 Welcome back to our second chapter. During our first chapter, we have looked at how classic stories are defined and designed in general, with a first introduction to what makes stories tick and where storytelling comes from. The upcoming two weeks, we will be talking about serial storytelling rather than the one-offs and singular stories many classic novels and movies offer. We start with a look at a storytelling medium that in recent years has reached new heights in audience dimensions, critical attention, diversification, and production values. We're talking about TV series. Why? Apart from the aspects just mentioned and dominating many viewers' hearts, we can learn a lot from TV series about how to tell serial stories not only on TV, but also on the web, in literature, games, and in transmedia. And also, as many of you might be, I'm a fan. To discuss and analyze TV series, we have talked to two experts on the topic. Rebecca Ahlen, head of digital at Ufa Serial Drama, here in Potsdam, Babelsberg, and Des Doyle, who's the director of the upcoming documentary Showrunners. Having spent his last years interviewing US TV show creators such as Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof of Lost, and many, really many others. As reality, or rather scripted reality series, today are in many ways making use of similar dramaturgic narration techniques as presented in purely fictional formats. We will focus today on the latter, fictional storytelling type. That means, weeklies like The Mentalist, The Good Wife, Game of Thrones and Dexter from the US, or Danish show Borgen, or dailies like German longtime favorite Daily Drama, Good Times, Bad Times. So what really is the difference between a series and a story like in a movie or a novel without any prequels or sequels? The biggest difference, I suppose, is that novels or films, even video games to some extent at the moment, are stories that are to a certain extent one-offs. So you watch a film, you get a story with beginning, middle and end. You read a book, you get a beginning and middle and end. Even in a series of books that continues on, there can be gaps of years between the stories that you're dealing with. Andrew Marlowe, who is the creator and showrunner on Castle, said something really interesting to me. And I thought it was very interesting from his background as well because he started as a screenwriter. He did Air Force One and a couple of other very successful movies as well. But he found the difference with television was that you can have an extended conversation with the culture, which is a really interesting thing that you can do. You can go into a depth of story and character that I think it's very difficult to achieve in those other formats. And also I think the people, audiences viewing, audiences who engage in storytelling on that major can make a much stronger emotional connection or an empathetic connection with the characters and the stories, especially something that's been delivered to them once a week, or if they're binging on a box set and catching up on a show, something where they can literally delve into it for hours at a time if they want to do that. And I think that's probably the most fundamental difference. And it gives people who are writing stories and television an option to be as intricate and detailed as they want to be or not, or as the network will let them be, which is another consideration. But which is why you can have very long ongoing serial storytelling, like you had in a lot of very deep mythologies and arcs, which you can do in books as well. But like I say with Game of Thrones, you've got an awful lot of people who are just hoping that George Oramarton doesn't die before he gets to the end of the story, which he's got, he won't. But it does offer that kind of extended conversation that I think they get a different level of value out of it. In this chapter, we want to have a closer look at what this extended conversation, this chance to create more detailed stories and characters, really means. And how it presents itself in internationally known media formats. As it would be wrong to lump together all serial formats, obviously, we'll have a closer look at different narrative structures first.