<i>True Detective</i> Stories: Media Textuality and the Anthology Format between Remediation and Transmedia Narratives

Through the analysis of the recent HBO first season TV series True Detective (2014-), the essays focuses on the renewed anthology format of contemporary seriality as a way to inscribe the form of the novel in the transmedia imagination and its narrative models. While the first part of the essay concentrates on Media and Literary Studies’ debates on the statute of media texts, their materiality and the transformations of their contents in the participatory and convergent culture of prosumers, the second part is devoted to an in-depth reading of some of the main features of True Detective’s first season: from the ways it remediates many other genres and media, to how – as an audiovisual sychretyc text - it plays with dialogues, cinematography, music and its temporal, spatial and seeing enunciative strategies and positions in order to construct a (quasi)dystopic narrative of America as an after-image, or, better, a post-collapse America and its Southern Gothic landscapes. In the lst paragraph, this writing briefly engages with how this particular format of TV series helps developing narrative models that fan we bpages and fanfic archives are still struggling not so much to comprehend, but to actually transform into an expanded textuality able to tell a more ‘true’ story