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Archives: c3
December 2, 2011
Global Cities and the Future of EntertainmentThis year's Futures of Entertainment 5 conference launched with a special event, hosted by the MIT Communications Forum, which specifically highlighted the international dimensions of our work, and it closed with a Technobrega performance at one of Cambridge's hotter night clubs. Both reflect our ongoing engagement with the cultures of Brazil and specifically with the City of Rio. Early in the Creative Cities event, my good friend, Mauricio Mota, Chief Storytelling Officer for The Alchemists, a transmedia company based in Rio and Los Angeles, took to the stage to share a personal message to the attendees from the Mayor of Rio. During my trip to Brazil last summer, Mauricio and I sat down with the Mayor to discuss his vision for the future of the city, which will be playing host to the Olympics and the World Cup over the next few years, and which has been undergoing dramatic changes in terms of the development of its economic and media infrastructure. Over the course of this trip, we hatched a plan together to develop a Center for the Futures of Entertainment in Rio, which would bring the best of what we've been doing at MIT and USC to Latin America. The Mayor quickly got the vision of what we wanted to accomplish and jumped at the chance to provide seed funds to get this venture underway. The Center will be a collaboration between the Futures of Entertainment Consortium (which evolved from the Convergence Culture Consortium and is now under the leadership of Sam Ford), the Annenberg Innovation Lab (which is under the leadership of Jonathan Taplin), The Alchemists, The City of Rio, and a range of corporate and academic partners, which include Petrobras, RioCriativo (State Government Culture Department) ESPM (Academic Partner), Western Kentucky University, and RioFilme (City of Rio film distribution company). Brazillian partners have long contributed support to the Consortium and they have been early backers of the Innovation Lab, so we welcome the opportunity to work more closely with them in the years ahead. (On a personal level, this country has been incredibly welcoming to me and my work. After the United States, the highest percentage of the readers of my blog and my Twitter flows come from Brazil, and the Portuguese edition of Convergence Culture has been the international version which has had the widest readership.) Apart from the connection to our new Brazil project, I also want to speak with enormous pride about the contribution here from Parmesh Shahani, a graduate of the Comparative Media Studies Program, and someone who has emerged as a major cultural thought leader in India, and with deep appreciation for my Dean, Ernest Wilson, who was willing to come to MIT and share his rich vision. Global Creative Cities and the Future of Entertainment. Today, new entertainment production cultures are arising around key cities like Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. What do these changes mean for the international flow of media content? And how does the nature of these cities help shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation allow people to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these trends co-exist? And what does it mean for the futures of entertainment? Moderator: Maurício Mota (The Alchemists) Panelists: Parmesh Shahani (Godrej Industries, India), Ernie Wilson (University of Southern California) and Sérgio Sá Leitão (Rio Filmes)
November 30, 2011
The Futures of Entertainment 5: The Videos (Day Two) Grant McCracken (author of Chief Culture Officer; Culturematic)
New means of digital circulation, audience engagement and fan activism have brought with it a variety of experiments with serialized video storytelling. What can we learn from some of the most compelling emerging ways to tell ongoing stories through online video, cross-platform features and applications and real world engagement? What models for content creation are emerging, and what are the stakes for content creators and audiences alike? Moderator: Laurie Baird (Georgia Tech) Panelists: Matt Locke (Storythings, UK), Steve Coulson (Campfire), Lynn Liccardo (soap opera critic), and Denise Mann (University of California-Los Angeles)
Children's media has long been an innovator in creating new ways of storytelling. In a digital era, what emerging practices are changing the ways in which stories are being told to children, and what are the challenges unique to children's properties in an online communication environment? Moderator: Sarah Banet-Weiser (University of Southern California) Panelists: Melissa Anelli (The Leaky Cauldron), Gary Goldberger (FableVision) and John Bartlett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Moderator: Johnathan Taplin (University of Southern California) Panelists: Molly Bingham (photojournalist; founder of ORB); Chris O'Brien (San Jose Mercury News), Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College) and Lenny Altschuler (Televisa)
The music industry is often cited as the horror story that all other entertainment genres might learn from: how the digital era has laid waste to a traditional business model. But what new models for musicians and for the music industry exist in the wake of this paradigm shift, and what can other media industries learn from emerging models of content creation and circulation? Moderator: Nancy Baym (Kansas University) Panelists: Mike King (Berklee College of Music), João Brasil (Brazilian artist), Chuck Fromm (Worship Leader Media), Erin McKeown (musical artist and fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University) and Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest)
November 28, 2011
Futures of Entertainment 5: The Videos (Day One)A few weeks ago, I made the trip back to Cambridge, MA to participate in the fifth iteration of the Futures of Entertainment conference. This conference emerged from the work we did at MIT through the Convergence Culture Consortium. The goal of the conference is to provide a meeting ground for forward thinking people in the creative industries and academia to talk with each other about the trends that are impacting how entertainment is produced, circulated, and engaged with. Through the years, the conference has developed its own community, which includes alums of the Comparative Media Studies Program who see the conference as a kind of homecoming, other academics who have found it a unique space to engage with contemporary practices and issues, and industry leaders, many of them former speakers, who return because it offers them a chance to think beyond the established wisdom within their own companies. Our goal is to create a space where academics do not read papers and industry folks don't present prospectus-laden powerpoints or talk about "take-aways" and "deliverables," but people engage honestly, critically, openly about topics of shared interest. Read by these criteria, this year's event was arguably our most successful venture ever, ripe with sometimes heated debates about the nature of the "crowd" (and of the relations between artists and consumers within crowd sourcing models), about the struggles over privacy, piracy, and self identity which shape everything from our relations with location-based entertainment to children's media, about the ways that global perspectives complicate some of the assumptions shaping American media practices, and about the ways that grassroots control over circulation complicate established business models. On a personal level, I was deeply proud to see so many of the CMS alums in their new professional identities, showing that they have continued to grow in intellectual stature and cultural authority after leaving MIT, including Sam Ford who has taking over as the primary person in charge of the event and of our newly renamed Futures of Entertainment Consortium. I was delighted to see so many of my new friends from the west coast fly to Cambridge to join us for this year's event, including Ernest Wilson, the Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism. Formally, Futures of Entertainment is the sister conference to Transmedia Hollywood, which we host here in Los Angeles, swapping years between USC and UCLA. But this was the year where the two families mingled with each other and the bridges between the two conferences were strengthened. By the way, I've gotten lots of questions about the next Transmedia Hollywood conference: there's not a lot of information to share yet, but it will be held on April 6 2012 at the USC Cinema School, if you want to save the date. Watch this blog for further announcements. Finally, I was deeply proud of the diversity we achieved in our programing this year, making further progress in a long struggle to get greater gender balance on our panels, and making a huge step forward in terms of bringing transnational perspectives into the mix. We welcome recommendations for speakers at our future events in general, but we especially welcome recommendations for female, minority, and international speakers. I am also proud that we continue to maintain a tradition of making webcasts of the conference available free to all. I am posting the videos of the Friday events today and next time, of the Saturday events. We will end the week with a focus on a special event on Global Creative Cities, and with some further reflections of our announcement of a new partnership with the City of Rio. Check out this very thoughtful response by Jonathan Gray to the conference's focus on "crowdsourcing" and collaborative production. While I was at MIT, I dropped by my old stomping grounds at the Comparative Media Studies Program and had brunch on Sunday with the newly arrived crop of Masters Students and some of the Program's Alums. What a smart group! After several years of regrouping, CMS has come back strong as ever, has maintained strong standards in terms of the quality and diversity of the community. I wish them all the best. Introduction (8:30-9:00 a.m.) William Uricchio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Ilya Vedrashko (Hill Holliday)
How are the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences transforming the concept of meaningful participation? And how do alternative systems for the circulation of media texts pave the way for new production modes, alternative genres of content, and new relationships between producers and audiences? Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green-co-authors of the forthcoming book Spreadable Media-share recent experiments from independent filmmakers, video game designers, comic book creators, and artists and discuss the promises and challenges of models for deeper audience participation with the media industries, setting the stage for the issues covered by the conference. Speakers: Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California), Sam Ford (Peppercom Strategic Communications) and Joshua Green (Undercurrent)
In an era where fans are lobbying advertisers to keep their favorite shows from being cancelled, advertisers are shunning networks to protest on the fans' behalf and content creators are launching web ventures in conversation with their audiences, there appears to be more opportunity than ever for closer collaboration between content creators and their most ardent fans. What models are being attempted as a way forward, and what can we learn from them? And what challenges exist in pursuing that participation for fans and for creators alike? Moderator: Sheila Seles (Advertising Research Foundation) Panelists: C. Lee Harrington (Miami University), Seung Bak (Dramafever) and Jamin Warren (Kill Screen)
Beyond the buzzword and gimmicks using the concept, crowdsourcing is emerging as a new way in which creators are funding media production, inviting audiences into the creation process and exploring new and innovative means of circulating media content. What are some of the innovative projects forging new paths forward, and what can be learned from them? How are attempts at crowdsourcing creating richer media content and greater ownership for fans? And what are the barriers and risks ahead for making these models more prevalent? Moderator: Ana Domb (Almabrands, Chile) Panelists: Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), Bruno Natal (Queremos, Brazil), Timo Vuorensola (Wreckamovie, Finland) and Caitlin Boyle (Film Sprout)
Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories (3:15-4:45 p.m.) Moderator: Xiaochang Li (New York University) Panelists: Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas), Dan Street (Loku) and Andy Ellwood (Gowalla)
The vast range of new experiments to facilitated greater audience participation and more personalized media content bring are often accomplished through much deeper uses of audience data and platforms whose business models are built on the collection and use of data. What privacy issues must be considered beneath the enthusiasm for these new innovations? What are the fault lines beneath the surface of digital entertainment and marketing, and what is the appropriate balance between new modes of communication and communication privacy? Participants: Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard University) and Helen Nissenbaum (New York University)
November 10, 2011
Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Four)This is part four of a five part series on transmedia business models by Brian Clark: Founder/CEO, GMD Studios. The segments are based on a talk Clark gave earlier this semester as a guest speaker to my USC class on Transmedia Entertainment. A HANDFUL OF VENTURE MODELS In the prior installment, we looked at handful of business models that try to work for even small budget projects. This time, we're going to look at models that rely (almost) intrinsically on raising capital. These models all share at least two common features, and the key one is that the source of funding is some kind of venture capital (which means the return that investors expect is their money back and hopefully some profit for taking the risk.) If that ís a little bit of capital, these might be angel investors that resemble patrons, but if that ís a lot of capital you'íll be dealing with professional investors. The change that comes with that is the mechanism of promotion. If you've only got a little bit of capital, you'll be relying upon media you create (owned) and earn (press and social sharing), but if you've got more capital you might start buying advertising from other places. Ticketed Events An entire set of business models that come from performance instead of media are frequently neglected by transmedia creators: an audience paying for a ticket to attend a live communal experience, whether that ís a theater performance, a concert, a conference or a stranger experience like "Red Cloud Rising" or "Sleep No More". This is the core business model of theatrical distribution (in film), pay-per-view (in broadcast), and touring theater and bands (in music).
Independent music and theater artists will tell you about the entrepreneurial challenges of squeaking a margin from festivals and tours (and then remind you to buy a t-shirt on your way out), but sustainable careers can be built on these models (and the way they can work with fan incubation as a business goal between ticketed events.) Having funding is usually essential, as the expenses to put on the event get incurred before you collect the revenue back from the sales and you have to buy gas for the tour bus to the next town. Marginable Arbitrage In market dynamics, arbitrage is nothing more than buying low in one market to sell high in another, often by creating new value from it that others arenít optimizing. Informercial space on television networks is a good example of this (the broadcast time is cheaper for an hour than for a thirty-second ad during primetime, which is why you see hour long commercials for $19.95 products), but most of the Internet is driven by arbitrage thinking. Many online publishers, for example, get a huge chunk of their traffic from Google because of their knowledge of search engine optimization of content, but then make money off of ads served up by Google that were actually the same as the ads on the search engine page they came from: the publisher made the ads more relevant to the audience, and got paid more because of it. Will some transmedia innovator find a similar system that uses infomercial broadcast space the way online publishers use Google? An arbitrage business model might look something like:
It isnít as easy as it sounds to find value in the cheap: you get two Snuggies for $24.95 plus shipping and handling because they've tested that more sales happen if they price it like that. The more neglected value you find and extract, the more you attract others to do the same (making that cheap resource less cheap) and, like the ticket sales model, as soon as you stop creating arbitrage you stop creating revenue. Conversely, I know people who do nothing but write for the Web from home and get six-digit checks every month because of their understanding of content arbitrage. Audience Developed Products In the same way that "fan funded" treats the renewable fan base as a replacement for investors, you could instead treat them as co-creators (and thus invested in the sustainability and promotion of the work.) Online interactive art, especially community games, are an obvious example of this (such as Top Secret Dance Off, Socks Inc. or Ze Frankís Star.me), but there are also filmmakers experimenting with crowdsourcing the shooting of features and online documentarians working to preserve history through cellphone photos or family pictures. These kinds of projects often produce business models such as:
The strength of this model (crowdsourcing of development) is also its Achilles' heel -- you need a vibrant enough community for that crowdsourcing magic to kick in, and that takes feeding and care. Where it seems to have the most predictable value is in creating longer tails of value, for example in videogames where making level editors available for Halo produced totally new fan-developed games like Portal that became products in their own right. Infrastructure Play If research & development models focus on creating new skillsets and proofs of concept, sometimes they are far more than that -- they become infrastructure plays. The impact of THX on audio standards in movie theaters was an infrastructure play contained inside the Star Wars business model, just as Condition One are documentarians creating licensable interactive technology to increase audience immersion. These types of business models typically look more like:
Infrastructure plays often require even deeper capital reserves than other types of models, because the core value of the sustainability argument requires scale (so, for the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, growth is more important in the short term than revenue generation.) These business models often also require "a business within the business" that focuses just on the licensing or enablement revenue streams (since those needs are often different than the actual creative implementation that generates that infrastructure). Venture Capital Every vibrant art form also has some kind of venture capital model, from financers of films and Broadway shows to venture capitalists in publishing and technology. Some of those communities are sophisticated enough to have created formal marketplaces for capital raising (for example, documentary film) while others have adopted venture capital models into new forms (for example, the artist granting organization Creative Capital). Venture capitalized business models often look something like:
The challenge with venture capital models are primarily in the courting of capital: people can spend years trying to put together a full slate of investors to trigger the actual creative work. Many give up before succeeding, and if they do succeed, then the pressure is on to deliver not just a completed creative work but a successful creative revenue stream. This is an even harder sell with innovation (unless you can show how youíll drink someone else's milkshake) because it makes everything seem more risky and risk raises the cost of capital. Three paragraphs per business plan is obviously skimming the surface of complex media business issues, but I'd like to extend that even further in the next installment and look at how multiple business models come together among the companies in the space (and thus potentially illuminate the kinds of innovations that will drive the next revolutions in transmedia.)
November 9, 2011
Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Three)This is part three of a five part series by transmedia designer and theorist Brian Clark.
In the prior two installments, we looked at what might drive the next wave of innovation in storytelling and dissected the patronage business model that dominates the transmedia space today. In this installment and the next, I want to dive deeper into ten different alternative business models that we know work from other media movements in the hopes that they provide some inspiration to other entrepreneurial storytellers. The first handful treats funding and sustainability as the primary challenges: if you don't have access to millions of dollars, just how much capital do you really need? Do you need any at all? No Budget Some artists and art movements solve the business model problem by assaulting the very need for capital funding. They might treat funding as unnecessary (such as Theater of the Oppressed in the 1950s, the Dogma 95 film movement of the late 1990s or the subsequent Mumblecore movement of the early 2000s that embrace no budget as a choice) or might literally treat capital as the enemy (such as the dÈtournement of the Situationist International movement of the 1950s or modern Anonymousí physical and digital hacktivism). In the context of business models, their solutions look something like:
No budget movements are a healthy part of any artistic form: things get made all the time without having business plan justifications. The Internet and digital creative trends amplifies these kinds of models disproportionately because of the constant increase in tools that decrease the costs of production towards free. Sadly, it isn't decreasing the cost of your food, rent and healthcare towards free and no budget artists typically have more traditional jobs that pay those bills -- which might be, in part, why Lars von Trier doesn't still make films under the Dogma 95 model. Grassroots Sometimes, not having funding isn't an active choice but is definitely a current reality. This is familiar territory to independent artists and publishers, from pulp fiction zines of the 1930s through the punk D.I.Y. ethic of the 1970s to the Internet tradition of "grassroots alternate reality games" of this century -- you embrace your limitation as a virtue and make the most of it. For this "D.I.Y. ethic" style of grassroots, the business model solve might look like:
Rather than being entrepreneurial, the funding in grassroots efforts is ad hoc, doesn't really set revenue goals for sustainability and leaves little funding for promotion. Sometimes, for the artists, the connection and affirmation of an audience is still enough reward to make them want to do it again. Research & Development Hopefully, creating always involves learning new things, but sometimes the point of making it in the first place is to learn. The R&D arms of giant companies share this business model with entrepreneurial garage tinkers and both work in prototypes and proofs-of-concept. Some creators, most notably Lance Weiler, have started talking about "story R&D" as the explicit value to their experiments -- learning how to tell stories across all these new platforms and opportunities in relatively low capital risk environments. An R&D business model solve might look like:
The most inherent challenge in R&D models is that you're entrepreneurially deciding to push the return on your investment and sustainability to some future date. It requires some confidence (at least on the artist's part) that those kinds of R&D results are a predictable yield and tends (by necessity) to push the work into more experimental territory (because there is very little R&D yield in doing things you already know how to do).
This is essentially the same model I critiqued in the prior installment, but with a key difference: you've become your own patron, you've become your own client, and you're leveraging the tactical usefulness to your own potential benefit. Like the research and development model, that means you've pushed off revenue and sustainability to some future product those fans want that has its own business model as an investment in a renewable resource. Fan Funding Speaking of the power of fan bases, if you already have even a residual fan base, there are ways to replace funding with those fans. In the classic models, you'd call this pre-sales -- collecting money for a product you haven't made yet to fund the creation itself (often incentivized by some exclusive value add), a model quite common now in the videogame industry but also the classic underpinning of why magazines and newspapers offer annual subscriptions. The Internet's capabilities for crowdsourcing have made this an even more attractive model for independents, whether you're harnessing fans as angel capitalizers with a system like Kickstarter or selling a product that was manufactured "just in time" via a platform like Lulu. The business model might look something like:
The scale of this model is directed tied to the size of the fan base: George Lucas will always pre-sell more than you do, but a smaller group of fans could dramatically change the way a grassroots project might operate. Many creative properties (large and small) leverage this business model in serial with fan incubation -- when you're not pre-selling something, grow the overall size of the fan base as an investment in your next cycle of fan funding. In the next installment, we'll look at another handful of models that solve from the opposite direction: maximizing revenue instead of minimizing investment.
November 8, 2011
Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Two)This is the second in a five part series on transmedia business models written by veteran crossplatform and indie media producer Brian Clark. DISSECTING THE "TRADITIONAL" TRANSMEDIA MODELS Most of the money fueling innovation in transmedia storytelling falls into one of three major buckets: entertainment properties created as extended experiences around a core media product; advertising properties created to advance the marketing of a brand; and issues advancing properties created to promote a topic or perspective. In the last installment, I proposed a "business model lens" for looking at some of issues hampering innovation in the new forms of storytelling. There's no better place to start than where the money is. The Danger of Tactical Functionality In truth, all three of these "traditional" transmedia models actually share the same business plan solution, one that focuses on the proven usefulness of transmedia as a tactical function. Let's take a look at the five business plan statements from the point of view of an entertainment, brand or issue property:
So if a big brand hires you to create a transmedia marketing campaign, they are actually hiring you to use transmedia tactics to accomplish some particular goal -- perhaps to sell cars or videogames, perhaps to increase brand awareness or enhance brand perception, perhaps to generate leads or social sharing. From the funder's point of view, the cost of doing it must be justified by the results they hope will be delivered. Big media brands work the same way as non-media brands in the current marketplace, because the budgets for those efforts are most typically from the marketing and promotions expenditures from the studio's point of view. The tactical goal might be different -- for example, film studios are often interested in "butts in seats" in the opening weekend as a marketing goal that they spend against -- but the focus on "transmedia as tactic" is identical. Issues projects are slightly different, but share most of the same attributes. From a grantor's point of view, the results your effort could create per dollar granted is being evaluated not just against the funder's mission but also against the submissions you're competing against for that same funding. Typically, the fees tacked on are much less than with brands and entertainment projects, and grantors typically are less willing to provide fuel for paid media promotion than financers who are in the business of paid media. The most noticeable difference between these three models is how they deal with the ownership of intellectual property. Brand marketing campaigns are nearly always a work for hire, which means you don't own the intellectual property you created because you were compensated to create it (although there are "branded entertainment" trends in those industries that are changing that). Entertainment properties tend to be similar, but as an industry they are more used to discussions regarding back-end percentages on direct revenue your work might create (and that trend towards "branded entertainment" is similarly impactful.) Issues funders are less likely to be focused on the ownership of the underlying IP, although some might put a re-compensation clause on funding that returns some small percentage of revenue back to the granting organization. Their greatest similarity is the focus on transmedia tactical usefulness to accomplishing particular goals. Being useful brings with it baggage. There is a tendency to treat the work as disposable, like an advertisement or a poster promoting a band's gig or a banner painted for a traveling sideshow. It can be beautiful, it can be moving, it can be groundbreaking, but these aren't the way the work will be ultimately evaluated. The goal will be accomplished or it won't, but continued activities require continued funding. Patronage as Lichen, Studio as Old Growth Forest Since ancient times, there has always been a deep connection between the arts and systems of patronage. In the modern media age (from say 1920s onward), those patrons and sponsors have become brands and studios and corporations instead of kings and churches. Even the meaning of the phrase "sponsor" has grown in modern parlance to have both the implication of commercial ("and now a word from our sponsor") and of patronage ("a proud sponsor of the Olympics") intertwined. The advantage for the sponsors has always been the platform to advance their own ambitions. Frequently, patronage is one of the first business models to develop in each periodic revolution in how media get delivered -- for example, the soap opera format first developed for radio that came about as branded entertainment for, you guessed it, soap manufacturers. Like lichen, it is the first part of the ecosystem that can thrive and that, in the process, lays the foundations for more complex ecosystems to develop (especially for those that are entrepreneurial in nature). Eventually, the media becomes so successful (and mass producible as technique, like "the movie ticket") that an industry will emerge -- like in publishing, radio, film, television, etc. You could think of some of those industries as old growth forest, one of the last ecosystems to develop that requires a level of stability in the environment. Much of the revolution you see in every other media is tied to disruptions and inefficiencies in those stable business models that allow for those old growth forests, and most of that is both created and solved by entrepreneurial independents working against/with the old growth forests. If we think that lichen is really cool and totally enough, patronage models are tremendous -- even those of us who aspire to more than that appreciate the fun of a nice big commercial innovation project. Many of my peers and I, though, hail from the more decidedly independent communities around music, film and new media. There, you work from the assumption that you'll probably never have access to the traditional system (but maybe you might) but still want to find a way to create a sustainable career making this kind of work. The transmedia movement has no traditional system to be excluded from, and the traditional system is the patronage model. What would it look like if the last hundred years of independent media business models were all research and development learning for this moment in time, before there was a real industry? In the next three installments, we'll go through ten business models that should provide inspiration for innovation.
November 7, 2011
Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part One)This week, I am going to be sharing a series of five guest blog posts by Brian Clark which are based on a lecture which he gave to the students in the Transmedia Entertainment class I have been teaching in the USC Cinema School. If you follow transmedia closely, you probably already know who Clark is. If you don't, check out some of his astute contributions to this panel from the 2009 Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT. (There are still a few seats left at this year's event which is bring held Friday and Saturday in Cambridge). What I admire about Clark is that he cuts through the crap. He's got a track record as someone who has worked across the entertainment industry and knows what's involved in creating and sustaining transmedia production. He brings street cred as someone who emerged from the worlds of indie music and filmmaking and who helped to create IndieWIRE. He has the pragmatic streak of someone who runs his own business and has to pay the bills, even as he enjoys the visionary speculations that excite many of us about the new forms of creativity that are emerging at the intersections between old and new media. And he's wickedly smart. When he spoke to my class, he brought all of that and more: this was a provocative presentation which described an array of different business models that might support the production of transmedia content as a challenge to the current economic and creative constraints which stem from the industry's reliance on promotional and advertising budgets as the primary driver of creative innovation in this space. I encouraged him to put the core ideas behind this lecture into writing and am happy to share this provocation with my readers in hopes that it will push all of us to think about what needs to be in place before our exploration of transmedia experiences can be sustainable.
