Jason Mittell	 29
	 longside the host of procedural crime	
	 dramas,domestic sitcoms,and reality com-	
	 petitions that populate theAmerican televi-	
	 sion schedule,a new form of entertainment
television has emerged over the past two decades to both
critical and popular acclaim. This model of television
storytelling is distinct for its use of narrative complexity
as an alternative to the conventional episodic and serial
forms that have typified most American television since
its inception.We can see such innovative narrative form
in popular hits of recent decades from Seinfeld to Lost,
WestWing to The X-Files, as well as in critically beloved
but ratings-challenged shows like Arrested Development,
Veronica Mars, Boomtown, and Firefly. HBO has built its
reputation and subscriber base upon narratively complex
shows, such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Curb
Your Enthusiasm, and TheWire. Clearly, these shows offer
an alternative to conventional television narrative—the
purpose of this essay is to chart out the formal attributes
of this storytelling mode,explore its unique pleasures and
patterns of comprehension,and suggest a range of reasons
for its emergence in the 1990s.
	 In trying to understand the storytelling practices of
contemporary American television, we might consider
narrative complexity as a distinct narrational mode, as
suggested by David Bordwell’s analysis of film narrative.
For Bordwell,a“narrational mode is a historically distinct
set of norms of narrational construction and comprehension,”one
that crosses genres,specific creators,and artistic
movements to forge a coherent category of practices.1
Bordwell outlines specific cinematic modes such as classical
Hollywood, art cinema, and historical materialism,
all of which encompass distinct storytelling strategies
while still referencing one another and building on the
foundations of other modes. Kristin Thompson has exNarrative
Complexity in Contemporary American Television
jason mittell
TheVelvet LightTrap, Number 58, Fall 2006		 ©2006 by the University ofTexas Press, P.O. Box 7819,Austin,TX 78713-7819
A
tended Bordwell’s approach to television,suggesting that
programs like Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective might
be usefully thought of as“art television,”importing norms
from art cinema onto the small screen.2
Although certainly
cinema influences many aspects of television, especially
concerning visual style,I am reluctant to map a model of
storytelling tied to self-contained feature films onto the
ongoing long-form narrative structure of series television
and thus believe we can more productively develop
a vocabulary for television narrative in terms of its own
medium.Television’s narrative complexity is predicated
on specific facets of storytelling that seem uniquely suited
to the series structure that sets television apart from film
and distinguish it from conventional modes of episodic
and serial forms.
	 Narrative complexity is sufficiently widespread and
popular that we may consider the 1990s to the present
as the era of television complexity. Complexity has not
overtaken conventional forms within the majority of
television programming today—there are still many more
conventional sitcoms and dramas on-air than complex
narratives.Yet just as 1970s Hollywood is remembered
far more for the innovative work of Altman, Scorsese,
and Coppola than for the more commonplace (and often
more popular) conventional disaster films,romances,and
comedy films that filled theaters,I believe that American
television of the past twenty years will be remembered
as an era of narrative experimentation and innovation,
challenging the norms of what the medium can do.Thus
for argument’s sake it is useful to explore how today’s
television has redefined narrative norms in a series of ways
that I label“complex.”Even though this mode represents
neither the majority of television nor its most popular
programs (at least by the flawed standard of Nielsen ratings),a
sufficiently widespread number of programs work
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30	 Narrative Complexity
against conventional narrative practices using an innovative
cluster of narrational techniques to justify such analysis.3
	 Obviously,the labels“conventional”and“complex”are
not value-free descriptions, just as terms like “primitive”
and “classical” signal evaluative standpoints in film studies.
While I have argued elsewhere for the importance
of questions of value in studying television, a tendency
that contemporary critical approaches dismiss, I do not
propose these terms as explicitly evaluative.4
Complexity
and value are not mutually guaranteed—personally,I much
prefer watching high-quality conventional programs like
The DickVan Dyke Show and Everybody Loves Raymond to
the narratively complex but conceptually muddled and
logically maddening 24. However, narrative complexity
offers a range of creative opportunities and palette
of audience responses that are unique to the television
medium and thus should be studied and appreciated as
a key development in the history of American narrative
forms.5
Arguably, the pleasures potentially offered by
complex narratives are richer and more multifaceted than
conventional programming, but value judgments should
be tied to individual programs rather than claiming the
superiority of an entire narrational mode or genre.Thus
while we should not shy away from evaluative dimensions
in narrative transformations,the goal of my analysis is not
to argue that contemporary television is somehow better
than it was in the 1970s but rather to explore how and
why narrative strategies have changed and to consider the
broader cultural implications of this shift.
	 Television scholars have typically been reluctant to
focus their analyses on the medium’s narrative form, as
television studies emerged from the twin paradigms of
mass communications and cultural studies,both of which
tend to foreground social impacts over aesthetic analysis,
although using markedly different methodologies.Analyses
of conventional television narration are surprisingly
limited, with classic work by Horace Newcomb, Robert
Allen,Sarah Kozloff,John Ellis,and Jane Feuer representing
the bulk of the field.6
Some early accounts of innovative
narrative strategies by Newcomb, Christopher Anderson,
Thomas Schatz, and Marc Dolan suggest the antecedents
of contemporary narrative complexity in Magnum,P.I.,St.
