From paleo-TV to post-TV: seriality as the creative space of television

Abstract

Starting from ‘Appunti sulla televisione’ (Eco, 1964) and from the suggestion that the television medium, although not yet considered to be at the centre of a creative process, is one of the ‘basic phenomena of our civilisation and that, therefore, it is necessary not only to encourage it in its most valid tendencies but also to study it in its manifestations’ (Eco, 1964: 317), it is possible, today, to trace a linear that from paleo-TV, passing through neo-TV, allows us to arrive at a reflection on the dimension of post-TV within which phenomena such as post-seriality (Brancato, 2011) and pop platform seriality come to life, new spaces of audiovisual fruition in which the creative and aesthetic process is not only definitively legitimised, but reaches the highest levels of experimentation. Therefore, the aim of the contribution is to trace within the post-televisual spaces those categories traced by Eco as early as the 1960s that explode in all their narrative power within contemporary television and serial products. From the power of analogy, passing through the precious value of obviousness, up to the necessary influence of lies and irony within the media narrative, always keeping alive that inescapable assumption according to which ‘if everything holds, the game is valid’, while pushing categories, forms and archetypes to their limits.