In September 2011, media scholar Henry Jenkins invited me to deliver a guest lecture to his transmedia class at the University of Southern California to explore with his students some of the issues raised in an epic Facebook thread my friends and I engaged in back in May called "Reclaiming Transmedia Storyteller". Henry asked me to focus on exposing his students to some of the transmedia business models "beyond the mothership franchise model" -- a dichotomy I jokingly referred to in that Facebook discussion as the "East Coast / West Coast" contrast in the transmedia community. Coming Tomorrow: DISSECTING THE "TRADITIONAL" TRANSMEDIA MODELS
September 16, 2011
Announcing Futures of Entertainment 5 ConferenceRegistration Open for Futures of Entertainment 5 We're excited to announce that registration has officially opened for our fifth Futures of Entertainment conference, which will begin on 11/11/11. The conference--which will run Nov. 11-12--will be held at the Kirsch Auditorium on the first floor of the Frank Gehry-designed Ray and Maria Stata Center on the campus of MIT in Cambridge, MA. Full details on the line-up as it stands is below. Registration is available here. Please keep in mind that seats are limited, so--if you plan to attend--register soon. The Futures of Entertainment conference brings together professionals from academia and the marketing and media industries to discuss how communication between media producers/brands and audiences are changing, and how the nature of storytelling is shifting in a digital era. On Friday, we will tackle some of the pressing questions and new innovations on the media horizon: new models of media creation and distribution--and challenges/questions related to participation--in a "spreadable media" landscape; new models aimed at representing fan interests in media production; innovations in crowdsourcing for content creation, funding, and distribution; the impact of location-based technologies and services; and privacy concerns raised by these developments. On Saturday, we will look at particular media industries to how these innovations are evolving: serialized storytelling; children's media; nonfiction storytelling; and music. The conference will run from 8:30 a.m. until 6:45 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with a reception scheduled for Friday evening. On Thursday evening, Nov. 10th, from 5-7, MIT will be hosting an "eve of FoE" Communications Forum event on "Cities and the Future of Entertainment" in the Bartos Theater in MIT's Wiesner Building. Cities and the Future of Entertainment. Today, new entertainment production cultures are arising around key cities like Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. What do these changes mean for the international flow of media content? And how does the nature of these cities help shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation allow people to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these trends co-exist? And what does it mean for the futures of entertainment?
Introduction:
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society. How are the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences transforming the concept of meaningful participation? And how do alternative systems for the circulation of media texts pave the way for new production modes, alternative genres of content, and new relationships between producers and audiences? Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green--co-authors of the forthcoming book Spreadable Media--share recent experiments from independent filmmakers, video game designers, comic book creators, and artists and discuss the promises and challenges of models for deeper audience participation with the media industries, setting the stage for the issues covered by the conference.
Collaboration? Emerging Models for Audiences to Participate in Entertainment Decision-Making. In an era where fans are lobbying advertisers to keep their favorite shows from being cancelled, advertisers are shunning networks to protest on the fans' behalf and content creators are launching web ventures in conversation with their audiences, there appears to be more opportunity than ever for closer collaboration between content creators and their most ardent fans. What models are being attempted as a way forward, and what can we learn from them? And what challenges exist in pursuing that participation for fans and for creators alike?
Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories. Location-based services and context-aware technologies are altering the way we encounter our environments and producing enormous volumes of data about where we go, what we do, and how we live and interact. How are these changes transforming the ways we engage with our physical world, and with each other? What kind of stories does the data produce, and what do they tell us about our culture and social behaviors? What opportunities and perils does this information have for businesses and individuals? What are the implications for brands, audiences, content producers, and media companies?
At What Cost?: The Privacy Issues that Must Be Considered in a Digital World. The vast range of new experiments to facilitated greater audience participation and more personalized media content bring are often accomplished through much deeper uses of audience data and platforms whose business models are built on the collection and use of data. What privacy issues must be considered beneath the enthusiasm for these new innovations? What are the fault lines beneath the surface of digital entertainment and marketing, and what is the appropriate balance between new modes of communication and communication privacy?
Saturday: Introduction:
The Futures of Serialized Storytelling. New means of digital circulation, audience engagement and fan activism have brought with it a variety of experiments with serialized video storytelling. What can we learn from some of the most compelling emerging ways to tell ongoing stories through online video, cross-platform features and applications and real world engagement? What models for content creation are emerging, and what are the stakes for content creators and audiences alike?
The Futures of Children's Media. Children's media has long been an innovator in creating new ways of storytelling. In a digital era, what emerging practices are changing the ways in which stories are being told to children, and what are the challenges unique to children's properties in an online communication environment?
The Futures of Nonfiction Storytelling. Digital communication has arguably impacted the lives of journalists more than any other media practitioner. But new platforms and ways of circulating content are providing vast new opportunities for journalists and documentarians. How have--and might--nonfiction storytellers incorporate many of the emerging strategies of transmedia storytelling and audience participation from marketing and entertainment, and what experiments are currently underway that are showing the potential paths forward?
August 1, 2011
Transmedia 202: Further ReflectionsThe above video was shot by Scott Walker during one of my presentations at San Diego Comic-Con, during which I spoke about some of the controversy which has surrounded the definition of transmedia over the past six months or so. I've largely stayed out of these conversations, though you can find a very good summary of the debates here. I've been focusing on other projects and also I've been more interested in the shapes these discussions take than seeking to intervene in them directly, but over the summer, in a range of venues, I've been pushing and proding at my own definitions to see if I can capture some of my own shifting understandings of transmedia, especially as I am preparing to teach a revamped transmedia entertainment class at USC. Today, I am going to try to put some of this still evolving thinking into writing in hopes that it helps others sort through these issues. Much of this is covered in the above video so if you process things better in audio-visual than in print, you have your options. I've heard some gossip that Jenkins was going to issue a "new definition" of "transmedia": this is no where near as dramatic an overhaul as that, just some clarifications and reflections about definitions. This definition still covers, more or less, what I mean by transmedia storytelling: Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, consider what follows Transmedia 202, to compliment my earlier Transmedia 101 post. Given the sheer range of people who have embraced (latched onto?) transmedia, we should not be surprised that:
So, let's start at the top with convergence, which in Convergence Culture, I describe as a paradigm for thinking about the current moment of media change, one which is defined through the layering, diversification, and interconnectivity of media. Convergence contrasts with the Digital Revolution model which assumed old media would be displaced by new media. Aspects of this convergence model are shaping decisions of media producers, advertisers, technologists, consumers, and policy-makers, and thus convergence has many different aspects and consequences. Transmedia, used by itself, simply means "across media." Transmedia, at this level, is one way of talking about convergence as a set of cultural practices. Keep in mind that Marsha Kinder in Playing with Power wrote about "transmedia intertextuality", while I was one of the first to popularize the term, transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling describes one logic for thinking about the flow of content across media. We might also think about transmedia branding, transmedia performance, transmedia ritual, transmedia play, transmedia activism, and transmedia spectacle, as other logics. The same text might fit within multiple logics. So, for example, we could imagine Glee as a transmedia narrative in which we follow the characters and situations across media, but more often, Glee's transmedia strategies emphasize transmedia performance, with the songs moving through YouTube, iTunes, live performances, etc., which we read against each other to make sense of the larger Glee phenomenon. So, there are some people who think that transmedia is simply a form of branding: I would rather argue that branding is one thing you can do with transmedia, but when I speak about transmedia storytelling, that is not the central focus of my interest. I am focusing on emergent forms of storytelling which tap into the flow of content across media and the networking of fan response. Some people have argued that transmedia is simply another name for franchising. Franchising is a corporate structure for media production which has a long history and throughout much of that history, there has been an attempt to move icons and brands across media channels, but not necessarily an attempt to extend the story in ways which expanded its scope and meaning. Most previous media franchises were based on reproduction and redundancy, but transmedia represents a structure based on the further development of the storyworld through each new medium. For a good guide to the history and practices of franchising, watch for the forthcoming book by Derek Johnson, who has been doing extensive thinking on this topic. Much of franchising has been based on licensing arrangements which make it hard for media producers to add or change anything beyond what is already in the primary text or the mother ship. True transmedia storytelling is apt to emerge through structures which encourage co-creation and collaboration, but as Johnson notes, the more a media producer moves in this direction, the greater the challenges of coordination and consistency become. I have sometimes talked about a distinction between adaptation and extension as fundamental to understanding these shifts. Basically, an adaptation takes the same story from one medium and retells it in another. An extension seeks to add something to the existing story as it moves from one medium to another. Christy Dena has challenged making such a cut-and-dried distinction. Adaptations may be highly literal or deeply transformative. Any adaptation represents an interpretation of the work in question and not simply a reproduction, so all adaptions to some degree add to the range of meanings attached to a story. And as Dena notes, the shifts between media mean that we have new experiences and learn new things. To translate Harry Potter from a book to a movie series means thinking through much more deeply what Hogwarts looks like and thus the art director/production designer has significantly expanded and extended the story in the process. It might be better to think of adaptation and extension as part of a continuum in which both poles are only theoretical possibilities and most of the action takes place somewhere in the middle. What the adaptation-extension distinction was intended to address was additive comprehension, a term borrowed from game designer Neil Young, to refer to the degree that each new text adds to our understanding of the story as a whole. So, the Falling Skies graphic novel is a prequel which tells us about the disappearance of the middle brother and thus helps to provide insights into the motives of the characters on the Turner television series. In this case, additive comprehension takes the form of back story, but the same graphic novel also helps us to better understand the organization of the resistance movement, which we can see as part of a world-building process. Most transmedia content serves one or more of the following functions:
I have been troubled by writers who want to reduce transmedia to the idea of multiple media platforms without digging more deeply into the logical relations between those media extensions. So, if you are a guild, it matters deeply that you have a definition which determines how many media are deployed, but for me, as a scholar, that is not the key issue that concerns me. As we think about defining transmedia, then, we need to come back to the relations between media and not simply count the number of the media platforms. So, again, let's imagine a continuum of possibilities. We might start with the notion of seriality. Seriality would imply the unfolding of a story over time, typically through a process of chunking (creating meaningful bits of the story) and dispersal (breaking the story into interconnected installments). Central to this process is the creation of a story hook or cliffhanger which motivates the consumer to come back for more of the same story. Historically, seriality occurs within the same text. So, we've seen American television evolve over time between highly episodic structures (more or less self-contained) to much more heavily serialized structures. Most shows, though, combine elements of the episodic (a procedural plot which can be wrapped up in a single episode) and the serial (an evolving character relationship, an unfolding mythology, a larger plot within which the individual episodes work as chapters.) The shift towards seriality on American television plays a large role in preparing audiences for transmedia storytelling. Most transmedia stories are highly serial in structure, but not all serials are transmedia. So, Bones, say, is a partially serialized drama which, for the most part, remains within a single medium. But we can think of examples where there is a movement across texts or across textual structures within the same medium. I describe this in terms of "radical intertextuality." So, for example, the DC and Marvel universes create dozens of titles which are seen as inter-related. Characters move between them. Plots unfold across them. Periodically, they may have events which straddle multiple book titles, and part of the pleasure of something like Marvel Civil Wars is that we see the same event from the point of view of multiple characters, who may have conflicting perspectives on what is happening. Similarly, Battlestar Galactica unfolds across multiple television series, mini-series, and stand-alone movies. If Battlestar remained in a single medium, television, then it would be another example of radical intertextuality. But, because Battlestar extends this process to include webisodes and comics, which are understood as part of the same continuity, then we call it a transmedia story. So, let's call this next level Multimodality -- a term coined by Gunther Kress to talk about how educational design taps the affordances of different instructional media, but applied by Christy Dena to talk about transmedia narrative. The key point here is that different media involve different kinds of representation -- so what Green Lantern looks like differs from a comic book, a live action movie, a game, or an animated television series. Each medium has different kinds of affordances -- the game facilitates different ways of interacting with the content than a book or a feature film. A story that plays out across different media adopts different modalities. A franchise can be multimodal without being transmedia -- most of those which repeat the same basic story elements in every media fall into this category. For me, a work needs to combine radical intertextuality and multimodality for the purposes of additive comprehension to be a transmedia story. That's why shortening transmedia to "a story across multiple media" distorts the discussion. So far, nothing here implies that particular media need to be involved for something to become transmedia. One can construct a high end transmedia system (a major blockbuster movie or network television show and its extensions) and one can construct a low end transmedia system (a low budget and/or independent film, a comic book or web series as the spring board for something which might include live performance or oral storytelling...) Some have tried to argue that games are a key component of transmedia, but I do not want to prioritize digital media extensions over other kinds of media practices. For this reason, it is possible to find historical antecedents for transmedia which predate the rise of networked computing and interactive entertainment. I am not preoccupied with the "newness" of transmedia. The current push for transmedia has emerged from shifts in production practices (shaped by media concentration, in some cases) or reception practices (the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media), but it has also come from the emergence of new aesthetic understandings of how popular texts work (shaped in part by the rise of geeks and fans to positions of power within the entertainment industries). The options available to a transmedia producer today are different from those available some decades ago, but we can still point to historical antecedents which were experimenting with notions of world building and mythology-modeled story structures in ways that include both radical intertextuality and multimodality. In that way, you can say that L. Frank Baum (in his focus on world building across media), Walt Disney (in his focus on transmedia branding) and J.R.R. Tolkien (with his experiments in radical intertextuality) each prefigure transmedia practices. Similarly, I've argued that Obama is as much a transmedia character as Obi Wan is. I do not mean by this simply that our everyday lives are conducted across multiple media platforms, though this is true. I also mean that we tend to connect those dispersed pieces of information together to form a story, that the story we construct depends on which media extensions we draw upon (Fox News vs. The Huffingston Post), and that there are architects who seek to coordinate and construct the range of meanings which get attached to that story. In that sense, the Obama story, as constructed by his campaign, includes both radical intertextuality and multimodality. When I wrote Convergence Culture, I focused the transmedia discussion around The Matrix, while including a side bar which discussed The Beast as an Alternate Reality Game. I understood that ARGs had something to do with transmedia, but my use of the sidebar structure allowed me to dodge the tougher question of whether ARGs are transmedia, and that's where some of the most heated debates in recent years has occurred. The Hollywood based model of transmedia assumes a story told or a world explored across not simply multiple media but multiple texts, which can be sold to audiences separately and which represent multiple touch points with the brand. (Note, for my definition, it really doesn't matter if the texts form a single narrative or multiple stories set in the same world, since in practice, most transmedia includes multiple plot lines which can be dispersed in different ways across the installments.) The ARG model, however, assumes that multiple media can contribute to a single entertainment experience. So, we are more likely to talk about The Beast, I Love Bees, or The Lost Experience as completed texts in their own right (as well as in all three cases as part of larger entertainment franchises). Different groups have different stakes in drawing lines distinguishing or integrating these two models. It is important to understand what they are each trying to accomplish, but I am less invested in defining in or out one model or the other. I just think this is a space which deserves closer conceptual work than it has received so far. Both could meet my emphasis on radical intertextuality and multimodality and both can deliver on the promises of additive comprehension. Another debate worth monitoring here has to do with issues of audience participation in the development of a transmedia property. These debates break down into two sets of issues. The first has to do with the differences I draw in Convergence Culture between interactivity and participation. For me, interactivity has to do with the properties of the technology and participation has to do with the properties of the culture. Obviously, in practice, both may come into play in the same text. So, for example, a computer game stresses interactivity and thus preprogramed entertainment experiences. Fan culture is high on participation, where fans take the resources offered by a text and push it in a range of directions which are neither preprogrammed nor authorized by the producers. When people claim that interactivity is a core element of a transmedia experience, I want to make sure we are using the term in the same way. We can imagine a range of different relations which fans might have to a transmedia property. On one end would be the hunting and gathering practices of finding the dispersed pieces of information and figuring out how they all fit together to form a meaningful whole. On the other end, we might have playing through a level of a game, working past obstacles, killing bosses, and gathering objects. But we might also think about various forms of fan performance -- from fan fiction to cosplay -- which are more participatory and open ended and less dependent on the design choices of the transmedia producers. A second set of issues has to do with continuity vs. multiplicity. Most discussions of transmedia place a high emphasis on continuity -- assuming that transmedia requires a high level of coordination and creative control and that all of the pieces have to cohere into a consistent narrative or world. This is a practice which is hard enough to achieve across the multiple divisions of the same production team and it becomes hard for fans to contribute directly to the development of a narrative which places high emphasis on continuity. Indeed, many projects which claim to tap "user-generated content" do so in ways which protect the "integrity" of the continuity at the expense of enabling multiple perspectives and more open-ended participation. They make the author or some designated agent an arbiter of what counts within the canon. On the other hand, there are forms of commercially produced transmedia which really celebrate the multiplicity which emerges from seeing the same characters and stories told in radically different ways. This focus on multiplicity leaves open a space for us to see fan-produced media as part of a larger transmedia process, even if we then want to try to sort through how different elements get marked as official canon or fan alternatives. Sorry this has gotten so complicated, but I think part of the problem is that many people are looking for simple formulas and a one-size-fits-all definition, trying to delimit what transmedia is. But, we are still in a period of experimentation and innovation. New models are emerging through production practices and critical debates, and we need to be open to a broad array of variations of what transmedia means in relation to different projects. I wrote in Convergence Culture that convergence practices, for the foreseeable future, will amount to "kludges," jerry-rigged attempts to connect different media together, as we all figure out what's going on and what works well. There is no transmedia formula. Transmedia refers to a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context depending on the particular resources available to particular producers. The more we expand the definition, the richer the range of options available to us can be. It doesn't mean we expand transmedia to the point that anything and everything counts, but it means we need a definition sophisticated enough to deal with a range of very different examples. What I want to exclude from this definition is "business as usual" projects which are not exploring the expanded potential of transmedia, but are simply slapping a transmedia label on the same old franchising practices we've seen for decades. As a way to promote more conversation, please send me your questions, critiques, and other responses to hjenkins@usc.edu, and I will try to respond in a future post.
July 25, 2011
Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Three)This is the final installment of my interiew with Brian David Johnson. Sorry for the delay in posting. I had some difficulty with email access during Comic-Con.
You talk in the book about "ubiquitous television." Many readers will not know this concept, so can you explain what it means and how it represents a significant shift from our current relationship to content? Ubiquitous TV is built off the idea of ubiquitous computing. This was a concept pioneered by Mark Weiser while he was at Xerox PARC. Weiser saw computing existing in three stages: Stage one was the old mainframe computer. These were the computer the size of an entire room. The second stage of computing was the personal computer. This is the Mac or PC that we all know and love. One could argue that there is a core tension between the idea of media as "personalized" and the idea of media as "socialized," something we consume through networks (whether old school broadcast or new school digital/social). This is not a new tension, but it seems hard for advocates for new models of television to keep both aspects in their heads at the same time. How do these two pulls impact the design of the next generation of television-related technologies? You couldn't be more right. It has been hard for people to keep both of these concepts in their heads at the same time. But for me I approach it differently. For me I think about what consumers and people are telling us. Because ultimately it's about what they want and people have no problem managing these two ideas at the same time. The reason why it's easy for them is because they want it both ways. As we start to think about how to design for both the personalized state as well as the socialized state, I think we need to remember that for consumers both of these states are still TV. In the business of entertainment and even in the business of thinking and writing about entertainment, we like to create categories and systems for understanding what's happening in the modern media landscape. This certainly is important as we need to have these discussions but even as we discuss and debate we have to remember that for consumers they don't think this way. They are not thinking about the business or cultural implications of media. People are simply enjoying it as a part of their lives. Much early writing on digital media implied that the era of mass media would be displaced by an era of niche media, yet there remains an ongoing engagement with our shared experience of broadcast media which has allowed television to weather the storm. What factors have allowed television to withstand competition from the net and the web? I love the old ideas of where TV was going to go. People always said that it would all be personal; that mainstream broadcast media would shrivel and die. No longer would large corporation dictate to the people what they should watch. It would be a wild and wooly collection of intensely personal niche channels that would change and adapt to the needs and desires of people. Well yeah that's cool but it didn't happen exactly like that. It turns out people love mainstream broadcast TV. People all over the world love watching American Idol or Pop Idol or Indian Idol... And there's nothing wrong with this. Consumers love personalization and they also love watching Idol live. This is not hard for them to understand. Part of the frustration of print publishing about emerging media practices is that the book is always out of date before it reaches the reader. What recent developments do you wish you had been able to discuss in the book? Ah yes! At the end of Screen Future I wrote that I figured that by the time people read the book there would be a whole host of issues and technologies that were outdated.
July 20, 2011
Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Two)
That's a tough one because TV, like any good system or organism, has survived for so long because it adapts. This is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by the history of TV. TV as a collection of technical innovations, business models, story structures, cultural indicators and motivators is in a constant state of change. I could give you the long list most of us take for granted: Black and white to color. Sponsored shows to the 30 sec spot. The big three broadcasters to cable and satellite. TiVo! The complex web of broadcasters and affiliates. The birth and refining and reimaging of the half hour sit com. The sit com or more pointedly the American sit com is really strange and deeply interesting...but I'm gushing You argue that a fundamental change occurred when the computer changed television into data. How so? How is this shift experienced by the everyday television consumer? I should start off by saying that this fundamental shift to TV from digital to data has not happened yet on a broad scale. It's certainly coming. Some folks I've talked to peg 2015 as a possible date from this but I'm thinking now for mass consumption it might be a bit longer. At the moment the average consumer isn't experiencing the world that I described...yet. But behind the scenes it's certainly happening and happening right now. At Intel I've seen some really smart work in this area three years ago. I write about it in my book that we have been doing work in the fields of video analytics and computer vision. In a way you can think of it as computers warning TV. How do computers watch TV? What computers what TV what do they see and how do they see it? Some are arguing that television is moving from an appointment-based medium to an engagement-based one. What roles will new technologies play in supporting and sustaining our engagement with television? Oh this is an easy one. You are throwing me a softball here Henry. Technology, the very technology we have been discussing has brought about the transformation of entertainment from a broadcast model or an appointment based TV experience to a more personated and engaged TV experience. Technology did this. No question. In the early days of the DVR is way ReplayTV and Tivo. Heck even to a very limited extent the VCR.
The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.
July 1, 2011
Now Available: Transmedia Hollywood 2 VideosDue to technical difficulties, we've been delayed in sharing with you the videos from our April Transmedia Hollywood 2 conference, jointly sponsored by the cinema schools at USC and UCLA, and hosted this year at UCLA. We hope to be back next April at USC with a whole new line up of speakers and topics, which we are just now starting to plan. In the meantime, check out some of these sessions, which should give the ever expanding Transmedia community plenty to chew on this summer. As for myself, I'm flying down to Rio, even as we speak. Transmedia Hollywood 2, Visual Culture & Design: Denise Mann Opening Comments from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo. Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC. (Some of my comments here got me into trouble at the time and I hope to post something here soon which explores the issue I raise here about the role of radical intertextuality within the same medium.) Transmedia Hollywood 2, Visual Culture & Design: Henry Jenkins Opening Comments from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo. Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play": Designing Virtual Worlds--From Screens to Theme Parks and Beyond Hollywood has come a long way since Walt Disney, circa 1955, invited families to come out and play in the first cross-platform, totally merchandised sandbox -- Disneyland. Cut to today and most entertainment corporations are still focused on creating intellectual properties to exploit across all divisions of the Company. However, as the studios and networks move away from the concrete spaces of movie and TV screens and start to embrace the seemingly limitless "virtual spaces" of the Web as well as the real-world spaces of theme parks, museums, and comic book conventions, the demands on creative personnel and their studio counterparts have expanded exponentially. Rather than rely on old-fashioned merchandising and licensing departments to oversee vendors, which too often results in uninspired computer games, novelizations, and label T-shirts, several studios have brought these activities in-house, creating divisions like Disney Imagineering and Disney Interactive to oversee the design and implementation of these vast, virtual worlds. In other instances, studios are turning to a new generation of independent producers -- aka "transmedia producers" -- charged with creating vast, interlocking brand extensions that make use of a never-ending cycle of technological future shock and Web 2.0 capabilities. The results of these partnerships have been a number of extraordinarily inventive, interactive, and immersive experiences that create a "you are there" effect. These include the King Kong 360 3D theme park ride, which incorporates the sight, smell, and thunderous footsteps of the iconic gorilla as he appears to toss the audience's tram car into a pit. Universal Studios and Warner Bros. have joined forces to create the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a new $200 million-plus attraction at the Islands of Adventure in Florida. Today's panel focuses on the unique challenges associated with turning traditional media franchises into 3D interactive worlds, inviting you to come out 2 play in the studios' virtual sandboxes. Moderator: Denise Mann Panelists:
TH2 Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo. Panel 2: "We're Looking For Characters": Designing Personalities Who Play Across Platforms How is our notion of what constitutes a good character changing as more and more decisions get made on the basis of a transmedia logic? Does it matter that James Bond originated in a book, Spider-Man in comics, Luke Skywalker on screen, and Homer Simpson on television, if each of these figures is going to eventually appear across a range of media platforms? Do designers and writers conceive of characters differently when they know that they need to be recognizable in a variety of media? Why does transmedia often require a shift in focus as the protagonist aboard the "mothership" often moves off stage as extensions foreground the perspective and actions of once secondary figures? How might we understand the process by which people on reality television series get packaged as characters who can drive audience identification and interest or by which performers get reframed as characters as they enter into the popular imagination? Why have so few characters from games attracted a broader following while characters from comics seem to be gaining growing popularity even among those who have never read their graphic adventures?
