of those motifs and suggests that they might function as a means of self-regulation. In our data they either assist in preventing retraumatization or facilitate the re-experiencing of the dreadful past. The features of those motifs are analysed on a semantic, a prosodic and an embodied level through the usage of Conversation Analysis, PRAAT and Multimodal Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TVmoji is a pictorial visual device that captions or interprets television footage. It is widely used in many non-scripted television shows, particularly in East Asia. Using a Goffmanian footing analysis, this study categorizes TVmojis as blurted expressions, soliloquies, captions, narration, fictive viewer’s talkbacks, and fictive viewer’s comments. The author argues that by playing various roles, TVmojis help construct the viewer’s sense of being a bystander while concealing the producers’ manipulations of the media’s interactive roles vis-à-vis the viewers. The author contends that to improve the understanding of this editorial manipulation-in-disguise, the media should be conceptualized as retellers, rather than representers, of narrative using footage and visual devices such as TVmojis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have demonstrated the power of entertainment narratives to influence attitudes and behaviors; fewer have examined the effects of TV portrayals on attitudes toward marginalized groups. The present study is among the first to explore how entertainment narratives depicting transgender individuals influence viewers’ attitudes toward transgender people and related policies. The study examines the impact of exposure to a TV storyline on Royal Pains (USA Network) and cumulative effects of viewing other TV series featuring transgender individuals. An online survey of 488 U.S. viewers of Royal Pains was conducted (391 had seen the relevant episode). ANCOVAs revealed exposure to both the Royal Pains’ storyline and other storylines portraying transgender individuals were associated with more supportive attitudes toward transgender people and policies. Mediation models revealed that for viewers of the Royal Pains’ storyline, the relationships between political ideology and attitudes toward transgender people and policies were mediated by identification with the main characters and the emotion of hope. Disgust mediated viewers’ attitudes toward transgender people, but not policies. Post hoc analyses revealed that exposure to transgender narratives reduced the influence of viewers’ political ideology on their attitudes. The attitudes of more conservative viewers became increasingly positive as they saw more media portrayals of transgender individuals. These findings highlight the potential for entertainment narratives to influence attitudes toward marginalized groups, and they demonstrate the importance of emotion in the context of divisive topics. Social, political, and public health implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jason Mittell argues that contemporary television narrative is marked by degrees of both structural and consumptive complexity. One way he addresses this complexity is through the concept of drillability, which he describes as “a mode of forensic fandom that invites viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the complexity of a story and its telling.” This essay analyzes a particular episode of CBS’s The Good Wife (2009–2016) to extend Mittell’s concept of drillability and to explore its theoretical links to Mikhail Bakhtin’s “dialogic imagination.” In doing so, the essay argues that “producer-fans” model modes of critical media consumption required by an informed and engaged citizenry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three strategies that TV shows have increasingly employed in recent years to produce what Jason Mittell, in an essay that marked the beginning of his thoughts on the issue, has called "narrative complexity": unreliable narration, counterfictional scenarios, and ellipses and anachronological narration. It uses the last minutes of "The Wheel," the final episode of the first season of AMC's Mad Men (2007-15), as its primary example. More specifically, this article proposes three different interpretations of the final moments of that episode. These readings have in common that they underline one of Mittell's central claims, namely that serial television shifts comprehension processes toward conscious hypotheses in what he describes as "operational aesthetic." However, the article will also assume a broader perspective throughout and demonstrate that the three interpretations it develops are instances of more widely spread phenomena that merit far more attention than a single article can provide. Thus, the article offers, on the one hand, a close reading of an episode of Mad Men against the background of the early seasons of the show, but, on the other, it also identifies three topics for further fruitful research on television narrative more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a 'paratext' has become widely accepted and used within fan studies, as an all-encompassing term for both official and unofficial productions associated with contemporary transmedia productions -- to the point where some scholars are arguing for the dissolution of the boundary between 'text' and 'paratext'. But although some excellent empirical work has been and is being done on the range and operations of particular paratextual networks, not many people adopting the concept have considered its meaning and implications in the work of its originator, Gerard Genette. This essay looks back at Genette's work, and contrasts his ideas with a number of contemporary uses, before outlining (via some test cases from materials associated with Game of Thrones) a working conception of 'paratextuality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the narrative strategies used in television series, focusing on how narrative time gradually builds and extends rather than moving in a linear fashion. Particular attention is given to how this is used to combine multiple storylines as the author cites the series "Orange Is the New Black" as an example of a chronotopic development of narrative.

