Young adults and TV series. Netflix and new forms of serial narratives for young viewers

Abstract

Nowadays, tv series are one of the major visual-narrative media: they are extremely popular and persistent and they can captivate a wide audience beyond gender and age. This trend was boosted by the success of on-demand streaming platforms, such as Netflix, where a great percentage of the target audience consists of teenagers and young adults. The present paper aims to investigate the influence of tv series for teenagers – mainly based on children’s literary tradition – on new forms of narration and fruition of stories, providing new potential risks in their usage, often connected to practices such as binge watching (watching tv series for a long time with no break). The present paper wants to offer an overview of the most common contents and formats offered by tv series for young audiences in the streaming platform and to outline new tendencies regarding a complex change in their fruition; a change that implies critical commitment and pedagogical attention so as to utilize new media avoiding foremost dangers.