L’impact du streaming sur l’écriture sérielle : Dark (2017-2020) et les séries à énigme

Abstract

This article investigates the impact of streaming on serial writing, using the case of puzzle series and, more specifically, the German science fiction series Dark (Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, Netflix, 2017-2020) broadcasted on Netflix. How do we understand the critical success of series that challenge interpretation by multiplying the "cognitive dissonance" effects (Kiss & Willemsen 2018)? Is it a response to the economic imperative of renewal of forms and formats in a context of increased competition? Is it a way of translating, by intensifying them, the contradictions and dilemmas of the current world? Or is it the result of a transformation of the audiovisual landscape and digital technologies that facilitate the spatio-temporal manipulations? Without excluding other interpretations, we will defend the hypothesis that puzzle series are the sign of the streaming giants' aim to personalize their offer, on the one hand by disavowing their debt to "traditional" television, and on the other by imitating the interactivity of video games. More broadly, puzzle series question the economic and ideological stakes of this extreme form of "Complex TV" (Mittell 2015), which encourages fan investment through various means suitable for data mining. The aim is therefore to highlight the economic impact of the digital broadcasting model, which relies both on the power of the audience's collective intelligence and on that of algorithmic computation.

Keywords

• jeux vidéo
• capitalisme attentionnel
• complexité narrative
• Complex TV
• Dark
• data mining