Television's World(s), Meet Ours Pt. 1

Television is composed of two interrelated but distinct fictional worlds. One exists on the level of individual programming, in the form of a show’s own diegetic world. These singular worlds proliferate within the scope of television as a whole, but they don’t remain separate. They are in fact part of the fictional world of television itself, an enclosed world encompassing the interconnected diegetic realities of all television programming. Television gives us the tools to understand the logic of its world, which is one of intertextuality, connectivity, and referentiality. It incites us to see the television world as interconnected, as something comprehensible and graspable. By understanding the world of television as a closed circuit we are encouraged to think of reality as a closed circuit too. Television shrinks the world for us, transforming our sense of reality into something more closely resembling its own fictional universe.

Each episode of Bored to Death begins with the image of a book titled Bored to Death, which opens up into the animated opening credits, as words jump off the page to form the shapes of the main characters and spell out the actors’ names.

Then, at the end of the clip, we move into the book and the words explode in front of us, at which point the show begins, moving from animation to “reality.” As the camera zooms into the pages of the novel, we enter the show’s diegetic universe. In his essay “What If?: Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” Jeffrey Sconce describes how shows construct their own enclosed fictional worlds, such as this one. Via the cumulative narrative mode—which contains episodic stories balanced within a long-term narrative arc—series “create worlds that viewers gradually feel they inhabit along with the characters” (Sconce 95). The visual effect of Bored to Death’s opening sequence is to draw us into the space of the show’s world every time we watch. It provides a buffer, a liminal televisual space that orients us and pulls us into the animated, clearly fictional world of the book before the words dissolve, the space between book and us collapses, and the episode begins.

The novel is a natural image for a “quality” television show of this type, for television has become more novelistic in its structure and plotting. Series now focus on “crafting and maintaining ever more complex narrative universes, a form of ‘world building’ that has allowed for wholly new modes of narration and that suggests new forms of audience engagement” (Sconce 95). In cultivating a comprehensive and novelistic diegetic world, Bored to Death propagates the concept of television viewing as a literary experience.

The viewer is thus constructed as a reader, which is part of the show's logic--we are reading and entering its world rather than passively viewing it. This is also part of the show's aesthetic: its ideal audience is the literary public, since the show inhabits a literary world made up of highbrow magazine editors, Raymond Chandler novels, and casual references to semi-obscure authors. When viewers enter the novel in the opening sequence, they engage in a distinctly literary experience that involves long-term investment and commitment in order that they may fully understand the show's fictional world. The cumulative narrative format "allows new and/or sporadic viewers to enjoy the standalone story of a particular episode while also rewarding more dedicated, long-term viewers for their sustained interest in the overall series" (Sconce 98). All are welcome to join, but if we are to finish the novel, to comprehend the entirety of the show's universe, we must don our reading caps. The opening sequence trains us to do so.