Narrative Ecosystems. A Multidisciplinary Approach to Media Worlds

This paper aims to propose an original approach to the investigation of audiovisual vast narratives, namely TV series, according to a new theoretical perspective which we label the ‘narrative ecosystem’. Our proposal is to study vast narratives through the narrative ecosystem paradigm, a model that encompasses a cross-disciplinary approach to TV series studies. In the past twenty years TV serial dramas, and in particular products coming from the US, have enjoyed great success among viewers worldwide, and have stimulated considerable critical attention from scholars of audiovisual media. In this paper we propose a new interpretative model: the narrative ecosystem. We believe this is a response to the need for a dynamic model that represents vast narratives, accounting for the interactions of agents, changes and evolutions. Production and management studies intertwined with cultural studies (Johnson 2013) are already going in the direction we are supporting. Our theoretical proposal thus aims to encompass this approach with a diachronic view of the media objects as well as with a method to make forecast about the evolution of a specific TV show. This last goal still needs work and effort in order to figure out a forecasting model that might be useful to the media industry. In this paper , in order to address this absence, we have started to draw together some theoretical observations based on ecological selection and evolution patterns, which we present in the essay.