Elsewhere,and Twin Peaks.7
More recently,Steven Johnson
and Jeffrey Sconce have offered their own accounts of
contemporary television’s narrative form,offering insights
that I build upon throughout; I take these writings as a
sign that media critics are turning attention to formal and
aesthetic issues that have typically been downplayed in the
development of television studies as a field.8
Drawing upon
this range of sources, we can establish a detailed account
of the narratological form that contemporary American
television offers as a true aesthetic innovation unique to its
medium.This new mode,which I term narrative complexity,
is not as uniform and convention driven as episodic
or serials norms (in fact, its most defining characteristic
might be its unconventionality),but it is still useful to group
together a growing number of programs that work against
the conventions of episodic and serial traditions in a range
of intriguing ways. While some point to this emerging
form as “novelistic” television, I contend that it is unique
to the television medium despite the clear influences from
other forms such as novels, films, videogames, and comic
books.9
	 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.10
Following a
historical poetic approach,innovations in media form are
not viewed as creative breakthroughs of visionary artists
but at the nexus of a number of historical forces that work
to transform the norms established with any creative practice.Such
an analysis examines the formal elements of any
medium alongside the historical contexts that helped shape
innovations and perpetuate particular norms.So what are
the relevant contexts that enabled the emergence of narrative
complexity? A number of key transformations in
the media industries,technologies,and audience behaviors
coincide with the rise of narrative complexity, not functioning
as straightforward causes of this formal evolution
but certainly enabling the creative strategies to flourish.
Although there is much more to examine about these
various contextual developments,a brief overview of key
changes in 1990s television practices points to both how
these transformations impact creative practices and how
formal features always expand beyond textual borders.
	 One key influence on the rise of narrative complexity
on contemporary television is the changing perception of
the medium’s legitimacy and its appeal to creators. Many
of the innovative television programs of the past twenty
years have come from creators who launched their careers
in film, a medium with more traditional cultural cachet:
David Lynch (Twin Peaks) and Barry Levinson (Homicide:
Life on the Street and Oz) as directors,Aaron Sorkin (Sports
Night and West Wing), Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel, and
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Jason Mittell	 31
Firefly),Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), and J. J.Abrams (Alias
and Lost) as screenwriters.Part of the appeal is television’s
reputation as a producer’s medium, where writers and
creators retain control of their work more than in film’s
director-centered model.Additionally,as reality television
has emerged as a popular and cost-effective alternative
to scripted programming, television writers seem to be
asserting what they can offer that is unique to fictional
television;narrative complexity highlights one limit of reality
shows, asserting the carefully controlled dramatic and
comedic manipulation of plots and characters that reality
producers find more difficult to generate.11
Many of these
writers embrace the broader challenges and possibilities
for creativity in long-form series, as extended character
depth,ongoing plotting,and episodic variations are simply
unavailable options within a two-hour film—note how
Whedon’s film Serenity, which extended the narrative of
Firefly, compressed an entire season’s plot into two hours,
minimizing storytelling variety, character exploration,
and ongoing suspense. While innovative film narration
has emerged as a “boutique” form over the past years in
the guise of puzzle films like Memento and Adaptation,the
norms of Hollywood still favor spectacle and formulas
suitable for a peak opening weekend;comparatively,many
narratively complex programs are among the medium’s
biggest hits,suggesting that the market for complexity may
be more valued on television than in film.
	 Certainly, shifts in the television industry have helped
reinforce strategies of complexity.Traditional industry logic
dictated that audiences lacked the weekly consistency to
allow for serialized narratives, and the pressures of syndication
favored interchangeable episodes of conventional
sitcoms and procedural dramas. But as the number of
channels has grown and the size of the audience for any
single program has shrunk, networks and channels have
grown to recognize that a consistent cult following of a
small but dedicated audience can suffice to make a show
economically viable.The overall audience size of Buffy and
Veronica Mars do not make these shows hits,but measured
expectations of newer networks like UPN and WB as
well as the youthful demographics and cultlike dedication
drawn by such programming encourage networks
to allow such experimentations to grow an audience.
Many complex programs expressly appeal to a boutique
audience of more upscale educated viewers who typically
avoid television,save for programs like TheWestWing,The
Simpsons, and The Sopranos—needless to say, an audience
comprised of viewers who watch little other television is
particularly valued by advertisers. For cable channels like
HBO, complex programs like The Wire, Oz, and Deadwood
may not reach Sopranos-like status, but the prestige
of these programs furthers the channel’s brand image of
being more sophisticated than traditional television and
thus worthy of a monthly premium (and generating future
DVD sales).While many complex shows like Firefly,
Boomtown, Wonderfalls, and early innovator My So-Called
Life were never granted time to establish a core audience,
all of these short-lived programs have emerged on DVD,
as their dedicated fandoms embrace the collectability of
television in this new form,a trend that the media industries
are eager to capitalize upon by creating programs with
maximum “rewatchability.”12
	 Technological transformations have accelerated this shift
in similar ways. For the first thirty years of the medium
television watching was primarily controlled by networks,
offering limited choice of programming on a tightly delimited
schedule with no other options to access content.
While reruns proliferated in syndication,typically,programs
were shown out of order,encouraging episodic narratives
to accommodate an almost random presentation of a series.Since
the mainstreaming of cable and theVCR in the
early 1980s, the balance has shifted more toward viewer
control—the proliferation of channels has helped routinize
repeats, so that viewers can catch up on a program in
chronologically aired reruns or view missed premium cable
shows multiple times throughout the week.Time-shifting
technologies likeVCRs and digital video recorders enable
viewers to choose when they want to watch a program,
but,more important for narrative construction,viewers can
rewatch episodes or segments to parse out complex moments.While
select series have been sold on videotape for
years, the compact packaging and visual quality of DVDs
have led to a boom in a new mode of television viewing,
with fans binging on a show a season at a time (like the
frequently reported attempts to watch a season of 24 to
match its diegetic time frame), and encouraging multiple
viewings of what used to be a mostly ephemeral form of
entertainment.
	 Technological transformations away from the television
screen have also impacted television narrative.The
internet’s ubiquity has enabled fans to embrace a “collective
intelligence” for information, interpretations, and
discussions of complex narratives that invite participatory
engagement—and in instances such as Babylon 5 or Veronica
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32	 Narrative Complexity
Mars,creators join in the discussions and use these forums
as feedback mechanisms to test for comprehension and
pleasures.13
Other digital technologies like videogames,
blogs, online role-playing sites, and fan websites have offered
realms that enable viewers to extend their participation
in these rich storyworlds beyond the one-way flow
of traditional television viewing,extending the metaverses
of complex narrative creations like Buffy’s Sunnydale
and the Simpsons’ Springfield into fully interactive and
participatory realms.The consumer and creative practices
of fan culture that cultural studies scholars embraced as
subcultural phenomena in the 1990s have become more
widely distributed and participated in with the distribution
means of the internet, making active audience behavior
even more of a mainstream practice.While none of these
new technologies directly caused the emergence of narrative
complexity, the incentives and possibilities they
provided to both media industries and viewers encourage
the success of many such programs.
