megaseries
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: megaseries
Etymology: From mega- + series.
Senses: examples: text: At 5:00, Krishnamurti speaks on “The Mind in Meditation” from Bangalore, India (1/31/71), concluding our megaseries “Krishnamurti in foreign lands.”
ref: 1980 January 16 – February, KPFK Folio, volume 22, number 1, North Hollywood, Calif.: KPFK, page 35, column 1:
text: Unfortunately, this was not as blindingly clear to the Television Management in London as it was to us and several other major projects were produced from the metropolis before the Natural History Unit at Bristol was in a position to launch its first ‘megaseries’ after many years of lobbying.
ref: 1982, Christopher Parsons, “Life on Earth”, in True to Nature: Christopher Parsons Looks Back on 25 Years of Wildlife Filming with the BBC Natural History Unit, Bar Hill, Cambs.: Patrick Stephens Ltd, →ISBN, page 308:
text: Remember the rampaging political rhetoric that accompanied ABC’s presentation of the $40 million, 14½-hour megaseries Amerika?
ref: 1987 May 29 – June 4, Mark Jurkowitz, “Don’t quote me: Duking it out: cheap shots and puff pieces”, in The Boston Phoenix, volume XVI, number 22, Boston, Mass., →ISSN, page 25, column 2:
text: And in Prelude to Foundation (Doubleday Foundation), Isaac Asimov, as we hinted decorously just a moment ago, bricked up yet another escape hatch from which any remaining life in his megaseries of long long ago might escape.
ref: 1989, John Clute, “Science Fiction Novels of the Year”, in David S[tanley] Garnett, editor, The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook Two, London: Futura Publications, →ISBN, page 306:
text: Thus Doordarshan’s megaseries, the year-long (52 one-hour episodes) serializations of India’s "classic" epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in the form of docudramas that entertain, encompass "intellectual activity" in Pocock’s sense.
ref: 1993, Lloyd I[rving] Rudolph, “[The Media and Cultural Politics] A Conceptual Space for Cultural Politics”, in Harold A[lton] Gould, Sumit Ganguly, editors, India Votes: Alliance Politics and Minority Governments in the Ninth and Tenth General Elections, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, →ISBN, page 162:
text: Which identities become relevant for politics is not predetermined by some primordial ancientness. They are crafted in benign and malignant ways in print and electronic media, in textbooks and advertising, in India’s TV megaseries and America’s talk shows, in campaign strategies, in all the places and all the ways that self and other, us and them, are represented in an expanding public culture.
ref: 1993, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Lloyd I[rving] Rudolph, “Modern Hate”, in The New Republic, Washington, D.C., →ISSN; republished in “[Violence] Looking at Ourselves”, in Carol J. Verburg, Ourselves Among Others: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers, 3rd edition, Boston, Mass.: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994, →ISBN, pages 602–603:
text: But different from all the rest is The Maids Tragedy, in which the dramatists created, some three centuries early, a plot worthy of a television megaseries and in its villainess, Evadne, the Joan Collins role.
ref: 1995, Judith Cook, “Revenge Plays and City Satires”, in The Golden Age of the English Theatre, London: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, part three, page 215:
text: Like many of the volumes in this megaseries, Blood follows a certain pattern.
ref: 1995 October, Paul Di Filippo, “[On Books] Wise Blood”, in Gardner Dozois, editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction, volume 19, number 11 (whole 236), New York, N.Y.: Dell Magazines, Inc., page 166, column 2:
text: Robert Goldberg reviews the 10-part megaseries “American Cinema,” airing on PBS in Feb 1995.
ref: 1996, “Television Programs”, in The Wall Street Journal Index 1995, Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, →ISBN, page 2261, column 3:
text: The CNN megaseries, which began five weeks ago and will not conclude till next April, might have been a sprawling bore or triumphalist rant.
ref: 2000, Kenneth Auchincloss, “The Cold War On-Screen”, in Arnold Beichman, editor, CNN’s Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy, Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, →ISBN, page 126:
text: I’m not discussing a maxiseries here; megaseries are far, far more complex and very unusual—you might write comics for 30 years and never participate in one. In fact, to my knowledge, there have been only a handful and they’ve starred just three heroes, Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman. They were possible because those good guys appear every month in several different magazines. So, although each megaseries has lasted only a year (or less) they’ve filled a lot more than the 264 story pages that normally comprise a year’s worth of any given title.
ref: 2001, Dennis O’Neil, “Megaseries”, in The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics, New York, N.Y.: Watson-Guptill Publications, →ISBN, page 104:
text: Kieman was the lead writer for the megaseries on air-traffic problems, “The Longest Day,” that won the explanatory reporting award.
