Why I take television series seriously as subjects for academic study

One of the most interesting things for me as a film historian is the development of what is called short-form television - series that have half-hour and hour-long episodes. In my lectures, I look specifically at the differences that length and serial structure make.

When you watch an individual television programme, it may seem to have a simple structure - especially situation comedy, which in the United States is basically only 24 minutes of narrative. But people who write for television have to structure several aspects at once - the individual programme, the series and the season within the series, which has a specific trajectory like the standard 26-programme American season. That is one area where complexity comes into television, and it is something that I do not think authors in most other forms have to deal with in writing narrative.

One series I am looking at in terms of adaptation is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which went from film to television. I want to look at sequels, adaptations and serials as ways of satisfying the modern media's voracious appetite for narrative material.

There are strengths in television narrative that are not often found in film - for instance the multiple-story programme such as Hill Street Blues, which introduced the notion of having some stories continue from one episode to the next while others are more short-term and achieve closure. The multi-story structure is a rare phenomenon in film: Robert Altman's Nashville, with its many characters, is exceptional.

I am especially interested in how people are able to comprehend and keep track of different narratives, given the capacity of the moving-image media to change instantaneously from one space and time to another. That kind of challenge to comprehensibility is present in both television and film.

In my lectures, I am not really setting out to say what is good television. I use examples that I think are good because they are the norms. I'm not trying to compare British or American television in terms of quality. But I think interesting things are being done, especially in the shorter series of the kind that you have here in the United Kingdom, where The Royle Family, say, has six episodes for the whole season. We are starting to get that sort of thing more in the US, with limited-season series such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City.

It might well be that people in the future will look on this as something of a new golden age in television - although there is a lot of dross out there as well.

Kristin Thompson, Visiting professor of broadcast media, Oxford University.

Kristin Thompson is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She will lecture on "Storytelling in film and television" on February 6 and 7 at Green College, Oxford. Her most recent book is Storytelling and the New Hollywood.

* Interview by John Davies