NAR-401 Common core Year Four Narrative & Writing

Storytelling IV: Series & Formats

Episodic design, format development, repeatability. Building a show, not just videos.

Lectures: 7
Total runtime: 5h 49m
Attendance minimum: 2h 55m
Prerequisites: NAR-301 Storytelling III: Visual Storytelling

Lecture Playlist

Ordered as a teaching progression, not by popularity. Attendance is recorded once half of a lecture has been watched.

Class 1: Introduction | MIT 21L.432 Understanding Television, Spring 2008 Series storytelling as its own art form, continuous with older popular narrative traditions MIT OpenCourseWare 2 Peer institution 66 min
Class 3: Television As A Cultural Form | MIT 21L.432 Understanding Television, Fall 2001 The series as a cultural form: flow, domestic habit, and the rhythm of return MIT OpenCourseWare 2 Peer institution 45 min
How Does Serial Fiction Work? The serial audience: what the gap between installments does to viewers Stanford 2 Peer institution 4 min
Class 10: TV Genres | MIT 21L.432 Understanding Television, Fall 2001 Format as a repeatable engine: genre, formula, and meaningful variation MIT OpenCourseWare 2 Peer institution 47 min
The Wire Conference Panel 2: Seriality and Narrative Experience Advanced seriality: long arcs, audience memory, and narrative complexity SOFHeyman (Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University) 1 Ivy League 92 min
TV Writers Panel Running a show: the writers' room, breaking story, sustaining a format across a season USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences 2 Peer institution 86 min
Practicum · working creator How Ryan Trahan's $0.01 Series Broke YouTube (Forever) A working format strategist tears down a daily serialized series, showing Lecture 3's gap between instalments and Lecture 4's formula-and-variation engine operating on a real channel Paddy Galloway P Practitioner 9 min

Every course reserves one practicum seat, listed last and marked P. It is filled by someone who has shipped the work — here, Paddy Galloway — because the university lectures establish why something works and the practicum shows it being done under real constraints.