| Summary: | In order to incite the spectator to need to know the continuation of the story, serials employ a very precise, almost mechanical form of manipulation, founded upon the very redondancy of which the genre is so often reproached. In Éloge de Monte-Cristo, Umberto Eco writes, “we discover that the horrible stylistic intemperances [the redundancies] are, of course, ‘fillers,’ but that they do have a structural value, like graphite rods in nuclear reactors, slowing the rhythm to make our expectations more nagging, our predictions more risky”. Through the study of a particular case of redundancy, the teaser, we will show how authors of TV series manipulate our expectations and predictions. The teaser is an integral technique of anticipation; its function is to prepare for and to lay out the coming action. This “preparation”, formed through one or more teaser, takes the form of an echo, but an echo “in reverse”, the most important information coming last. We will study narrative teasers that aim to orient the spectators’ desires, short-term teasers (which play out within the episode), then teasers concerning multiple episodes by examining two classics: the creation of desire that characters enter into a romantic relationship and the creation of the desire that some character be the murderer, or rather “the bad guy”. Accordingly, we will address the question of the spectator’s need for confirmation, which would seem almost more fundamental than the need to be surprised. Each type of teaser will be illustrated by an example from Melrose Place and coupled with a second example from another series to verify the validity of the procedure.
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