True Detective Stories: Media Textuality and the Anthology Format between Remediation and Transmedia Narratives

In questioning the so-­ called complexities of narrative models through the possibilities offered by the new trans-­media digital platforms, what defines the specificity of a medium, its materiality, inks and codes, along with the effects of the vanishing anchorage of the content in an identifiable technological dispositif, are issues to be confronted. This essay tries to elaborate on a very limited such confrontation, through the case study of a TV series – the first season of True detective (USA, HBO, 2014) and the ways it rewrites and translates some of the features of contemporary seriality and transmedia storytelling. Hence, what the article elaborates is, firstly, a hopefully productive, however brief, reflection on a language of the text that does not exclude the “materiality” of the screen or the computer, along with the effects that the idea of contents outside their containers might induce on the very thinking of new forms of narratives and their affects.