TH2 Panel 2: "We're Looking for Characters" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo. Game On!: Intelligent Designs or Fan Aggregators? A similar revolution is taking place in the post-network television industry as creators form alliances with network marketers in an effort to reach out to engaged fans. Many of the cutting-edge creative team at Smallville forged this path in the wilderness, creating innovative on-line campaigns that they later took to Heroes. Fans avidly pursue TV creators who incorporate an arsenal of visual design elements derived from films, comic books, games, web-series, and theme park rides in the series proper and in the online worlds. Experimenting with ways to reinvent an aging medium and buoyed by a WGA strike that assigned derivative content to showrunners, the question remains whether these creators won the battle but lost the war as more and more network dot.coms have asserted control over the online interactive entertainment space. Do web-series like Dr. Horrible and The Guild represent the next frontier for enterprising creators or can creative personnel learn to play within the confines of the corporate playground? We will ask creators from both industries -- gaming and television--to explain their philosophy about the intended and unintended outcomes of their interactive properties and immersive entertainment experiences. Marketers clearly love it when fans become willing billboards for the brand by wearing logo T-shirts, deciphering glyphs, or joining mysterious organizations such as Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Fairies, Elves, and Trolls, and then sharing clues, codes, and supporting content across a virtual community. These and other intriguing questions will be posed to the creative individuals responsible for designing many of these imaginative and engaging transmedia worlds. Moderator: Denise Mann
TH2 Panel 3: "Game On!" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.
The rules for how to structure a Hollywood movie were established more than a century ago and even then, were inspired by ideas from earlier media -- the four-act structure of theater, the hero's quest in mythology. Yet, audiences and creators alike are still trying to make sense of how to fit together the chunks of a transmedia narrative. Industry insiders use terms such as mythology or saga to describe stories which may expand across many different epochs, involve many generations of characters, expand across many different corners of the fictional world, and explore a range of different goals and missions. We might think of such stories as hyper-serials, in so far as serials involved the chunking and dispersal of narrative information into compelling units. The old style serials on film and television expanded in time; these new style serials also expand across media platforms. So, how do the creators of these stories handle challenges of exposition and plot development, managing the audience's attention so that they have the pieces they need to put together the puzzle? What principles do they use to indicate which chunks of a franchise are connected to each other and which represent different moments in the imaginary history they are recounting? Do certain genres -- science fiction and fantasy -- embrace this expansive understanding of story time, while others seem to require something closer to the Aristotelian unities of time and space? Moderator: Henry Jenkins Panelists:
TH2 Panel 4: "It's About Time!" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.
June 29, 2011
Acafandom and Beyond: Week Three, Part Two (Kristina Busse, Flourish Klink, and Nancy Baym)Kristina: I think it's interesting to look at three of us and how our different background quite strongly affects not just the way we do research but also the things we worry about. Coming from a straight up literature department (in the middle of High Theory no less) and teaching in a philosophy department, I worry a lot about what represents, both in research and in teaching. Meanwhile, my fan life feeds directly into my academic research, so that I feel a strong responsibility toward my fan friends to neither exploit nor to misrepresent them. Unlike Nancy, I was trained to analyze texts, and it actually took me a long time to negotiate my solely text-based background with, for example, ethical concerns for my research subjects/fan friends. In other words, it was my fannish background that made me create a research ethics that to most social scientists is probably totally obvious. At the same time, though, moving back and forth between studying texts and studying people, looking at blog posts as textual artifacts and looking at them as revealing material about a person, has forced me to address these issues in ways I feel many literary scholars don't (they often subscribe to the notion that everything that's accessible online is citable and in an almost New Critical way follow an author-less text model) and many social scientists don't (insofar as they erase the identity of individual fans when they don't name names). As for Flourish, I can't really speak to her experiences except that for me fandom is something that isn't connected to production and industry. As a fan I don't want to engage directly with actors/writers/directors, and as an academic, I don't care about that side either. I know it's an important area, and I'm very happy that we have good and smart people explaining and representing fandom, but to me fandom is mostly about what we as fans do. I'm passionately and hopelessly in transformational fandom, and I am interested in tracking and analyzing what fans do on their own rather than how fans interact with the industry. [And I am well aware of the gendered aspects of that attitude and its drawbacks!] The other thing that I notice a I'm looking at the three of us is generational. I don't know Nancyís age but I know she published already when I was just entering English grad school, so I think of the three of us possibly representing not only different disciplinary backgrounds but different fan studies generations. And maybe that means that Flourish's industry collaboration indeed is the future?
Nancy: Uh oh, I think I've just become a grandmother! Give me a few more years! I published my first piece about fandom in 1993. Like most of that work, until it took book form in Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage, 2000) it was being positioned primarily as work about online interaction, not as work about fandom (even in the book, it is at least half and half). Again this colors why the term "acafan" has never seemed relevant to me. I wasn't positioning myself as a fandom scholar, I was a qualitative internet researcher who studied what fans do. I like Flourish's points about industry and I appreciate her bringing them in as a third party to the personae we balance as people who study and participate in fandom. I love that people like Flourish are working with industry. In the last several years I have begun to speak at industry events and talk more with people in industry, particularly the music business, and the more I see, the more convinced I am that we really need fans represented in those rooms where Flourish sits with her teal hair (and I sit with my asymetrical hair with streaks of color that don't belong there). As fans we are constantly being viewed as ATM machines - "let's connect so we can monetize you!" - and I believe that the sustainability and long term future of the entertainment industries relies on a new kind of engagement with fans that must be informed both by those within fandom and by academic research. I keep going back again though to the notion that these concerns are not unique to fandom in any way. It's always incumbent on researchers to recognize the different audiences who have a stake in our work and to figure out the ethics of treating them all appropriately. These are rarely problems with obvious answers that fit everyone. They are ongoing processes we all work through on moment by moment and project by project bases. I don't think we all have a responsibility to speak to industry, and I totally get where Kristina is coming from in saying she wants to keep fandom for the fans. I do think, though that we have some responsibility within fandom to listen to the voices of the industry. Actors, musicians and writers are also real people with real feelings. I interviewed a woman in a band who had stumbled across fan fiction about her having an explicit erotic encounter with another female musician whom she knew in real life. She read it and the fan responses (which were along the lines of "wow, what a cool pairing") and felt both violated and kind of mortified about ever having to see her friend again without thinking about that. I believe in transformative works, but to me, this is a problem. As I've interviewed musicians about their interactions with fans, it's become clearer to me that some of the things fans do to gain status within fandom hurt the musicians. I'm not saying they shouldnít do them, and I do advise musicians to toughen up and let things go, but I do think it's worth thinking about how we might raise fans' awareness of how they affect the people they are discussing as well as the industry's awareness of how they affect fan discussions and academics discussions about both.
Flourish: Nancy, your story about the band member makes me think about fans' reactions to the academic articles they themselves are in. That's a productive comparison, I think - "fans are to acafen the way that band members are to RPF writers" - because I think it opens the door to discussing the competing ethical responsibilities we have. Part of defining oneself as an 'acafan,' I think, is about making an ethical commitment to the fan community, yes? So that when they read your academic work, they don't feel like that band member - misrepresented and kind of miserable. On the other hand, as a fan, Kristina is eager to reject any responsibility towards the creators of source texts for transformative works (or the actors and musicians whose lives provide source texts). Obviously, there''s some important differences - an academic is making truth claims, whereas a fan is not; academics have cultural power, whereas fans rarely do; fans do not (usually) put themselves forward as public figures, whereas musicians and actors must by the nature of their work. But ultimately, academics and fan fiction writers both mine preexisting texts and come up with narratives that make arguments about our world, right? They aren't the same, but they are similar. While I'm sensible to the argument Kristina is making about industry's interests not intersecting with hers (and the implicit argument I think she's making about industry's power and desire to control fannish behavior), I think it's interesting to think about the question of whether academics' interests actually match up with fans'. For many years, I pooh-poohed the idea that academics publishing about fandom would have any impact at all on what industry understood or thought - but now I see people in industry independently bringing up articles that have appeared in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. (One result of having an open-access journal is that, yes, fans can read the articles published therein, but so can folks in industry.)* If there are fans who truly want to be left alone, they haven't been helped by academics, not one bit. Besides, that horse has already bolted. Whether fans like it or not, there are more academics studying fandom than ever, and there are more people in industry sniffing around than ever. At this point, there's no reversing it. As Nancy suggests, the only thing that's left to do is to think about how to create some kind of balance - how to make sure that everybody can co-exist. Academics do play a role in that, whether we want to or not - which is one aspect of being an acafan that's not usually highlighted. *Yes, I realize that this somewhat contradicts what I was saying above about industry having more of an impact on daily life than academia. I am large, I contain multitudes. Nancy: I'm not sure how major a point it is for this discussion, but I am troubled by the idea that a performer who presents herself as willing to engage fans is thus obliged to be written about in public spaces in explicit sexual terms and, should she encounter that work, obliged to ignore it. I have no issues with people imagining and writing sexual encounters between fictional characters, but I do think that for fans to treat real people as fictions for their own and one anothers' imaginations can be selfish and even cruel, and that is not the fault of a musician for daring to be nice while looking good. I stand by my sense that one thing academics ought to be doing is giving fans frameworks for at least thinking critically about the ethics of what they do, just as we are well positioned to argue to the industries about the ethics of the choices they make towards fans. Our conversation seems to have revolved largely around ethics and accountability. When I first started studying fandom and read much of the textual analytic work on soap opera fans I was mortified by the willingness to make claims about what fans got out of the genre without ever actually looking at what fans did or talking with them about it. Not surprisingly, these textual analyses often led to analyses of fans as deeply screwed up people living vicariously through texts. I was also struck by the fact that so much of that work was written in language that was borderline incomprehensible without a Ph.D. in the area. In response, from the start, my core obligation has been to write about fans in a way that honors their perspectives and in a way which they can read easily [as a sidebar, open access publishing is an increasingly important part of this]. But 'honoring' does not mean 'fawning.' When fandom misbehaves, when there are fan works that are problematic or poorly done, when there are fans within communities who pull weird power plays or whatnot, we mustn't paper over that in order to make sure fandom looks good. We are often eager to criticize previous research in order to situate the value of our own, we need to be willing to criticize the fandoms we study too. Similarly, there are temptations to paint fans as good guys and industry professionals as bad guys, which is just as intellectually sloppy. What academics contribute isn't necessarily "truth" as Flourish said - I'd argue truths are multiple and contestable when youíre talking social behaviors and meanings - but insight. I see my role as an academic as doing systematic and rich analysis that provides a basis for understanding social phenomena. All of the relevant identities we experience as researchers can be mined for their contribution to understanding if we are reflexive throughout the research process. We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication. BIOS Kristina Busse (http://kristinabusse.com) is an English Ph.D. who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. Kristina is co-editor of†Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and of the forthcoming collection†Transmedia Sherlock.† She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Nancy Baym (http://www.nancybaym.com) is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Her recent work on independent Swedish musicians, labels and fans has been published in Popular Communication, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and First Monday. She blogs (now and then) at http://onlinefandom.com and collects links about artist-audience relationships at blog.beautifulandstrange.com.
June 24, 2011
Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters...Yesterday, J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame announced a bold new online venture called Pottermore which has sent shock waves through multiple communities which I follow closely and I've had more than a few people already ask me to weigh in on my initial thoughts about what's taking place. Keep in mind that, as Will Rogers used to say, all I know is what I read in the newspaper. I have no knowledge of what's taking place here other than what's already in the press and what I can speculate about from my knowledge of the announcement's fit within a range of trends impacting social media, transmedia entertainment, Web 2.0, and fan culture. Here's the video of Rowling's announcement, which you should watch, if you haven't already, so the rest of this makes sense. Now, let's consider what this announcement means from several perspectives. Pottermore as Transmedia Storytelling: This may be the most highly visible transmedia project to date -- after all, Harry Potter is as big a media franchise as we are likely to see anytime soon. I've blogged before about the paradoxical nature of Harry Potter fandom:
Relatively little of the official Harry Potter media produced to date has been transmedia in the sense that I use the term -- as an extension of the information we have available about the world rather than as a replication of the story from one medium to another. I've been suggesting lately that we might identify transmedia projects through the combination of two factors - radical intertextuality (that is, the complex interweaving of texts through the exchange of story-related information) and multimodality (that is, the mixing of different media and their affordances in the unfolding of the story). Pottermore works at both levels.
By far, this is the aspect of the announcement which has caught fire with fans, especially those who have been worried that the intensity of the fandom will fade once the last film is released into the theaters. Trust me, there's been lots of mashing of teeth about this. No one thinks that Harry Potter fandom will go away completely -- we've seen many fandoms long outlast the production of new material -- but there is apt to be less intensity and visibility once the final film hits the theater. For these fans, Pottermore is a game changer. Here, for example, is some of how HPANA, one online Harry Potter fansite, responded to the news:
Those are high hopes for the author to meet. On the other, there is the promise of multimodality represented by what's been described as interactive "moments" introduced around the books -- including a sorting hat process and a wand shop -- which allow fans new ways of interacting with the story. For literary critic Lev Grossman, who has been a key enthusiast for the books, this aspect of transmedia causes him to pause: When publishers mix reading with other media, the way Pottermore does (or the way that The 39 Clues, another Scholastic creation, does), I find it confusing. Every time I see more of the Potterverse realized in other media, as video or audio or even still images, it undoes the work I did by reading about it. It takes away from the marvelous, handmade Potterverse I've got going on in my head and replaces it with something prefabricated. Those of us who are more enthusiastic about transmedia see it differently: we see these materials as expanding our knowledge and deepening our experience of the story (at least in so far as they are done well and everything about Potter has been done well) by allowing each medium to do what it can do best. There's been lots of talk about whether there has been a killer demonstration of the potential of transmedia -- this may well become that killer demo, for better or for worse, and I for one am going to be watching closely to see what happens next. Pottermore as eBook: The Wall Street Journal has read the Pottermore story through the lens of ebook publishing and the future of authorship, and it's a pretty significant story from that perspective also. Here's part of what they speculate: While her publishers and major online book retailers will continue to sell her physical books, Ms. Rowling has reserved for herself the digital editions, the fastest-growing segment in the book world. The move could inspire other authors, large and small, to pronounce themselves independent agents in hopes of tapping more lucrative paydays. Ms. Rowling refused for years to release her books in electronic format, retaining the digital rights for herself. While most other authors have already handed over their digital rights to their publishers--most recently, John Grisham--Ms. Rowling's deal could prompt them to self-publish when their deals come up for renewal or demand higher royalty rates than the 25% of net sales that most publishers offer today on digital editions. Some may even choose to forgo all traditional means of book publishing and set up their own bookstores, reaping 100% of everything they sell.I am following the world of epublishing closely these days, thanks to my affiliation with the Annenberg Innovation Lab which is launching its own epublishing division. Few authors at this point can exert such power over their own publications and few have the ability to set new terms of professional compensation. Read through this lens, it may be a comparable to when George Lucas took a smaller salary on Star Wars in return to a percentage of the revenue from ancillary products, a decision which helped paved the way for Star Wars as a ur-text for transmedia storytellers and entertainers. Rowling recognizes that it is not enough to offer a digital offset of the books via Kindle but that ebook publishing represents its own kind of event, which enables her to further expand the reader's experience through new content and new ways of interacting with the material. Her continued involvement with the social network of her fans moves the ebook from a product to a process - not a one time thing, but something which can draw back people who have already read the seven books and watched the eight films to have a new set of relationships with the story. So, again, the announcement is big news. This has become increasingly true for Rowling, who has shown many signs that she wants to continue to shape and control how fans respond to her work well after she finished writing it. We can see this in the epilogue to the last novel, which seems to pointlessly map out futures for all of her characters, including shaping the "ships" (relationships) between them, in what amounts to spraying her territory. Many fans would have preferred a text which was more open ended on that level and allows them more freedom to speculate beyond the ending. She decided to "out" Dumbledore not through the books but via her own discourse around the books. She tried to shut down the Harry Potter Lexicon. So, it is abundantly clear that she likes some of her fans more than others and that any effort to facilitate fan interactions also represents an attempt to bring fandom more under her control. Two key phrases stood out for me in the announcement: "digital generation" and "safe," both of which require some glossing here. Harry Potter has attracted a very strong adult readership, many of whom would not conventionally fall into the digital generation. Even among those who come from the digital generation, many of those who grew up reading the books, are now young adults, even in some cases, parents on their own. And then, there are the children readers who were the targeted audience for the books. The most active fans, as noted above, are often a "surplus audience," and may well not be children. This doesn't matter when the book can be purchased at a range of different locations, read in a variety of contexts, but if you try to bring that readership together online, then the tensions are apt to become more of an issue. That's where the term, "safe," is a red flag. In this case, it can mean two things -- first, a space where you can read the stories without encountering any of that dratted "pornography" that some (many actually) of the adult fans have been producing. I remember talking to Warner executives when I was working on Convergence Culture who kept saying they wanted to distinguish between the "fans" and the "pornographers," and I couldn't bear to tell them that most of the erotica is produced by the fans and is part of what it means to them to be a fan. So, "safe" in those terms means censored, regulated, or policed. So, the promise is that "You," "Us," will help shape the future of the franchise but only in terms specified by Rowling and by the companies involved in overseeing this site. Here enters a second potential meaning of the word, "safe," which is that the site will comply with the Children Online Privacy Protection Act (or its British equivalent) which sets restrictions on the exchange of personal information, especially by minors. (For a useful discussion of how the desire to protect children may also restrict their ability to meaingfully participate, check out this recent post by Anne Collier.) So, does this mean that Pottermore will become the literary equivalent of Club Penguin, social media without the potential for off-line social interactions, and how does this fit within the larger framework of social relations upon which Harry Potter fandom, like all other fandoms, depends. Moving beyond the word, "safe," there's the potential that this follows the logic of Web 2.0 more generally which seeks to capture and commodify participatory culture. There are multiple concerns here, which I need to know more to be able to address. While the language of the video hints at a more open-ended structure of participation, wherein fans share their thoughts, speculations, and creative works with each other, the only features specifically described constitute preprogramed interactivity -- such as the Sorting Hat -- which sets the terms of our engagement with the storyworld. I might note that Harry Potter fandom has been among the most innovative in helping fans make the transition to the era of social networks -- having developed their own platforms and practices since the book was first published -- including several very sophisticated versions of the Sorting Hat. Which house you identify is deeply personal to Harry Potter fans. I strongly identify with my affiliation with Ravenclaw, so why should I cede to Rowling and Sony the right to decide which house is mine! So, in this case, Rowling is offering fans what they already have on their own terms and using the release of information as a bribe to pull them into her walled garden. (Keep in mind that the information is going to get spoiled and leaked the moment it is posted.) If, on the other hand, she does allow for more creative and participatory engagement of the material on the site, that opens other questions already hotly debated along the borders between Web 2.0 and Participatory Culture. Abigail DeKosnik, for example, has described the bargain fans often are forced to make -- ceding all rights to their own intellectual property in return for the promise, easily revoked, of corporations not suing them for their efforts. Others have described this in terms of issues of fan or free labor -- people are doing creative work for free which benefits corporations without getting any revenue in return. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to describe this as a modern form of "sharecropping." This is a complicated issue and we have a lot to say about it in my forthcoming Spreadable Media book. I am not prejudging the terms that Rowling and Sony are offering here. I am just saying that the platform as described raises these questions and we need more information before we can really weigh whether Rowling is treating her fans fairly here. She's been surprisingly supportive of fan culture in the past, but on a selective basis, which does not give us much guarantee on how this one is going to shape out. The devil is going to be in the details here and those are going to be rolled out over the next few months. Could Rowling's "gift" to her fans turn out to be a Trojan Horse? Hell yes, but it may also open the door for some other creative opportunities along the lines discussed in the earlier sections of this post.
June 16, 2011
How Do You End a Cult Series?: Fans RespondI asked for your thoughts about how cult series should end and in particular your expectations and responses about the resolution of Smallville. Here are your responses: Hello: I watched Smallville at the beginning and kind of faded out when Jonathan died. I left it alone for a couple of years and picked it back up again in season 8. I've since watched all the episodes in order and truly love the series for so many reasons. The messages were so positive, family was important, good, truth, justice and all the things that we seem to be lacking or maybe I should say we're trying to uncover again. I thought the end of the series was excellent. I truly was not disappointed other than learning it took another seven years for Clark to marry Lois. I'm not a comic book fan so I don't know what's happening in that reality. As far as Chloe goes, my impression was she was happily married to Oliver, she's a mother and she's still involved in the Justice League albeit in a role that keeps her anonymous for her protection and the team's. Given her propensity to stick by Clark no matter what, I can't imagine Chloe doing anything else with her life. It would have been nice for them to work Lana in there somehow. I wanted to know what happened to her but I wasn't disappointed per se. Hope this is what you were looking for. I'm just so grateful not to have a St. Elsewhere or Dallas kind of ending. As it was done, Smallville and Superman live on. Happy writing! Kim Kloes
Hi Allison I have been watching Smallville since my dad had me watch it with him which was "Justice" in season 6 as my starting episode. It was awsome and I have loved your character ever since. And just between u and me I think chloe was more fun with Oliver then Jimmy. Besides the Finale what episode do u think u liked the most of the ones u were in for season 10? For ur role I think the best was probably "Masquerade with Desaad" but u looked like u had a lot of fun with "Fortune." What kinda props did u take home when the season ended? Did kristen and erica not like each other that much because after season 5 they actually (and i looked back) had only 6 scenes together in 2 whole seasons. Or was it the writers who did that? Im sorry if this is a little akward and u dont have to answer but i always wanted to know was it akward that u and tom knew each other for 9 years and u guys did a naked scene together in season 9 in "Escape"? With Silver Banshee? I think thats enough questions and I loved Smallville and I will always love it. I also was happy with Chloes ending being a recruiter of heros, a mom, and still a reporter. Your character always developed in fun ways and whats good is that it never changed it just kept adding on. Thanks, Justin your Smallville fan
My 1st response is about the show: The most awesome part about it is that, because of it's origins of Comic books, it already had it's core fan base; Those that weren't comic book geeks are more abstract/contemporary viewers.
