Variazioni di mondo. Esercizi di stile seriale nel telefilm contemporaneo

The link between standardization and variation is that of the fundamental functioning mechanisms of serials. Analyzing the historical development of American TV series, we can notice how it finds a codified and steady balance in the forms of series (drama and comedy) and of serial (soap opera and prime – time soap). This concretely results in the building of a recurrent world, immediately recognizable, characterized by representative and narrative constants. The advent of new text forms, such as the serialized series, linked to the second golden age, and become a mainstream in the last decade, brings forth the use of variation as a tool for a deeper and very close communication relation between implicit author and model spectator. The essay hypotheses that the most frequent form of variation in contemporary American serial TV could be defined “world variation”: a highly reflexive style exercise, made on the momentarily transformation of the diegetic universe of the series. The essay hypotheses therefore a first attempt of “world variation” typology, starting from some special episodes from contemporary series: Buffy, Lost, The Simpson, Scrubs, indicating some more research paths in the text analysis, but also in the study of production (the emerging figure of the author – creator as origin/source of the “world variation”) and consumption (the fandom audience as privileged addressee of the style exercises linked to the variations)