Introduction. Cultural Memory and the Transmedia Semiosphere

The miniseries Chernobyl (HBO-SKY, 2019), about the nuclear disaster that occurred at the nuclear power plant of the same name in 1986, took the viewer back to the horror generated by the largest catastrophe in history caused by the human species to date. Created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, Chernobyl is a fictionalized account of the causes and consequences of the catastrophe. TV seriality, as Chernobyl teaches us, thrives on the intermedial and transmedia relations that are created through the paratexts, the commentaries, the reinterpretations and interpretations that circulate on the web, in the transmedia storytelling of the Western semiosphere (to limit ourselves to this part of the world).
We could argue in terms of a broad and dynamic, extended and time-varying “media ecosystem” (Innocenti, Pescatore and Rosati 2015): a universe containing texts and paratexts, fictional and nonfictional, and media products of different types, from the critical to the more ludic. Concerning the Chernobyl miniseries, one should consider not only promotional, paratextual, and commentary texts but every fictional or non-fictional media product, for example, all films dedicated to the Chernobyl tragedy and documentary media products, journalistic reportage, and so on. Speaking of documentary media products related to the Chernobyl disaster, an ecosystem should include, for example, direct visual and audiovisual sources such as photographs or film footage from the time of the disaster or other footage, including television reportage shows and later interviews with direct witnesses, journalistic or investigative literature, or indirect sources such as later scientific articles and historical or more popular books.
A miniseries like Chernobyl also teaches us something about the “forms of cultural memory” (Assmann 2011 [1999]), involving the relationship between “storage memory” and “functional memory.”