“It Plays out Like a Novel”: Mad Men e la legittimazione artistica nella serialità televisiva

Focusing on Mad Men (2007-2015), the essay starts from the assumption that the comparison established between contemporary (American) Tv series and novels is part and parcel of the strategies of legitimization that in the last twenty years have changed the perception of serial television. The suggested line of inquiry is twofold. On the one hand, the cultivation of a relationship with literary texts seems to depend on the cultural capital and the internalized dispositions of the creators, critics, and audience of the series. On the other hand, the latter’s narrative and stylistic complexity does lend itself to be analyzed through an intersemiotic comparison with the novel. Both perspectives suggest the coexistence in Mad Men of a variety of novelistic models, from the realistic to the historical novel, from the postmodern to the proto-modernist one.