This article examines the character Illyria (Amy Acker) from the television series Angel (1999–2004). It examines Illyria as a representation of the ‘cult’ action heroine, and as a means of creating visual pleasure within the television narrative. In exploring her function within the narrative of Angel, in which her characterisation undercuts some common ways in which the female body is represented on-screen, the essay compares the character with other female action heroes of 1990s to 2000s television series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the television comedy of the late 1960s, with a focus on the duo Konto 55-gō. Through analysis of some of the critical and popular reception of the duo, I argue that their meteoric rise reflected a watershed moment in the history of Japanese television, as the medium discovered an aesthetic that, uniquely its own, positioned the affective alongside the visual. Numerous accounts from the era emphasized the pair's speed, as well as their tendency to disregard the conventions of the industry and characterized their energy as one that seemed to "burst out" from the frame. This reputation, I demonstrate, laid the foundation for a narrative, in which the pair were portrayed as ushering in a new epoch of television. Konto 55-gō, according to this narrative, had overcome the boundaries of the television apparatus and forged a direct and immediate connection with viewers. Exploring several facets of this narrative as well as its resonance with contemporary trends in Japanese television, I consider in conclusion the role that the live audience laughter of Konto 55-gō's performances played within it. Characterized as being as raucous and uncontrollable as the duo itself, that laughter served within the discourse on the pair as both a vehicle for the affective connection that they created with viewers and synecdoche for the sensibilities of a vast mass audience that extended beyond the studio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective disposition theory explains well the process of enjoying hero narratives but not the appeal of narratives featuring antiheroes. Recent antihero studies suggest that character identification and moral disengagement might be important factors in the enjoyment of such fare. The current study builds on this work. A sample of 101 self-identified fans and nonfans of the television series 24 viewed a condensed version of Season 1, providing evaluation of various protagonist perceptions, moral judgments, and emotional responses to the narrative, as well as overall enjoyment. As expected, fans reported greater liking of the protagonist and greater enjoyment. But more importantly, regression analyses illuminated key differences between the groups in terms of the factors predicting enjoyment, providing a clearer picture of how we enjoy antihero narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the most recent serial fiction the hero is markedly different. The main characters of the latest series almost always have a feature that is far from the classical virtuosity, an element of strangeness, often asocial. This article aims to show that in the U.S. television drama of the last ten years the hero progressively acquires new features that not allow the normal interaction with the world around him. The characteristics of this type of character, away from traditional narrative standards are diverse, but all of them are typical of the known as freak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2000s RAI television drama makes a temporal turn that coincides with Second Republic's revisionism of the divided memory of crucial episodes in post-Unification Italian history. This article examines two historical mini-series on Italian migration in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Il Grande Torino/The Great Torino (2005) and Marcinelle/Inferno Below (2003). In both narratives the microhistory of migration lived and performed by ordinary people is coupled with the macrohistory of disaster: respectively the 1949 Superga airplane crash, which brought an end to the Grande Torino football team, and the Marcinelle coalmine fire of 8 August 1956, which killed 136 Italian workers. These historical narratives work within transmedial constellations of cultural memory and interact with institutionalized collective memory. In both cases the model image of the Italian migrant worker as a redemptive figure of Italy's post-war regeneration in television documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s is replaced by a contemporary ambivalent representation of the paradoxes of migration, and redemption is activated instead by the story of disaster and as a specific quality of Italian character. Both episodes can be seen as a homage to the sacrifice of labour of the Italian worker with the difference that the main character of Il Grande Torino/The Great Torino sacrifices his individual migrant story to the memory of the Superga disaster, while Marcinelle's hero becomes the redemptive figure of the Italian migrant worker thanks to the exceptional circumstances created by the mine catastrophe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the century, serial television drama is increasingly associated with quality. This reappraisal has been widely documented, but such accounts are strongly Anglocentric. Is this rise (or return) of 'quality TV' an international trend? Is it also present in smaller markets with lower budgets? To answer these questions, this article focuses on the small television market of Flanders (Dutch-language North Belgium). Nine successful productions are discussed, also their reviews. The core of the analysis is constituted by interviews with people involved in the production of these dramas, trying to understand how they define and aspire to produce 'quality drama'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes multi-genre television series oscillating between fantasy, mystery, and horror with regard to their self-referentiality. The author discusses the interplay between a series' plot elements and narrative techniques and its active reception by its viewers in creating this self-referential system and, as examples, provides interpretations of the U.S. television programs "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Supernatural."

The article analyzes the narrative structure of the opening sequence of the pilot episode of the television series "Game of Thrones," starring, among others, Peter Dinklage, Emilia Clarke, and Kit Harington, and developed by showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Issues addressed include the adaptation of the literary basis for the episode, the prologue of the novel "Die Herren von Winterfell" by George R. R. Martin, to television, cold opens, and strategies of narrative exposition more broadly.

The article discusses the formats, narrative techniques, and production processes of television shows and their evolution over time. The author outlines the history of television series, emphasizing that the early twenty-first century witnessed a significant increase in plot complexity and drawing on examples from the United States and Germany. The implications of these trends for children's television are also commented on.

