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Since the turn of the 21^st century, the television series has replaced cinema as the paradigmatic filmic medium by developing a new and different form of narrative. Like few other genres, serial narration lends itself to exploring society in its different layers. The topic of community described thus far underscores how contemporary television not only focuses on contemporary society at large, but also, via the connection to the state of the nation, emphasises British and Irish culture and society. Although this seems to be quite obvious in a volume that exclusively investigates British and Irish television series, it is nevertheless a point worth mentioning, because the most important innovations within the genre in the past decades originated in the United States. The principal developments in the theory of television series as well as seriality likewise concentrate on US American artefacts (see e.g. Mittell, Complex TV). This emphasis on the cultural industry of the US is slightly misleading because, especially in recent years, British television has been a driving force regarding originality and scope, a development that also has been mirrored in academic studies (see Kamm/Neumann).

Despite a number of similarities between the American and the British and Irish market, there are also striking differences which need to be addressed, especially regarding the genre and the format of the television series. Whilst an American ‘season’ consists of sometimes 22 or more episodes, a British ‘series’ only has six or eight episodes, or even, as in the case of Sherlock (2010-), only three. One merely needs to compare the 22 to 26 episodes of each season of The Office (2005-2013) to the six episodes of each of the two British original series (2001-2003) to see that. Furthermore, there are divergences regarding the duration of each episode: “Episodes of American series are particularly inflexible in terms of their length; they are generally broadcast in half-hour or one-hour instalments, five to fifteen minutes of which are taken up by commercials.” (Allrath/Gymnich/Surkamp 11) An episode of a British television series, however, may vary in length and is hardly ever interrupted by commercial breaks because the majority is produced by and first broadcast on BBC. The reasons for these differences are not arbitrary, but rooted in the history of British and American television. What is more, this historical difference has also shaped the development of television theory, as one of the landmarks in the field, Raymond Williams’ Television of 1974, as John Caughie remarks,

is informed by Williams’s first encounter with American television. At a time when British television was still shaped by the principles of public service, American television in 1974, increasingly shaped by commercial principles, represented a possible future. (50-1)

Although this strict opposition is no longer absolutely valid today, i.e. in the age of Netflix, Hulu, and other online streaming services, it is worth looking at this history as regards the development of the television series, before we will focus on most recent developments in the field of seriality studies.

Currently, it is the genre of the television series which is held in the highest esteem by critics and viewers alike; a few decades ago, however, critical focus concentrated almost exclusively on the single play (see Williams, Television, 51-58). During the so-called ‘golden age’ of British television, i.e. the 1960s and 1970s, television was arguably more shaped by the theatre than the film industry. Some of the best dramatic works were produced not for the playhouses but for television within formats such as the BBC’s Wednesday Play. Aesthetically, this implied that the single play was much closer to theatrical performances than to movies produced for the cinema, a fact also determined by technical and production circumstances: “[T]he shot length of British television drama in the 1960s and 1970s was considerably longer than that of cinema”, and “pace and dynamism were created by camera movement rather than by cutting” (Bignell/Lacey 5). This led to a form of realism situated between techniques used in the cinema and the experience of witnessing a performance in the theatre. As a result, film teams shooting for television and those shooting for the cinema were not identical, and neither were their techniques, skills, and methods. This strict binary opposition began to disappear with the digital revolution at the turn of the Millennium, as it allowed for cheaper forms of production and much lighter filming equipment. Even today, though, there is still a line drawn between the means of production, even if the tendency to produce high-quality and more expensive television series increasingly blurs the boundaries between crew and equipment used for feature films or for television production (see Murphy/Carolan/Flynn 64). This change set in around the turn of the Millennium with shows like The Sopranos (1999-2007), The Wire (2002-2008), or Breaking Bad (2008-2013) in the US, but soon the UK followed with programmes like Wire in the Blood (2002-2008), Spooks (2002-2011), or Downton Abbey (2010-2015).

This goes hand in hand with an aesthetic change of television drama. As already mentioned, the television series has risen in esteem in recent years, and the aesthetically and narratologically most complex and achieved television shows today are arguably produced as series rather than as TV films or single plays. There are multiple reasons for this development, which set in roughly around 1990 with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991; 2017) as one of the earliest and most significant examples. Recent research has tried to describe and analyse this phenomenon, highlighting a distinct aesthetics of seriality (see Kelleter) and analysing the series as an open form as opposed to the closure characteristic of the single work. This process has been supported by the digitisation of television and especially the changes in viewer habits. Whilst viewers a few decades ago watched a programme at a given time during the week, digitisation, first with DVDs and more recently with media streaming services, has individualised viewing habits extremely. Furthermore, a large scene of organised followers emerged on the Internet, ranging from fan sites to fan fiction. As a result, a television series in the digital world today can no longer be regarded as a passive artwork, but must rather be seen as one element of a network.