	 While claims that programming trends are a direct reflection
of audience tastes and viewing practices are gross
oversimplifications, there is no doubt that many of the
innovations comprising narrative complexity have stuck
because they have been actively embraced by viewers.
Using the new technologies of home recording, DVDs,
and online participation,viewers have taken an active role
in consuming narratively complex television and helping
it thrive within the media industries.As suggested below,
this programming form demands an active and attentive
process of comprehension to decode both the complex
stories and modes of storytelling offered by contemporary
television.Audiences tend to embrace complex programs
in much more passionate and committed terms than most
conventional television, using these shows as the basis for
robust fan cultures and active feedback to the television
industry (especially when their programs are in jeopardy of
cancellation).The rise of narrative complexity has also seen
the rise in amateur television criticism,as sites like televisionwithoutpity.com
have emerged to provide thoughtful
and humorous commentaries on weekly episodes.14
Steven
Johnson claims that this form of complexity offered viewers
a “cognitive workout” that increases problem-solving
and observational skills—whether or not this argument
can be empirically substantiated, there is no doubt that
this brand of television storytelling encourages audiences
to become more actively engaged and offers a broader
range of rewards and pleasures than most conventional
programming.While it would be hard to claim that any of
these industrial, creative, technological, and participatory
developments explicitly caused the emergence of narrative
complexity as a narrational mode, together they set the
stage for its development and growing popularity.
	 So what exactly is narrative complexity? At 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.Additionally, narrative complexity
moves serial form outside of the generic assumptions
tied to soap operas—many (although certainly not all)
complex programs tell stories serially while rejecting or
downplaying the melodramatic style and primary focus
on relationships over plots of soap operas, which also
distances contemporary programs from the cultural connotations
of the denigrated soap genre.15
While certainly
soap opera narration can be quite complex and requires
a high degree of audience activity to parse out the web
of relationships and backstory evoked at every plot turn,
narratively complex programming typically foregrounds
plot developments far more centrally than soaps, allowing
relationship and character drama to emerge from plot
development in an emphasis reversed from soap operas.
	 Historically, this move toward complexity dates to the
late 1970s and early 1980s,as prime-time soap operas like
Dallas and Dynasty (as well as parodic predecessors Soap and
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) were popular innovations,
and more critically hailed (though initially ratings-challenged)
shows like Hill St. Blues, St. Elsewhere, and Cheers
imported serial storytelling into the generic forms of cop
shows,medical dramas,and sitcoms,respectively.16
Unlike
soap operas, these prime-time serials are not uniformly
dedicated to delaying narrative closure, as typically these
shows feature some episodic plotlines alongside multiepisode
arcs and ongoing relationship dramas.These early
programs tend to allocate episodic and serial stories as tied
to typical generic norms—relationship stories carry over
between episodes, as in soap operas, but the police and
medical cases are generally bound within one episode or
serialized as a two-parter.Thus unlike soap operas, individual
episodes have a distinctive identity as more than just
one step in a long narrative journey. Similar divisions between
serialized relationships and episodic plots continued
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Jason Mittell	 33
to late 1980s programs like Moonlighting,thirtysomething, and
Star Trek:The Next Generation, all of which incorporated
innovative narrative devices that would become more
common in the 1990s.
	 The programs of the 1990s and beyond build on 1980s
innovations by expanding the role of story arcs across
episodes and seasons.Early attempts at this long-form arc
storytelling in the mideighties,notably,Wiseguy and Crime
Story, did not catch on with audiences or foster imitators
until the breakthrough of Twin Peaks in the early 1990s.
This cult hit, whose influence was far more long-lasting
than the series itself, triggered a wave of programs embracing
its creative narrative strategies while forgoing its
stylistic excesses and thematic oddities. Effectively a cross
between a mystery,soap opera,and art film,Twin Peaks offered
television viewers and executives a glimpse into the
narrative possibilities that the episodic series would mine
in the future.While Twin Peaks was ultimately a ratings
failure,the positive buzz and accolades it received opened
the door to other programs that took creative liberties
with storytelling form in the early 1990s, most notably,
Seinfeld andThe X-Files,both of which added key facets to
the repertoire of narrative complexity with more ratings
success.
	 The X-Files exemplifies what may be the hallmark of
narrative complexity: an interplay between the demands
of episodic and serial storytelling. Complex dramas like
The X-Files,Buffy theVampire Slayer,Angel,and The Sopranos
often oscillate between long-term arc storytelling and
stand-alone episodes.As Sconce discusses,any given X-Files
episode might focus on the long-term“mythology,”an ongoing,highly
elaborate conspiracy plot that endlessly delays
resolution and closure,or offer self-contained“monster-ofthe-week”stories
that generally exist outside of the arcing
scope of the mythology. Although The X-Files features
an influential array of narrational innovations, the show’s
eventual creative and critical decline highlights one of the
key tensions inherent in narrative complexity: balancing
the competing demands and pleasures of episodic and serial
norms.According to many X-Files viewers and critics,
the show suffered from too great a disjunction between
the overly complex and unsatisfyingly deferred mythology
versus the detached independence of monster-of-the-week
episodes that might contradict the accrued knowledge of
the conspiracy.For instance,the highly regarded (and quite
parodic) episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” mocks
the show’s nested conspiracies,while the events it presents
seem to undermine some of the revelations of the ongoing
mythology concerning alien presence on Earth. Despite
viewers’cultish devotion to unraveling the mysteries driving
Agent Mulder’s endless quest, this episode (as well as
many others) left viewers unsure as to how to consistently
fit events into the storyworld.Viewing tastes thus divided
between conspiracy buffs,who saw the sometimes reflexive
and tonally divergent monster-of-the-week episodes as
distractions from the serious mythological mysteries, and
fans who grew to appreciate the coherence of the standalone
episodes in light of the increasingly inscrutable and
contradictory arc—personally,I found myself in the latter
camp before abandoning the show entirely.
