Everybody Makes it Until They Don't - Serial Television and Zombies

Talk by Maria Sulimma, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin, DFG-Forschungsgruppe 1091 ?Ästhetik und Praxis populärer Serialität?.
 
Before the US-American cable television channel AMC premiered the series The Walking Dead on Halloween in 2010, critics and audiences had wondered whether a narrative about zombies would work in the serial, ongoing form of television. Readers of the comic series that the television show is based on were quick to point out the appeal of what would grow into a cross-media franchise (comics, television, games, and novels): The stories that The Walking Dead tell do not attempt to answer or explain the cause of the zombies; instead, the focus is on the survival, on the organization of everyday life, and on social interaction in communities formed to survive in the hostile surroundings of a zombie apocalypse.
 
The talk will investigate seriality and transmedia storytelling as central dynamics, its reception practices as well as production contexts.
 
We will screen one episode of The Walking Dead after the talk.
 
In English
 
In cooperation with the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin, and the DFG-Forschungsgruppe 1091 ?Ästhetik und Praxis populärer Serialität?, the Institut für Medienwissenschaft der Universität Tübingen and Auswärtiges Amt Berlin