Wow, you are a brave person, opening up your inbox to comments from a horde of Sci-Fi fans :) I appreciate the opportunity to weigh in, so I'll keep my comments brief. I'll lead off my comments by pointing out that there's obviously no way they could have satisfied everyone with the finale, especially with a Canadian TV show budget. If you did everything all of the fans wanted, you'd spend a hundred million dollars, which was clearly not in the cards. I also note that many folks appear to be quite satisfied with the finale. For my part, though, I found the finale to be monumentally unsatisfying, but not for the reasons that are being cited by many. My only expectation was that I expected the producers handling the finale to deliver a cohesive, meaningful story that wrapped up the TV series, its characters, and its plotlines during their last outing, and it is in this basic storytelling respect that it really came up short. The best example of this fact is the way in which the Lois and Clark wedding was handled. The fact that Lois and her relationship with Clark was so important to his destiny was one of the truly innovative and memorable things about this season and a really novel, welcome addition of the Superman mythos; the storyline and accompanying great performances by the two actors really enhanced the show. They ultimately built up the wedding into one of the prime narrative drivers of the season, to the point where it took up half of the time in the series's final episode. The Lois and Clark wedding was, of course, also heavily hyped by the network. If you spend that much time building up to something, you have raised audience expectations to the point where you really, really, need to cohesively deliver a satisfying resolution onscreen. Instead, the wedding gets interrupted at the halfway point to the show, we get to the end of the final episode, there's a brief 7-year flash forward sequence, and the two main characters still aren't married. As a viewer, my response to that moment was roughly: "WHAT?!!! Are you kidding me? All that buildup and this is what we get?" The fact that the ending of the show establishes that they are still trying to get married is really just a bad storytelling decision. It rudely snaps the viewer out of the story. This ending raises a host of uncomfortable questions that the viewer really shouldn't have been induced to ask, since they completely ruin the "suspension of disbelief" that is absolutely required for a show with an (admittedly zany) premise like this one. Questions like: Why didn't they just finish the wedding in the parking lot with the minister 7 years before? Why did it take so long for them to try to get married again? More importantly, why haven't Superman and Lois Lane, of all people, not been able to find a day--or heck, even an hour--in seven years to finish their 90% done wedding, which had been portrayed as immensely important to them both for an entire season? You make time for what's important, and waiting seven years is very much out of character for them. The Lois character in particular goes from "never accepting defeat" just two episodes prior to apparently blithely accepting defeat in the case where her own wedding doesn't get finished. Bottom line: the whole thing just defies belief, and having a prime narrative focus of the series be handled in this fashion really makes no sense. What makes it even more frustrating is that there are any number of ways this plotline could have been handled more satisfyingly; I for one would have been A-OK if that last scene had just established that they were were married offscreen at some nebulous point beforehand, which would have been shockingly easy to do (a simple "Hello, Mrs. Kent" would have worked just fine...). Instead, although we did get lots of wedding-related character moments and the ending clearly shows that the two characters are still together, the viewers categorically did not get a satisfying onscreen narrative conclusion to the season-long wedding plotline. You spend that much time building up to something, you have to deliver, and they did not. It would be interesting to hear about the thinking that went into this decision; to a completely average TV viewer such as myself, it is absolutely befuddling, and I just felt insulted by the way that the wedding plotline was handled. It felt like my time had been wasted for an entire season. Now, I don't know if the non-wedding was mandated by the studio or was a misguided effort to leave the viewer "wanting more", but no matter whose responsibility it is, it was a huge mistake to end that plotline (and the show) in such a nonsensical and unsatisfying manner, especially when handling it in a more straightforward and crowd-pleasing way would have been just as easy and let them tell the same story. The completely illogical conclusion to the wedding plotline is emblematic of other, similar problems in the finale, like (for example) the bizarre Chloe-and-the-comic book framing story that gives away Clark's identity already noted by many, as well as the fact that (despite two seasons of some pretty thick foreshadowing) we never get to see Lois name Superman and reveal him to the world, a fairly important and defining moment for both characters. In the cosmic scheme of things, of course, it doesn't really matter. Griping about the final episode is of course a symbolic gesture at this point since the show is over, we'll never see the actors in these roles ever again, and everyone (myself included) is moving on. But, that's just why I think some people remain frustrated. The producers apparently took the position "We don't need to show [insert really important Smallville character milestone here] on our TV show, since we all know from [insert comic book or movie here] that it will eventually happen!". Well, that's just lazy. As a fan of the TV show, I wanted to see these iconic story moments with "our" versions of these characters, and that's what the viewers really didn't get. I had always held off buying the Smallville DVDs, because I knew there would inevitably be a big box set at the end of the series, and I knew that for me the payoff from the destination (the finale) had to be worth making the journey. Let's face it, this show had some real clunkers along the way. Unfortunately, the final episode (and in particular, that final scene, where the two main characters are inexplicably not married after a whole season of buildup) was such a let down that I'm not going to waste my time and hard-earned money on the DVDs in order to relive a journey that has such an unsatisfying destination. Which is kind of a shame. Thanks again for the opportunity to offer an opinion! I don't mind if you utilize the preceding paragraphs for public consumption, but I would request that my identity remain anonymous. Cheers, I am a huge Smallville, Superman fan and have been from day one. I am also involved heavily in the online fandom on various sites including Twitter and Kryptonsite forums so I have a very good idea of how the Finale of Smallville was perceived. Generally, I've only come across a small minority who didn't enjoy the finale for various reasons and unfortunately these people are also the most vocal. I wish I could write a logic piece analyzing bit by bit how the writers broke the contract with the audience they established in the pilot. I'm a writer myself (in Spanish, English is not my first language as you probably can tell in my bad grammar) and I studied for years creative writing, plot points, chekhov guns, the journey of the hero and the heroine....so many other treaties about the art of writing and if the writers really think they did their job I pity any new fans that engage into their projects because they lack basic storytelling skills. But I can't. I'm still mourning. The connection the first five years created with this characters and me was strong and powerful, and it was downhill from them on and in the end they just destroyed it, to a point that all I can feel is rage thinking about it. I wish I could be more rational about it, is just a TV show that no one will remember in 10 years (maybe because of the horrible ending), but I can't. I was in love with Smallville. I usually call it my only abusive relationship, always believing the promise that the good times will come back and kept coming back for more mistreatment almost every week, like a beating husband that brings you flowers and promises not to hurt you again and you forgive because you are in love, but then the beatings continue coming and in the end you end up dead. This is what Smallville did to me. It killed my faith on TV series. I will say I haven't seen any other series and I don't plan to, I can't have faith again. Heroes started great and also ended in a mess, and the perfect TV series Pushing Daisies was canceled. There are many other great series that also suffered the same faith so is obvious that TV shows are stale like Hollywood movies are becoming now with nothing new or original just rehash, unlikeable characters and bad writing that they cannot see it for the life of themselves. I really hope the producers of Smallville are really happy about being part of the many problems I have with TV that lead me to quit it altogether. For as much as they say this is the planned ending for the last 10 years I would love to see the original planned ended script or layout, I'm pretty sure it was totally different. As for my kids I will be buying DVD of good TV shows of the past for them to actually enjoy watching good stories. Star Trek TNG for example, also finished in its own terms and their ending was perfect, IMO. It got closure for all the characters, gave us a glimpse of the future that was logical for them in most ways and opened new possibilities, organically integrating even the special guests....just perfection in writing. But new TV shows and cable networks can keep airing bad written shows and Reality TV 24/7 if they want to. This viewer, that was willing to purchase the special 10 seasons package of Smallville if only the ending would had been...decent, Is going to take her disposable income and investing on good stories and people that are willing to actually do their homework and keep their promises, YMMV as usual. Thanks again for the chance and who knows I might be able to write something proper in the future, at this point I just can't. Ana Bastow
Editor's Note: Thanks to everyone (whether fan or professional) who took the time to share with me your thoughts on Smallville's ending or on the ending of cult series more generally. There were many different and sometimes conflicting perspectives expressed here, and it's worth remembering the range of production contingencies and restrictions which also figure into this process.
June 15, 2011
Acafandom and Beyond: Week One, Part Two (Anne Kustritz, Louisa Stein, and Sam Ford)In this second installment, the participants engage in back and forth conversation intended to extend upon the ideas contained in their opening statements. Louisa Stein: Anne and Sam, I'm struck by the harmony in our three separately written pieces. We all seem to recognize the perceived dangers or negative connotations of the term acafan, and yet feel a value in holding on to the term because of its potential as a self-reflexive signpost, a bridge between interconnected disciplines or subject positions, and even perhaps a politicized position. One question I have is from where this perception emerges that acafan is an essentialized standpoint or identity connected to identity politics? All of our three responses here indicate that that none of us relate to the term acafan in this way, though we are all wary of these associations. Why and where does this negative perception of acafan as a divisive concept take root and how can we counter this narrative? Or is this perception an unavoidable part of the project of acafan work?
Sam Ford: In Soap Fans in 1995, Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby made compelling points about the necessary balance between private and social fandom. I agree with Anne that, just as fan studies has often privileged the fan community over private consumption practices, the term "acafan" has come to hold particular meaning to participants in a community. The implications that being an acafan might have for those doing textual analysis, for instance, is strong. I primarily study (and am a fan of) areas of entertainment whose cultural value is often missed by anyone who would not consider themselves a fairly ardent "fan" of the genre in question: soap operas and pro wrestling. From the "outside," both are often considered of no artistic merit, and the trouble that fans of either genre find is that even explaining the artistry of the genre or what makes for "good" vs. "bad" wrestling or "quality soap opera storytelling" is lost on someone outside the genre. I remember in particular, after the cancellation of As the World Turns, being interviewed by a television critic for a prominent publication about the death of long-running soap operas. I was explaining what was unique about the soap opera storytelling model and what might be lost as daytime soaps go off the air. In the interview, she could detect from my passion and the depth of my knowledge that I did more than "study" soap fans or write "about" the genre: the "fan" side of my "acafan" was showing through. I could instantly tell that her radar went up. As she detected that I liked what she saw as lowbrow and lower-grade programming, she began to completely dismiss all that I had to say. After I finished, she said, "I've watched soap operas before, and I didn't see any of what you saw." My point was exactly that: that the language of soap opera and the ability to see what DEFINES "good storytelling" and high quality texts within the soap opera genre can only be seen by someone who understands the genre deeply enough to know its lexicon. And, similarly, for soaps, I've written before about the fact that doing textual analysis for that genre (with 260 new episodes a year, for decades) is so complex that it's hard for those who aren't intimately familiar for the genre to follow and not see it as totally ridiculous. All this is to say that, for textual analysis in genres like these, being an acafan provides a great wealth of experience and understanding of a genre that those who aren't dedicated viewers just wouldn't have. So I certainly believe that we too often, in using the term "acafan," privilege the social side of "fan" without thinking about the "aca" part. And part of what we are questioning here, I suppose, is whether "acafan" becomes a label for a scholar's relative position to an object of study; a mode of engagement with particular methodologies and approaches; or a label for a distinct kind of scholar or a sub-field of work under "fan studies." Sometimes, there seems to be slippage across these uses. Louisa Stein: Anne, I want to focus in on a very valuable point in your response that I'd like us to unpack further. You wrote: "Even the suggestion that the term 'aca-fan' always offers a relevant and contradictory identification to some extent implies a false universal." Anne Kustritz: I agree that allowing for a variety of life experiences and disciplinary approaches to populate the aca-fan concept is the primary challenge. Partly, this may require that a case be made for what self-reflexivity has to offer, in tandem with the importation or creation of methods for critically evaluating aca-fan self-reflexivity, because as with any mode of writing, some authors will offer more nuanced, sophisticated, and productive analyses than others. In the first case, this blog conversation will hopefully amplify the diversity of experiences and approaches taken by aca-fen, which will hopefully allow for all of us to be in broader conversation with the field as a whole. In the second instance, the aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding and evaluating how scholars employ self-reflexivity to separate justifications of the aca-fan concept from the success with which it is employed in various pieces. Perhaps this addresses Sam's concern about the relatively unexamined "aca" end of things. As I've mentioned, because of my background in cultural anthropology, I tend to draw upon that literature for its specialization in analyzing the researcher-participant relationship, but it would likely behoove us to collectively build a literature of our own specifically on the process of scholarly analysis for aca-fan works. Thus, perhaps instead of questioning whether one ought to be an aca-fan, which as a question of identity and identification seems problematic to police, and instead move toward creating principles for thinking through aca-fan works. Which aspects of an aca-fan text make it more or less successful or useful? Sam Ford:I think both of your suggestions are key here and get back to one of my concerns of what would be lost if the ideas surrounding "aca-fan" were to be lost: a space for academics from a wide range of traditional disciplines to come together to share work that both study fans/fan communities in a way that shows respect, nuance, and an acknowledgment of autonomy for those fans--and a space that allows for the intersection of academics and fans to converse with one another on high-level concepts surrounding the reception and socialization of texts that draw high levels of engagements from their viewers/listeners/readers/players. We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.
Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercom Strategic Communications, an affiliate with both the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and a fellow with the Futures of Entertainment group. He is also a regular contributor to Fast Company. Sam is co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (NYU Press, forthcoming) and is co-editor of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughter Emma. Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures. You can find Louisa on twitter here and on wordpress here..
June 13, 2011
Acafandom and Beyond: Week One, Part One (Anne Kustritz, Louisa Stein, and Sam Ford)This is the first installment of our summer-long discussion of "Acafandom and Beyond." Many readers ask me what "Acafan" means in the title of this blog. This conversation will be a chance to dig deeper into this concept and explore its relationship to more general concerns of the place of subjectivity and self-reflexivity in cultural critique. In the first segment of each week, we will be reading opening statements from the three invited participants. Anne Kustritz: My interest in aca-fan identity derives from two main concerns. First, I envision the aca-fan construct as the demarcation of a site of cultural and political struggle and an opportunity for solidarity; yet it often seems to be represented as a coherent or even essentialized standpoint or identity (and identity politics). Secondly, the issues I imagine as most central to theorization of aca-fan identity have also been elucidated significantly in the works of post-structuralist, post-modern, feminist, queer, post-colonial, and native ethnography/ethnology, and those conversations would significantly enrich our dialogue. It seems to me that arguments about or discussions of aca-fan identity often work at cross-purposes because they reveal the lack of a shared object and method: that is, the material incoherency/heterogeneity of both the "fan" and the "studies" of fan studies; basic disagreement about the organization and definition of these terms means that scholars (and fans) discussing aca-fan identity lack a shared vocabulary. The stakes involved in embracing, repudiating, or entirely avoiding the aca-fan construct remain localized within particular geographical and institutional spaces. Thus, the conversation looks almost entirely different depending upon which fans one studies, using which methods. For example, in my own work I've tried to make a distinction between "creative" and "as is" fans who either treat the canon as open to fan transformation, or a closed system to be interpreted and commented upon but not altered. In past aca-fan discussions I've also come to see the critical importance of studying enculturated versus unincorporated fans as a locus of disagreement, i.e. those fans who participate in communities and define themselves through that participation, and those who act within a less fixed network, or none at all. Both of these distinctions as well as numerous others repeatedly unseat our attempts to determine who is a fan, and thus what may be gained or lost by identifying as such. Subsequently, the methods one uses to study "their" type of fans also structures beliefs about the aca-fan concept, particularly between those who see fans as primarily a textual phenomena and those who see fans as a primarily socio-cultural phenomena, as well as those who balance the two perspectives. Even then, significant disagreement still persists over whether fans primarily pose artistic, psychological, cultural, legal, or political questions. Our investments in who defines a fan, how they should be studied, and why we study fans all become ventriloquized in discussions about the value and nature of aca-fan identification. In other words, a little self-reflexivity about our thoughts on self-reflexivity might be in order. Secondly, our discussion of aca-fan identity occurs in the wake of two decades of debate in cultural anthropology about the trials and tribulations of studying a group to which one belongs, as well as over a century of thought on the unique political, ethical, and psychological implications of studying people. While it may seem strange to turn to anthropology, especially to those who study unincorporated, "as is" fans, it would behoove us to take these conversations into account and allow them to enrich our dialogue. We need not invent this wheel. Just as a sample, post-structuralist anthropology, particularly the works of James Clifford, warn against allowing our observations of some behavior of one group of people to construct a coherent, ahistorical, or essencialized notion of "culture" - or "fans." Rather, it is through the act of naming and narrating both our participants and ourselves as fans that these scattered activities seem homogenous and inherently meaningful. Ruth Behar's work, thought by many to mark the beginning of cultural anthropology's self-reflexive turn, deeply probes the layers of hierarchy and difference at play when the life story of a researcher comes into contact with the on-going life stories of her group of interest. She notes that while self-narratives of the heroic, self-determined researcher feel reassuring, it is more honest and affords deeper human connections with participants and readers to acknowledge our fallibility and partiality while engaging in what she terms "vulnerable observation." Similarly, many critical ethnographers, including Gelya Frank, Gayle Rubin, and Kamala Visweswaran, argue that doing work within our own communities does not resolve the inherited colonial and class based baggage inherent in "studying down," but rather often intensifies them because one begins to study the very system of hierarchy within which one's own life remains entangled. Scholars like Julie Taylor who use ethnographic methods at the disciplinary margins challenge us to reconceptualize the value of academic work by refusing to mystify its necessary partiality, limitations, and personal/somatic origins, instead celebrating the inescapable fact that academic work comes from unique subjectivities. Thus Taylor describes her work as "her tango," and makes the specific enunciation (rather than inherent nature) of Argentine tango danced by herself and her participants as inflected by the widespread terror of the dirty war and the gendered terror of sexual abuse the very focus and strengths of her study. In general, critical cultural anthropologists, ethnographers, and ethnologists offer a long literature problematizing the culture concept, probing the construction of researchers' identities both "in the field," and at home, as well as while doing "homework," and imagining a type of scholarship not based on the false empiricisms of absolute, essential, or ahistorical knowledge. Therefore, I find it important to start by stating that I study enculturated, creative fans using an interdisciplinary array of mixed methods including critical theory and ethnography. My feelings about the aca-fan concept are thereby conditioned by my training in both cultural studies and critical cultural anthropology. I am wary of allowing the aca-fan construction to imply any homogeneity of culture or identity construction among either fans or academics, and instead find it most useful as the description of a site of struggle between the dominant constructions of each, pointing toward many disciplines' remaining investments in "objectivity," and the social stereotype of "the fan" as masculine yet emasculated, overly emotional yet analytic and socially inept, educated yet enraptured with the detritus of the popular. Although I emphasize the heterogeneity of experience and investment among the group and my own idiosyncratic place therein, I identify as a slash fan and an aca-fan because these are labels of solidarity for me. Like queer, these offer an opportunity to claim and stand with a set of socially marked investments in sex, sociality, research practice, and classed cultural tastes.
Sam Ford: Over the past few years, the term "acafan" has been picked up for a variety of uses. For academics, it's been a way to discuss a particular type of fan studies. By that, I mean pieces more qualitative in nature, more informed by in-depth knowledge of a particular fan culture because it's been written by someone who is a member of that community, and which often use an inductive sort of logic, focusing on the rich details of a particular fan community and then looking at what that case might tell us about fan practices at large. It's also become a way to be more up-front about one's own complicity in what he is writing about (as Anne discusses), encouraging academics to both admit the limitations their "embeddedness" causes but also to be able to draw from the knowledge they have as a participant of some sort in a particular fandom or as a self-professed "fan" of a media property. But, of course, both "academic" and "fan" are loaded terms. There's plenty of anti-fandom in academic culture (as Louisa alludes to), which the "acafan" has been a construct to rail against. And there's plenty of anti-egghead feelings in fan culture, both conceptual (not seeing the value in "overanalyzing" or questioning the "privileged"/heightened position an academic is perceived to be taking on) and based on real experience (for any of us who have ever ran into an "acafan" who believes their fannish opinion "superior" because they are "not just a fan but also an academic.") As fan communities face members who see their positions as enlightened because of their "superior" knowledge--and as academic conferences, programs, and journals are flooded with people who see fan studies as a justification to make a living writing about their hobby without worrying so much about any critical intervention or generating compelling insights--it's perhaps no surprise that the term has "grown" to the point that people are now questioning whether its use has been stretched past usefulness. Hence, we have this series over the summer here on Henry's blog: what I hope will be a helpful intervention to figure out what can't be lost about the position, methodology, and type of writing/discussion implied by the "acafan" construct while hopefully helping weed out ways that the term has come to be used in counterproductive ways. While I don't have deep investment in whether the actual term "acafan" is retained, I do have reservations about what could be lost in abandoning the term. As Anne points out, there is a lack of boundaries in fan studies that is both freeing (being able to draw from multiple disciplines/methodologies and encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration) and constraining (a lack of shared vocabulary, etc.) But, even as we celebrate the interdisciplinary nature of fan studies, I think it's crucial to think about all the areas of what might be considered "fan studies" which our field has not intersected with: sports studies and music/folklore studies, for instance, both of which are areas where many of the academics writing in these areas likely have deep personal/social investments in their objects of study. The "acafan" construct still might act as a means through which we can connect many academics who "fan studies" as a "field" has not yet intersected with. Even more fundamentally, I fear a dismissal of "acafandom" outright might miss opportunities for collaboration, conversation and debate between fan studies academics and fan communities members who deeply invested in larger discussions about fandom, the politics of affinity communities, etc. I feel that the idea of "acafandom" have come to represent spaces of collaboration where academics studying fandom can learn from fans and vice versa, and I've participated in a variety of conversations, online and in-person, that have been strengthened by collaborative discussion between those who study fandom professionally and those who primarily approach fandom through "vernacular theory" (to borrow Thomas McLaughlin's term). As someone with a deep investment in "applied humanities" (to use a popular term from my alma mater, MIT), I long to see an academia more inclusive of a diverse range of "non-academic" opinions, just as I long to see the insights of media studies academics reach audiences outside journal readership and media studies conference attendees. For me, acafandom has represented sites for such collaboration, and I feel that fan studies loses significant ground if we accidentally raze spaces for interdisciplinary and academic/fan dialogue in reconsidering our use of the term. We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.
Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercom Strategic Communications, an affiliate with both the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and a fellow with the Futures of Entertainment group. He is also a regular contributor to Fast Company. Sam is co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (NYU Press, forthcoming) and is co-editor of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughter Emma. Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures. You can find Louisa on twitter here and on wordpress here..
June 11, 2011
Going Beyond the Ending: A Wrap UpThis week, this blog has been using the debate about Smallville's ending to raise some larger questions about how cult series ends and how producers might deal with fans who are disappointed or frustrated or enraged or betrayed or... with the outcomes. Seeking to place this debate in a larger context, I reached out to Flourish Klink,who graduated with a Masters from the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (where I was her proud mentor) and now, alongside teaching at MIT, works as the Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists, advising this transmedia company about fan relations and participatory culture. She always has interesting things to say about the interplay between producers and fans, so I wanted to give her a chance to weigh in on this discussion. Cult series always seem more satisfying to fans in the middle than at the end. How do you think producers should deal with the expectations which have built up over the run of the series? Are there classic mistakes which producers make in trying to respond to fan frustration with the ending of a program? One of the most important aspects of dealing with expectations is to be honest about the situation, the possibilities, and the fact that not everybody is happy. One of the most classic mistakes that producers make is to become very defensive about their own work, suggesting that the way the show (or book, or...) ended is the only way it could have ended. Obviously, producers and writers and actors get just as wrapped up in their own long-running projects as fans do, so sometimes they become very certain that they're doing the right thing!
What franchises do you think have done the best job in resolving the competing expectations that surround the final episode of a favorite series? Even though lots of fans disliked the final season, I think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a very good job - and it did a good job of using multiple shows and multiple media to let fans choose what view of the universe they wanted to take. Fans can choose to only watch Buffy - or also watch Angel - or also read the Season 8 comic books. Depending on what they chose to do, what they choose to consider their own personal "head canon," they can enjoy their own ideas about the series. What's more, whether you liked or disliked the final episode of BTVS, nobody was able to say that it wasn't climactic. BTVS somehow managed to have an apocalypse every season and still raise the stakes every season. If that's possible, no other show has an excuse for not having a climactic final episode! For those who want to have a better understanding of how one can be a fan, even a very loyal fan, and actively seek to write around or think around disappointing elements in the original series, I'd recommend checking out my chapter on Beauty and the Beast in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Here was a series that many, though not all, fans thought took a wrong turn which violated the genre contract the producers had made with their viewers and many chose to disavow an entire series and proceed with the fandom as though it had never existed as part of the canon. Now, I want to share two letters I received from other fans who wanted to share their thoughts on the ending of cult series. I would be happy to see more such letters at hjenkins@usc.edu and will publish more if they come. Do let me know if you intend your letter for publication.
From Eugenia:
Sometime during Season 3, I had decided that there were three types of resolutions to this series. These were:
1. Everyone dies According to the laws of narrativium and story logic [1], this was the most likely resolution. Hints, or what other writers call "foreshadowing", in this direction were themes such as humanity wasn't fit to survive and children didn't come into their own until their parents were eliminated. Minor plots centered on schisms in the population leading to violence, characters suffering fatigue both mentally and physically, and characters becoming addicted to mind-altering substances. Logically these actions would have led to depleting resources to the point the fleet would be unable to defend or sustain itself. 2. Most of the main characters survive Given Moore and Eick's manifesto [2] which described their "re-imagining" as "Naturalistic Science Fiction" and which stated, "Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series", something resembling an optimistic ending was the least likely resolution. After several seasons of "gritty realism", bleakness, and despair, the reversion to something resembling a traditional ending where the "good" guys win would be tantamount to an admission of failure of their "re-imagined" series. Rationalizations of following the original series are mere excuses. Moore and Eick never felt obligated to follow anything in the original series beyond the title, the character names (even then demoted to "call signs" or last names), and the general design of the eponymous spaceship. It's absurd to even bring up Galactica: 1980 to justify the ending; that series wasn't titled Galactica: 148,000 BC. In light of the "critical acclaim" of the series in the first two seasons, this conclusion to the series was possible if Moore and Eick sought to reinstate their favoured position with the critical intelligentsia. The typical ingredients of postmodern works are evident in the series: style over substance, juxtaposition of different elements, references to past works, combination of the "lowbrow" and "highbrow", ambiguity, nihilism, and self-awareness of the artificial contrivance involved in creating the "work". Frequently accompanying postmodern literature or art is the author's stated intention to make it "difficult" for the reader or viewer. Not only difficult in interpreting it, but also even reading or looking at it due to the revolting subject matter. These traits were evident in the series with its use of documentary (cinema-verite) camera work, the "re-imaging" of a "cheesy, 1970's TV show" into something "complex" with "layers of meaning", the disjointed narrative which frequently shifted time frames leaving gaps in the storyline, the monotone colour scheme of the costumes and sets making it difficult to distinguish characters, and viewers constantly being referred to deleted scenes and podcasts to fill in the gaps. Adding to the difficulty in understanding the storyline was demanding the viewer to shift frames of reference in quick succession. At times it was space opera, at others it was contemporary drama, and at still other times abstract symbolism. A frequent trait in postmodern literature is the author making an appearance in the story itself, so Moore's cameo in the final scenes was not unexpected. What is claimed as sophisticated and erudite is merely confusing as the postmodern approach repeatedly disrupts the "suspension of disbelief" which narrative fiction relies on. The conclusions of such works are often self-referential or circular in that they return to the beginning.