	 Buffy and Angel are arguably more adept at juggling the
dual demands of serial and episodic pleasures.While both
shows (together and separately) present a rich and ongoing
mythology of a battle between the forces of good and evil,
plotlines are centered upon season-long arcs featuring a
particular villain, or “big bad,” in Buffy’s parlance.Within
a given season,nearly every episode advances the season’s
arc while still offering episodic coherence and miniresolutions.Even
highly experimental or flashy episodes balance
between episodic and serial demands; for instance, Buffy’s
“Hush” features literal monsters-of-the-week, known as
The Gentlemen,who steal the voices of the town of Sunnydale,leading
to an impressively constructed episode told
in near silence.Yet despite the episode’s one-off villains
and highly unusual wordless mode of storytelling,“Hush”
still advances various narrative arcs,as characters reveal key
secrets and deepen relationships to move the season-long
plot forward; many other Buffy and Angel episodes similarly
offer unique episodic elements with undercurrents of
arc narration.These shows also interweave melodramatic
relationship dramas and character development with story
arcs—at its most accomplished, Buffy uses forward plot
momentum to generate emotional responses to characters
and allows relationships to help drive plots forward,as exemplified
by how“Hush”simultaneously offers closure to
a monster-of-the-week,furthers the relationship between
Buffy and Riley,and adds new wrinkles to the season-long
arc concerning the Initiative.
	 But narrative complexity cannot simply be defined as
prime-time episodic seriality; within the broader mode
of complexity,many programs actively work against serial
norms but also embrace narrative strategies to rebel against
episodic conventionality.For instance,Seinfeld has a mixed
relationship with serial plotting—some seasons feature an
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34	 Narrative Complexity
ongoing situation,like Jerry’s NBC sitcom pilot,George’s
impending wedding,or Elaine’s new job.These story arcs
work primarily to offer backstory for in-jokes and selfaware
references—George suggests a potential story for an
episode of his and Jerry’s sitcom“about nothing”based on
the night they waited for a table at a Chinese restaurant,
the actual plot of an earlier episode. However, these arcs
and ongoing plots demand little explicit knowledge from
episode to episode,as actual actions and events rarely carry
across episodes—arguably because of the infrequency of
significant actions and events on a show committed to
chronicling minutiae and insignificances.While certainly
appreciation of the show’s storyworld is heightened the
more you notice ongoing references like ArtVandelay or
Bob Sacamano,narrative comprehension does not require
the engagement in any long-term arcs as with The X-Files
or Buffy.Yet Seinfeld offers a wealth of narrative complexity,
often through its refusal to conform to episodic norms of
closure,resolution,and distinct story lines.Many episodes
leave characters in an untenable situation—Kramer arrested
for being a pimp, Jerry running into the woods
after becoming a“wolf-man,”George stuck in an airplane
restroom with a serial killer.These unresolved moments do
not function as cliff-hangers as in serial dramas but rather
as comedic punchlines not to be referenced again.
	 Seinfeld and other narratively complex comedies like
The Simpsons,Malcolm in the Middle, CurbYour Enthusiasm,
and Arrested Development use television’s episodic form
to undercut conventional assumptions of returning to
equilibrium and situational continuity while embracing
conditional seriality—some story lines do in fact continue,
while others are never referred to again. Arrested Development,
a more explicitly serialized comedy, subverts these
conventions even more,as most episodes end with a“next
week on Arrested Development” teaser, showing scenes
continuing that episode’s stories.However,regular viewers
soon learn that future episodes will not show these scenes,
nor will they have actually occurred within the ongoing
storyworld (although in the second season the show
varies this norm by allowing some of the teaser material
to occur diegetically). Likewise, The Simpsons generally
embraces an excessive and even parodic take on episodic
form,rejecting continuity between episodes by returning
to an everlasting present equilibrium state of Bart in fourth
grade and general dysfunctional family stasis.17
However,
there are exceptions to these norms,such asApu’s marriage
and parenting of octuplets, that suggest at least two years
have passed in Springfield’s life cycle—yet nobody else
has aged.Often making jokes about the need to return to
equilibrium state, The Simpsons offers ambiguous expectations
over which transformations are “reset” after each
episode—frequent losses of jobs, destruction of property,
and damaging of relationships that will be restored by next
week’s episode—and that will be carried over serially—like
Apu’s family, Skinner and Crabapple’s relationship, and
Maude Flanders’s death. Thus these complex comedies
selectively engage the norms of serial form,weaving certain
events into their backstories while ambiguously discarding
other moments into the more commonplace realm of
forgotten episodic histories,a distinction that viewers must
either overlook as inconsistency or embrace as one of the
sophisticated traits of narrative complexity—evidence of
fan practices online suggest that the latter is more common
once audiences accept the shifting rules as one of the sophisticated
pleasures offered by these complex comedies.
	 Seinfeld typifies another facet of narrative complexity,
offering a more self-conscious mode of storytelling than is
typical within conventional television narration.18
The show
revels in the mechanics of its plotting, weaving stories for
each character together in a given episode through unlikely
coincidence,parodic media references,and circular structure.
In conventional television narratives that feature A and B
plots the two stories may offer thematic parallels or provide
counterpoint to one another,but they rarely interact at the
level of action. Complexity, especially in comedies, works
against these norms by altering the relationship between
multiple plotlines, creating interweaving stories that often
collide and coincide. Seinfeld typically starts out its four
plotlines separately, leaving it to the experienced viewer’s
imagination as to how the stories will collide with unlikely
repercussions throughout the diegesis.19
Such interwoven
plotting has been adopted and expanded by CurbYour Enthusiasm
and Arrested Development,extending the coincidences
and collisions across episodes in a way that transforms serial
narrative into elaborate inside jokes—only by knowing
Larry’s encounter with Michael the blind man from Curb’s
first season does his return in the fourth season make sense.
