As critics,
creators and academics alike herald the new “Golden Age” of television, the
accent has increasingly been placed on the excess inherent in the form, the
temptation to “binge-watch” a single fiction over several hours, or the
proliferation of narratives and storylines in American television’s “endless
present” (which, unlike its British equivalent, is not traditionally designed
to end at any specific point).
Melissa
Ames (Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in
Twenty-First-Century Programming, 2012) reminds us however that time is at the
very center of the television narrative, and that television differs from its
cinematic equivalent notably by its incremental approach to storytelling
–alternately playing with and combining duration and brevity. Thus, in this
publication, we would like to come back to what originally distinguishes TV
series from films, i.e. their specific connection to shortness. We will be
examining television as a short form, insisting on the structure implicit in
the television episode, be it the traditional forms (30 or 60 minutes), or the
increasing popularity of webseries that feature microepisodes (of 2-10 minutes),
like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Frankenstein, MD, Carmilla, or Kings of Con and
Con Man. We will attempt to examine this balance between short episodes and
long duration, as well as the association of episode length with genre –
traditionally, hour-long series have been dramatic, and half-hour series comic.
(All the webseries with microepisodes mentioned here are comedies.)
