7. Conclusion : Telefilm, Cross-Media Migration, and the Demise of the Film Serial

Abstract

The conclusion offers an outlook past the 1940s. It places film serials in the context of the shifting cinema landscape in the 1940s and 1950s and the rise of television. The chapter compares the viewer address of film serials to television’s programming in terms of a ‘segmented flow’ and argues that film serials imagined and practiced a televisual mediality before the advent of TV. Serials and television thus became convergent media, which counters the prevalent notion that television killed film serials. The chapter further stresses the adaptability of the film-serial form to varying exhibition and distribution contexts, which helps to explain their continuous reappearance in the multiple ‘new media’ in the second half of the twentieth century and in the digital culture of the twenty-first century.