Digital devices like the DVR and video iPod, as well as alternative distribution models like video-on-demand, DVD box sets, and the iTunes digital download service, collectively comprise the infrastructure around which today’s serialized television narratives are constructed. Scholars and journalists alike have devoted considerable attention to charting the “narrative complexity” of Lost, The Wire, Veronica Mars, and other programs that exploit the capabilities of these devices and models to spin storylines so sprawling and convoluted that their audiences are obliged to attentively view (and in many cases re-view) each of their episodes (Mittel 2006; Johnson 2005). However, there is the tendency to overlook concurrent developments that push television’s texts in the opposite direction. The same infrastructure that facilitates the expansion of television’s serial narratives also factors in the ascendance of video formats that aggressively contract the traditional durations of television programming. Websites like Heavy.com host hundreds of “webisodes” ranging in duration from a few seconds to ten minutes. TiVo DVRs allow subscribers to download three-minute long video podcasts to their living room sets. And mobile telephone companies in the US beam highly condensed versions of series like The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives to subscribers’ handsets.

My contribution to this conference will consider the aesthetics of these longer and shorter forms of television storytelling. In particular, I want to focus on paratexts that condense, digest, or otherwise disaggregate serial narratives into shorter units. Television paratexts have existed for decades, being most commonly associated with the soap opera updates offered in magazines, newspaper columns, and on telephone hotlines. In the current climate of digitalization, however, paratexts occupy a special place in both industrial programming strategies and the audience’s everyday viewing experiences. Increasingly, paratexts are called on to furnish programming for new video playback devices (including handheld media players, mobile telephones, and computers) and provide much-appreciated clarifications of the narratives of some of television’s more convoluted serials. That said, it is still unclear whether paratexts are, as one observer puts it, textual “parasites,” a convenient (yet provisional) solution to the technical limitations of digital hardware and the bandwidth restrictions of new distribution channels (Johnson 1997), or, conversely, whether they are examples of an autonomous televisual form with its own distinctive aesthetic and viewing protocols. My paper will approaches this question from a historical perspective, drawing insight from consideration of some of these paratexts’ antecedents, including the condensed Reader’s Digest novel and the Cliffs Notes study guide series. I suggest our answer to this question will have important implications not only for how we as television studies scholars define our object of study, but also for the ways in which we conceive of television’s visual and narrative pleasures.

“The Days of Commissioning Programmes are over…”: The BBC’s ‘Bundled Project’

Niki Strange, University of Sussex