Sherlock’s Children: the Birth of the Series

Abstract

Taking television into account, it is arguable that the two most prevalent fictional forms of our time are the series and the serial. But while the serial or soap opera can be discussed as a variant of the single extended storyline, reflecting its ancestry in Dickens and other Victorian writers of novels that were episodically presented in periodicals, the series demands to be discussed in its own unique terms. Such discussion is still somewhat fitful and quite often the two forms are blurred together, as in the noun ‘seriality’, which seems to spring from the word ‘serial’s’ double life as a noun and as the adjectival form of ‘series’. The series as such is the form which repeats, theoretically ad infinitum, the same kind of action in roughly the same narrative space or time-slot, featuring at least one character continuously throughout. Its particular qualities deserve a more accurate name than ‘seriality’: ‘seriesicity’, perhaps.