There can be little doubt that the consumer society of the 20th century goes along with series and seriality (Beil, Engell, et al. 2017, 12-15). It is not surprising, therefore, that, in the middle of the 20th century, a powerful new medium emerged that can be read as a huge experiment with time and especially with the possibilities of seriality and the production of time by series. This medium, of course, is television. A comparable richness of different serial forms has never been developed anywhere else. Television shows circulate commodities as well as streams of moving images. And during the evolution of the television series, the opposition between those rooted in identity and hence in space and those rooted in difference and hence in time has been more or less systematically iterated, reiterated, differentiated, and folded back on itself (Deleuze 1969, 36-37). One might even assume that the astounding career of television happened due to the need for such a space where experiments with serial time and its forms could be undertaken and that, inversely, our thinking about seriality – even in philosophical terms – is deeply affected by the serial operations and practices of television.

Watched closely, though, television's position towards seriality, as we will develop here, differs from both the identical and the differential series. In its beginnings, television did not deliver anything stable in time.