Histories travel; memories emerge: Netflix’s profile pages as cohesive texts communicating and promoting history-‎based drama

Abstract

Netflix establishes itself as a giant digital storyteller and cultural-memory shaper, achieving phenomenal success in ‎promoting history-based drama. Central to this are the platform’s media profile pages which function as cohesive promotional and entertaining micronarratives. Situated within a broader project exploring how these pages deliver their promotional narrative content, this study continues efforts initiated through a primary material-dimension investigation of the pages’ autonomous representational resources to propose that their cohesive multimodal composites interact semiotically to produce the higher-order signification and performativity through which they communicate with viewers. The study employs Royce’s analytical framework of intersemiotic complementarity to examine the patterns created by the multimodal resources across 23 history-based TV show profile pages. These pages are found to offer viewers a sense of presentism through networks of ties that enable the represented story worlds and historical nuances to resonate with current individual and social contexts. Reliance on intersemiotic collocation ties, followed by hyponymy and synonymy, depicts story worlds with high delicacy and dynamism. Strategic antonymy and repetition add balanced tension, giving the macro-narratives a neutral sense of entertainment and intrigue, especially when ethnocultural sensitivities are involved, thereby fostering viewing and purchasing intentions.