Fiction and Science in the Argentine Serial Narrative

Abstract

Cromo, the Argentine television series (Lucía Puenzo, Nicolás Puenzo and Pablo Fendrik, TV Pública: 2015) arises within a special period marked by legislative, technological, and institutional changes that allow the development of an unprecedented renewal in the national panorama of the television fiction in general and serial narrative in particular. From a methodological point of view, this article proposes to analyze the narrative construction of the series –the introduction of the characters, the presentation of the main spaces that host the action, the central conflict–, from their relationship with classic film genres like the melodrama and the police and its mediation with the scientific intertext. In a second instance, the objective is to highlight the author's imprint of one of its directors (Lucía Puenzo) in terms of the poetics previously developed in her feature films –XXY (XXY, 2008) and El médico alemán (Wakolda, 2013)– and by finally, to examine the impact of the series in terms of its marked "cinematographic value", a quality highlighted by the intrigue, the assimilation of cinematographic genres, and the chosen natural sites. This proposed approach, added to the context in which Cromo is registered, allows it to be located at the beginning of a change in production, distribution and exhibition of the television serial narrative, which representation of a socio-environmental conflict can be read as the embodiment of a period symptom.