Introduction: the activity of world-making

“Every TV series creates a world”, write Aldo Grasso and Massimo Scaglioni in their Introduction to the book Arredo di serie. “Of course, this is a quality that great literature, theater, and cinema share. However, in TV shows this ability to build worlds is, so to speak, amplified” (Grasso and Scaglioni 2009, 7).1 In addition to being related to serial and long-term storytelling devices that enable the development of increasingly complex and detailed narrative worlds, this amplification of TV series’ world-building activity appears as one of the main features of the contemporary media landscape and can be explained on the basis of various interconnected factors.

First, this amplification can be related to the possibility of developing narrative arcs and expanding narrative universes across multiple different media platforms (from novels, graphic novels, or comics to video games, from hoax websites to Alternate Reality Games and Role Playing Games), a possibility extensively discussed by Henry Jenkins (2006) through the well-known concept of transmedia storytelling. Second, the amplification of the world-building activity can be related to the notion of narrative complexity that Jason Mittell discusses as the new paradigm of television storytelling and that, of course, “was enabled by, and helped transform, the industrial, technological, and reception contexts of television in the 1990s and 2000s” (Mittell 2015, 30):