ABSTRACT:This article discusses three strategies that TV shows have increasingly employed in recent years to produce what Jason Mittell, in an essay that marked the beginning of his thoughts on the issue, has called "narrative complexity": unreliable narration, counterfictional scenarios, and ellipses and anachronological narration. It uses the last minutes of "The Wheel," the final episode of the first season of AMC's Mad Men (2007–15), as its primary example. More specifically, this article proposes three different interpretations of the final moments of that episode. These readings have in common that they underline one of Mittell's central claims, namely that serial television shifts comprehension processes toward conscious hypotheses in what he describes as "operational aesthetic." However, the article will also assume a broader perspective throughout and demonstrate that the three interpretations it develops are instances of more widely spread phenomena that merit far more attention than a single article can provide. Thus, the article offers, on the one hand, a close reading of an episode of Mad Men against the background of the early seasons of the show, but, on the other, it also identifies three topics for further fruitful research on television narrative more generally.

中文翻译：

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三思而后行：疯子的“车轮”与电视叙事的未来研究

摘要：本文讨论了近年来电视节目越来越多地采用三种策略来制作杰森·米特尔（Jason Mittell）在一篇标志着他对这个问题的思考开始的文章中所说的“叙事复杂性”：不可靠的叙事、反虚构的场景和省略号和不合时宜的叙述。它使用 AMC 广告狂人 (2007–15) 第一季​​的最后一集“The Wheel”的最后几分钟作为主要示例。更具体地说，本文对那一集的最后时刻提出了三种不同的解释。这些解读的共同点是，它们强调了米特尔的核心主张之一，即连续电视将理解过程转向他所描述的“操作美学”中的有意识假设。然而，文章还将自始至终假设一个更广泛的视角，并证明它所发展的三种解释是更广泛传播的现象的实例，值得比一篇文章所能提供的更多关注。因此，该文章一方面提供了以该剧早期季节为背景的一集《广告狂人》的详细阅读，但另一方面，它也确定了三个主题，以进一步对电视叙事进行卓有成效的研究。一般来说。