Isadora García Avis, Tomás Atarama-Rojas

TELEVISION SITCOMS THROUGH THE DECADES: INTERTEXTUAL DIALOGUE IN MARVEL’S WANDAVISION

Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Spain, Universidad de Piura, Peru

In the past few decades, transmedia storytelling has become more and more prominent, acquiring
relevance as a narrative strategy that maximizes the potentialities of communication ecosystems
(Scolari, 2013), in which audiences become “hunters and gatherers” of content (Jenkins, 2006) in
order to enhance their personal experience with a story (and its storyworld). Within this context,
storytellers design complex narrative constructions, encouraging their audiences to establish
intertextual references between different texts, and providing them with new ways to interpret and to
enjoy a given story (Ryan, 2013).

This phenomenon can be observed in the case of WandaVision (Disney+, 2021), a TV series that
belongs to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel has developed a wide transmedia franchise, with
stories disseminated across many different media, and with a high level of active audience
participation (Atarama-Rojas, 2023). Even though most of the intertextual connections set up by
Marvel are established across their own graphic novels, video games, TV series and films,
WandaVision is specially innovative, because it also opens up a new type of intertextual dialogue,
unique within this storyworld. By using the format of the television sitcom as an integral part of its
story, and as a key tool in the development of its main character, the diegetic universe of this TV
series invites audiences to establish new intertextual connections with the very concept of the family
sitcom itself.

This research paper will reflect on the role of intertextual dialogue as a screenwriting resource that
can enhance the narrative of transmedia stories. Using WandaVision as a case study, the analysis of its
intertextuality will be two-fold. Firstly, the paper will examine the references and narrative
connections that can be found between this TV series and other works within the Marvel universe.
Secondly, the central role that the sitcom format plays within the story will also be analyzed, focusing
on the aesthetic and narrative references made to American sitcoms from different decades.
Ultimately, this study aims to open up new horizons for research on intertextuality in the realm of
transmedia franchises, going beyond the dialogic connections established within a specific
storyworld or narrative universe. In the case of WandaVision, as this study will demonstrate, the
audience’s television culture and knowledge of the sitcom format may also inform their viewing
experience, proposing new intertextual dialogues that can amplify and enrich their involvement with
the Marvel franchise as a whole.

Isadora García Avis is Lecturer in Audiovisual Narrative at the School of Communication
Sciences, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain), where she teaches modules
on film and television narrative, screenwriting for television formats and transmedia storytelling.
She obtained her PhD at the University of Navarra (Spain), with a doctoral dissertation on
transcultural remakes in television. Her thesis was awarded the First Prize of Research in
Audiovisual Communication, issued by the Audiovisual Council of Catalunya. Her main
academic interests focus on adaptation studies, screenwriting, and television formats (more
specifically, scripted series). Her research tends to have a transcultural scope, and it usually
combines textual and hermeneutical analysis of audiovisual narratives with other qualitative
methods, like in-depth interviews with screenwriters and producers. She is a member of the
Executive Council of the Screenwriting Research Network since September 2021.

Tomás Atarama-Rojas is an associate professor of screenwriting and transmedia storytelling at
the School of Communication Sciences, Universidad de Piura (Peru), where he teaches modules
on film narrative, screenwriting and transmedia storytelling. He obtained his PhD at the
Universidad de los Andes (Chile), with a doctoral dissertation on transmedia storytelling and
social audience in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). His research has been focused on new
formats of narrative in the digital environment and on the relevance of audiences’ participation
on social media from a transmedia storytelling strategy perspective.