Likewise,Arrested expands the number of coinciding plots
per episode, with often six or more story lines bouncing
off one another, resulting in unlikely coincidences, twists,
and ironic repercussions,some of which may not become
evident until subsequent episodes or seasons.
	 While this mode of comedic narrative is often quite
amusing on its own terms, it does suggest a particular set
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Jason Mittell	 35
of pleasures for viewers, one that is relatively unavailable
in conventional television narrative.The viewers of such
complex comedies as Seinfeld and Arrested Development not
only focus on the diegetic world offered by the sitcoms
but also revel in the creative mechanics involved in the
producers’abilities to pull off such complex plot structures,
a mode of viewing Sconce labels as“metareflexive”but that
warrants more detailed consideration.This set of pleasures
suggests an influential concept offered by Neil Harris in
his account of P.T.Barnum:Harris suggests that Barnum’s
mechanical stunts and hoaxes invited spectators to embrace
an “operational aesthetic” in which the pleasure was less
about “what will happen?” and more concerning “how
did he do that?”20
In watching Seinfeld we expect that
each character’s petty goals will be thwarted in a farcical
unraveling,but we watch to see how the writers will pull
off the narrative mechanics required to bring together the
four plotlines into a calibrated comedic Rube Goldberg
narrative machine.There is a degree of self-consciousness
in this mode of plotting not only in the explicit reflexivity
offered by these programs (like Seinfeld’s show-within-ashow
or Arrested Development’s winking acknowledgment
of television techniques like product placement, stunt
casting,and voice-over narration) but also in the awareness
that viewers watch complex programs in part to see“how
will they do it?”This operational aesthetic is on display
within online fan forum dissections of the techniques that
complex comedies and dramas use to guide, manipulate,
deceive,and misdirect viewers,suggesting the key pleasure
of unraveling the operations of narrative mechanics.21
We
watch these shows not just to get swept away in a realistic
narrative world (although that certainly can happen) but
also to watch the gears at work, marveling at the craft
required to pull off such narrative pyrotechnics.
	 The operational aesthetic is heightened in spectacular
moments within narratively complex programs,specific sequences
or episodes that we might consider akin to special
effects.Accounts of cinematic special effects highlight how
these moments of awe and amazement pull us out of the
diegesis, inviting us to marvel at the technique required
to achieve visions of interplanetary travel, realistic dinosaurs,
or elaborate fights upon treetops.These spectacles
are often held in opposition to narration,harking back to
the cinema of attractions that predated narrative film and
deemphasizing classical narrative form in the contemporary
blockbuster cinema.22
While such special effects do appear
on television (although arguably television’s dominant
mode of visual spectacle highlights the excessive beauty
norms of beer commercials and Baywatch more than the
pyrotechnics of the large screen), narratively complex
programs offer another mode of attractions: the narrative
special effect.These moments push the operational
aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed
nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at
how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forgo
realism in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality
in which we watch the process of narration as a machine
rather than engaging in its diegesis.
	 As programs become established in their own complex
conventions we also marvel at how far creators can push
the boundaries of complexity,offering baroque variations
on themes and norms; these narrative special effects can
be the climaxes of shows,as when all the divergent Seinfeld
or Arrested Development plots collide or when a plot twist
on Lost or 24 forces us to reconsider all that we’ve viewed
before in the episode.Or narrative spectacles can be variations
on a theme—Six Feet Under begins every episode
with a “death of the week,” but by the second season the
creators vary the presentation of these deaths to offer misdirections
and elaborations to keep viewers engaged once
they understand the show’s intrinsic norms.A particularly
telling moment of narrative spectacle comes from the Lost
episode “Orientation”: after discovering what is hidden
beneath the mysterious hatch,two characters watch a training
film that details the origins of the facility as part of a
research institute. Once finished with the enigmatic film
containing many obscure details that recast events of the
show’s first season in a new light,Locke gleefully exclaims,
“We’re going to have to watch that again!”mirroring the
reaction of millions of viewers prepared to parse the film
for clues to the diegetic and formal mysteries offered by the
show.This is not the reflexive self-awareness ofTex Avery
cartoons acknowledging their own construction or the
technique of some modernist art films asking us to view
their constructedness from an emotional distance; operational
reflexivity invites us to care about the storyworld
while simultaneously appreciating its construction.
	 Another level of narrative spectacle centers on entire
episodes. Buffy is probably the most accomplished show
for narratively spectacular episodes, with individual episodes
predicated on narrative devices like starkly limiting
storytelling parameters (the silence of “Hush”), genre
mixing (the musical episode “Once More with Feeling”),
shifts in perspective (telling an adventure from the vantage
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36	 Narrative Complexity
point of habitual bystander Xander in “The Zeppo”),
or foregrounding an unusual narrator (Andrew’s pseudodocumentary
in “Storyteller”). While each of these
episodes and others like them in StarTrek:The Next Generation
(“Frame of Mind,”“The Inner Light”),The X-Files
(“Monday,” “Triangle”), Angel (“Smile Time,” “Spin the
Bottle”), Seinfeld (“The Betrayal,” “The Parking Lot”),
Scrubs (“His Story,”“My Screw Up”), and The Simpsons
(“Trilogy of Error,”“22 Short Films about Springfield”)
may offer diegetic thrills and laughs, the more distinctive
pleasure in these programs is marveling at the narrational
bravado on display by violating storytelling conventions
in a spectacular fashion.Through the operational aesthetic
these complex narratives invite viewers to engage at the
level of formal analyst, dissecting the techniques used to
convey spectacular displays of storytelling craft;this mode
of formally aware viewing is highly encouraged by these
programs, as their pleasures are embedded in a level of
awareness that transcends the traditional focus on diegetic
action typical of most viewers.
