The Television Title Sequence

Fictional television series are increasingly becoming recognized as important cultural products with which viewers engage using a variety of media platforms such as television broadcasts, DVD box sets, Internet downloads/streaming, and so on. ² Discourse-oriented studies of such series have only recently started to emerge (e.g. Bednarek, 2010; Piazza, Bednarek, & Rossi, 2011; Richardson, 2010). So far, the main focus of such studies has been on the linguistics of television series and on their characters and narratives. In contrast, this chapter approaches television series from the perspective of critical multimodal analysis and focuses on data that are not part of the televisual narrative per se—the television title sequence (TTS). The television title sequence is a sequence of moving images, typically accompanied by music, which precedes each episode of a television series and is used throughout a season in identical format. I will first introduce key characteristics of the TTS before briefly discussing findings from a quantitative survey of 50 contemporary TTSs. I then move on to a qualitative analysis of the TTS for the musical television comedy Flight of the Conchords (Bobin, Clement, McKenzie, Miller, & Smiley, 2007–2009), which is the main focus of this chapter. I explore this TTS from a multimodal and from a critical perspective, drawing on Machin and Thornborrow (2003) in investigating the discursive practices of a contemporary commercial brand.