Signs of Time

While US prime time television drama of the broadcast era featured self-contained, modular storylines and (mostly) amnesiac protagonists, the arrival of the cumulative narrative (a term coined by TV scholar Horace Newcomb in 1985 to describe television series adopting the soap operas' ongoing narrative structure) was an important step towards what is hailed today as prime-time novel / quality TV. This study explores the organisational patterns and generic implications leading to the rise of cumulative storytelling and points to further venues of narrative-as-backstory analysis in terms of diegetic memory.