Basically the conclusion was a traditional "happy" ending in which most of the main characters survive and a quick addendum of the postmodern self-referential with a few final swipes at the original series. Moore and Eick just couldn't resist making the "Guardians" (old-school Cylon centurions) all on the "evil" side and obliterated. They just couldn't resist pitching the whole fleet into the sun accompanied by the original 1978 series title music played at the tempo of a dirge [3]. They just couldn't resist one last potshot regarding the original Baltar's beheading/non-beheading [4]. WHY IT DIDN'T WORK FOR ME It contradicted the underlying assumption of the science fiction genre. Underneath the spaceships, lasers, funny-looking makeup, etc. is the ideal that the scientific method enables progress through a greater understanding of the physical world. As such, it allows humanity to determine its own destiny by surviving threats of extermination from disease, natural disasters, and predators. The finale succumbed to the romantic notion of the "noble savage" living in harmony with nature by giving up material possessions, advanced technology, and accumulated knowledge. In essence, these Colonials sentenced their direct descendants to ignorance and a minimal existence. This is the antithesis of the science fiction genre's foundation. The series conclusion reveals that the "optimism" that Moore and Eick criticized as unrealistic in Star Trek was actually a lack of understanding on their part of the values inherent in the scientific method and Western civilization. The cyclical "what has happened before, will happen again" typifies Eastern traditions. Destiny is preordained meaning when it come right down to it, an individual or civilization having no "free will". References to the "Head" people as angels who are acting in accordance with God's instructions is actually in direct opposition to the original series "Beings of Light". The "Beings of Light" represented the possibility of humanity's evolution to a higher state yet they could not "interfere with freedom of choice [5]", unlike the "re-imagined" series "Head" people who directly interfered and acted in the capacity of fate or destiny. Various comments regarding comparisons of the original series to the "re-imagined" series indicate that some viewers weren't paying attention or were not able to recognize recurring themes without a character pontificating at length. When the original series mentioned that Kobol's [6] civilization migrated and abandoned technology, it stated: "And when they settled the Colonies, they turned on the very technology that could have saved them had they used it properly [7]". This theme is later alluded to in dialogue referring to the Cylons as "a race of beings who allowed themselves to be overcome by their own technology [8]". Technology wasn't considered evil in and of itself, but that it could be misused either intentionally or through over-reliance. The original series connected the themes of "free will" and the use of technology. These themes are intertwined in the episode "War of the Gods" and complement the surface mythic storyline. In being seduced by technology, there is the danger of losing one's humanity or soul. To retain "free will", and thus humanity, it was deemed necessary to maintain family, community, and knowledge through religious, educational, political, and military structures. To submit blindly to another power is to lose "free will" and the ability to determine one's future. This point was again visited in the episode "Experiment in Terra" with the words: "I came from a world where the people believed the opposite of war was peace. We found out the hard way that the opposite of war is more often slavery. And that strength -- strength alone -- can support freedom [9]". [1] The force that holds the story together as defined by Terry Pratchett.
June 10, 2011
How Should Cult Series End?: A ReponseLast time, I posed the question of how to end a series which has attracted a passionate and committed fan following -- using Smallville as our central example. Today, I wanted to give some of the people associated with the series a chance to respond and share some of their perspectives on trying to close out Smallville's tenth and final year as a television series. Specifically, I asked them to reflect on how they closed off the Chloe Sullivan storyline which some fans had come to see as emblematic of what it means to be a professional women in the early 21st century. As I mentioned last time, I am grateful to Mark Warshaw of the Alchemists for his help in arranging for these responses. The first comes from Kelly Souders, an alum of USC's Graduate Screenwriting Program, who joined the Smallville team, with her creative partner Brian Peterson as staff writers and finished their ninth and final season on the show as Executive Producers and showrunners. Kelly's frank and intelligent discussion of the challenges of constructing and managing transmedia characters was a highlight of this year's Transmedia Hollywood 2 conference, as you will see when we release the videos of that event through this blog late next week. What are some of the challenges you face in trying to bring about closure to something as long-form as a cult television series like Smallville? Honestly, "challenges" is a polite way to put it. Trying to sum up a decade of stories and characters, trying to sum up that season's arc, trying to give people as much as they can (knowing even a major feature film couldn't do it and they aren't following a nine day shoot and many other tv constraints) is pretty much... impossible. But, the benefit of a ten year show is that the people that are there after so long are there because they are passionate. And everyone gave 150%. Given the diverse investment fans make in such series, what steps can producers take to live up to their expectations?
Some fans have expressed concern that the ending of Smallville effectively has "undone" some of the character development from the rest of the series, for example closing off Chloe's career ambitions. How would you respond to these concerns?
This second response comes from Allison Mack, the actress who played the part of Chloe Sullivan, and has now moved on to do stage work: I want to begin this response by stating how moved and honored I am to know that a piece of work I was involved in creating over the last decade has inspired such passion, commitment and support. I believe our ability to have deep emotional experiences is what makes life worth living. Knowing that I was and am a small part of inspiring this type of experience is more gratifying than I can express. Thank you. I would love to hear what you are thinking. As I did with the discussion of committed relationships and Castle, I am going to suggest you send your responses to me directly via e-mail at hjenkins@usc.edu so you don't have to face the headache of my spam catcher. I will post as many responses as I can through the blog proper. Please be clear if you are sending this personally to me or want to see it published. So, if you are a Smallville fan, what did you think about how the series ended and how might you like to see the series extended in new directions, as Mack suggests here? And if you are not a fan of Smallville, share your thoughts about the endings of other cult series. Which ones were handled the best? Which were handled the worst? What steps can producers take in responding to fan disappointments around the series? What would you like to tell "The Powers That Be" about how cult series should end? Next time, I will share some closing thoughts and we will hear from Flourish Klink, a former student of mine who is now Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists, and perhaps from some of you.
June 8, 2011
When Bad Things Happen to Good Series, or How Should Cult Series End?The May 20th issue of Entertainment Weekly included a list of what they saw as the most controversial television series finales; they included Lost, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Saint Elsewhere, and Newhart. The piece was timely since as I was reading it, I was hearing of some of the controversies surrounding several of the cult television series which concluded this season. Reader Polly Robinson shared with me an interesting set of developments around Stargate:Universe getting canceled. I wrote some time ago about the ways Stargate fans worldwide had lobbied to keep this franchise in production. In this case, the much publicized Universe extension had been canceled by the SyFy Network after only two seasons and dedicated fans wanted an explanation. Craig Engler, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Syfy Digital, went on the GateWorld blog to offer an explanation, offering some interesting behind the scenes insights into how cable networks make decisions about how long and in what ways to prolong struggling series. Not every fan was satisfied by Engler's answers, but most appreciated his efforts to help them understand what had happened. About the same time, I received an email from Margaret J. Bates, a longtime Smallville fan, who was disappointed with some of the narrative choices made in that series final episodes. Bates had been part of an effort featured on this blog to produce a television commercial paying tribute to the character of Chloe Sullivan, though she wanted me to be clear that the opinions she expressed were her own and not necessarily a reflection of that movement as a whole. I asked her to frame her concerns in a way that I could share them with you via this blog and this is what she had to say:
Craig Byrne, webmaster of KryptonSite and author of five Smallville licensed companion books, offered this account of fan response to the final episode: I think the general response to the finale of Smallville is dependent on what the viewer signed up to see. There are people who were elated that their favorite characters ended the series together, and there were people who celebrated the fact that after ten years, Clark Kent has become Superman. There is some negative reaction - some have complained about the computer-generated Superman and lack of full-on Superman from Tom Welling, and others didn't care for having Lex Luthor forget everything - but there is a strong feeling that the show at the very least was able to go into a series finale and conclude itself rather than having the network make the decision for them. Inspired by what GateWorld had done to help fans get some closure on the ending of their series, I reached out to contacts I had with the Smallville production team via Mark Warshaw of The Alchemists, who had developed some of the original transmedia content around the series. Through his help, we've been able to talk with several folks associated with the program, and their responses will run next time. I should be clear that I have only seen a limited number of episodes of Smallville and so am not taking my own position on this, but since I was in a situation to help clarify things between the producers and the fans, I am offering this website as a channel of communication. I welcome your feedback on the conclusion of Smallville or of other cult series, and will run a special reader's response post, if I hear back from enough people. Send your comments directly to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and signal if they are intended for publication.
April 14, 2011
From the VCR to YouTube: An Interview with Lucas Hilderbrand (Part One)What happened before YouTube? It's a question we've addressed here many times before. Many different histories lead to our current moment of video sharing and DIY media-making -- some subcultural (the history of fandom and a range of other communities of practice which are generating new content), some economic, some technological. Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, holds some critical pieces of the puzzle, writing with historiographical sophistication about the emergence of video as a technology and as set of cultural practices, about the debates it sparked especially around shifts in control over production and distribution, about the communities which formed around the sharing of tapes, and about how all of this looks forward to contemporary digital practices. It is a book which raises vital questions and provides a rich historical context for our current debates. As someone who lived through the era when the VCR was launched, the book brought back many memories of things I had almost forgotten about the dramatic adjustments which the culture made to this transformative and transgressive technology. Working through the book for an interview, I was struck by the fact that I, like many other instructors, have had very little to say about videotape in my current course on new media and culture, something I will work on the next time I teach it. Given my enthusiasm for this book, I was delighted to be able to interview Hilderbrand and share with you his own reflections on the ways the history of video can help us to understand some contemporary media developments. As you note, the debates about videotape form an important precursor to current debates about digital technologies -- especially those concerning the implications of expanding grassroots control over media production and circulation and debates around copying and intellectual property. From the start, video was understood as "out of control," as shifting the balance of power between established media producers and distributors, new entrepreneurs, and consumers. What can we learn from tracing the history of video, which might better inform current discussions around file-sharing, piracy, and YouTube? For me, the stakes of the project were always largely historical and in response to a threat of cultural amnesia. On the one hand, I was interested in intervening in new media studies, which has historically focused on the newness and nowness of technologies. I was intrigued by work that rethought newness in a historical sense, by returning to the 19th century and examining old media in their own moments of newness. But even this more historical work seemed to erase recent and increasingly obsolete technologies from memory and from the histories of new media. It seemed to me that many of the functions and political struggles surrounding new digital technologies had already pre-existed with tape technologies. I thought that it was important not only to complicate the hype surround new media but also to look back at the lessons we could learn from these prior moments that shaped the present. You describe video as the beginning of "on demand" culture, but also note that this culture has always been constrained on a practical level by issues of availability. How might we carry forward these tensions between the promises and reality of access to think about recent offerings by Amazon, Netflix, and others, that would make more movies and television shows available on demand? The innovations are largely changes in convenience: as you have suggested in Convergence Culture, convergence often means the availability of the same content across multiple platforms. Even before streaming video, Netflix was functionally the best video store in the world, insofar as it has more selection than any single brick-and-mortar store could, yet even Netflix's inventory was limited to content that had been released on DVD. There remain treasures and obscurities that have never been made available on DVD. And, of course, every tangible technology wears out eventually, so if Netflix's discs of a film got scratched, broken, or lost and that title had gone out of print, it could not be rented. So there is always the limitation of what is made materially available. Your book argues that issues of access and copying give rise to an aesthetic that recognizes if not respects the reality of "degeneration" which characterizes all analog video. Yet the digital introduces the potential for a "pristine" copy, an image that does not wear down through use. In my own research, I've watched aesthetic shifts in the fan vidding world between early vids which showed rainbow lines and other technical imperfections which emerged from the process of copying and more recent work that uses digital editing techniques and uses DVDs for the source material. What changes do you think have occurred in "video" aesthetics as a consequence of the shift from analog to digital? First, I'd like to challenge the concept that digital technologies are perfect. Although in principle reproduction should not involve degeneration, most digital reproduction does involve compression, which is a different kind of loss. Perhaps I didn't think this through as clearly as I could have at the time when I was writing: analog reproduction operates through degeneration, digital reproduction through compression. In addition, so many of our interactions with new technologies involve frustration and troubleshooting, whether it's an unreadable DVD or a problem toggling a laptop to a projector or an email missing an attachment. Some of these problems are about mechanical failure, others about human error.
March 9, 2011
A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part Two)
For me, the video's remediation of the look and style of pin-up magazine covers as live videos is a clear example of an instance of remediation that I would see as distinct from transmedia. On the other hand the now longstanding practice of refashioning songs as music videos might be able to be seen as an example of both remediation and transmedia. Would you agree with this? HJ: We could, however, imagine a version of this music video that with very little changes would be pulled towards transmedia narrative (or transmedia play). Right now, the magazine covers function to comment on the situations being described in the song lyrics, but they also seem to construct a kind of world where the song takes place. Let's suppose we built more of a plot into that world -- not simply the story the song offers of failed relationships, violated trusts, and sexual tension. Can we imagine extending those core plot elements into a melodramatic plot and imagine the magazine covers perhaps referring us to other media where we learned more about these people and their relationship? Can we imagine the magazine covers as functioning as clues which led to a kind of alternative reality game, which then led us down a rabbithole where we started seeking out more information elsewhere on the web? This would pull us much more fully into a transmedia logic. RG: Yes, I suppose we could and I suppose it would. Your inclination to actively remediate or transmediate existing media forms is much stronger than mine. I see myself more as a cultural critic or media theorist than as a creator of new forms. Still I would be interested in you defining even further how you see transmediation differing from or extending remediation.HJ: Well, I think I intended this as a thought experiment at most, but your point is well taken. My work on transmedia has taken me into much closer dialogue with the creative community than I had expected and as that happens, I become much more likely to imagine other possible configurations of media that have not yet emerged in much the same way that Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck sought a kind of predictive or anticipatory aesthetics, mapping what could be done with the affordances of digital media she saw starting to emerge. And do not overlook the fact that Remediation has surely inspired many designers and artists, even if you have not yourself chosen to explore the creative practices implicit in your argument. RG: True enough. I like the way you describe your and Janet Murray's work as imagining or anticipating new media futures. It reminds me that, in the context of my most recent work, premediation was already quite active in the 1990s. And yes, it has been very gratifying to see how Remediation was taken up by designers, artists, and other creative people--not to mention by new media scholars like you, especially in relation to transmedia.Immediacy and Hypermediacy HJ: On the other hand, more and more, transmedia extensions represent themselves as advertisements for imaginary products, such as True Blood. They show us what the mediascapes of these fictional societies might look like, and so we achieve a kind of access to the fictional world through an heightened awareness of processes of mediation. We can see how the immediacy and hypermediacy come together by looking at something like MNU Spreads Lies , one of the websites created to help promote District 9. The website proports to be the home page for an Alien Rights organization. Much of the text is in an alien alphabet, though we can convert it to English. My favorite entry is one called "I'm Speechless" which is halfway down the page. Here, we have a mocked up government video on the aliens reproduction system, complete with imitation grain and scratches, clearly intended to achieve a certain degree of immediacy, though the focus on the buggyness of the footage uses properties of mediation to allow us to achieve that level of immediacy. The text around it shows a fake resistant reading of this fake documentary -- the alien rights organization has captured this footage from the government and is offering a shocked and outraged reaction to what they are seeing. Here, we are invited to be aware of the processes of mediation and contestation that have emerged around the video -- for me, this would seem to represent a kind of hypermediation. As you note in the book, at a certain point, as our everyday reality is shaped by our interactions through media, the lines between immediacy and hypermediacy blur. We achieve immediacy by way of hypermediacy. RG: HJ: Both the True Blood and the District 9 materials were generated by the producers (or those working for the brand) rather than the fans. They certainly are responsive to genres and themes which may have originated within fan culture. (We are just beginning to theorize how fan productions might or might not be understood as part of the transmedia system around a given media property). Transmedia is part of a larger shift in the logic of the media industries to place a greater emphasis on engagement, which in turn values fans as the ideal audience for their productions. Part of what first drew me to look at transmedia storytelling was the ways that it seemed to represent a commercial response to key aspects of fan culture: such as the desire to extend the world, to construct backstory, to focus on secondary characters, or even to construct alternative versions of the original characters. But ultimately, these materials claim the status of canon and not fanon, and that has consequences for how they are read. If they are participatory, it is on the level of reception and circulation rather than on the level of production, though we are seeing some kinds of transmedia production which apply crowd-sourcing or user-generated content models to build out the fictional world further. So, yes, these are part of a new commercial logic. My argument, though, is that they are not simply commercial products; they are also creating new opportunities which gifted storytellers and artists are exploring in ways that deepen our possible engagement with these fictional universes. You could read both the District 9 and True Blood examples as promotional: they are designed to spread word about their affiliated media properties. But they are both expansive (adding to what we learn in their respective works) and expositional (helping to inform our experience once we see their affiliated works) in ways which go beyond what we would expect from a movie trailer. We go into District 9 with different expectations (even a different moral orientation or emotional identification) and have a different experience if we've visited the MNU Spreads Lies site than if we have not. Given this, I don't think we can simply dismiss them as promotional materials.
March 7, 2011
A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part One)This week, I am sharing an extended conversation with Richard Grusin, co-author of Remediation and author of Premediation:Affect and Mediality After 9/11 If this sparks your interest in learning more about Transmedia Entertainment, check out Transmedia Hollywood II conference coming up at UCLA on April 8. Tickets are still available. At the time you wrote Remediation, many of us were very excited about the kind of multimedia expression which was possible within cd-roms, a short lived technology, which never-the-less became the focus of a good deal of scholarly interest. So, we might start by thinking about the relationship between the multimedia (envisioned within the cd-rom) and the transmedia (now being realized via digital networks). For me, the difference can be summed up as inside the box - outside the box. That is, multimedia sought to organize a series of different kinds of media experiences inside a curated and bounded text. There might be movies and audio files and illustrations and texts, but they were all inside the cd-rom itself. By contrast, the elements of a transmedia experience are dispersed -- they are spread across multiple media channels -- with the expectation that the consumers will tap into digital and social networks to track down the elements. Part of the pleasure is what I would call "hunting and gathering" and what Rose calls "foraging." Alternate Reality Games make tracking down, exchanging, deciphering, and mapping the dispersed media elements the central play mechanic. And insofar as we are doing this activity within fan communities or as "collective detectives" to use an old term from the ARG world, these mechanisms support social interactions with other readers. Part of what allows this to become a viable form of publicity for media franchises is our tendency to want to brag about our discoveries and share them with others with whom we have common goals and interests. The rise of the iPad seems to suggest a return to a multimedia model -- witness the promotional video for Sports Illustrated on the iPad which sparked so much excitement in the publishing world at the time the platform was introduced. Here, we again see all of the media elements brought together into a single ordered, curated experience. This design will make these kinds of experiences more accessible to casual readers who want to simply click through an experience, but they may take away from the social mechanics that have grown up around "foraging" or "hunting and gathering." It occurs to me that the Sports Illustrated video might be a good starting point for us to compare notes. What do you see going on here when you read it through your core concepts? RG: Thanks, Henry, for suggesting this. I think it's a great idea, and after reading your initial paragraphs I think there is plenty of room both for clarification and divergence. I will confess that at first I was a bit puzzled by your identification of remediation with the multimedia cd-rom--especially insofar our account of the double logic of remediation at the end of the 20th century takes up so many other media artifacts including muds and moos, the world wide web, and hypermediated space. But in light of your concept of transmedia storytelling I can see why the contrast with an apparently self-contained multimedia artifact like the cd-rom would be important for you. HJ:
From Remediation to Premediation
February 18, 2011
Starstruck: An Interview with Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (Part Two)
One thing that my research has indicated is that celebrity is big business - hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars go into the production and upholding of celebrities. Many paychecks and livelihoods beyond those of the stars themselves are a result of celebrity. Being a celebrity is hard work in that one has to constantly keep on top of cultivating one's public persona and of course getting into the Hollywood star machine is virtually impossible for most of us. That said, many of us question the self-perpetuating, almost tautological nature of celebrity, but if we look at the number of jobs and payroll it makes a lot of sense why there are so many people who want to keep the celebrity industry and the production of stars in business.
For someone like Obama McCain's slur has no negative impact - Obama is really talented and a very gifted politician so McCain can try to compare Obama to Hilton but it does not detract from Obama in the way he might have wanted. McCain's comment rings true though: we're collectively fascinated with both Paris and Obama and we care about how they drink their coffee and when they go to the gym. We are ambivalent about celebrity because we do think it's frivolous but the fact is that we care about our stars and they build empires around our fascination (See again: Paris Hilton. See also: Kim Kardashian).
Well, democratic celebrities are different because they are more like us - again less icons of perfection than our Hollywood stars. They give us the belief that should we want that type of stardom we could achieve it. They are also circumventing the conventional star system and they are created through the public's - their fans' - preferences. They've "beaten the system" and don't have to comply to rigid Hollywood standards of stardom.
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press) and Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity (Faber & Faber). She is assistant professor at University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Developme
February 16, 2011
Starstruck: An Interview with Elizabeth Currid-HalkettCelebrity culture is in many ways the flip side of fan culture. Having spent many years studying fans, I was delighted upon arriving at USC to meet a new colleague, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, who studies celebrities. We instantly began comparing notes. In many world, those fans who are drawn towards celebrities display very different dynamics than those drawn towards fictional characters. Celebrity-focused fans seem more competitive, less collaborative, with each other, in part because the celebrity is a limited good. The fans who get close to the celebrity often become "protectors" of that access by "policing" the behavior of other fans. Only a limited number of fans can be "close" to Johnny Depp, while there can be as many Jack Sparrows as there are fan fiction writers. And so, I suspect celebrities often see fans at their worst rather than understanding the richness of all that fan culture has to offer. Currid-Halkett's book, Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity, was released late last year and I am happy to present it to my readers "for their consideration," as the posters around Hollywood this time of year would put it. I found it a very engaging and informative read, one which seeks to understand the economics of being famous, and one which takes an imaginative approach to mapping the social networks which grow up around celebrity culture in Hollywood and elsewhere. She certainly has a lot to say about what it means to be famous in our culture, including being famous for being famous, as is true say for Paris Hilton, or being famous in a niche community, as might be true for Big Name Fans in the science fiction world or in her example, designers in the wargaming world. While there's just enough gossip here to keep us turning the pages, people checking out this book will get a lot more -- a deep understanding of what makes being a celebrity or being close to a celebrity or selling news and pictures of celebrity such a lucrative business in today's culture.
Celebrity hinges on the collective fascination we have with particular people which means it can exist in all social stratospheres. Hollywood is just a very visual mega version of a phenomenon that exists in all of our lives. Facebook and social media more generally just provide more avenues for people to cultivate a public persona. If we look back to high school or the family reunion we see the same type of collective fascination in more old fashioned contexts as much as in "celebrity 2.0".
February 14, 2011
Announcing Transmedia, Hollywood 2: Visual Culture and DesignTransmedia registration can now be done through
A UCLA/USC/Industry Symposium Friday, April 8, 2011 Event Co-Directors: Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School of Communication Overview Transmedia, Hollywood 2: Visual Culture and Design is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood 2 turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means. Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and media research centers in the nation, Transmedia, Hollywood 2 builds on the foundations established at last year's Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story. This year's topic: Transmedia, Hollywood: Visual Culture and Design is meant to move from an abstract discussion of transmedia storytelling in all its permutations to a more concrete consideration of what is involved in designing for transmedia. The past year has seen the Producer's Guild of America (PGA) embrace the concept of the transmedia producer. The other Guilds have begun discussing the implications of these developments for their membership. A growing number of small production units are springing up across the film, games, web, and television sectors to try to create and distribute transmedia content. Many of today's new transmedia producers are helmed by one-time studio or network insiders who are eager to "reinvent" themselves. Inside the studios, the executives tasked with top-down management of large media franchises are partnering with once marginalized film directors, comic book creators, game designers, and other creative personnel. The underlying premise of this conference is that while the traditional studios and networks are hanging onto many of their outdated practices, they are also starting to engage creative personnel who are working outside the system to help them re-imagine their business. With crisis and change comes the opportunity for the next generation of maverick, independent-minded producers--the next Walt Disney and George Lucas-- to significantly challenge the old and to make way for the new. So, now, it is time to start examining lessons learned from these early experiments. Each of the issues outlined below impact the day-to-day design decisions that go into developing transmedia franchises. We hope to break down the project of developing transmedia content into four basic design challenges:
As with the first event, Transmedia, Hollywood: Visual Culture & Design will bring together comic book writers, game designers, "imagineers," filmmakers, television show runners, and other media professionals in a conversation with leading academic thinkers on these topics. Each of our speakers will be asked to focus on the unique challenges they faced while working on a specific production and detail how their understanding of transmedia helped them resolve those issues. From there, we will ask all our speakers to compare notes across projects and platforms with the hopes of starting to develop some basic design principles that will help us translate theories of transmedia entertainment into pragmatic reality. The creative personnel we have assembled include many of the key individuals responsible for masterminding the fundamental changes in the way traditional media operates and engages audiences by altering the way stories are told temporally, by exploring how graphic design translates from one medium to another, and by explaining how these visually-stunning worlds are being conceived in today's "connected" entertainment arena.
