“You should’ve seen Luke!” or the multimodal encoding/decoding of the language of postmodern ‘webridized’ TV series

The aim of this paper is to investigate the postmodern multimodal language of some contemporary American TV series and its gradual hybridization with the language (and practices) of social media. The paper begins with the analysis of popular television texts that have experimented with visual/musical/narrative form in order to outline the main characteristics of their meaning-making processes. Then, it will explore the concept of “expanded transmediality” according to which audiences participate in the co-construction of narratives (Stein and Busse 2012) to highlight the top-down/bottom-up ongoing exchange in franchise storytelling and it will focus on the textual features of some fan-generated artefacts that enter into these global narrations and where fans exploit postmodern diegetic and editing forms. Finally, the paper will return to the analysis of television to investigate how the on-screen emergence of social media networks has influenced postmodern TV series in terms of their semantic and semiotic realization and/or fruition processes, giving rise to a ‘webridization’ of postmodern television textuality.