This one really isn’t really for me, because I’m pretty excited (or, as excited as one can be about writing 15 pages …) about my first idea. But I was watching some television, as one does on break, and realized that beyond the narrative of a television episode itself, credit sequences are endowed with a surprising amount of fabula/syuzhet information. A show relies on its credit sequence to tell the story of its whole narrative, to embody, in a certain way, the mood and content of the entire series. What, and how, do we learn of television serials from their credit sequences?
In TV and American Culture I remember examining the credit sequence of Miami Vice with this in mind. But some shows go beyond a simple montage of images and sound relating to mood and content. Middlebury graduate Cara McKenney just won an Emmy for her team’s work on the title sequence of Mad Men (for more information, see this Globe Article). Credit sequences rely on images, but also on the star system in naming creators and actors that further inform our hypotheses about the show as viewers.
I know it’s a bit thin on the traditional narrative front, but I’ve always found credit sequences fascinating in their choice of style and content. Anybody interested?