ref: 2001 April 23, Sasha Ambramsky^([sic – meaning Abramsky]), “Reporters in flight and out of sight”, in Editor & Publisher, volume 134, number 17, New York, N.Y.: ASM Communications, →ISSN, page 23, column 1:
text: “In some ways, the series business is segmenting,” explains Craig Walker, Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of Scholastic Paperbacks. “Instead of there being a megaseries that everybody has to read, there is a tendency for kids to narrow down their interests. We are finding that a number of series will do well, but none to the extent that they did in the past.”
ref: 2002, Vicki Hambleton, “The Paperback Writer”, in Susan M. Tierney, editor, Children’s Writer Guide to 2002, West Redding, Conn.: Institute of Children’s Literature, →ISBN, part 1 (Publishing 2002), pages 51–52:
text: Her latest handiwork is “Dinotopia,” an $85 million, six-hour “megaseries” about a lost world of dinosaurs, which started airing Sunday night.
ref: 2002 May 20, Johnnie L. Roberts, “Prime-Time Pressure”, in Newsweek, New York, N.Y., page 47, column 1:
text: On the heels of HBO's success with the groundbreaking megaseries Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon, other networks are getting in on the act with at least three major events this season: Taken (Sci-Fi Channel) from Steven Spielberg, Masterpiece Theater's remake of The Forsyte Saga (PBS) and a new Peter Jennings/Todd Brewster panorama, In Search of America (ABC). Ranging from six to 10 episodes, these sprawling megaseries may generate significantly greater benefits for their book tie-ins than television generally affords.
ref: 2002 August 26, John-Michael Maas, “Megaseries Madness”, in Publishers Weekly, volume 249, number 34, New York, N.Y., →ISSN, archived from the original on 23 Jan 2022:
text: The objective of another megaseries, managed by Gan Yang, Wenhua: Zhongguo yu shijie (Culture: China and the world), was to translate 470 books by foreign authors, including Lacan, Foucault, Sartre, and Camus.
ref: 2004, Rong Cai, “Appropriation and Representation: The Intellectual Self in the Early 1990s”, in The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature, Honolulu, Haw.: University of Hawaiʻi Press, →ISBN, page 187:
text: Comics worth reading: Ex Machina, Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers megaseries, All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, 100 Bullets, Gotham Central, Majestic, The Unnamed Awesome Comic That Somebody Better Hire Me To Write Or Else.
ref: 2005 November, David Brothers, “Biographical Data”, in Hardcore Gamer Magazine, volume 1, number 5, Redmond, Wash.: DoubleJump Publishing, →ISSN, page 5:
text: The production of the epic megaseries Three Kingdoms, consisting of eighty-four one-hour episodes, lasted four years.
ref: 2007, Junhao Hong, “From Three Kingdoms the Novel to Three Kingdoms the Television Series: Gains, Losses, and Implications”, in Kimberly Besio, Constantine Tung, editors, Three Kingdoms and Chinese Culture (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture), Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, →ISBN, part IV (Three Kingdoms in Contemporary East Asia), page 127:
text: We explore the success of diet-related bestsellers such as Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution and Arthur Agatston’s South Beach Diet; business guides including The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, and Good to Great by Jim Collins; and priority-straightening jump-starters such as Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance, Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul megaseries.
ref: 2007, Lisa Adams, John Heath, “What We’ve Done and Why We’ve Done It”, in Why We Read What We Read: A Delightfully Opinionated Journey Through Contemporary Bestsellers, Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, Inc., →ISBN, page 16:
text: Intriguingly, this was also where the differences between the two RPG megaseries really started to become obvious. FFVII was a technological revolution, using the most advanced programming and impressive CG visuals to offer gamers a mind-boggling experience. DQVII, on the other hand, looked kind of like an amateur’s first PlayStation game, and it played almost exactly like its NES predecessors.
ref: 2007 March, Jeremy Parish, “Dragon Quest: Japan’s other never-ending fantasy”, in Electronic Gaming Monthly, number 213, New York, N.Y.: Ziff Davis Media Inc., →ISSN, page 101, column 1:
text: In 2000, the CBC produced, in English and in French, the very successful epic megaseries, Canada: A People’s History.
ref: 2008, R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, Donald B. Smith, “Contemporary Canada”, in Destinies: Canadian History since Confederation, 6th edition, Toronto, Ont.: Nelson Education, →ISBN, part four (Modern Canada, 1945 to the Present), page 562:
text: It had been sixteen years since the BBC’s Grace Wyndham Goldie wrote her internal memo about luring him back to make sociological/scientific TV programmes. Now a second note had circulated, from the science department, proposing that he should present the Corporation’s next educative megaseries.
ref: 2012, Kate Bassett, “Mid-Seventies Onwards: Operatic beginnings and The Body in Question”, in In Two Minds: A Biography of Jonathan Miller, London: Oberon Books Ltd, →ISBN, page 219:
glosses: A series that is much longer than is usually the case.