1. Introduction: Cognition, Emotion, and Aesthetics in Contemporary Serial Television
Part1. The Nature of Contemporary Televisual Seriality
2. Television’s Temporality: Seriality and Temporal Prolongation
3. Multi-plot Structure in Television Serials
4. “Oh My God, They Didn’t Kill Kenny”: Seriality and Viewer Engagement in Contemporary Animated Television
5. Seriality and Expressiveness in Mad Men
Part2. Audiences
6. From Shots to Storyworlds: The Cognitive Processes Supporting the Comprehension of Serialized Television
7. Beliefs, Desires, and Emotions: A Theory of Emotions and Some Implications for the Understanding of Viewer Reactions to TV Serials
Part3. Poetics
8. Reaching through Time: On Seriality, Temporality, and Twofoldness
9. Five Theses on the Difficulty of Ending Quality TV Series
10. Pop Music in Television Serials: Priming, Authorial Commentary, and Musical Memory
11. Twin Peaks and the Performative Poetics of Complex Television
12. Parallelism and Complex Storytelling in Film and TV
Part4. Value: Aesthetic and Beyond
13. Audiovisual Atmospheres, Moods, and Metaphoric Spaces: Aesthetically Rich Spaces in Complex TV Series
14. Repetition, Familiarity, and Aesthetic Pleasure: Formulaic Generic Television Series
15. Ethics and Bad Protagonists in Serial Television Drama
16. A Sense of Moment: Appreciating Television Serials from Aesthetic and Cognitive Perspectives