This article summarizes an evidence-based study that adapts a breakpoint approach to investigate how elements of television narratives (two half-hour episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 'Lamb to the Slaughter' and 'The Case of Mr. Pelham') were considered meaningful to viewers. Actions considered meaningful were found to be high in informational and emotional content, and primarily consisted of plot points where changes in narrative direction and protagonist's goals were perceived as interpretively salient. Viewers also registered as meaningful those scenes that were character centered and provided subjective access to the main characters. The article reviews segmentation behavior in the relevant film theory literature to contextualize study, and concludes by summarizing other potential applications of an adapted breakpoint approach beyond the investigation of dramatic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the slash community surrounding the television series Smallville. Utilizing textual data, audience survey responses, and fan ethnography, I locate the performance of homoeroticism in Smallville and highlight important (sub)textual moments of the series as recounted by participants. These observations reveal important implications concerning the performative capabilities of narrative, the cultural significance of this particular Superman retelling, and the influence of textual intent on subcultural practices related to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. In essence, slash fans create an alternative vision of television narrative by marking each characters' actions as homoerotic, which is rearticulated by the writers, directors and actors of the series. This interplay illustrates the changing nature of television narrative, where text, audience and production are inseparable when analyzing media artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is proposed to explore the role played by the witness in journalistic narratives. We seek to understand these narratives in their work of mediation of suffering caused by events on individuals. The paper addresses the witness both in the form of rhetorical artifice founded on the claim of journalistic veracity - under the shade of the problem of information sources - as in the ethical implications raised by the narration of the experience of subjects suffering - in which the phenomenon of witness refers not only to the attestation, but mainly to the encounter with the other, made possible by journalism. For this, we used examples of television narratives, considered singular instances of inquiry about the journalistic statute of witness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the role of cultural diversity in the construction of consumer identity, and in particular, how cultural diversity is appropriated through television viewing. Data based on depth interviews and surveys of young adults who created brand collages centered on a television-based character reveal that viewers identify and engage with television narratives through a process of 'homophilization'; that is, they actively envision various features of television narratives as similar to themselves and their own lived experiences. The data also show that homophilizing processes are enacted primarily by customizing the narrative, or textual poaching, in which the consumers insert themselves and their experiences into the narrative, and that consumption choices serve as primary mechanisms for poaching. Because media narratives are important in the formation and maintenance of consumer identity, the authors strongly recommend vigilance in the production and dissemination of socially conscious narratives that allow prosocial and realistic characters with whom consumers can actively engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to discuss how narratives are constructed media about the strike. So let's use the example of a story broadcasted by Jornal Nacional, of Rede Globo network, on November 26, 2010, on the stoppage of bus drivers and conductors of Vitória (ES). The discussion here attempts to show that these events in order to present the "reality", are processed in news endowed with meanings that, in turn, reshapes the journalistic event (their conflicts, their characters...). Through the pragmatic analysis of the newspaper story noted that the conflicts between capital and labor are a reflection of systematic and complete by feeding back important social consensus on the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a call for submissions of articles to be published in the number 10 issue of the journal with a focus on the relationship between television narrative and literary narrative, including topics such as television seriality, transmedia, and self-reference in television series.

Which is the actual relationship between net and television? Could we fi nd a point of contact between linear narration and hypertext? The last decade has brought about some radical changes: new ways of broadcasting the signal have been introduced, as well as new protocols containing new specifi cations about audio/video quality. One hour after the most signifi cant TV programmes have been broadcast locally, they are made available on the p2p networks to the whole world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Older adults are increasingly using the Internet for health information; however, they are often not able to correctly recall Web-based information (eHealth information). Recall of information is crucial for optimal health outcomes, such as adequate disease management and adherence to medical regimes. Combining effective message strategies may help to improve recall of eHealth information among older adults. Presenting information in an audiovisual format using conversational narration style is expected to optimize recall of information compared to other combinations of modality and narration style. Objective: The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of modality and narration style on recall of health information, and whether there are differences between younger and older adults. Methods: We conducted a Web-based experiment using a 2 (modality: written vs audiovisual information) by 2 (narration style: formal vs conversational style) between-subjects design (N=440). Age was assessed in the questionnaire and included as a factor: younger (<65 years) versus older (≥65 years) age. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental webpages where information about lung cancer treatment was presented. A Web-based questionnaire assessed recall of eHealth information. Results: Audiovisual modality (vs written modality) was found to increase recall of information in both younger and older adults (P=.04). Although conversational narration style (vs formal narration style) did not increase recall of information (P=.17), a synergistic effect between modality and narration style was revealed: combining audiovisual information with conversational style outperformed combining written information with formal style (P=.01), as well as written information with conversational style (P=.045). This finding suggests that conversational style especially increases recall of information when presented audiovisually. This combination of modality and narration style improved recall of information among both younger and older adults. Conclusions: We conclude that combining audiovisual information with conversational style is the best way to present eHealth information to younger and older adults. Even though older adults did not proportionally recall more when audiovisual information was combined with conversational style than younger adults, this study reveals interesting implications for improving eHealth information that is effective for both younger and older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces this issue of the journal, which contains contributions on, among other things, the narrative structure of television series, the use of nerds, freaks, and geeks as identification figures in the television show "The Big Bang Theory," and the use of surprise and irritation in literary analysis for students.