This monograph from Jason Mittell is comprehensive, exciting and accessible. The scholarship is robust and authoritative and it is easy to imagine this quickly becoming an essential resource and point of reference for anyone working in contemporary US television. The primary focus and argument of Complex TV is on and about the emergence of a new kind of televisual narrative form, or the “rise of a particular model of narrative complexity on mainstream commercial American television” (5). However, it builds this argument around often brilliant close readings of The Wire (2002–8), Breaking Bad (2008–13), Lost (2004–10) and Mad Men (2007–15), and has much to offer in the way of textual analysis of these and many other programmes as well.

One of the immediately engaging aspects of Complex TV is its meta-ness. Mittell's book is structured in a way that clearly speaks to key aspects of his argument and even mirrors his subject. This is a deliberate conceit which is explicitly highlighted in the introduction:

In essence this book is a box set of over a decade's worth of scholarship and it represents a body of work that, like contemporary television, has developed in response to audiences, has been presented on multiple platforms and can be consumed in different ways. On this last point, Mittell actually states that bar the first chapter, the chronology of the book is flexible: “the rest of the chapters can be read in any order” (12). By drawing attention to the structure of the book, Mittell lays a solid foundation for his argument about developments in episodic and serial complexity in American television from the 1990s.

Mittell defines complex television narrative loosely as a kind of hybrid form that includes elements of the serial and the episodic: “not necessarily a complete merger of episodic and serial forms, but a shifting balance” (18). One early exemplar he points to is The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–), which included both “monster-of-the-week”-style episodes and a series-long narrative arc relating to the programme's “mythology,” with frequent intersections between these two modes (19). In establishing this unique “shifting balance” (18), Mittell works meticulously through the narrative possibilities and also persistent limitations of television. While it is clear that the possibility for an episode of television to deliver narrative that functions simultaneously as a self-contained story and as part of a longer story arc is something that television can do better than cinema or literature, Mittell also highlights certain residual limitations. For example, he points out that “prescribed lengths often with required breaks for advertisements” would be similar to publishers demanding “the exact same word count for every chapter of every novel, regardless of genre, style, or author” (33). Similarly, Mittell points to the fact that complex television narratives are often written without a planned conclusion – this can be both liberating and challenging for television writers but is most certainly unique to television.

Within this framework, Mittell builds a picture of a rich period of innovation and increased sophistication that has been aided in part by technological advances such as online streaming or even the DVD box set. Both of these developments have contributed to the “binge-watching” phenomenon, but the box set, Mittell points out, added prestige to television on account of the simple fact that it has allowed it to be tangibly owned: “a television program is now a tangible object that can be purchased, collected, and catalogued on your shelf, much like books, musical albums and films” (37). Complex TV, however, is also deeply concerned with the emergence of television as distinct from film and literature, rather than aspiring to be “cinematic” or “literary.” Mittell repeatedly emphasizes a belief that “such cross-media comparisons obscure rather than reveal the specificities of television's storytelling form” (18). In this respect there is a clear alignment with Elliott Logan's recent monograph Breaking Bad and Dignity: Unity and Fragmentation in the Serial Television Drama (2015), which uses analysis of that programme to argue for the unique narrative possibilities of prestige television. In order to flesh out the specific features of the complex television form, which broadly melds the serial and episodic, Mittell uses the concept of “poetics.” This is defined here as fundamentally to do with “the specific ways that texts make meaning … more than issues of content or broader cultural forces” (5).

As I said, this volume, which come to nearly four hundred pages, also contains some excellent close readings of now canonical programmes and equally astute analysis of specific tropes in contemporary television. For example, Mittell is excellent on the prominence of the “antihero” in contemporary US television and makes an astute point about how the serial form is particularly suited for this conceit. To make this point he evokes the idea of a “fictionalized Stockholm Syndrome, in which time spent with hideous characters engenders our sympathy as we start to see things from their perspective” (144). Mittell is also particularly good on The Wire, one of the programmes on which he has published previously – notably in Stephen Shapiro and Liam Kennedy's edited book The Wire: Race, Class and Genre (2013). In Complex TV, Mittell puts his expertise on The Wire to use in order to discuss the different ways in which this “shifting balance” between seriality and the episodic might manifest. While the story arcs in The Wire are always long, Mittell points out that “an episode's unity comes more from its consistent mood and tone than from a contained story” (30). Overall, this is an outstanding addition to scholarship in contemporary television and essential reading for anyone working in or interested in the field.