The increasingly complex narratives of television series are closely connected to this network aesthetics. Recent theoretical investigations of the aesthetic criteria characteristic of this change have therefore not made use of traditional methods and theories stemming from the fields of film studies, semiotics, or drama studies to investigate this phenomenon, but very often turned to the academic field of narratology (see Allrath/Gymnich/Surkamp; Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”). Jason Mittell, for instance, describes a number of distinctive characteristics in his formal and narratological analysis of what he terms “Complex TV”. He claims:

In examining narrative complexity as a narrational mode I follow a paradigm of historical poetics that situates formal developments within specific historical contexts of production, circulation, and reception. (Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”, 30)

In essence, his definition of the narrative complexity of television series is based on the collapse of the barrier between ‘series’, with recurring characters but where each episode finds closure, and ‘serials’, an ongoing, open, and potentially endless story (for the distinction see Williams 56-57; Allrath/Gymnich/Surkamp 5-10). Suggesting “a new paradigm of television storytelling” (Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”, 38-39), Mittell maintains that

[a]t its most basic level, narrative complexity is a redefinition of episodic forms under the influence of serial narration – not necessarily a complete merger of episodic and serial forms but a shifting balance. Rejecting the need for plot closure within every episode that typifies conventional episodic form, narrative complexity foregrounds ongoing stories across a range of genres. (Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”, 32)1

What distinguishes the most recent successful series in general is, furthermore, a return to a more authorial mode with a mastermind or showrunner who acts as the main writer, favouring the more recent American over the established European model of serial narration. Thus, the showrunner is more important than the director, which also explains the tendency to introduce narrative twists that at times come across as unforeseen and even shocking. In effect, sophisticated television series are, according to Mittell, increasingly metafictional in that they reflect on their own form and development as the programme proceeds.

The characteristic feature of self- or meta-reflexivity – i.e. “an intensive tendency toward self-observation in serial narratives” (Kelleter 18, emphasis in original) – links Mittell’s investigation of American television series to a more general theory of seriality. Seriality is opposed to, and contests, an aesthetics which considers art in terms of finite structures – in a word: as works. Set against this traditional and still standard way of looking at culture and art as distinct and complete structures, seriality highlights their open and performative character, which also includes audience interference in the creative process: “[S]erial aesthetics does not unfold in a clear-cut, chronological succession of finished composition and responsive actualization. Rather, both activities are intertwined in a feedback loop.” (Kelleter 13) Regarded from this perspective, television series are no longer passive ‘works’, but become part of a dynamic network of cultural practices.

In a more general vein, i.e. not restricted to the genre of contemporary television series, seriality can thus be described as a key attribute of modern art’s focus on innovation and originality and even of capitalist modernity at large, as Frank Kelleter maintains:

It is not a coincidence, then, that starting in the mid-nineteenth century, seriality has become the distinguishing mark of virtually all forms of capitalist entertainment. Serial storytelling seems to be a central praxeological hub in the shaky yet traditionally potent alliance between market modernity and the idea of popular self-rule. This is so because serial media, interactive from the start, embody what may well be the structural utopia of the capitalist production of culture at large: the desire to practice reproduction as innovation, and innovation as reproduction. (Kelleter 30, emphasis in original)

According to Kelleter, then, the concept of seriality illumines key elements not only of popular culture but also of modern society and modern, i.e. post-Romantic, art. This general observation leads us back to the topic of this volume: community in British television series. Seriality can be described as an apt form of discourse that highlights the openness and ritual nature of modern society, which is characterised by a structural contingency. The genre of the television series is therefore an ideal object to investigate the subject matter of community, which, on the story level, looks at modernity from a similar angle. Community often suggests a nostalgic and conservative view of society, which, in turn, emphasises the fact that this notion of togetherness is an unreachable ideal and always already a thing of the past. Thus, the British and Irish television series investigated in this volume shed a light on contemporary society in flux – and they reflect this in their very form.

That being said, there is of course a wide variety of serial formats and genres. Whilst some series like Top Boy or Happy Valley are openly critical of society, this criticism is merely a side effect in shows like Luther (2010-) or Love/Hate (2010-2015). Despite their individual differences, all of them are characterised by narrative complexity and astonishing aesthetic quality. Many of them are revisionary; Broadchurch reinvents the traditional crime show, Peaky Blinders and The Village revise the genre of the period drama, Misfits (2009-2013) questions the fundamental traits of the superhero genre, and the anthology format of The Street (2006-2009), Accused (2010-2012), and Black Mirror (2011-) undermines the serial format by consisting of a series of television plays connected by a unifying topic.