A Poetics of the Popular Film Series: How the James Bond Films Tell Continuing Stories Differently Colin Burnett (bio) for David Bordwell Introduction: Poetics, Series Storytelling, and James Bond Over the last twenty years, film and media narratologists have made major strides in a collective effort to shed light on how popular media tell stories. This scholarship has emphasized new as well as old—both ambitious storytelling forms of recent years and antecedent ones from the histories of literature, cinema, television, gaming, and comics. Scholars of these various media have made significant breakthroughs on such phenomena as iterative, serial, transmedia, and interactive storytelling, as well as on industry strategies like media mixing, world-building and -sharing, rebooting, remaking, and the production of cycles and sequels, assessing their impact on the shape and feel of popular stories.1 In-depth case studies have led the way, exploring the narrative innovations of soap operas, role-playing games, feature-length film series, and children's trading cards. This research, while fine-grained, seeks to understand the big picture, eschewing purely formalist methods which isolate individual texts and media from their surroundings in favor of approaches which illuminate how form circulates. Film and media scholars currently situate storytelling in relation to social and market structures, industry ecosystems, franchise business strategies, networked fan communities, and the habits, passions, and skills [End Page 1] of the broader public. Not only is this scholarship now highly attuned to the nuances of narrative form itself, especially in terms of continuing narratives, as we will see; but it relies on refined contextual frameworks to ground studies of form in an array of economic, social, cultural, and psychological considerations. If we look to its underlying commitments, this trend in film and media narratology bears the markers of a school of thought known as historical poetics—an expanded and in some ways engaged version described by Henry Jenkins in his 1995 essay ("Historical Poetics" 101). Its commitments vis-à-vis style and form are straightforward but principled. Historical poetics as Jenkins conceives it takes an "investigatory" approach driven by both question-based research and a desire to "liberate" studies of the popular through a principled upsetting of prevailing assumptions—views about what constitutes 'high' and 'low,' 'quality' and 'primitive,' 'conventional' and 'vanguard,' and 'complex' and 'simple' within media-culture (101, 106). Explicitly and implicitly, film and media narratologists are overturning these and other cultural hierarchies. Some, for instance, are blurring the analytical lines that once separated "Peak TV" from feminized daytime shows, revealing formal commonalities among genres once thought to be divided by levels of ambition and the audiences to which they appeal (Levine and Newman 2011). Others—to cite just one additional case—have uncoupled the notion of formal experimentation from avant-garde and other elite genres like art cinema and art TV in order to discover true innovation in 'amateur,' user-generated, and mainstream cultural production as well (Bordwell, Perplexing Plots 9–10). Similarly, this narratology of popular media has fundamentally rethought how we take pleasure in continuing narratives, blurring yet more narratological lines, namely those that divide serial from episodic storytelling. If critics and scholars once employed 'serial' and 'episodic' to describe a simple binary choice—a series will rely on either connected stories (serial storytelling) or standalone ones (episodic storytelling)—this strain of film and media narratology has rediscovered the creative flexibility of these forms, in comics (e.g., Meyers 87–102), short stories (e.g., Pagello 27), video games (e.g., Dena 3; Jaagola 160–2), TV shows (e.g., Newcomb 24; Sconce 97–100; Mittell 22; Hills 248), and, as we will see, film series. Scarcely as simple as they once seemed, serial and episodic [End Page 2] structures, as we now know, are comprised of clusters of distinct but combinable creative strategies sometimes operating at several narrative levels within series. Studies of film series, the focus of this article, have contributed significantly to this push for a more refined narratology of popular series. In a 2019 essay, for example, William Proctor argues that a mixture of episodic and serial form shapes the global and mid-level structures (as I call them) of the Universal Classic...