Season Greeting’s: Between Special Events and Repetition from Television to Streaming Platforms

In this contribution, three aspects of the relationship between series and television studies will be examined: Firstly, a few examples of television episodes are taken up to outline how the annual cycle and modes of presentation used in television series intertwine. Particular attention will be paid to episodes around and on holidays. Secondly, I discuss two opposing approaches that have been central in television research to date, namely the approach of thinking about program structure as serial repetition on the one hand and the concept of media events on the other hand. Discussing holiday episodes, I want to show how these two apparently opposing concepts converge in a particulary way and at a certain time. Thirdly, it will be illustrated how the interlocking of series and special events can also be made productive for an analysis of streaming platform series, whose publication and reception are supposedly independent of seasonally connected events.