Admission is free

Workshop of the working group “Television Studies/Fernsehgeschichte” of the Society for Media Studies (GfM) in cooperation with the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM).

Televisuality is historically closely linked to various forms of seriality: Television lives in the design of its program, the economy of its media production and the ritualized form of its reception of repetition in series. In the television series, this coupling is condensed into a genuine object form: through the reliable return of familiar serial characters, the mode of their cinematic and narrative procedures typical of each individual series, and the regularity and permanence of their availability, forces of connection arise not only between the individual episodes of a series, but also between medium and audience, through which the television series has become a model case for television theory itself.

With the emergence of serial research as an independent field of research, the historically close coupling of televisuality and seriality, both in terms of theoretical traditions and epistemologies as well as in terms of research programs, has increasingly weakened in recent years: the (media) scientific popularity of series and serial forms remains unchanged, while there is comparatively little interest in the theorization of television. This manifests itself, for example, in media-neutral determinations of seriality as a ‘transmedial narrative form’ or in an attempt to completely eradicate the televisual from the now ‘audiovisual series’. The workshop is therefore intended to open the space for a mutual and fundamental determination of the relationship between series research and television science: Are theories of television beyond the mere historical entanglement of televisuality and seriality still relevant for research into contemporary series and serial forms? To what extent would the televisual be a possible reference point for serial regulations beyond television? Is there perhaps even a recursiveness of television history, does the episodic of television, apparently suppressed by narrative progression, reappear in the form of the anthology series? Conversely, however, one can also ask how the concept formation of television studies can react to the dissolution, transformation and networking of media dispositives and their integration into digital media ecologies, the analytical penetration of which is precisely the aim of series research. How does the examination of televisuality in turn benefit from a conceptualization that refers primarily to ‘Quality’ TV, to the series offerings of HBO, Amazon or Netflix and other post-televisual actors and media forms?

So how can a possible television forgetfulness of series research not only be problematized, but productively turned around? And how can the terminological repertoire of television theory possibly be extended beyond itself with theories of the serial?

Against this background, the working group would like to gather current approaches for serial research on television, discuss them together and thereby give the subject new impulses for future studies.

Program

9.30am
Opening by Dominik Maeder, Herbert Schwaab und Denis Newiak

10.00am
Christine Piepiorka: Verräumlichte Transmedialität – prozesshafte Serialität
Jana Zündel: Fernsehen als transmediales Konzept? Zur Modifikation televisiver Text- und Strukturprinzipien auf Streaming-Plattformen
Denis Newiak: Fernsehen und Einsamkeit: Serien der Ver- und Entgemeinschaftungen

11.30am
Coffee break

12.00pm
Stefan Borsos: ‚Serielle Eruptionen‘ im US-Fernsehen der sechziger Jahre
Christine Lang: Vertikale Dramaturgie in Fargo (TV)
Florian Krauß: Im Angesicht fernsehhistorisch gewachsener Strukturen: ‚Qualitätsserien‘-Projekte und -Diskurse in der deutschen Fernsehindustrie

1.30pm
Lunch break

3.00pm
Sven Grampp: Season’s Greetings: Fest und Serie
Anja Peltzer: Fernsehzeiten? Zur chronologischen Ordnung und den Wirklichkeitsbezügen eines Leitmediums im Wandel
Markus Kügle: Die Clip-Show in der US-amerikanischen (Fernseh)Serienlandschaft

4.30pm
Coffee break

5.00pm
Kim Carina Hebben: Verspieltes Fernsehen. Spiel und Spieler_innen im Transmedialen
Andreas Sudmann: Serialität und Fernsehen im Zeitalter der Lernalgorithmen
Michaela Wünsch: Relationale und differentielle Serialität

6.30pm
End of event

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