Jason Mittell, Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, has written a fascinating new book, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press). “Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television,” Mittell writes, “One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming.”

Complex TV sets out to analyze the “poetics” of these complex narratives by unpacking, in great detail, the intricacies of scenes in The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Dexter, and Mad Men, to name just a few. As a television and media scholar Mittell has grown accustomed to the constraints of print culture in performing this analytic task—of having to continuously examine and interpret audio-visual material to which the reader has no direct access while on the printed page.

As a result, Mittell has done what more and more media scholars are doing, especially in collaboration with the Alliance’s partner presses: He has built a companion in Scalar comprised of the audio-visual material cited in the print version of Complex TV along with the original analysis of that material. Mittell has created a stunning companion in the process, one which offers readers multiple pathways through a rich series of high quality video clips from more than three dozen, mostly contemporary, TV shows.

In constructing the companion Mittell also took advantage of the fair use protection offered by our partner archive Critical Commons for the copyrighted material he used (see more about Critical Commons fair use advocacy). Critical Commons is an open access media archive developed specifically to facilitate the scholarly quotation of media sources as allowed by the fair use statute in U.S. Copyright law (Section 107).

See Mittell’s Scalar companion to Complex TV.