When I look at today's landscape of television series, I see not just entertainment but an archaeological map of human storytelling. Here lie the strata of Homer, the imprints of Shakespearean drama, even the traces of medieval chronicles. Some series manage to awaken the very same mechanisms that once kept our ancestors listening for hours to storytellers by the fire. Others falter precisely because they ignore these ancient codes.
The Archetype of the Endless Journey
Take the Odyssey – perhaps the very first «series» in human history. Homer gave us the structure we now call the «hero's journey», but with one crucial twist: each of Odysseus's stops was a self-contained tale, and yet all were tied together by the thread of his return home.
Modern long-running shows use the same principle. Supernatural lasted fifteen seasons because the Winchester brothers, like modern Odysseuses, moved from town to town solving local problems within a grander mythology. Each episode was its own myth, yet the overarching journey gave the story an epic resonance.
Compare this with series that try to stretch a single storyline across multiple seasons without intermediate «stops». They often sink into their own mythology, losing the viewer somewhere along the way.
The Ritual Nature of Watching
Anthropologists know: ritual binds us more strongly than content. The ancient Eleusinian Mysteries drew people not only with the promise of revelation but with the very act of repeated participation in sacred performance.
Compelling series always create a ritual of viewing. At its peak, Game of Thrones became a modern version of medieval chronicles – people gathered on Sundays, debated events, spun theories. It was not mere content consumption, but participation in collective mythmaking.
Gatiss and Moffat's Sherlock turned watching into a detective game. Each episode carried puzzles for viewers to unravel between seasons. The three-year breaks only heightened the ritual – like ancient festivals awaited year after year.
Series that drop entire seasons at once on streaming platforms often lack this ritual element. They are binged over a weekend and forgotten within days.
Collective Memory and Mythological Layers
Successful series work like a palimpsest – an ancient parchment overwritten with new text, while the old layers still glimmer beneath the ink.
David Lynch's Twin Peaks is a classic palimpsest. Beneath the detective story lies a soap opera; beneath that, a mystical thriller; deeper still, the archetypes of American folklore. Each viewer found a layer to read, but all layers operated at once.
Westworld employs the same principle, but at the meta level. A story of robots in a theme park becomes a parable about the nature of consciousness, built on the scaffolding of ancient tragedy. No wonder the creators constantly quote Greek authors – they deliberately construct a modern myth upon the foundations of classical drama.
The Archetype of the Collective Hero
One of the great discoveries of modern serial storytelling is the rejection of a single protagonist in favor of the ensemble. This is a return to the ancient tradition of choral lyric, where truth arose not from one voice but from a polyphony.
Lost introduced a new kind of mystery – not «what will happen to the hero», but «how are all these people connected»? Each character was a shard of a larger mosaic, and the viewer became an archaeologist piecing together the whole.
The Sopranos perfected this principle. Tony Soprano stood at the center, but the series functioned as a family saga, where every character carried part of the larger story about the transformation of American society. It resembled Icelandic sagas, where what mattered was not the fate of one hero but the destiny of an entire clan across generations.
Unfinishedness as a Principle
The paradox of engrossing series: they hold us precisely by withholding final answers. It is as old as the mystery cults – initiation never ends, each new level unveils deeper secrets.
The X-Files turned this into a formula. Every answered question spawned two new ones. Viewers fell in love not with the solutions but with the very act of seeking truth. As in alchemy, it was not the philosopher's stone that mattered but the Great Work itself.
Unsuccessful series often make the opposite mistake: either offering answers too simple, or setting up mysteries that never had solutions. In the first case, interest evaporates after the reveal; in the second, the audience realizes it has been deceived and walks away in distrust.
Time Loops and Cyclical Time
Modern physics speaks of linear time, but human consciousness still thinks in cycles. The seasonality of television is no accident, but a reflection of the ancient sense of time as an endless rhythm of death and rebirth.
True Detective embraces this cyclical nature deliberately. Each season tells a new story, but the philosophical frame remains the same. It is like the annual cycle of mysteries: the actors change, yet the archetypal drama endures.
Noah Hawley's Fargo takes this principle to perfection. Each season tells of ordinary people thrown into extreme circumstances, but always in a different temporal layer. The pleasure lies not in novelty but in variation on a familiar theme – like hearing folk tales, where the structure is known yet each telling reveals fresh nuances.
The Collective Unconscious in the Age of Streaming
Jung spoke of the collective unconscious as a reservoir of archetypes shared by all humanity. The internet age has created a new form of collective unconscious – fan communities that do not merely consume content but actively help shape it.
Sherlock became a phenomenon precisely because its creators listened to fan reactions while writing new seasons. It was not just a show but a collective detective game where the viewers became co-authors.
Unsuccessful series often ignore this interactive nature of modern content consumption. They create closed worlds that leave no room for the viewer's participation in mythmaking.
The Memory of Genre and the Evolution of Form
Every genre carries the memory of its past incarnations. Successful series know how to play with that memory – not by copying, but by reinterpreting.
Breaking Bad works like an ancient tragedy: a noble man makes a choice that inevitably leads to his downfall. But Gilligan set this structure against the backdrop of the American middle-class dream. The result was a modern Oedipus Rex in the suburbs of Albuquerque.
«Homer would have been proud», I thought, as Walter White uttered his final «I did it for me». It was a confession that could have belonged in any Greek tragedy.
The Alchemy of Modern Mythmaking
In the end, captivating series are not just products of the entertainment industry but continuations of the ancient tradition of collective mythmaking. They use the same mechanisms that worked thousands of years ago: archetypal plots, ritual regularity, collective participation in meaning-making.
The series that understand this create not just stories but new mythology. Those that ignore it remain mere television products – technically polished, perhaps, but lacking the magic that turns screen time into sacred time.
Everything new is old, but with a filter. And the best shows of our age are ancient stories told through HD cameras and serialized form. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, that is the beauty of human culture – we keep telling the same stories, but each generation finds its own way of telling them.
