UC Berkeley professor Mark Sandberg holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Film and Media and Scandinavian

The advent of social media within post-9/11 American culture has created conditions in which long-form serial television has flourished. If a central experience of the current low-grade emergency culture in the US is the potential for traumatic information to reach us at any moment, serial television offers the opposite-the pleasures of delay, the incremental leak of narrative information, the depiction of characters who know less than we do. This combined lecture and television clip screening-using the series Mad Men as a point of departure-surveys recent serial television's creation of a spoiler-sensitive culture and explains what is at stake.