Serial Jewelry. The Role of Pop Songs in the Opening Titles of TV series

In the last few years, title sequences in quality television series have become a genre on its own which can often be compared to a work of art. By opening the way to the immersive emotional experiences of the episodes, the opening titles epitomize - and often improve - the visual, narrative and emotional style of the series as a whole. Although some research has been done about narrative functions of soundtracks in quality television series, some work is still to be done on the multi-faceted role of pop songs in the opening credits. The paper will focus on the effects of the combination of lyrics, music and images in a serialized short format, which is quite different from the narrative and aesthetic functions both of the videoclip and of the opening titles in films. Starting from the classical Genette’s definition of paratext, some examples will show how the aural dimension of music joined to the meaning of lyrics can contribute to build up a dense - and sometimes ambivalent - serialized audiovisual text, whose effects can be either coherent with or divergent from the meaning of the series as a whole.