Projections

In the current digital age, television serialization has consolidated itself as a preferred form of fiction consumption all over the planet. This broad and continuously evolving field of media products demands scholarly investigation into its distinct narrative and aesthetic qualities, its effects on viewers, and its cultural impact. This Special Issue on Serial Television for Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind facilitates a dialogue between scholars in various disciplines and brings the study of TV series to the forefront of contemporary intellectual debate, including interdisciplinary approaches that bridge the traditional humanities/sciences division.

This article explores how narrative strategies—specifically dramatic irony and surprise—shape viewer engagement in the first season of the dystopian puzzle TV series Severance (Apple TV+, 2022–). It examines how these devices manage cognitive load and information distribution to influence both anticipatory and retrospective engagement. The analysis focuses on how dramatic irony and surprise operate within the temporal prolongation and multiplot structures of serialized television. Dramatic irony sustains engagement by creating a knowledge advantage for the viewer, prompting proactive and reactive inferences. Surprise, conversely, disrupts expectations and triggers cognitive restructuring as viewers re-evaluate earlier narrative events. We show how Severance strategically regulates information flow and viewer assumptions to deliver impactful plot twists that deepen character engagement and explore themes of identity and control. As a case study, the series highlights how streaming-era narratives leverage slow-building mysteries and strategic information management to balance emotional tension with cognitive complexity.

Spoilers have become a noteworthy point of contention for popular media culture, especially for television serials. Across several disciplines, a body of scholarship is emerging around contemporary concerns about spoilers. This article has two main objectives in order to address gaps in this existing research. The first of these is descriptive and is aimed at addressing some fundamental questions. What are spoilers? What do they spoil? The article makes the case that we will benefit from finer-grained conceptualization of spoilers. To this end, this article presents a definition of spoilers before distinguishing two different types: suspense spoilers and surprise spoilers. The second concern of this article is a normative one. Should we care about spoilers? Through analysis of the television series Succession, the article contends that the answer to this may depend in part upon the type of spoiler in question.

This article explores the many interesting cognitive effects derived from Better Call Saul's status as a prequel to Breaking Bad. These include how Better Call Saul uses viewers’ foreknowledge of the original series to strongly influence hypotheses about what will happen in the prequel, sometimes by narrowing viewers’ hypotheses, sometimes by creating surprises, or even opening up possible directions for the narrative relatively late in the series’ run, and sometimes by enlivening otherwise perfunctory scenes. The series also sometimes encountered difficulties engaging viewers with plots concerning legacy characters who did not change much from series to series. Ultimately, the article contributes to the discourse surrounding prequels and narrative complexity in television.

Medical television dramas have become a prominent genre, blending personal and professional narratives within healthcare settings. These series explore the lives of healthcare professionals, ethical dilemmas, and complex doctor–patient relationships while incorporating critical social issues such as abortion as pedagogical tools that shape public perceptions of healthcare and social debates. This article examines how medical dramas like New Amsterdam integrate sensitive topics into their storytelling, contributing to narrative ecosystems theory. Through this framework, the analysis explores mechanisms such as character embedding, narrative alignment, and long-term memory, demonstrating how social issues are woven into narratives and influence discourse. By analyzing the New Amsterdam episode “Maybe Tomorrow,” the article illustrates how narrative ecosystems function in serialized television and mirror societal debates on sensitive topics. The findings offer theoretical insights into narrative ecosystem dynamics, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between media narratives and social discourse, emphasizing medical dramas’ role in reflecting and influencing ongoing sociopolitical conversations.

By accommodating the antihero programs in the context of aesthetic cognitivism on the one hand and philosophical theorizing about evil on the other, I explore insights—ethical goods, as Carl Plantinga refers to them—that these works give us into social and phenomenological aspects of evil, and I argue that they also serve as a philosophical probing of immorality and wickedness. I claim that antihero program is a subgenre of crime fiction and that it continues crime fiction's traditional interest in evil individuals and immoral actions, and I strengthen this view by relying on contemporary research in criminology. My account is based on analysis of the aesthetic features of these works, on the particular aspects of viewers’ long-term commitment to serialized fiction and the affective relations they develop for the characters, most notably their cognitive interest in the stories and the effective ties for the characters.

This article takes the miniseries Unbelievable as its case study to explore how television series can use expectations toward the first episode for rhetorical effect. The first episode portrays the rape of a young woman and her ensuing encounter with male police officers who do not believe her, in line with rape myths. Yet this series sets up expectations in the first episode only to break with them. In the second episode, a pair of female detectives is introduced, and slowly and meticulously they connect the dots to find and prosecute a serial rapist. I argue that the marked change from the first and the second episode works as a plot twist, frame shifter beginning to articulate a feminist vision of police response to rape.

The article argues that the medium of serial television has the same matter as the medium of film, namely, moving images, but it does not have the same form, understood as the principle governing both the artist's manipulation of the matter and the audience's appreciation of the manipulated matter. It is argued that the medium of serial television shares with conceptual art a form that calls attention to underlying concepts whereby displays and episodes are constructed in conceptual art and serial television respectively. One might object that the episodes of a TV series, unlike the displays of a work of conceptual art, are ordered in a way that suggests that we should appreciate them as a whole narrative. The article replies that this does not prevent concept of a TV series from being the focus of appreciation but rather makes serial television conceptual in a peculiar way.

Nahuel Ribke. Multilingual Fiction Series: Genres, Geographies and Performances. New York: Routledge, 2024, 184 pp, $56.99 (paperback) ISBN: 978-103245662.

Reviewed by Melissa Ames