Between Memeability and Televisuality: The (Self-)Memefication of Television Series

This essay explores how seriality and televisuality inform and fuel meme culture. Television and streaming series not only provide material for internet memes, i.e., appropriable audio-visual extracts that circulate on social media and video-sharing platforms, but often already feature meme-like visuals themselves, e.g., visual or scenographic imitations of artwork, reenactments of movie scenes, or even entire iconographies of a media franchise. In a semi-historical approach, this essay explores these “memefications” as intertextual practices for recalling, recycling, and preserving cultural artifacts. Citing various cases in US series from an autobiographical collection of such revisualizations and elaborate referential networks in both legacy TV series and popular contemporary shows, this essay proposes a taxonomy of pre-internet memefication within and between series: intermedial, interserial, and intraserial memefications. I discuss them as aesthetic and praxeological precursors of current moving image memes such as TikToks, which similarly restage scenes, characteristics, or tropes from other shows, films, or media. As it is a key characteristic of televisuality to adopt and transform modes of representation from other media, I argue that television may have premeditated and mastered memefication before the conception of internet memes, which are now prevalent in everyday communication.