Cultural differences in the retelling of television fiction

Abstract

Within the broader study of how viewers from different cultures interpret American television texts, this article examines differences in viewers’ retellings of an episode of Dallas. In settings designed to simulate normal viewing circumstances, small homogeneous groups from five distinct cultural backgrounds watched an episode and then were asked how they would retell the story to someone who had not seen the show. The coding of the group retellings reveals correlations between ethnicity and choice of narrative form—classified as “linear,” “segmented,” or “thematic"—which, in turn, reflect viewers’ perceptions of the program and their own worlds.