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Abstract
Successful American narrative television series tell stories across three separate yet connected levels---the individual episode, the season, and the run of the entire series. To succeed, a series must tell engaging and entertaining yet comprehensible stories that draw viewers back week after week, season after season, year after year. This study examines the seven season run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997--2003) to demonstrate how narrative techniques derived from the classical Hollywood cinema have been adapted to articulate these three levels of narration for television audiences. Drawing upon David Bordwell's theory of narration, this study seeks to understand television storytelling as a process designed to communicate clear, comprehensible narratives within and between episodes and seasons. In the process, the study calls upon Bordwell's work with Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger to help demonstrate similarities and differences between classical Hollywood and television storytelling via traditional cine-narrative concerns such as goal-driven protagonists, constructions of cinematic time and space (including narrative gaps), and mental/psychological schemata necessary for narrative comprehension. Although each of these phenomena manifest themselves in television in a manner comparable to the classical Hollywood cinema, each also undergoes significant transformation as applied at and across all three levels of TV narrative. While making no global claims about television storytelling, this study nonetheless argues that the medium's three levels of narration can be better understood and appreciated against the backdrop and influence of the classical Hollywood cinema.