	 Not only can individual episodes manifest the operational
aesthetic through narrative spectacle, but whole
programs can be predicated upon such storytelling pyrotechnics,either
through their ongoing stories or inherent
structure. For an example of the former, Alias has offered
a strong example of narrative complexity, juggling both
ongoing and episodic stories of espionage with arcs of
relationship dramas mapped onto both family and spy politics.
But its boldest moments of narrative spectacle occur
when the plot makes unforeseen sharp twists that cause
the entire scenario to “reboot,” changing the professional
and interpersonal dynamics of nearly every character.The
first,and arguably most effective,of these reboots occurred
midway through the second season in the post–Super Bowl
episode“Phase One”;over the course of this episode,the
entire espionage scenario was reconfigured,with the main
character’s status as a double agent shifting to becoming
an outright CIA agent, chasing down the same main villain
but with different alliances and motives.Additionally,
the relationships between characters transformed, with
Sydney’s innocent-bystander friend Francie being replaced
by a nefarious agent and her long-simmering crush on
Vaughn finally coming to fruition—all within one hour!
While much of the effectiveness of this shift was in breathing
life into a premise that may have been on the verge of
becoming too repetitive, an important pleasure was to be
found in the impressive way in which the producers were
able to reconfigure the scenario in a way that was diegetically
consistent (at least with the show’s own outrageous
norms of espionage technology and mythology), narratively
engaging,and emotionally honest to the characters
and relationships. Similar series revisions were pulled off
in subsequent seasons of Alias as well as Buffy (through the
introduction of Buffy’s sister Dawn) and Angel (with the
heroes taking over their archenemy’s law firm). In all of
these cases audiences take pleasure not only in the diegetic
twists but also in the exceptional storytelling techniques
needed to pull off such machinations—we thrill both at
the stories being told and at the way in which their telling
breaks television conventions.23
	 Narrative spectacle can be built into the core scenarios
of programs as well—24 is often heralded for its real-time
narrative structure,which in narratological parlance equates
story time and discourse time (excepting commercial
breaks). Even more interesting here is that it may be the
only television series ever named for its storytelling technique,
not in reference to its diegetic world (the number
24 refers to nothing notable in the storyworld) but rather
to the number of hours (and episodes) needed to convey
the story. Other programs are similarly notable for their
storytelling discourse (how the story is told) more than the
story itself—Boomtown offers fairly typical police stories,
but when told through changing multiple limited perspectives
among an ensemble of characters,the cases are more
nuanced and complex than they first appear.Jack and Bobby
tells a typical tale of teen brothers,but,through the conceit
of frequent flash-forward interviews in the 2040s,a future
tale emerges of one of them becoming U.S.president,with
future events and relationships resonating with adolescent
family drama. Reunion highlights a group of high school
friends, with each weekly episode charting one year in
their lives over a twenty-year span.24
In all of these shows
what is arguably most compelling and distinctive is not
the stories that they tell but the narrative strategies used
in the telling.
	 Narratively complex programs also use a number of
storytelling devices that,while not unique to this mode,are
used with such frequency and regularity as to become more
the norm than the exception.Analepses, or alterations in
chronology,are not uncommon in conventional television,
with flashbacks serving either to recount crucial narrative
backstory (as a detective narrates the solution to a crime) or
to frame an entire episode’s action in the past tense (like the
dramatization of Rob and Laura meeting on The DickVan
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Jason Mittell	 37
Dyke Show). Similarly, conventional programs have often
used dream or fantasy sequences to explore possibilities of
other scenarios (like Roseanne’s retelling as a 1950s sitcom)
or to probe a character’s inner life (the experimental St.
Elsewhere episode“Sweet Dreams”).Another device,found
in episodes of conventional programs like All in the Family
and Different Strokes, is retelling the same story from
multiple perspectives, often called the “Rashomon effect”
after the landmark Kurosawa film.Voice-over narration is
atypical in most television,but conventional programs like
Dragnet and The WonderYears use it to set the emotional
tone and provide expository transitions.Yet all of these
devices,which vary from the“exceedingly obvious”mode
of conventional television storytelling,typically maximize
their obviousness by explicitly signaling them as differentiations
from a norm,predicated by expository narration (“I
remember it well”) or contrived scenarios (like hypnosis,
courtroom testimonies, or recollections over a photo album)
to highlight how the show is using unconventional
conventions.
