On Mai 8, Sean O'Sullivan will give the talk "Episode Five: Serial Television and Narrative Becoming":

"The beginning of a serial narrative is an act of educated guesswork on the part of its creators. The sprawl of installment fiction means that the shape of the stories, the particularities of the characters, and the engagement of the audience are always works in progress. That challenge is particularly prominent in serial television, where production schedules, changes in personnel, and the central difficulty of imagining a blueprint into repeatable practice mean that the initial episodes of a show may chart very different and perhaps conflicting directions for the narrative's future. This talk will take as its special emphasis the beginnings of "sonnet-season" series--that is, U.S. television shows that, in the fifteen years since the debut of The Sopranos, have adopted the thirteen-episode season as their organizing poetic models. Putting particular pressure on first episodes, or pilots--which we might call synecdoches of something that does not yet exist--and on fifth episodes--as recurrent turning points in series as varied as Breaking Bad and Deadwood--the talk will examine the questions of how possibility turns into necessity as a serial tries to discover the narrative syntax, visual vocabulary, and conceptual design that will become its identifying elements."