Articulo_5_EN_Doxa_29

1. Introduction

In recent times, we have witnessed a generational change in the television drama scene. The narrative constructions for this medium have been developed in an expansive way and with a special communion with the habits of the audience (Kinder, 1991). The 2004-2005 television season “was a real creative revival for networks thanks to the success of House, Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy” (Cascajosa, 2007: 20). All of these series, renowned fictional brands, have in common the same strategy of communication and a semantic construction based on “high quality standards, a particular idiosyncrasy of the plot, the characters, and a specific target audience, who are unconditional followers of these products” (Tous , 2010: 80). They are new audio-visual proposals that have succeeded in developing a new kind of viewer.

This new generation of series has taken the television medium to unexplored lands. They are composed of new formats of audio-visual products that have gained a worldwide audience. Therefore, anyone can watch the same premieres of new episodes, releases, plots and advertising campaigns all over the world. Afterward, they can comment on everything internationally on the Internet. In addition, the case of Lost was composed of an “online community fragmented into subcategories to avoid spoilers” (Brooker, 2009: 58). This is a result of the Jenkins participatory culture (2008). It is based on the exchange of information,

and on the search for synergies between television work and the Internet, in a strategy to promote a community of fans and a ‘participatory culture’ around the series in question, from Babylon 5 to Lost (Pérez, 2013: 79).

This meant a break with the television programming of traditional networks. Thus, the space for the new viewing platforms on demand was born. The viewers can decide how to watch these works of fiction on their computers, mobile phones or televisions at the time and under the circumstances they choose. Even more, “the new viewer accesses the content in its original version thanks to the subtitles” (Ramos and Lozano-Delmar, 2011: 421). Gordillo (2009: 15) refers to this new television model as hypertelevision. This is defined as a type of television: “generalist, multi-thematic of different platforms, and the one that converges with the Internet and mobile telephony”. In this context, we can recognise this new style of series. They are productions that connect with different types of audiences through different media and networks, composing complex, autonomous, and at the same time complementary stories. The technological and communicative skills available for the current audience not only allow the cohesion of consumption, but also the branching of plots and the atomization of these according to the narrative and the media. In other words, the hypertelevision model brings on the transmedia construction of the plot, where “the dissemination of complex messages is adapted by adjusting them to the characteristics of each media to obtain a message that complements and diffuses individually” (Martí, 2010: 141).

Within this new television model, the series Lost (2004-2010) stands out as one of the first dramas to provide viewers with spaces for the development of these new habits. Today this show is considered a television classic promoted by the filmmaker J.J. Abrams and produced by ABC television. It is one of the latest successes of the North American cultural panorama. Thus, Tous (2010: 89) considers that “Lost has become a matter of American popular culture”. This series was characterised by presenting some complex plots that were difficult to follow. Likewise, it proposed an important hybridization of genres through a horizontal construction of the main story. This was supplemented with vertical plots