	 In contemporary narratively complex shows such variations
in storytelling strategies are more commonplace and
signaled with much more subtlety or delay; these shows
are constructed without fear of temporary confusion for
viewers.Fantasy sequences abound without clear demarcations
or signals, as Northern Exposure, Six Feet Under, The
Sopranos,and Buffy all present visions of events that oscillate
between character subjectivity and diegetic reality,playing
with the ambiguous boundary to offer character depth,
suspense, and comedic effect. Complex narration often
breaks the fourth wall, whether it be visually represented
direct address (Malcolm in the Middle,The Bernie Mac Show)
or more ambiguous voice-over that blurs the line between
diegetic and nondiegetic (Scrubs,Arrested Development),calling
attention to its own breaking of convention.Programs
like Lost, Jack and Bobby, and Boomtown offer analepses in
every episode with few orienting signals, while Alias and
TheWestWing frequently begin episodes with a teaser at the
climax of the story,then turn back the clock to explain the
confusing situation with which the episode began. In all
of these programs the lack of explicit storytelling cues and
signposts creates moments of disorientation,asking viewers
to engage more actively to comprehend the story and rewarding
regular viewers who have mastered each program’s
internal conventions of complex narration.These strategies
may be similar to formal dimensions of art cinema, but
they manifest themselves in expressly popular contexts
for mass audiences—we may be temporarily confused by
moments of Lost or Alias, but these shows ask us to trust
in the payoff that we will eventual arrive at a moment of
complex but coherent comprehension,not the ambiguity
and questioned causality typical of many art films.25
	 The“Noël”episode of WestWing typifies the complex
use of such discursive strategies: the episode is framed by
Josh Lyman’s therapy session to process his posttraumatic
stress reactions to being shot,which allows for the conventions
of repeated flashbacks via Josh’s narration.However,
the flashbacks are rampant and not always signaled as falling
within a clear order,with sound bridges between the present-tense
therapy and past-tense events adding to a sense
of disorientation that the show uses to increase tension
and anxiety.Additionally, we see frequent dramatizations
of Josh cutting his hand on a glass, an accident he claims
to have happened but that his therapist correctly suspects
is a lie masking a more violent act; these lying flashbacks
lack a clear differentiation from other past events until the
end of the episode, leaving the audience to decode the
contradictions and confusing chronology.The episode climaxes
with a five-minute sequence interweaving disjoined
sound and image from five different time frames (including
one that never actually happened),rhythmically edited to
convey a robust emotional arc—a presentational mode
more common to European art cinema than American
television but ultimately in service of a coherent ongoing
narrative.While much of the episode’s pleasure is serial,
as the more we know Josh the more we can engage with
his breakdown, the episode stands alone as a dramatically
compelling character portrait (which won actor Bradley
Whitford an Emmy), but only if we accept its distinct
storytelling conventions,a competency that regular viewers
learn over time. Narratively complex programs invite
temporary disorientation and confusion,allowing viewers
to build up their comprehension skills through long-term
viewing and active engagement.26
	 This need for gaining competencies in decoding stories
and diegetic worlds is particularly salient across a number of
media at the moment.27
Certainly, videogames are predicated
on this ability to learn how to understand and interact
with a range of storyworlds and interfaces—nearly every
game contains its own diegetic training module,as players
learn to master the controls and expectations for this particular
virtual world.Cinema has also seen the emergence of
a popular cycle of“puzzle films”that require the audience
to learn the particular rules of a film to comprehend its
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38	 Narrative Complexity
narrative;movies like The Sixth Sense,Pulp Fiction,Memento,
The Usual Suspects,Adaptation,Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind, and Run Lola Run have all embraced a game
aesthetic,inviting audiences to play along with the creators
to crack the interpretive codes to make sense of their complex
narrative strategies.28
But crucially, the goal of these
puzzle films is not to solve the mysteries ahead of time;
rather, we want to be competent enough to follow their
narrative strategies but still relish in the pleasures of being
manipulated successfully. I doubt anyone who predicts
the twists of these films could say that they enjoyed them
more than the willing (but still active) spectator who gets
pulled along for the ride.Puzzle films invite us to observe
the gears of the narrative mechanisms,even flaunting them
in a show of storytelling spectacle—think of the climax
of Sixth Sense, as the twist is revealed through flashbacks
demonstrating how the film masterfully fooled its viewers.Although
few television programs have followed the
puzzle film model fully (individual episodes of Seinfeld,
The Simpsons, Scrubs, and Lost have mimicked these films,
which themselves are influenced by the seminal anthology
television program TheTwilight Zone),what seems to be a
key goal across videogames, puzzle films, and narratively
complex television series is the desire to be both actively
engaged in the story and successfully surprised through
storytelling manipulations.This is the operational aesthetic
at work—we want to enjoy the machine’s results while
also marveling at how it works.
	 Thus narratively complex television encourages, and
even at times necessitates,a new mode of viewer engagement.While
fan cultures have long demonstrated intense
engagement in storyworlds,policing backstory consistency,
character unity,and internal logic in programs like StarTrek
and Dr.Who, contemporary programs focus this detailed
dissection onto complex questions of plot and events in
addition to storyworld and characters.We watch Lost,Alias,
Veronica Mars, The X-Files, Desperate Housewives, and Twin
Peaks at least in part to try to crack each program’s central
enigmas—look at any online fan forum to see evidence
of such sleuths at work.But as in any mystery-driven fiction,viewers
want to be surprised and thwarted as well as
satisfied with the internal logic of the story.In processing
such programs viewers find themselves both drawn into
a compelling diegesis (as with all effective stories) and
focused on the discursive processes of storytelling needed
to achieve each show’s complexity and mystery.Thus these
programs convert many viewers to amateur narratologists,
noting usage and violations of convention, chronicling
chronologies, and highlighting both inconsistencies and
continuities across episodes and even series.While certainly
audiences have always been active,most scholarly accounts
of these processes focus on negotiations with television
content, reconciling with the politics of Madonna videos
or The Cosby Show. Narratively complex programming
invites audiences to engage actively at the level of form as
well, highlighting the conventionality of traditional television
and exploring the possibilities of both innovative
long-term storytelling and creative intraepisode discursive
strategies.
	 Many of these programs outright demand such level of
engagement—it is hard to imagine how someone might
watch Lost or Arrested Development without noting their
formal innovations and considering how the use of flashbacks
or reflexive narration changes their perspectives on
the narrative action.You cannot simply watch these programs
as an unmediated window to a realistic storyworld
into which you might escape;rather,narratively complex
television demands you pay attention to the window
frames,asking you to reflect on how it provides partial access
to the diegesis and how the panes of glass distort your
vision of the unfolding action.Interestingly,these programs
can be quite popular with a mass audience (Lost, Seinfeld,
The X-Files) or have narrow appeals to cult viewers willing
to invest the effort into the decoding process (Arrested
Development,Veronica Mars,Firefly)—while certainly many
of these cult shows have demanding narratives that may
seem inaccessible to a mass audience,the striking popularity
of some complex programs suggests that a mass audience
can engage with and enjoy quite challenging and intricate
storytelling.This is not to downplay the importance of
traditional pleasures of character depth,neat resolution of
plots,storyworld consistency,action-oriented excitement,
and humor—narrative complexity at its most robust employs
all of these elements while adding the operational
pleasures of formal engagement. Certainly, chief among
Lost’s pleasures is the show’s ability to create sincere emotional
connections to characters who are immersed in an
outlandish situation that,as of this writing,is unclassifiable
as science fiction,paranormal mystery,or religious allegory,
all constructed by an elaborate narrational structure far
more complex than anything seen before in American
television.
