This article presents a concept of cultural scenarios, structures that are vested in a long-term status in the Braudelian sense. They are specific matrices imprinting both in the scenarios specific to the imagination, ordering meanings in the media, and in the acts of communication played – usually unconsciously – by media users. The reconstructed scenarios include very extensive material: from ancient itineraries that are reborn in television reports after the Smolensk plane crash, through medieval opera beggars, whose rules are run in television formats like makeover shows, to metamorphic transformations in the trickster-jurodivy-celebrity-scandalist scenario. In the study of cultural scenarios, the author primarily took into account the instruments of anthropology of communication, historical anthropology and cultural archeology, he also used a conceptualization based on the triple model of Lotman-Bachtin-Guriewicz. The analyzes carried out showed that the current cultural scenarios in the media are not receptive to easy rationalizations. Their uncertain, shaky status – going beyond logic and bivalent semantics – is reflected in their users’ attitudes, suspended between a compromise sense of security and non-conformist resistance. This ambivalence perhaps raises the greatest difficulty in attempting to describe (conceptualize) them, but it seems to be the most tempting challenge, also for doctoral students from the Wrocław media research center who undertake research on cultural scenarios in their work.