9:15--9:45 am
Rather than rely on old-fashioned merchandising and licensing departments to oversee vendors, which too often results in uninspired computer games, novelizations, and label T-shirts, several studios have brought these activities in-house, creating divisions like Disney Imagineering and Disney Interactive to oversee the design and implementation of these vast, virtual worlds. In other instances, studios are turning to a new generation of independent producers--aka "transmedia producers"--charged with creating vast, interlocking brand extensions that make use of a never-ending cycle of technological future shock and Web 2.0 capabilities. The results of these partnerships have been a number of extraordinarily inventive, interactive, and immersive experiences that create a "you are there" effect. These include the King Kong 360 3D theme park ride, which incorporates the sight, smell, and thunderous footsteps of the iconic gorilla as he appears to toss the audience's tram car into a pit. Universal Studios and Warner Bros. have joined forces to create the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a new $200 million-plus attraction at the Islands of Adventure in Florida. Today's panel focuses on the unique challenges associated with turning traditional media franchises into 3D interactive worlds, inviting you to come out 2 play in the studios' virtual sandboxes. Moderator: Denise Mann
12:00--1:50 PM How is our notion of what constitutes a good character changing as more and more decisions get made on the basis of a transmedia logic? Does it matter that James Bond originated in a book, Spider-Man in comics, Luke Skywalker on screen, and Homer Simpson on television, if each of these figures is going to eventually appear across a range of media platforms? Do designers and writers conceive of characters differently when they know that they need to be recognizable in a variety of media? Why does transmedia often require a shift in focus as the protagonist aboard the "mothership" often moves off stage as extensions foreground the perspective and actions of once secondary figures? How might we understand the process by which people on reality television series get packaged as characters who can drive audience identification and interest or by which performers get reframed as characters as they enter into the popular imagination? Why have so few characters from games attracted a broader following while characters from comics seem to be gaining growing popularity even among those who have never read their graphic adventures? Moderator: Henry Jenkins
2:00--3:00 PM
Once relegated to the margins of society, today's media fans are often considered the "advance guard" that studio and network marketers eagerly pursue at Comi-Con and elsewhere to help launch virtual word-of-mouth campaigns around a favorite film, TV series, computer game, or comic book. Since tech-savvy fans are often the first to access Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Second Life in search of a like-minded community, it was only a matter of time before corporate marketers followed suit. After all, these social networking sites provide media companies with powerful tools to manage fans and commit them to crowd-sourcing activities on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Given the complexities and contradictions involved in negotiating between industry and audience interests, we will ask the game designers to explain their philosophy about the intended and unintended outcomes of their fan interfaces. Marketers clearly love it when fans become willing billboards for the brand either by wearing logo T-shirts or by dressing a favorite Madman avatar in the 1960s clothing, accessories and backgrounds on display on the AMCTV.com "Madmen Yourself" and then spreading the content through Facebook and Twitter. What is the design philosophy behind a video game like Spore, which allows fans free range to create their own creatures and worlds but then limits their rights over this digital content? Who owns these virtual creations once they appear for sale on E-bay? These and other intriguing questions will be posed to the creative individuals responsible for designing many of these imaginative and engaging fan interfaces. Moderator: Denise Mann
5:00--6:50 PM We might think of such stories as hyperserials, in so far as serials involved the chunking and dispersal of narrative information into compelling units. The old style serials on film and television expanded in time; these new style serials also expand across media platforms. So, how do the creators of these stories handle challenges of exposition and plot development, managing the audience's attention so that they have the pieces they need to put together the puzzle? What principles do they use to indicate which chunks of a franchise are connected to each other and which represent different moments in the imaginary history they are recounting? Do certain genres -- science fiction and fantasy -- embrace this expansive understanding of story time, while others seem to require something closer to the Aristoltelian unities of time and space? Moderator: Henry Jenkins
7:00 PM Location
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January 26, 2011
"Deep Media," Transmedia, What's the Difference?: An Interview with Frank Rose (Part One)Wired contributing editor Frank Rose is releasing a new book this month which will be of interest to many of my regular readers -- The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories. It is a highly readable, deeply engaging account of shifts in the entertainment industry which have paved to way for more expansive, immersive, interactive forms of fun. He's talked to key players -- from Will Wright and Jeff Gomez to James Cameron and George Lucas -- and brings back their thinking about the changing media landscape. As he wrote me, "at various points in my career I've focused on technology and at other times on entertainment, but when I joined Wired in 1999 I started writing about both together." Rose has been exploring some of the key concepts from the book through his blog as he's been working through the project. I suspect when I teach my transmedia storytelling class again at the USC Cinema School next fall, this book will be on the syllabus, since it manages to condense down many of the key conversations being held around these much discussed topic into language which is accessible and urgent. When I first heard of his concept of "deep media," during a talk Rose gave at South by Southwest, I was intrigued by its relationship with what I've called transmedia entertainment. And in fact, I've been asked about the relationship many times and didn't really know what to say. So, naturally, given a chance to interview Rose for the blog, that's where I started. It sounds like his own thoughts on the relationship have evolved over time and in interesting ways. As the interview continues, we talk about world-building, the relationship between games and stories, the interweaving of marketing and storytelling, and the impact of 9/11 on interactive entertainment. You write in the book about what you call "deep media." What do you see as the core characteristics of deep media? How do you see your concept relating to others being deployed right now such as transmedia or crossmedia?
Throughout the book, it seems you see these creative changes towards a more immersive and expansive entertainment form being fueled by the emergence of games. Why do you think computer and video games have been such a "disruptive" influence on traditional practice in other entertainment sectors?
Another key idea running through the book is the idea that entertainment is now designed to be engaged by collectives, often of the kinds that form in and through social network sites. What are some of the consequences of perceiving audiences as collectives of people who interact with each other and with the producers rather than as aggregates of isolated eyeballs?
December 10, 2010
The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Four): Why Fans MatterThe final section of The Survival of Soap Opera focuses on the evolution of fan community practices online, on various soap opera fan experiences/demographics, and on relations between the soap opera industry and its fans. Below, a variety of the contributors to this section answer questions about the relationships fans have with the soap operas they watch and with one another. Tom Casiello is a current member of the writing team for The Young and the Restless, a former associate head writer for One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives, and a two-time Daytime Emmy Award-winning writer with As the World Turns who has written about the genre at his blog, Damn the Man! Save the Empire. Abigail De Kosnik is an assistant professor at the University of California-Berkeley in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies who writes on media, fandom, and copyright. As editor of the collection, she co-wrote the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." She also wrote an essay in the collection, entitled "Soaps for Tomorrow: Media Fans Making Online Drama from Celebrity Gossip. C. Lee Harrington is professor of sociology and a Women's Studies Program Affiliate at Miami University is co-author of the book Soap Fans and who has written on the soap opera genre since the late 1980s for publications including The Journal of Aging Studies, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Transformative Works and Cultures. As one of the book's co-editors, she co-wrote the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." She also co-authored a piece for the book with Denise Brothers, entitled "Constructing the Older Audience: Age and Aging in Soaps." Roger Newcomb is the Editor-in-Chief of soap opera news site We Love Soaps, the producer of two Internet radio soap operas, and executive producer and co-writer of the film Manhattanites. His essay in the book is entitled "As the World Turns' Luke and Noah and Fan Activism." Radha O'Meara is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in screen studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who has published her work in Screwball Television: Gilmore Girls and in the Austrian journal Metro. Her essay in the book is entitled "The 'Missing Years': How Local Programming Ruptured Days of Our Lives in Australia." Julie Porter is a longtime newspaper editor and reporter who is webmaster of soap opera site talk!talk!. Her essay in the collection is entitled "Hanging on by a Common Thread." QueenEve is the pseudonym of a career professional and soap opera fan who has moderated and/or founded several popular soap communities online. The collection features a piece based on Abigail De Kosnik's interview with QueenEve focusing on fan activity around and against soaps. How has the relationship between U.S. soap operas and their fans evolved over time? Tom Casiello: I honestly think the relationship between the soaps and the fans hasn't changed nearly as much as others believe. (I also think we have to be very careful not to group them all together as "the soap operas." There are currently six U.S. daytime soaps on the air, all of which should have their own individual identity, wherin their fans expect different things from each show.) At its core, the audience still wants stories and characters they can connect with on a human level, mixed with the element of fantasy and escapism they've come to expect. They want to know the characters they've loved their whole lives, whom they've watched grow and evolve, are in capable, trustworthy hands...and they will continue to live on in their homes daily. While audience demograhics may shift, and trends will come and go, strong, long-term serialized storytelling with heart is all the fans have ever wanted. Roger Newcomb: Obviously, from radio soap operas to present-day television and internet soaps, the way fans view or listen to their soaps has changed tremendously. The relationship the soaps have with fans has evolved as well. Even 30 years ago, the main feedback mechanisms were snail mail and telephone feedback lines. In 2010, fans can email the shows and their networks, and many times the stars themselves. The shows also have Facebook and Twitters accounts to solicit immediate feedback from fans, and the actors themselves directly interact with fans in a more personal way through social networking. It is not clear whether this increased and immediate interaction has impacted storylines or story direction. QueenEve: I think it used to be a far more personal relationship shared between female multi-generational family members and the soap opera. Over time, with the growth of soap magazines covering more than just "the stories," suddenly we knew about the actors playing the characters and the writers writing the show, making it a little less personal. We learned about the relationships between the actors playing the parts (marriages, divorces, and kids), entirely separate from their parts, and the experience expanded beyond one among just you, your mother, and the story. Then, with the internet, it became even less intimate and much more of a group activity with other viewers. So, what had been something between female members of a family and the soap eventually involved the actors, the writers, the media, and other viewers who may not have viewed the show and characters as you and your family did. The other side of that is that the "family" element has sort of dropped out, and it is no longer a multi-generational female experience. Some of that is the changing role of women in society, but a large part of it is that soaps have backed away from telling multi-generational female stories in search of the almighty 18-49 demo, and the audience loss has reflected that. So, I think it went from a highly personal and intimate experience to a more expansive but impersonal experience such that viewers don't have the investment they once did. What changes have we seen in recent years in how fans of U.S. daytime dramas connect with one another? Tom Casiello: The Internet for one - for the first time in history, it's much easier for those with the same interests to connect instantaneously, on a level playing field. Who they are in their lives, where they come from, their education - it's irrelevant on the Web. Here, they are all equal fans, and that has not only helped organize a stronger group effort in their campaigns but also created a world of discussion to bounce their ideas and opinions off of each other in what is hopefully a moderated environment. Abigail De Kosnik: The most striking fan activity that the Web, and online communities, have brought about (in my view) is that "fans make their own fun," as one of our contributors, Web site moderator "QueenEve," stated. Since fans have started communicating online, they have basically produced their own virtual soap operas - spreading spoilers and dissecting upcoming plots, posting speculations about what's going to happen next as well as (often very thoughtful) analyses of what happened recently on their favorite shows, in addition to gossiping about behind-the-scenes rumors (Which co-stars won't work together? Why did the Exec Producer fire that actor? When is that former writer coming back to this show?). There's also been a level of drama in the wars between fan bases that matches that of the heightened conflicts depicted on soap operas. The animosity that warring fan bases have borne toward one another has been awesome in its fierceness, and, while I don't want to minimize the fact that some people's feelings have probably been deeply hurt by these acrimonious exchanges, I must say that there's an element of watching or participating in soap fans battle online that is immensely engaging and entertaining. I have taken part in some of these "bitchfests" myself (and it's not always fans vs. other fans; it's also fans vs. the shows or the networks or particular storylines), and I'll always remember those impassioned campaigns as really interesting, exciting times of my life. There's something about the dedication and commitment that soap fans have for their shows that really infused the online fan experience with an intensity that many other Internet fan groups lack. It comes, I think, from the fact that, when the Web became a big part of soap fans' lives, many fans had already been engaged with these soap story worlds for years - in many cases, fans' involvement predated the Internet by decades. The Web, which permits for a really wide range of discussions and actions that can be micro-interventions or can go on for months or years, almost seems like it was specifically built as a platform for soap fans, who have decades' worth of information and insight to discuss. C. Lee Harrington: While soap viewers were among the first groups to migrate to the Net recreationally, as Nancy Baym discussed in Tune In, Log On, they were slower to create the type of user-generated content currently associated with media fandom, in part because the frequency (daily) and longevity (the average age of US soaps is 40 years) of the "primary"' text created less need for viewers to fill narrative gaps in between episodes or installments. Over the past few years, soap fans have become increasingly engaged in vlogs, video-sharing, fan fiction, podcasts, and mash-ups, while much of soap fans' energy remains devoted to the ongoing daily criticism, discussion, and fan activism which takes place in online forums and the blogosphere. Roger Newcomb: Fans are connecting on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and continue to interact on various message boards. The fans seem to be more tech-savvy these days, so the number of message boards and Facebook pages has grown by leaps and bounds. In some ways, this has splintered the online audience, with more websites and social network sites dedicated to particular actors, characters, or soap couples. We Love Soaps TV receives almost 10 percent of our hits from Twitter and, in many cases, from fans who tweet and re-tweet our features. Twitter has become the fastest way of spreading information about soaps around the web. Julie Porter: Be careful what you wish for! To me, that's the warning label that should be placed on the desire to raise viewership at any cost. The race for ratings - and ad revenue - has had an unintended consequence along the way: a decrease of conflict in storyline. The intense competition for audience share gives soap viewers a powerful amount of clout in determining how stories are resolved - and, generally, they want favorite characters to be happy, and want to see their characters' conflicts resolved. But is that what they really want? Accelerated storytelling satisfies the short-term viewer but weakens the long-term story. Conflict makes for anxiety, but quick resolutions make for an awfully boring soap, long-term. Once, it might have taken three years to resolve a complex story in a big reveal. That's storytelling. But, these days, if the focus groups say to wrap it up - well, it gets wrapped up quickly, and there's short-term satisfaction but a lot of opportunity for story and character development is lost. Faster-paced storytelling throws characters into a revolving door of reaction; the storyline rules, but deep character development is almost nil. And so the viewer who wanted a quick resolution also quickly loses interest. The willingness of networks to give focus groups and online campaigns a strong role in the decision process also leads to a bad end: It places creative control in the hands of executive management rather than writers, and fan feedback becomes the tail that wags the dog. The soap that has evolved into a marketing tool isn't nearly as satisfying as one that does what soaps were intended to do: explore the feelings and lives of people, and their ups and downs. QueenEve: I think, in the past, you might have a discussion with a neighbor or friend about the soap or the "girls" in the dorm, but fandom was fairly generic. Now, with the internet, you have both a gathering place and a divisive means of organization. That is, people generally check in on the internet to find fans of the characters or couples they like, to the exclusion of a more general audience. It has led to "board wars" in the past, between couple fans especially. The Sonny & Brenda versus Jax & Brenda fans of the 90s on General Hospital was a good representation of that, as were the Robin & Jason fans versus the Carly & Jason fans. So, on the one hand, the internet allowed fans to find each other on the internet and connect while, on the other hand, it leads to divisive and heated fights. How do the teams who make these shows take into account the fans' feedback and mindset, from your perspective? Abigail De Kosnik: I know for a fact that the shows do pay attention to soap fans' feedback, to some extent. The contributors to our book who work in the soap industry verified this, and I have heard soap actors often tell fans who want to see changes on their favorite shows that they must write or call in to the network to voice their opinions. One of my e-mails to ABC, urging them to portray professional women - the female nurses, doctors, lawyers - in a more positive light on General Hospital, got quoted almost verbatim by ABC Daytime exec Brian Frons in an interview he did with one of the soap magazines back in 2003. But, on the other hand, I think many fans, and I am one of them, are frustrated by the fact that, although the Internet permits for a much greater flow of feedback from soap viewers to soaps' producers, the shows don't seem to be able to take effective action in response. Several of our industry contributors have told us that, with soaps, time is a huge factor in this - of course, feedback on a storyline comes in well after months of that story are written and shot - but, also, I wonder if the case of soap operas, in which we see this enormous wave of feedback going to TV shows and not that much difference being made, just illustrates the fact that television is a creative industry and, probably on any television program, whether daytime or prime time or a miniseries, the writers just can't care too much about what the audience thinks about a particular storyline or character. I mean, Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner doesn't think about what fans want, or what they've liked about past episodes, when he puts a new season of Mad Men together, except in the most general way (I think he once mentioned that one reason for an increase in child character Sally Draper's air time was that many viewers relate to Sally the most, she's their "way in" to the show, since they were about Sally's age in Mad Men's time period.). So, maybe the frustration of soap fans is just indicative of the fact that online participation isn't a guarantee that "the people" can influence the power centers that much. The Web gives an illusion of what others have called "participatory democracy," but just sending a bunch of e-mails obviously isn't the way to change the minds of the minority who are the decision-makers. However, I do think that there are probably ways to use online connectivity to influence power centers, both in soap operas and in other arenas, like politics. And maybe soap fans can pioneer ways to use digital technologies to share feedback that really creates change, and then political fans and organizations can learn from those tactics!!! C. Lee Harrington: From what I can tell, soap opera creators have waffled back and forth on this. The production team rightfully knows a projected story arc in ways viewers do not, and there is a longstanding perspective of "trust us to tell a good story," even when viewers are rejecting what they are seeing daily onscreen. The flip side of that is that, with the instantaneous feedback that the internet allows, production teams (or perhaps network honchos) can get too engaged with daily (or minute-by-minute) viewer reaction and respond accordingly, to the long-term detriment of the narrative. The heated debates about the usage of focus groups in...when did that start in daytime? Late 1990s?...preceded the current tension between short and long-term narrative and industry goals. Roger Newcomb: I personally think, for the most part, the fan feedback online is disregarded. When there is a huge outrage over something (like the abrupt end of the Kyle and Fish storyline on One Life to Live), the shows and networks take notice, but, even then, it doesn't necessarily change the outcome. In general, there are so many opposing views from fans on storylines that it is difficult to know which is the majority. I've also directly heard from writers and producers of daytime soaps that they believe the online audience does not necessarily reflect the perspective of the total viewing audience, even when the online audience number in thousands, a greater number than a supposedly statistically sound Nielsen sample. QueenEve: From my experience, they couldn't care less about fans' feedback and mindset unless it feeds their agenda and own personal likes and dislikes. Occassionally, the feedback is strong enough that it can change things, but I have seen more often them using the feedback as a means not to change things but rather to force a story even more firmly down the fans' throats. That is, if some new character is not going over with the fans but the show is highly invested, we'll see even more of the character, and we will get overkill of stories trying to make this character more sympathetic and hearing other well loved characters "pimp" and "prop" the new character endlessly. How has the trend of an aging soap opera audience impacted the soap opera industry in the U.S.? Tom Casiello: The networks continue to look for new ways to entice younger viewers to their shows, as they've always felt (with good reason) that these shows survive when passed down from generation to generation. However, I do believe we are seeing the first signs of a possible shift in that thinking. Those audience members over fifty are consuming far more than their counterparts from half a century ago did. Consumers with more income in older demographics are proving to be just as valuable as younger demographics. The key is to find a way to welcome new viewers into the fold while trying not to alienate older viewers...and it's a struggle all the soaps have faced for the last fifteen to twenty years, more so than ever as the generation gap grows wider. C. Lee Harrington: As my chapter with Denise Brothers suggests, the aging of soap opera audiences had a major impact. The age of all television viewers is going up (as the global population ages), and soap viewership is no exception to this trend. However, the core demographic remains 18-49 year old women, which means soap viewers are rapidly aging out of network priorities. This is visibilized on-screen in terms of which actors/characters are prioritized (with vets moved to window-dressing or dropped from contract to recurring status), as well as the story content itself. The older viewers and actors we spoke with for our study are keenly aware of this trend and believe the genre is suffering for it. If soaps do not respond more fully to the aging of its viewership, an older demographic that is more economically powerful than the industry apparently appreciates, the genre will be in even more trouble than it is now. Roger Newcomb:Obviously, the aging soap audience is one of the contributors to the decrease in viewers. As longtime fans have passed, they weren't replaced by new fans of the genre. Even though the average age of soap viewers is the mid-50s, the shows have continued to focus on younger characters to a large degree. But there have been some shifts in the past year. Days of Our Lives features more over-50 contract actors today than ever in the history of the show. One Life to Live has recently shifted the focus to the veteran actors on the canvas. There seems to be a better mix between younger and older characters, and this may be due to the networks finally realizing who their audience is. QueenEve: Not at all. The shows keep trying to write for an audience that isn't there -- 18 - 34 -- and are losing the "aging audience" that they simply do not value. It's insane really, because it's not just the soap opera audience that has aged -- it's all of society now that the baby boomers are aging. Why that audience isn't valued is a mystery to me. What "surplus audiences" outside the target demographic should soap opera producers be paying attention to? What can they learn from these audiences? Tom Casiello: Diversity is a major issue daytime needs to address. This isn't just a Caucasian versus African-American issue. In a perfect world, these shows would also represent Latino characters, Asian characters, Jewish characters, homosexuals/bisexuals; there's no end to the types of characters these shows should involve in their long-term stories--while always striving to find a balance between honesty and stereotyping, walking that fine line between truth and cliche. All of these demographics can play vital roles in front-burner stories and can present just as many interesting character dilemmas as a middle-aged, Caucasian, heterosexual character can...probably with an added layer of nuance, an original perspective that puts an entirely new spin on the storyline. C. Lee Harrington: As I noted above, I believe older viewers should be repositioned from "surplus" to "core," given demographic projections. To engage the US viewing population as fully as possible, soaps would benefit from greater diversity in characters and storytelling overall--more LBGTQ characters, more characters of color and immigrant characters, more characters of lower socio-economic classes etc. There are genre-specific risks to this, of course (I have published several articles on the generic challenges that gay and lesbian characters/stories present to daytime), but narratives that better reflect the US population as a whole may engage a wider audience. I also echo Radha O'Meara's call below for greater attunement to audiences in other parts of the world, given the still-central role that serial narratives play in global import/export patterns. As Denise Bielby and I wrote in Global TV (2008), The Young & the Restless and The Bold & the Beautiful has been particularly smart in writing narratives for multiple geographic/cultural audiences, avoiding lengthy on-screen legal trials and certain types of humorous stories that may be perplexing to non-Americans, for example. I'm not sure the extent to which other programs are following suit, but, if not, they should. Roger Newcomb: The soaps have targeted women 18-49 and 18-34 for decades. Men make up 20-25% of the total viewing audience, but you do not see commercials for men on any of these shows. African-Americans also make up a large portion of the audience, but characterizations of African-Americans are few and far between on daytime soap operas. Gay audiences, targeted by networks like Bravo, would have been a potential goldmine for soaps, but, with the cancelation of As The World Turns, there is only one regular gay character on daytime now--Bianca on All My Children. Targeting various niche groups would seem to be a more lucrative alternative for soaps than the current one-size-fits-all model. QueenEve: I think the soaps should go back to the beginning and start writing compelling stories about characters of all ages and stop writing for the "sweeps explosions." I think people like the soap opera genre. If they didn't, the genre's serial aspects would not have been adopted by primetime TV and be so successful there. It's ironic because, as soap operas tried to be more like primetime with big explosions, fights, special effects, and adventure, they became less successful. While, as primetime became more like soap operas with ongoing stories that build throughout a season (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, ER, etc.) they became more successful. Daytime soaps are bleeding viewers not because the soap opera genre is dying but because it is being executed so poorly, compared with primetime TV. People want a better product. Radha O'Meara: I'm most interested in international surplus audiences for US soap operas, and my contribution to the collection was about the Australian audience for Days of Our Lives. I think that the focus on US audiences for US productions is particularly strong, commercially and critically. If producers and creators give more serious consideration to international soap audiences, they might learn from different strategies and priorities in scheduling, episode duration, and attracting niche audiences, including young people. This might help them to attract greater audiences globally and domestically. I find the strong focus on domestic distribution and audiences for US soap operas in American media studies a little troubling. Although US scholars are cognizant of international distribution and audiences, they seem to maintain a strong emphasis on the US as the principal audience. From an antipodean perspective, it seems American media studies could be more open to the implications of plural global audiences. Given that many soap operas have long histories with international audiences, there is a wealth of experience and data on which to draw. The broadcast of US soap operas in international markets can highlight the potential of alternatives for scheduling and attracting niche audiences. For example, the most popular US daytime soap opera in Australia is The Bold and the Beautiful. It is broadcast on weekdays on the Ten network in the 4.30 p.m. timeslot. This has allowed the show to garner a significant number of young viewers, who watch it after coming home from the day at primary or high school. Since loyalty to soaps can be so enduring, this early attachment can lead to a lifelong connection. I began watching the show regularly after coming home from high school several decades ago and still enjoy it. I suspect The Bold and the Beautiful's half-hour format is a significant part of its appeal as the highest-rated U.S. daytime soap in Australia, and indeed the world. This is a contrast to many other US daytime soaps which run for an hour, and particularly those which are screened in Australia (Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital). The half-hour format might be more appealing to Australian viewers, as Australian viewers are more accustomed to popular half-hour soaps made in Australia and Britain, such as Neighbours, Home and Away, Coronation Street, EastEnders. Throughout the long history of US soap operas, program duration has consistently expanded. Early radio and television soaps often ran for 15 minutes, including a single commercial break, but most television soaps expanded in the 1950s to half-hour and later to full hour programs. A few even tried 90 minutes daily. In today's fast-paced world, perhaps US soaps could experiment with episodes of shorter duration. Rather than cancelling soaps with falling ratings, US producers might consider what shorter episodes could do for both international and domestic audiences. Producers and scholars should consider what makes particular soap operas popular in different regions and the implications this has for definitions of soap opera as a commercially successful genre. Soap opera in the US is much more clearly defined by US programs and by local emphasis on the scheduling and audience distinction between daytime and primetime. These distinctions are much less significant for international viewers. Many Australian soap fans follow daytime and primetime US, UK, and Australian soaps. Despite obvious differences, they often have no trouble grouping them together as soap operas, which share common family traits. In fact, Australian audiences are often unaware of the "original" features used to define programs in the US: US daytime soaps have been broadcast here at midnight, and primetime soaps have been broadcast during the day; daily soaps have been broadcast weekly or bi-weekly, and weekly soaps have been broadcast daily. This means that producers and scholars can learn more about what audiences seek in soaps by exploring broader definitions of the genre and its audiences. According to Christine Geraghty, Australian soaps have influenced British soaps to integrate more male characters, young characters, and "masculine" storylines over the past few decades (Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps, Polity 1991). Perhaps US soaps might also consider such changes. In my contribution to the collection, I wrote about an unusual rupture in soap opera broadcasting. After screening episodes of NBC daytime drama Days of Our Lives in a continuous sequence for over thirty years, in 2004, Australia's Nine Network skipped approximately one thousand episodes. The Nine Network continued to broadcast the program daily, but most Australian viewers missed four years' worth of episodes. An interesting tension arose from this fissure between those who understood the Australian audience as a component of a global, homogenous audience for Days of Our Lives centered on the US, and those who understood the Australian audience as a unique, local experience. Scholars and producers should both consider their positions on this tension. Similarly, this rupture of Days of our Lives for Australian audiences raised questions about the nature of soap audiences' enduring commitment to particular programs. It highlighted how significant parts of the audience seemed to value their own history with and experience of the program more highly than a wider, communal experience. This deeply personal connection is something that producers presumably want to foster, and new distribution methods may impact on these experiences in even more divergent ways. These are some of the lessons US soap opera producers can learn from international audiences, and they may even help them maintain their domestic audiences.