	 This account of narrative complexity suggests that a
new paradigm of television storytelling has emerged over
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Jason Mittell	 39
the past two decades, with a reconceptualization of the
boundary between episodic and serial forms,a heightened
degree of self-consciousness in storytelling mechanics,
and demands for intensified viewer engagement focused
on both diegetic pleasures and formal awareness. By exploring
the formal structure of this mode of storytelling
we can appreciate connections with broader concerns of
media industries and technologies, creative techniques,
and practices of everyday life,all of which resonate deeply
with contemporary cultural transformations tied to the
emergence of digital media and more interactive forms of
communication and entertainment.A common underlying
trend that manifests itself both in television narratives
and many digital forms like videogames and web pages is
a need for procedural literacy, a recognition on the part
of consumers that any mode of expression follows particular
protocols and that to fully engage with that form
we must master its underlying procedures.This manifests
itself explicitly in videogames, where procedural mastery
is a requirement for success,and web use,as we have come
in a very short period of time to accept linking,searching,
and bookmarking as naturalized behaviors.For television,
contemporary complex narratives are foregrounding the
skills of narrative comprehension and media literacy that
most viewers have developed but rarely put to use beyond
rudimentary means.To understand this phenomenon we
must use formal narratology to chart its structure and
boundaries while incorporating other methods to explore
how this narrative mode intersects with dimensions of
creative industries,technological innovations,participatory
practices,and viewer comprehension.This mode of analysis,
adapted from the paradigm of historical poetics, deserves
a place within the multiple methodologies of media studies—exploring
the ties between formal developments and
cultural contexts highlights that all facets of media, from
production to reception,are embedded within the complex
means by which television tells complex stories.
Notes
	 1. Bordwell, Narration 155.
	 2.Thompson, Storytelling.
	 3.This essay considers entertainment,scripted series programming
with recurring situations and/or characters exclusively; thus madefor-TV-movies,
miniseries, sketch comedy, anthology, variety, news,
documentary, and reality programming, while certainly interesting
and potentially incorporating facets of these narrative modes, all fall
outside my analytic scope.
	 4. Mittell,“The Loss of Value.”
	 5.Arguably, many of the trademarks of narrative complexity are
more commonplace in other national television forms, and certainly
the influence of British television upon American programming
cannot be understated.Yet there is still value in understanding how
American programming, which of course saturates the global media
market, has evolved on its own terms.
	 6. Newcomb, TV; Feuer;Allen; Kozloff; Ellis.
	 7. Newcomb,“Magnum”; Anderson; Schatz; Dolan.
	 8. Sconce; Johnson.
	 9. See McGrath for an influential characterization of novelistic
television.
	 10. See Bordwell,“Historical Poetics of Cinema”; Jenkins,“Historical
Poetics.” Mittell, Genre andTelevision, applies historical poetics
to television via Dragnet and the police genre.
	 11. Not to suggest that reality television lacks complexity, but it
seems that typically the arcing dimensions of most reality shows stem
more from characters and relationships (as in traditional soap operas)
than events and plots.
	 12.Johnson makes this point about the shift from Least Objectionable
Programming to Most Repeatable Programming.
	 13. See Jenkins,“‘Do You Enjoy’” for an early example of such
technological practice; Jenkins tellingly quotes one online fan,“Can
you imagine Twin Peaks coming out before VCRs or without the
net? It would have been Hell!” (54).
	 14.This website recaps both reality programs and scripted dramas
(not sitcoms), but among the dramas, the majority could be called
narratively complex,and the bulk of programs they elect not to recap
are more conventional.
	 15. See Allen. The gendered pleasures tied to soap operas and
narrative complexity are a complicated issue beyond the scope of
this essay. Briefly,Warhol outlines traditionally effeminate narrative
pleasures,which I believe are incorporated into more masculine genres
and narrative structures in complex programming and thus offer more
cross-over pleasures for viewers than do conventional soap operas or
procedural dramas.
	 16.Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age offers an account of
this era’s programming innovations.
	 17.See Mittell,Genre andTelevision for an account of The Simpsons’s
parody of sitcom form.
	 18. For the best account of Seinfeld’s narrative techniques see
Smith.
	 19. Johnson discusses multithreaded plotting in depth.
	 20. See Harris; see also Gunning and Trahair for work exploring
the operational aesthetic in film comedy.
	 21.Such discussions can be found on numerous dramas like Alias,
24,and Lost on televisionwithoutpity.com,The Simpsons on snpp.com,
and Arrested Development on the-op.com,although there are certainly
dozens of other online discussions about these programs.
	 22. See Ndalianis.
	 23. Such narrative reboots have precedents in art cinema, such as
the works of Luis Buñuel and David Lynch; however, the effect has
a far different impact in an ongoing series with a narrative spanning
multiple years versus a single feature film.
	 24.Reunion’s plan was to focus each season upon a different group
of friends, jettisoning the situational and character stability typical of
seriesTV altogether and embracing a more flexible season model like
that of realityTV, as new contestants and locations come and go, but
the underlying mode of presentation remains consistent.The show did
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40	 Narrative Complexity
not garner sufficient ratings,leaving the underlying mystery unsolved
via a midseason cancellation.
	 25.Bordwell,Narration offers an influential account of art cinema
narration along these lines.
	 26. Interestingly, when I screened this episode for a class, one
student who had never watched the show mistook it for a “recap
episode,” assuming that all the flashbacks referred to events already
witnessed in previous shows.The only previously seen footage used
is a few seconds of Josh’s shooting.
	 27. See Johnson for more on this cross-media trend.
	 28.These puzzle films clearly drew many techniques from earlier
narrative experiments in the art cinema,but aside from a few“paranoia
films” of the 1970s like The Conversation, such techniques and form
were rarely used.
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