Opinioni non richieste. Il culto ragionato delle serie televisive in Italia, tra quotidiani e critica online

Over the past twenty years television serial narratives have gained success, cultural legitimation and critical attention. Related to such tendencies, we have witnessed in Italy a discrepancy between Italian networks’ programming policies and audiences’ routines of consumption. On the one hand, this landscape has led to an increasing presence of news and public discourses on serial narratives; on the other hand it has led to the formation of communities and online spaces in which viewers, fans and enthusiasts exchange opinions, comments and interpretations. The purpose of my research is to explore Italian official and non-official critical discourse on contemporary TV series. Official, or institutional spaces of discourse include newspapers and professional online magazines; non-official, or amateur spaces of discourse include blogs and websites, which are organized and managed by expert viewers and fans. The project aims to answer to the following research questions: - What impact did fans and amateur critics’ expertise and knowledges have on official discourses - What impact did they have on TV series’ dynamics of circulation? - Is it possible to pinpoint a guiding role in such expert viewers and amateur critics? The thesis argues that while TV criticism is mostly absent from the newspapers, it significantly finds a prominent status on fan websites, which re-elaborate the U.S. and U.K. recap model. The research develops into three main steps: first, an overview of the main studies on contemporary television serial narratives, both national and international; second, an overview of the media environment in the digital era, focusing especially on the changes and evolutions of television and viewership; third, the analysis of cultural journalism and television criticism, both on newspapers and online. The analysis of four case studies complete the research. The two institutional case studies are Italian newspapers «La Repubblica» and «Corriere della Sera», during the period between 2007 and 2013; the two amateur cases are the websites «Serialmente» and «Seriangolo».