December 9, 2010
The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Three): New Trends In Production and DistributionThe third section of the The Survival of Soap Opera examines how soap operas have been experimenting with both production and distribution, from new ways of taping and editing soaps to the use of transmedia storytelling. Below, several of the contributors to this part of the book answer some questions about these new trends for daytime dramas. Ernest Alba is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin whose previous work on soap operas can be found at MIT CMS: The American Soap Opera and through the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. He co-authored a piece for the book with Bernard Timberg, entitled "'The Rhetoric of the Camera in Television Soap Opera' Revisited: The Case of General Hospital. Patrick Erwin is a freelance writer and journalist who has written for the soap opera genre for Marlena De Lacroix's site and at his blog, A Thousand Other Worlds. His essay in the collection is entitled "Guiding Light: Relevance and Renewal in a Changing Genre." Racquel Gonzales is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Irvine and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin Radio-Television-Film Master's program whose research into the soap opera genre includes reception studies of online and offline fan communities and industry history. Her essay in the collection is entitled "From Daytime to Night Shift: Examining the ABC Daytime/SOAPnet Primetime Spin-off Experiment." Erick Yates Green is an assistant professor of media production in the School of Communication at East Carolina University and a director and cinematographer. His piece in the book is entitled "The Evolution of the Production Process of Soap Operas Today." Deborah Jaramillo is an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University, where her research focuses on television as a complicated collocation of culture, aesthetics, commerce, and politics. Her essay in the book is entitled "It's Not All Talk: Editing and Storytelling in As the World Turns." Elana Levine is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written about soap operas in her book Wallowing in Sex as well as in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Flow TV and in the anthologies Beyond Prime Time and Convergence Media History. Her piece in the collection is entitled "'What the hell does TIIC mean?' Online Content and the Struggle to Save the Soaps." Emma Webb is a doctoral student at the University of Kansas whose work focuses on fan influence and online message boards, including multiple academic projects on U.S. daytime soaps and soap opera fans. Her essay in the book is entitled "The Evolution of the Fan Video and the Influence of YouTube on the Creative Decision-Making Process for Fans." What do you feel have been some of the most successful or compelling experiments in telling soap opera stories, or distributing that content, in the past few years in the U.S.? Patrick Erwin: I do think that the Guiding Light experiment I describe in the book was compelling and important. I've said before that it's a case of "the operation was a success, but the patient died." It may have been too much change for an existing show that had a very defined visual palette. But I believe it was incredibly important in terms of defining what's possible. As we move increasing towards narrowcasting on TV and the Web, programming will need to be made on a more economic scale. Racquel Gonzales: Two experiments I found promising and expanding the possibilities of the medium were the SOAPnet Night Shift series (as I've explored in my contribution to the book) and the popular, nostalgic past episode blocks featured on SOAPnet and most recently on ABC (though their "past" episodes hardly delve into the so-called "golden era" of soap history). These two share a key element crucial for contemporary resonance with audiences: acknowledgment and embrace of a rich soap past. Soap fans, more than any other TV viewer, can have years and even decades of memories with the same storylines, characters, fictional families, and fictional locations. So much soap viewing pleasure comes from those historical and memory ties between the audiences and the soap themselves and our ability to make those complex narrative connections with the texts. When the soap industry can bring about these moments of remembrance, even in experimental ways like the Night Shift spinoff, they can tap into a shared history of viewing and a soap viewer's memory of watching. Of course, this can always create a backlash where, for instance, viewers watching a General Hospital episode from 1996 on SOAPnet lament the good ol' days in comparison with current GH! Erick Yates Green: The innovative webisode series entitled What If that was aired on ABC.com and SOAPnet.com that brought together central characters from different and established soap operas is innovative. Like previous webseries Imaginary Bitches, Family Dinner, Gotham, and Venice, What If was developed as a series (in this case, 10 webisodes) and was originally aired on July 12, 2010. You can find additional information on the series here and here. Like feature films and TV primetime broadcasting, the world of soap operas distribution is VERY dynamic in our contemporary media playing field. What If, at least, is dealing with the divergent media distribution venues not only with programming that goes first to the web as well as broadcast, BUT, interestingly, as they experiment with divergent distribution, they also experiment with bringing together characters from their different primary shows into an experimental melodramatic melting pot as well. Deborah Jaramillo: I ran into a great Mexican telenovela this summer on Univision, which, as I sadly noticed at NCA, mass communication scholars continue to forget is a U.S. broadcast network. One of the most amazing things about this novela, Soy Tu Dueña (I Am Your Owner), was that it actually broke into the top 25 broadcast programs in the late summer of 2010. And Univision has recently been beating the English-language broadcast networks in the competition for 18-34 year-olds. Soy Tu Dueña would never have appeared on my radar had it not been for the World Cup in May. Even though the audience for the Mundial is probably more male then female, Univision still promoted the hell out of Soy Tu Dueña during the matches. Soy Tu Dueña features an all-star cast, including Lucero, who sings the title song with Joan Sebastian, and Silvia Piñal, a veteran of Buñuel films ("la primera actriz," the credits boast). Soy Tu Dueña is actually a remake of La Dueña, produced by Televisa in 1995. This was the complete package--pre-sold product, big stars, an excellent theme song--that rode on the coattails of the biggest sports event in the world. Sports...not exactly novela territory. It was a great experiment, and it worked. Elana Levine: I've seen a few particularly compelling experiments in recent years. One is What have been the biggest failures? Ernest Alba: I recently gave a lecture to a classroom of 50 undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin based on the essay by Bernard Timberg and myself in The Survival of Soap Opera. During the discussion, I discovered a few surprising things about young people and their relationship to soap opera - primarily that they think they know all about soap operas, don't like it based on what they know, and they have several misconceptions about them. Based on the discussion of soap opera in that class, I would say that the biggest story is of the failure of soap opera to communicate its value as entertainment to a young audience. When I posed to them the question, "What are some associations we have with soap people who watch soap operas?" I received several different responses: "Old people," "My grandma and my grandma's friends watch it," "Anyone that has free time during the day watches soaps," and my favorite: "Lonely people watch soaps." This class of mostly freshman students associate soap opera not with their parents but with their grandparents! One student related that she watched them with her mother who watched them to learn English. It is clear that young people associate soap opera with people that they perceive as being diametrically opposed to them in their viewing habits and lifestyles.
Furthermore, it seems that they are confused about what soap opera is and how it can be an enjoyable experience. They seem to believe that soap opera is a less realistic form of storytelling than other television formats, like the primetime drama or the reality show. One student made the audacious claim that House M.D. is a soap opera. Immediately a cacophony of protests rose from the class. The way they distinguished their conceptions of soap opera from House was that House had better acting, less exaggerated plots, Hugh Laurie (a single, strong male lead), more comedy, and other things to draw you in as opposed to "sappy" and "exaggerated" drama. The student finally threw up her hands in defeat and said, "Apparently, a lot of people like House and don't want it to be associated with soap opera." Despite their acknowledgement of the fakeness of television drama in soap operas, they are unwilling to associate their dislike of "fakeness" with their favorite shows, which are also clearly scripted, staged, and unrealistic depictions of reality. It is this attitude of defining soap opera primarily as that which is antithetical to anything they value that allows them to participate in the tradition of denigrating soap opera as a form of entertainment. If there is one thing that gives me hope, it is that only two students raised their hands when I asked who had never watched an episode of a soap opera. A full quarter (about 13 or 14 people) raised their hands when I asked if they'd regularly watched a soap opera at some point. One student listed four or five soaps she watched regularly when she was younger. The students know that soap opera exists and some understand it quite thoroughly, but many hold common misconceptions about soap opera because it doesn't play a role in their life and plays a role in the life of people they don't consider their peers. They use those misconceptions to further dissuade themselves from watching soap operas. Patrick Erwin: For me, I think the change in narrative from a more character-based narrative to more of a traditional soap/action adventure hybrid is the biggest failure of the last decade. Even when GH had the Luke and Laura/Ice Princess type of stories, they worked because the narrative was still rooted in the reality of what happened to those people. Soaps have alienated their existing audience and demographic by chasing the youth demographic and have implemented closed-ended storylines that buy short-term attention at the expense of long term fan investment. Racquel Gonzales: It is difficult to pin these down in a bullet point style, but, broadly, the soap industry has been disconnected with the desires of its audience for a while, and that gap has only gotten wider against the many TV and network changes throughout the 1990s and 2000s. On a very basic level, there are numerous cringeworthy experiments and sensational storylines whose aims were to entice new viewers and keep long-time viewers interested, but their results generated disinterest and audience ire. As a soap fan and scholar, the most disappointing and frustrating failures have been those manipulations of soap history and viewers' investments for quick fixes on ratings because the soap audience investment in these various often fantastic storylines depend on character continuity, recognizable relational ties, and simply a day-to-day viewing that makes sense. Deborah Jaramillo: With regard to As The World Turns, I was very disappointed with the quicker pace and the elliptical editing that made my program resemble an hour-long drama rather than a soap. I am not against formal experimentation in any genre--my piece in the anthology elaborates on this theme--but much of the pacing and editing decisions seemed to stem from an atmosphere of panic and not from artistry. I constantly complain to my students (especially when they started to get impatient with Lost several seasons back) that no one knows how to appreciate the beauty of serialized programming because no one watches soaps anymore. So many people deride television viewers' short attention spans, but watching an old-school soap opera was a daily exercise in patience. We've lost those conventions that make us wait and anticipate. We've lost process in favor of product, and this has contributed to a spoiled audience. Elana Levine: As my essay discusses, I think ABC's character blogs revealed a poor understanding of fans' investment in soaps. Because these blogs did not do much to expand or delve into the thoughts and experiences of their character-authors and so rigidly reproduced the preferred meanings of current storylines, they revealed themselves as baldly promotional efforts, with no real interest in exploring show history or character depth. Emma Webb: The first is not distributing free content online earlier. ABC didn't begin to distribute their soaps this way until 2009, even after they had been making prime-time shows available this way for over a year, and even though many of the networks had been partnering with Hulu since it's inception in 2007. The second is the lack of investment in production of soaps. As Sara Bibel points out in her chapter in the book, as the ad revenue for each soap has gone down, costing-cutting measures like eliminating breakdown writers and the actors' rehearsal time (so that each show can speed taping). This has resulted in a change in what I believe is most critical to soaps: the stories. The stories that now show up on screen often have continuity issues, focus on new characters that the audience does not know (as unknown new actors are significantly cheaper to feature than veteran actors that the audience does know), and actors (based on what has been said at personal appearances) are often confused about the direction of the story and their character's motivation. It is a downward spiral. It appears, based on the rating trends, that, as soaps cut more costs, the quality of each soap goes down, and more viewers tune out, resulting in less ad revenue and more cost cutting. What lessons can we learn from both these successes and these failures? Ernest Alba:While I find it encouraging that soap operas like General Hospital and Young and the Restless still have strong ratings, I find it discouraging that old warhorses like Guiding Light and As the World Turns have been cancelled. The biggest failures of soap opera from my perspective are that they have failed to capture a new young audience. It is clear that many students are able to pinpoint some of the strengths of soap opera - emotion, drama, and multi-character narrative structures - but they perceive them as weaknesses. Still, other strengths - longevity of characters and complexity in family structure - are mysteries to them. In our essay for the book, Bernard Timberg discusses the ways in which the camera rhetoric in soaps conveys meaning to an audience. These camera movements and ways of editing and framing a scene are unique to soaps in that they are not the same ones used in serial dramas and do not convey the same meanings. In the way meaning is constructed by the camera, we have argued that soap operas have changed little. But, if the potential audience has changed so much that they are unable to decode the meanings in soaps, it might be time to change the way in which soap opera is filmed and edited so that new audiences who are used to reality shows and documentary-style filmmaking can decode the camera's rhetoric and, if not understand the intended meaning of the narrative, at least understand the intended meaning of the shot. Some experimentation in this vein has obviously already taken place in several soaps, but the traditional way of filming and editing still dominates. My one suggestion is that we must look/research to ensure that audiences still understand how to decode the stylistic conventions of soap opera filmmaking or begin to encode meaning visually in a different way. Patrick Erwin: I think it's important that serialized storytelling return to basics, whether it's classic TV soaps or new Web soaps. The audience may be smaller, and I don't think we've quite figured out the equation that can make money on the Web, but, again, we need to move from broadcasting to narrowcasting, and soaps need to learn not to try to be everything to everyone....but rather be who they were, and are, proudly. Racquel Gonzales: It is a difficult road to anticipate the current and future viewing audience, a road soaps have been on since they began on radio. And thinking about what does or doesn't work right now in soaps really sparks wider questions about contemporary TV viewing in general, especially since seriality has been embraced as a potential element of current "quality TV." Deborah Jaramillo: If soap operas are on their way out--if everyone involved in As The World Turns knew the clock was ticking--why mess with the formula? Why try to attract an audience that isn't going to come? Why not go back to your roots and just celebrate the genre, the form? This is not to say that all changes in soaps happened recently--all genres are static and dynamic--but, if you're going to pander to an audience, pander to the one that's stuck with you across generations. Elana Levine: The first lesson would be the importance of story, of the writing. The second season of Night Shift worked because it was well written by someone (Sri Rao) who understood the rhythms and appeals of soap narrative and who respected and drew from GH history. This seems an obvious set of principles on which to base soap writing, but, too often these days, the insular community of soap writers ends up failing to take advantage of these core generic traits. The disappointments of the ABC character blogs further enforce this point. I believe that these platforms did not provide the kind of attention to history and the pleasures of soap narrative that they might have, and thus they turned off rather than drew in many viewers. How has transmedia storytelling impacted the U.S. soap opera (or not)? Racquel Gonzales: Soaps have been exploring transmedia storytelling for quite a while, particularly in print, with different characters' "diaries" being made available in book form. While these avenues provide alternate revenues, they also create more fragments for audiences to piece together for storyline continuity. Elana Levine: I don't think transmedia storytelling has had an important role in US daytime soap opera thus far. Most attempts along these lines have been pretty obviously promotional and not particularly interested in expanding or further developing the story worlds in any substantive ways. Perhaps the current format of US daytime soaps demands so much of both the production staff (churning out so many episodes so quickly) and of viewers (watching five broadcast hours a week in most cases) that there is little time or interest in expanding those story worlds in additional ways. Emma Webb: I think one of the failures of soaps has been the inability to successfully integrate transmedia storytelling into their shows. There have been attempts (as with Robin's blog on General Hospital, as described by Elana Levine), and characters writing books (for example, As the World Turns' Katie Peretti "writing" Oakdale Confidential), but they don't appear to have been successful. This may have been because, as Levine points out in her chapter, often times there is the temptation to move the character's motivation and thoughts from the screen to another other media outlet, leaving viewers frustrated and confused at a character's on screen motivation rather than providing an alternate entry point for lapsed or new viewers. However, while soaps' attempts at transmedia storytelling does not appear to have been successful, fans' attempts at transmedia seems to be more so. For example, in 2005, As the World Turns paired the characters of Lucy and Dusty together, and, in an attempt to help educate potentially new or lapsed viewers, many fans created video synopses of the two characters' history and storyline together. These videos provided an entry point for those viewers who had not been watching the show. And this type of video could provide a way for lapsed or returning viewers to get a recap of a character's storyline which could make it easier to catch-up. How have alternate distribution outlets changed the way fans find and share U.S. soap opera content? Racquel Gonzales: YouTube has been an amazing tool to bring together shared viewing memories, though I'm not sure the networks themselves appreciate the site like soap viewers. Moreover, in uploading old VHS recordings of soap edits on YT, soap fans have created an invaluable archival resource for fellow soap viewers and soap scholars. The medium makes it impossible to provide a simple DVD set of a soap. Just imagine how many discs would be required to just capture a month of One Life to Live from 1988. On YT, some of these episodes have been made available by fans for fans, while the comments section provides (as I've said previously) a shared space of viewing memory. Debrorah Jaramillo: I'm going to continue with the topic of the Mexican novela on U.S. television, not to be stubborn, but because it presents an interesting complication with regard to transmedia fandom. Unless a novela is an original production of a network like Univision, it is being aired in the U.S. after it has completed its run in its country of origin (or it simply could be delayed by a few weeks). In both cases, it becomes nearly impossible to engage with the novela within the transmedia landscape. I'm terrified to search for Soy Tu Dueña online because I don't know if it has actually completed its run in Mexico. I don't want to know what happens, and I don't want to run across fan commentary. My relationship with this novela is completely untouched by the internet and even print magazines. I feel like I'm watching this in the 1980s, even though the image is in beautiful HD. Emma Webb: Making soaps available online (either through the network's website, YouTube, or other sites) has been the biggest change to the way that fans share soap opera content in the last few years. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, this also means that fans don't need to set their DVRs or watch the show's broadcast in order to keep up with their favorite soap opera. Another interesting development is that, when the content is considered to be bad or uninteresting by a group of fans, fans often ask their fellow fans if "today was worth watching?" And there are alternatives for fans who don't want to sit down and watch an entire episode. If a fan thinks that their favorite soaps are boring but still wish to see select scenes, they can easily go to YouTube and watch the scenes that interest them in what is often 10 minutes or less. With these new distribution outlets, it's even easier for a fan to catch-up if they have become a lapsed viewer. Fans can easily go back and find key moments from a variety of sources. However, this also means that, because this content is available online, fans' attention to detail about individual characters seems to have become more heightened. So, as soaps struggle with diminishing production values as they cut their budgets, the fans are even more likely to notice the slip in production values.
