Research on Spanish fiction television series. A critical review study (1998-2020)

This review paper assesses academic articles published about Spanish fictional television series in scientific journals indexed in multidisciplinary databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Dialnet between 1998 and 2020. A combined quantitative and qualitative method of analysis based on the SALSA Framework was used, in order to build a systematic bibliographic review. The results showed that the most common studies were those about the representation proposed in the fictional series about certain groups or social settings. Other approaches referred to the development of television fiction genres, adaptations, as well as to audiences and how audiences had received the series. Innovative research pointed to the emerging themes of transmediality, participatory audiences, hybrid studies that explained the content from production and authorship, and feminist works. Among the gaps noted were approaches that addressed the audiovisual language and the aesthetics of television fiction as research opportunities.