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In:Transmedia in Translation and Transculturation
Edited by Vasso Giannakopoulou and Elin Sütiste
[Benjamins Translation Library 167] 2025
► pp. 32–54

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A postmodern western or a cinematic TV series?

Breaking Bad between intermediality and intersemiotic translation

 | University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Published online: 20 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.167.02dus
Abstract
This work examines some rhetorical and sociosemiotic operations that contribute to create contemporary narrative ecosystems, focusing on Breaking Bad (AMC 2008–13), a TV series that has often been defined as both “cinematic” and a “postmodern western,” while it opens itself up to intertextual relations with Leone’s, Friedkin’s, and Coppola’s movies, and to intermedial relations with music videos, commercials, and video games.
Through this case study I explore items of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2006), intersemiotic translation, intertextuality and intermediality (Rajewsky 2005), which work by crossing the borders between media and building a broader idea of “transmediality” (Dusi 2020; Lotman [1984] 2005; [1992] 2009; Saldre and Torop 2012).
Nowadays, contemporary TV series are studied as “complex TV” or “serial medial ecosystems” (Mittell 2015; Pescatore 2018). This essay discusses how these storyworlds become at the same time dynamic “possible worlds” (Eco 1979; Ryan 2014) and the result of many post-media practices of bricolage and remix (Dusi and Grignaffini 2020; Manovich 2013).
Article outline
  • Complex TV and medial ecosystems
  • An expanded serial universe
  • Space of culture: Texts, discourse, media
  • Breaking Bad between Friedkin and Leone
  • Intermediality in Breaking Bad teasers
  • Breaking Bad and transtextuality
  • Transmediality and crossmediality in Breaking Bad
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (79)
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