Introduction

This introduction presents The World of Medical Drama as the outcome of the PRIN project NEAD (Narrative Ecosystem Analysis and Development Framework), which uses medical drama as a privileged case for rethinking how contemporary serial television should be analyzed. The editors argue that conventional retrospective narrative analysis is inadequate for long-running serial forms, because television series evolve through ongoing interactions among creative decisions, production conditions, audience reception, and wider sociocultural forces. The chapter proposes the NEAD framework as a dynamic, multi-method, and transdisciplinary approach to seriality, centered on four interconnected dimensions: story arcs, narrative memory, alignment, and embedding. Together, these concepts are meant to explain how serial narratives develop over time, manage past information, position viewers ethically in relation to social issues, and incorporate those issues into characters and plotlines as part of a broader process of social discursiveness rather than simple representation. A major contribution of the project is methodological. The introduction explains how the research moved from labor-intensive manual content analysis toward the use of large language models for context-sensitive semantic analysis across a corpus of roughly one thousand episodes, enabling comparative and longitudinal study at a scale that would otherwise have been difficult to sustain while still preserving interpretive control by researchers. The introduction also situates the volume’s three main empirical areas: US and transnational serial form, Chinese medical drama, and Italian medical drama. In particular, it shows how the NEAD framework can travel across media systems, illuminating not only the narrative logic of medical dramas but also the ways fiction interacts with institutional discourse, public debate, gender politics, health communication, and audience engagement in different cultural contexts. Finally, the editors frame the volume not as a conclusion but as an opening toward a broader research agenda. The medical drama case serves to validate the ecosystem approach while pointing beyond the genre itself, toward future work on serial knowledge, discursive positioning, ecological crisis, algorithmic culture, and the emerging role of generative AI in both narrative analysis and production.