Crossing Eras: Exploring Nostalgic Reconfigurations in Media Franchises

Over the past few years, as television began to build a more solid history, televisual products have been affected by a nostalgic wave that lead to the revival of several old time favorite franchises. Such a trend is one of the consequences of a wider technological environment, where television content is more and more interconnected and somehow serialized, not only through space, whether fictional, virtual or real, but also through time, in a continuous dialogue between media of the past and media of the present. This reticular mechanism, which involves processes of recycling and remediation among others, contributed to consolidate a preexisting association between the domain of media and forms of nostalgia. While nostalgia doesn’t appear as a new paradigm in contemporary history, since it has been affecting human societies starting from their ancient years, the emergence of digital media indeed created alternative premises for triggering nostalgic practices in cultural industries worldwide. Being easily accessible in libraries online, always available, mediated nostalgia turns a self-generated state of longing into an externally prompted condition, which responds to technological changes, socio-cultural dynamics and commercial parameters. As a multifaceted concept, it carries several meanings and implications, ranging from an economical to a cultural understanding of the production of storytelling practices. This chapter investigates the concept of mediated nostalgia in the digital age, by analyzing its role in contemporary television seriality, as well as its effects on textual forms and narrative structures, and on the industry that surrounds them.