December 8, 2010
The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Two):The History and Legacy of Serialized TelevisionThe second section of The Survival of Soap Opera looks at the deep history of the stories and characters on U.S. soap operas and the unique ways this genre draws on a show's backstory (or, in some cases, does not make good use of such history). This part of the book includes multiple reflections on the similarities and differences between serialized primetime genres and daytime serials. Below, several of the contributors to this section answer some questions about how contemporary U.S. soaps relate to their backstories. Kay Alden is co-head writer of The Bold and the Beautiful, a former consultant for ABC Daytime, and the former head writer for The Young and the Restless, a show for which she wrote from 1974 to 2006 and won four Daytime Emmys and two Writers Guild of America awards. The book includes a piece based on Sam Ford's interview with Alden about what makes the soap opera genre unique. Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy at Peppercom Strategic Communication, a research affiliate with the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT (where he conducted Master's thesis work on soaps and taught a course on the genre), and an instructor with the Popular Culture Studies program at Western Kentucky University (where he is teaching a class on soaps) who has published work on the genre for Fast Company, Portfolio, and Transformative Works and Cultures. Ford co-authored the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." He also wrote an essay for the collection, entitled "Growing Old Together: Following As the World Turns' Tom Hughes through the Years." Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera critic and active member of the online soap opera fan community who has written for Soap Opera Weekly and currently writes on the genre at her Red Room member blog. Her essay in the book is entitled "The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Operas." J.A. Metzler is a lifelong soap opera viewer who runs a boutique marketing and communications consultancy and formerly participated in a daytime writer development program. His essay in the collection is entitled "Did the 2007 Writers Strike Save Daytime's Highest-Rated Drama?" Christine Scodari is a professor of communication and multimedia studies and a women's studies associate at Florida Atlantic University who has written numerous pieces of scholarship on issues of gender and age in soap operas, including her book Serial Monogamy. Her essay in the collection is entitled "Of Soap Operas, Space Operas, and Television's Rocky Romance with the Feminine Form." Why is the history of U.S. soap operas so vital to their continued survival? Sam Ford: U.S. soap operas may be one of the most hyper-serialized forms of storytelling in history, but it certainly does not "own" serialization. As many essays in our book point out, there are many ways in which primetime television and other types of storytelling are often "doing serialization" better than daytime serial dramas these days. Yet what sets the U.S. soap opera model apart not only from primetime serialized television shows these days but also from telenovelas and other adaptations of the soap opera genre is their history. As soap operas look to compete in an increasingly cluttered media landscape, the industry's answer is often to adapt what they have to offer to what it seems audiences want: thus, we hear discussion about the MTV-ization of our culture or else reality television's effect on audience expectations, and many people in the soap opera industry start thinking and talking about how soap operas need to adapt to these changes. My response is quite the opposite: that soap operas have to stick to their major points of differentiation in storytelling style, even as they change with the social stories of the times. In short, rather than trying to tell their stories more quickly to compete with primetime serialization, soap operas have to think about what primetime cannot do. Primetime shows can do CGI better than daytime dramas because they have bigger budgets. Primetime has a better chance to do location shoots these days. What primetime can't do is tell stories with characters who people have been following for decades, with such complex backstories and generations of fans who have grown up watching these shows. As soap operas concentrate on quick-fixes to jump start the genre instead of leaning on the history that sets the genre apart, these shows run the risk of distancing themselves from their very points of differentiation. For instance, my work has concentrated on the now-cancelled As the World Turns, a show that maintained one of its core families for its entire 54-year run and had multiple actors who had been in the same role for up to five decades. My essay in this collection focuses on the character of Tom Hughes, who audiences watched from birth in 1961 to the show's cancellation in 2010. No other form of entertainment can accomplish that sort of storytelling, and the rich history and complexity such storytelling drives cannot be duplicated elsewhere on television. (I've made the argument elsewhere that narrative worlds like the super hero universes of Marvel and DC, the pro wrestling narrative world, or the "real" worlds of various sports leagues or political news might rival the "immersive story worlds" of soap operas in their longevity and depth.) In our collection, Jason Mittell's piece points out the many ways in which primetime serialized television differs from daytime soaps, rejecting the notions of many who feel that complex primetime television narratives are a direct descendant of U.S. soaps. And, elsewhere, Jason writes about complex primetime television shows as having a high degree of "drillability," with dense texts that have multiple layers of meaning to unpack. Soap operas achieve complexity as well, but--to Jason's point--in a much different way than primetime shows. Rather than a (relatively) small number of episodes that are quite dense, soap operas achieve their complexity through accretion--by telling the daily stories of characters over the course of decades and thus relying on collaboration with their audiences in comparing any current moment in the text with the deep history of those characters. Primetime television shows cannot provide those pleasures, and yet daytime soap operas very rarely take full advantage of the types of stories only they can tell. Have you seen examples of today's soap operas in the U.S. taking advantage of their histories in powerful ways that you believe exemplify what the soap opera genre is supposed to do? Sam Ford: There were certainly elements of the end of As the World Turns which played on the rich history of those characters and the show. In particular, bringing back longtime show favorite Dr. John Dixon after several years of absence from Oakdale was a fantastic nod toward fans, as was featuring several of the show's most enduring faces more prominently in the show's final months. Meanwhile, while I didn't watch it myself, I heard many great things about Days of Our Lives' treatment of the death of show matriarch Alice Horton in 2010 after portrayer Frances Reid's death. J.A. Metzler's piece in our book highlights The Young and the Restless' renewed focus on longtime character Katherine Chancellor as a sign of how that show gained some traction by recalibrating its focus through the writer's strike, and The Bold and the Beautiful writer Kay Alden writes in her piece about how that show has retained focus on four central characters from its premiere to the current day. These examples are stark reminders to fans of why they still watch soap operas in particular and the pleasures that soap operas provide that cannot be found elsewhere. My suspicion would be that it is these moments, periods, eras, and elements which keep millions of U.S. viewers still dedicated to a genre that is clearly in decline. Why do these soap operas ignore or not properly make use of that rich history? Sam Ford: Writers too often see the history of soap opera story worlds as a point of risk rather than a strength, especially as writing teams move from one show to another and thus have decades of history to catch up on. That leads to new writing regimes bringing in new characters and downplaying those characters they are afraid they can't write so well. Rather than seeing fans' desire for continuity as a way to engage with them and draw them in, it's seen as a negative: to avoid fan complaining, writers just stay away from history they don't know that well. I've had head writers of shows complain to me in the past about how difficult it can be to come on board a new show and try to catch up on storylines of years gone by, especially now that these shows have several decades of history. Much of the problem has to do with resources: many shows don't have digitized or easily accessible archives to review history and, even if they do, there is so much history to catch up on, and writers are expected to write 260 original episodes each year. So, if you aren't already steeped in the history of the show you write for, it's extremely hard to get caught up. In my mind, that means knowledge of and history with the franchise should be a requirement for being hired to write for a soap, but it's typically not. J.A. Metzler: As ratings for all soap operas have eroded over time, I think that soap producers and writers have sought to find alternate ways to build a viewing audience. I think many producers/writers have been trying to "recreate the wheel" instead of relying upon the tenets that have long made serialized storytelling popular: character consistency; evolution of a character or set of characters over time; and a certain feeling of familiarity that comes with "visiting" with these characters on a regular basis. I think too many have tinkered with the older, more tested formula, ignoring their shows' rich history and consistency in order to try and evolve to a new formula driven by a faster-paced, plot-based type of storytelling with a revolving door of younger, unfamiliar characters, in the hopes of engaging a new audience of viewers who they believe have a limited attention span for slower-evolving stories based on character and continuity. In what ways are contemporary U.S. soap operas failing to use their history in compelling ways? Lynn Liccardo: There was great excitement among As the World Turns fans when word leaked out that Julianne Moore would be briefly reprising her breakout role of Frannie Hughes. Her appearance was to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of Frannie's father and step-mother (and aunt), Bob and Kim Hughes, which coincided with the show's 54th, and final, anniversary this past April 2nd. As it happens, on April 2nd, I was in St. Louis, presenting my essay for The Survival of Soap Opera, on the Capitalizing on History panel at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference. You just cannot plan that kind of irony. Had I not known of Moore's appearance two episodes hence, and, had I not seen a clip somewhere online of her lifting a glass to toast her parents, the April 1st episode might have given me false hope for how the show would close out its 54-year run. The episode opens with Kim and Bob celebrating their anniversary over champagne at the Lakeview. Kim gives Bob a framed photograph of their cabin, which she had redecorated. She tells him that she's made sure that his schedule was clear so the two of them could spend a long weekend together. But Bob's schedule had changed, and he wants to postpone their getaway. With the conflict in place, the stage was set for the kind of story that could have - make that should have - been the linchpin for the show's final months. Instead, it was all over in three short episodes that barely scratched the historical and emotional surface before all was resolved. While ATWT had used the short-arc format extensively in 2008-9, after the show's cancelation was announced in December 2009, the writers had returned to soaps' more traditional narrative structure. Why the show chose the short-arc for Kim and Bob's anniversary reveals great deal about TPTB's attitudes towards both longtime fans and the show's history. Before I get into why, a little bit of background about the couple. Bob Hughes was a young boy when ATWT began in 1956. He may well have been the first character to be SORASed (soap opera rapid aging syndrome) when Don Hastings took over the role in 1960. Kathryn Hays began playing Kim Sullivan (Reynolds, Dixon, Stewart, Andropoulous, Hughes) in 1972. The admitted doppelganger of ATWT's creator, Irna Phillips, Kim proceeded to seduce Bob, who was married to her sister (Frannie's late mother, Jennifer). For more than a decade, Kim and Bob suffered the consequences of their indiscretion. But, by 1985, the couple was deemed sufficiently rehabilitated to marry and assume the role of tent pole characters previously occupied by Bob's parents, Nancy and Chris. In recent years, ATWT had abandoned its traditional intergenerational storytelling in favor of more isolated storylines (see here). So the flashbacks interspersed in the second episode of the arc filled in the backstory for newer viewers. For this longtime fan, it was an exercise in ambivalence: while I was delighted to see the show's glorious past, those flashbacks were also a bitter reminder of just how much had been lost. The emotional depth so apparent in the flashbacks stood in stark contrast to the superficial, even trivial, manner in which Kim and Bob's story was playing out. There were no good guys or bad guys here. Both characters' points-of-view were valid and easily understood. Bob was reluctant to give up his profession and concerned about the legacy he would leave; Kim, worried about the serious health issues both had dealt with the previous year and tired of playing second fiddle to Bob's career, wanted to spend more time with her husband. In fact, the tension between Kim and Bob mirrored aspects of the tension between Bob's protègè, Reid Oliver, and legacy character Luke Snyder as the two embarked upon their short-lived relationship. This brings up another issue. When fans complain about soaps' lack of intergenerational storytelling, TPTB often point to the budget restrictions that limit the number of actors per episode. Okay. But Kim and Bob were on fairly often in the final months, so the actors were already getting paid. However, with Kim and Bob's problems so quickly resolved, the characters' only purpose was to prop Reid and Luke and their son Chris. Tom was right when he said of his father and Kim, "If they can't make it, what hope is there for the rest of us?" How much richer the story would have been if all the couples trying to find their way back to each other could have learned from Kim and Bob's troubles. And the conversations: Kim with her niece, Barbara, and daughter-in-law, Margo; Bob with his sons Tom and Chris and grandson Casey. The old rivalries referenced: Bob's first wife and Tom's mother, Lisa, and the impact being a child of divorce had on Tom, for instance, or Bob's affair with Susan Stewart, the mother of Casey's girlfriend, Alison. All of that could have been spread out and fully examined over the show's final months. Instead, some of the interactions reduced characters to farce: both Lisa and Susan trying to seduce Bob as a test to prove that he really loves Kim. Really? Now, of course, maybe if this had been a facet as the story evolved the course of several months... Not to belabor my almost morbid fascination with Executive Producer Christopher Goutman's psyche, but I have to say that, like the train wreck that killed Reid Oliver; the first time Luke and his first love, Noah, made love, and the death of the show's matriarch, Nancy Hughes, there was a perfunctory quality - even patronizing, and almost spiteful - about how Kim and Bob's story was shoehorned into these three episodes. It was almost as though Goutman was taunting longtime fans: "Look how we remember the show's history, and, yes, we actually do remember how to lay out this kind of story and write these kinds of scenes; but three episodes is all you're going to get. So, be satisfied, and don't complain." And, for the most part, that was exactly the response from fans and the soap media. Other than a few laments about the story's brevity, I don't recall see any critical comments on the boards. It seems that fans have been conditioned not just to accept these crumbs, but to be grateful for them - even if TPTB make a mockery of the show's history in the process. Kim and Bob's truncated story was a far cry from how ATWT's sister show, Guiding Light, closed out its 72-year run in 2009 with the marriage of Vanessa and Billy Lewis. Both were long characters, to be sure, but not nearly as deeply-woven in Springfield's canvas as Kim and Bob were in Oakdale's. And, while, as a couple, Vanessa and Billy had their fans, theirs was not a manifest destiny. In fact, there were a few on the boards who would have preferred that Vanessa remarry another former husband, Matt Reardon. But Kim and Bob were forever. Funny story: I came across the questionnaire I filled out for C. Lee Harrington and Denise Brothers' essay for the book, "Age and Aging in Soaps." Here's what I wrote back in 2007: "What I'd really like to see is a former love come into the life of a vet...(but) I'm not interested in seeing a marriage - Tom-Margo, Bob-Kim - threatened." While I'm sure I meant it at the time, I would have so loved for As the World Turns to have ended its 54 years showing Kim and Bob fully confronting their conflicts, secure in the knowledge that they would, indeed, resolve them. What is the relationship between these soap opera and other forms of serialized television drama in the U.S., such as reality television or primetime scripted dramas? Kay Alden: When reality TV descended upon us, unlike some others, I did not view this development as the harbinger of the death of the soap opera. Instead, I argued that the sudden popularity of such programming increased the likelihood of the survival of the soap opera, in that these reality shows inherently draw their support from the innate human desire to know "what happens next," which is our stock in trade in soapdom. I believed at that time that the enormous popularity of the reality shows would not sustain because of the lack of knowledge the audience has of the characters, unlike in soap opera, where viewers have known these characters often for many years. I believed that this type of programming is inherently formulaic, and, between that fact and the lack of well-known, well-drawn characters, I did not believe that reality TV, over time, could compete with what we do in daytime television via the scripted medium. I did hope, however, that seeing a new public interested in this type of serialized drama might somehow transfer to a new, younger demographic available for daytime serials. Regrettably, such transference has not occurred. It is interesting to note that, in many reality programs, more attention is now placed on the characters - who these people are whose lives have been brought together for the duration of the program; who will form alliances; who will be the successful manipulators? Reality TV has learned the lesson well, that in order to succeed, an audience needs to care about the characters involved. Choosing the cast of Dancing with the Stars has now become a significant facet of the show, as producers hope to cement viewer involvement with their "characters" even before the season actually begins. Survivor promotes the characters in their upcoming season as the primary draw for viewers to tune in. Thus, I maintain, reality TV has learned what we must always remember in our soap opera world: daytime drama is a character-based medium. It is the characters, far more than clever plot twists, which keep viewers tuning in again and again. In reality TV, the plots are simple. The drama is the contest: who will win the game. But the relationships among the characters, the friends and foes that develop, the alliances, the manipulations...these are the facets that keep viewers involved. Now, the question is: what can we learn from this new venue that has so successfully entered our realm and captivated the viewing public? Immediacy, surprise, fresh plot twists...all these are important. On The Bold and the Beautiful, we have recently tried to find ways of adding more of the "reality" perspective, with our real-life shows among the homeless of Los Angeles and subsequent additional reality segments we will be featuring on the show. But, above all, we in soap operas must continue to concentrate on our well loved and well understood characters. This is where we in daytime drama have the supreme advantage, with shows that have been coming into viewers' homes for years and characters our audiences know and love. In the quest to reach out and garner new audience, let us always remember that it is our beloved characters which provide our first and foremost draw for loyal viewership. Christine Scodari: I've seen it dozens of times, whether I'm casually perusing online forums devoted to primetime dramas or systematically investigating them for my research. "Why must every show have a romance?" a fan queries. Another chimes in, "I'm tired of them shipping the male and female leads." Then, almost like clockwork, there's the rub: "This is not a soap opera!" Not only do such exchanges refer to something essential (but not unique!) to the soap opera genre (developing romantic relationships or, in fanspeak, "ships" between ongoing characters) but implicitly to another ingredient that makes the first one possible and, perhaps, probable--serialization. Before 1978, when Dallas (CBS, 1978-1991) debuted, there had only been a couple of short-lived soaps in prime time. Except for these and one or two series in which the leads were married from the start, there were no developing romances between ongoing characters in U.S. primetime dramas during network television's first three decades. Prior to the 1980s, nighttime dramatic series were structurally episodic, and save for maintaining the basic premise, setting, and slate of regular characters (anthologies, of course, didn't even have these), each episode was its own mini-movie. Guest players entered and left the canvas within the hour, including villains and objects of affection for the primarily male heroes. Thanks to an amnesia-inducing reset button, whatever guest characters the regulars loved, or fought, or mourned in the previous episode would conveniently be forgotten the following week. Star Trek's (NBC, 1967-1969) Captain Kirk may have had his disposable girl-on-every-planet, but, while Della Street pined for the title character in the legal drama Perry Mason (CBS, 1957-1966) and Miss Kitty Russell eyed Marshall Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955-1975), these long-suffering regulars never got to first base. The show most credited with ushering in the hybridized, serial-episodic primetime drama and the related phenomenon of developing romances between ongoing characters is Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-1987). However, neither it nor its many imitators are true soap operas. As Thompson notes in From "Hill Street Blues" to "ER": Television's Second Golden Age (1996), Hill Street's creators were ordered by the network to insert at least one plot each episode that would begin and end within the hour. And that they did, usually by bringing one or more professional storylines to closure while attenuating the personal ones. Such series were showered with Emmys and lauded as innovative and gutsy for their long-term character arcs and sink-in-your-teeth acting, with nary a nod to the much-denigrated genre that actually pioneered such storylines (albeit in low-budget fashion). Since then, mushrooming media options and accompanying audience fragmentation have made serial and serial-episodic primetime dramas into riskier investments for the major commercial networks. Viewers who miss a week or two of complex plotting become frustrated and often drop off. As a result, such series fare worse in both first-run and syndication than episodic, procedural dramas such as those associated with the "Law and Order" and "CSI" franchises. Daytime soap opera viewership has, logically, declined for many of the same reasons. The new model for serial-episodic drama series in prime time is one that is more episodic than serial. Its epitome is CBS's The Good Wife (2009-present), in which a long-term arc anchored in attorney Alicia's troubled relationship with her politico husband and flirtation with a partner at her law firm very sparsely peppers each installment, while the "A" plot of each episode is one open and quickly shut legal case. Meanwhile, daytime dramas languish as their numbers dwindle, their business model insufficient to address today's realities. In a spate of experimentation to see what, if any, primetime traits might be emulated in order to improve its prospects, daytime has lately dabbled in storylines sampling every dramatic subgenre from the occult to organized crime to high school musicals and forayed into reality TV territory, in part by incorporating talent and other contests into its plots. These gestures have one thing in common; they are efforts to nestle shorter-term storylines within longer arcs, just as competitive reality series tell a weekly tale of which contestant will be eliminated in the course of weaving a seasonal narrative about who the ultimate victor will be. Even for soaps, then, it seems that serialization and the intricate, patiently plotted character stories it can engender are becoming suspect. The pivotal contribution daytime made to the development of "high quality" primetime drama has been persistently overlooked, and now this very feature--serialization--is one to be gingerly employed, if not drastically curtailed, wiped away like that soapy ring around the tub. Perhaps the anti-shippers need only wait--wait until soap operas themselves fade away and inflexibly episodic series are again so dominant in primetime that elegantly evolving relationships between regular characters are virtually impossible to assemble. I, on the other hand, would mourn that eventuality. Lynn Liccardo: My focus has been on the relationship between daytime soaps and primetime scripted dramas - hence the title of my essay for the book, "The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Operas." So, it's no surprise that, as my daytime soap viewership came to an end with the final episode of As the World Turns this past September, I was looking at several primetime shows to take up the slack, one in particular: the CW's Life UneXpected. But as the wise Yogi put it so well, "It's like deja-vu, all over again." Creator Liz Tigelaar's experience as an adopted child inspired the story of sixteen-year old Lux, who seeks out her birth parents. The show surely would have resonated with soap opera's creator, Irna Phillips, whose difficult relationships with her adopted son and daughter provided material for powerful stories on As the World Turns and Another World. Like Friday Night Lights and Mad Men, LUX (yes, the wordplay between the title and the title character is a bit precious) is one of those modest stories of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. LUX was always a strange fit on the CW (a joint venture between CBS and the old WB), a fact the network acknowledged when the show premiered in January 2010: The drama is unlike most of the CW's current schedule, because it's not about sexy high schoolers in Beverly Hills or sexy college students on the Upper East Side. Instead, it's a mature, adult drama. The show has more in common with classic WB dramas like Gilmore Girls and Everwood, dealing with the relationships between parents and children. Not only is it the best new show of 2010, but it's certainly the best new show the CW has produced in its four years on the air. Indeed it was, but that was then. Just before the second season premiere the very week ATWT left the air in mid-September, Tigelaar gave a candid - very candid (were that former ATWT executive producer Christopher Goutman as forthcoming about the network interference he had to deal with over his 11 years with the show) - interview detailing the changes the CW demanded before renewing Life UneXpected last spring. "I could tell tales about Baze and Kate and Lux and Ryan the rest of my life and not get bored. The CW would kill me and cancel my show, but I seriously could." And I would happily watch Tigelaar's tales. Sad to say, the second season reminds me of what daytime soaps have become: a few beautifully written moments squeezed in-between what the network wanted from Tigelaar: "to introduce new characters, to provide more conflicts, foils, love interests to all the main characters." In the words of The AV Club's Todd Vanderwerff, "Can we maybe get some more superficial conflict in here?" So, for its second, and likely final, season LUX morphed from "a mature, adult drama" to one more CW show about a "sexy high schooler," in this case, having an affair with her teacher while thoughtlessly betraying her best friend. Fan reaction was predictable. For ShellySue at TWoP: Last night I was thinking, "This show is horrible. I can't possibly watch it anymore. It used to be a good show with so much potential. What happened?" At that same moment ShelleySueTeenDaughter said, "This show is great. I can't believe I ever didn't like it. It was so boring in the beginning. I'm glad they made it more interesting." So it's clear to me that I'm hating this show because it isn't written for me anymore (if it ever was). To bad, because I really used to enjoy it. Tigelaar gets character - and she gets soap opera - "I love those conventions, I love those moments...I love those soap opera storylines..." She has worked on some of the primetime shows I've always believed embodied the ethos of your mother's soap opera: "an ensemble of fully developed, multi-generational, middle-class characters shown in open-ended, inter-connected, intimate stories, where the actions of one character reverberated for all," among them American Dreams and Dirty Sexy Money. Yes, yes, I know the Darlings were filthy rich, but, in the first season, the family relationships were grounded in emotional honesty. That is until ABC programmers started mucking around with the second season, then cancelled the show. The recent announcement that the CW was not ordering additional 2nd-season episodes beyond the initial thirteen suggests that Life UneXpected will soon follow suit. The AV Club's Todd Vanderwerff speaks for many frustrated fans of these kinds of shows when he says: If there's one thing networks believe in the very pits of their stomachs, it's that real life, life as it's really lived, cannot make for interesting and compelling television, despite the fact that the entire output of Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick (thirtysomething, etc.), Friday Night Lights, and even the shows of David Simon suggest that writing small-scale stories about people living mundane lives can be really, really fascinating when done right But the truth is, for the broadcast networks, the numbers simply aren't there for these kinds of small-scale stories. Friday Night Lights made it to five seasons only because of the deal NBC put together with DirecTV. Mad Men survives on AMC with fewer than two million viewers. So it's not surprising that there's a growing consensus that if serialized storytelling is to survive, it will be on cable - and not just premium cable. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick provides a clear and cogent explanation of how economics allow basic cable to take a chance on a show like Men of a Certain Age. CBS would have taken the show; after all, co-creator Ray Romano made the network a ton of money with Everyone Loves Raymond. But the network wanted changes - 30 minutes, more comedic - Romano was not willing to make. (For what it's worth: as mentioned above, CBS is one of the owners of the CW, which might account for what's gone on with Life UneXpected.) But Romano stood his ground, and Men of a Certain Age, which was well received by critics, returns for its second season on TNT on December 6th. But it's not just taking a chance on a show: it's giving the show - and viewers - a chance. A cable show may get pulled after one season, but not before all thirteen episodes have aired - and in the same time slot. So, while a critically acclaimed show like Fox's Lone Star might not have survived more than one season, the show would have gotten a fair shot instead of being cancelled after two episodes. Losing Lone Star so quickly was particularly frustrating because the show had a fascinating, if edgy, premise - a con man leading a double life while trying to break with his past - with a cast that included Jon Voight and David Keith. Of course, while Fox's decision to use Lone Star cannon fodder against ABC's Dancing with the Stars makes sense in the real world of broadcast networks - put your strongest show up against the toughest competition - why, when it predictably failed to beat DWTS, Fox didn't give the show a lifeline at FX is anybody's guess. This is hardly a new phenomenon: Sam Ford and I had this conversation in 2006. The economic realities that force the broadcast networks to move shows around and pull serials after a couple of episodes have created something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; many viewers who've been burned before simply don't watch, or, if they do watch, don't allow themselves to become emotionally invested. So maybe creators wanting to tell "small-scale stories about people living mundane lives" should follow Ray Romano's lead and not allow the broadcast networks to try to save any more of these shows by destroying the very qualities that make them so special. Had Liz Tigelaar gone to TNT or AMC instead of The CW when she was looking for a home for Life UneXpected, the show might be preparing for its third season rather than facing almost certain cancellation. But, while cable offers hope for the future of serialized storytelling, there are challenges. The thirteen-episode cable season limits the depth of serialized storytelling. Fans on Television without Pity's FNL board were hungry for more; marnyh's comment was typical: "As much as I adore this show, it really was harmed by the abbreviated season. There was too much stuff I wanted to see more of, and too many characters I wanted fleshed out." As for Mad Men, on Ginia Bellafante's New York Times blog, one fan posited, "I'm sure we can all agree that Congress should pass a law that this show should be two hours, at least 40 weeks a year. Rest up, Mr. Weiner." Then there's the question of gender. Because FNL, Mad Men, and, to a lesser extent, Men of a Certain Age, are about, well, men, or at least, manly pursuits, these shows are able to escape the "chick" label and, as a result, attract more media buzz. Witness Charlie Rose, one of the few places where in-depth conversations about popular culture take place. Rose's shows about FNL and Mad Men, have, with the notable exception of Connie Britton, have included only men. This is not to devalue the opinions of Matt Roush, Ken Tucker, and Bill Carter, but to suggest that people like Virginia Heffernan, Ginia Bellefante, and Alessandra Stanley, all of whom (and yes, I realized they're all at The New York Times) have written with great insight about these shows, and others, would enrich the conversation around Charlie's oak table. Another example: Todd Vanderwerff's posted his observations about Life UneXpected on The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion. The A.V Club is a reference to "the olden times, a school's audiovisual club would be composed of a bunch of geeks..." Needless to say, AV clubs were largely populated by socially inept males. Hence, Michael Clayton's response to the Vanderweff post: "I think I grew an ovary just reading the first 2 paragraphs. Seriously though, I've never heard of this show. Why is AVClub covering it?" As serialized storytelling continues its transition, there are questions that must be asked and answered: Who's the audience for these kinds of shows? How to identify potential viewers? And why is that audience so small compared to, say, reality shows? Since there is such and enormous range of serialized storytelling, exactly what do I mean by "these kinds of shows" beyond being "small-scale stories about people living mundane lives?" What about the web? I'm still working on that, so check my blog for the future of serialized storytelling, part 2...
December 6, 2010
The Survival of Soap Opera (Part One): The State of the American SoapSoap operas have been a staple in American broadcasting since the dawn of network radio in the 1930s, yet at a time when several major soaps have been canceled, they seem to be an endangered species. A new book released this week, The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations For a New Media Era, brings together key thinkers about this embattled genre from the worlds of industry, fandom, journalism, and academia to share their reflections on the current state of the American daytime serial and to offer their suggestions on what tactics and strategies might allow it to thrive in a new media era. The book is edited by three researchers -- Sam Ford (Director of Digital Strategy for Peppercom Strategic Communications), Abigail De Kosnik (assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies), and C. Lee Harrington (professor of sociology and a Women's Studies Program Affiliate at Miami University) -- who have been key contributors to the Convergence Culture Consortium (soon to be rebranded as the Futures of Entertainment Consortium). Ford is also the co-author with Joshua Green and I of my current book project, Spreadable Media, which we hope to release late next year. This book does what the best contemporary media scholarship should be doing -- tackling an issue which has enormous impact on the shape of our communications environment, brokering a conversation which brings key stakeholders to the table and reflects the diversity of perspectives around this topic, and making an intervention which reaps pragmatic rewards even as it sharpens our conceptual understanding of how television production emerges at the intersection between Broadcast networks and networked communications. The prose remains accessible throughout, in part because it is designed to reach an audience far beyond the university book store ghetto. There's an immediacy about the project because it seeks to bring classic scholarly perspectives to bear on a very pressing set of concerns. And there's a passion to the writing because everyone contributing feels a strong stake in these developments, because whatever else they are, they are fans of soaps as a genre and care about their long-term viability. I have asked the three editors of the book to help organize a forum to be conducted in four installments through this blog, bringing together some key contributors to the book, to share their reactions to its four core themes. This material is at once a sample of what the book offers but also an extension of the book which is able to include some developments which have unfolded since the book went to press. The first section of the book looks at the many challenges U.S. soap operas face today. Below, a cross-section of the contributors to that section answer some questions about the state of the U.S. soap opera industry today. Giada Da Ros is a television critic for a weekly Italian newspaper who has published essays on a variety of primetime television dramas, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, The L Word, Lost, and Queer as Folk. Patrick Mulcahey, a current writer with The Bold and the Beautiful, has won four Daytime Emmys and three Writers Guild of America awards for nearly three decades of writing for soap operas, also including General Hospital, Guiding Light, Loving, Santa Barbara, Search for Tomorrow, and Texas. The collection features a piece based on Da Ros' interview with Mulcahey which focuses on changes in soap opera writing contracts. Barbara Irwin, a professor of communication studies at Canisius College who has researched soap operas for more than two decades, has co-authored two books on soap opera The Young and the Restless and currently serves both as chair of the soap opera area of the Popular Culture Association national conference and as co-director of the Project Daytime research initiative. The collection features a piece based on C. Lee Harrington's interview with Irwin and research partner Mary Cassata, focused on the state of U.S. soap operas today. Jaime J. Nasser is the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Film Studies Program; the Gender and Sexuality Program; and the Latin American, Latino and Iberian Peoples and Culture Program at Bryn Mawr College who recently received his doctorate from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts with a dissertation that focused, in part, on the emergence of the telenovela. Nasser's essay in the collection is entitled "Giving Soaps a Good Scrub: ABC's Ugly Betty and the Ethnicity of Television Formats." William J. Reynolds is a published historian who writes about the Ossining, New York, area and U.S. presidencies and he researches soap opera history and actively participates in online and offline soap opera community events. The collection features a piece based on Sam Ford's interview with Reynolds on memories of the soap opera The Edge of Night. Tristan Rogers is an actor best known for playing the role of Robert Scorpio for various stints over the past three decades on General Hospital and General Hospital: Night Shift and who currently has roles on both The Young and the Restless and online series The Bay. The book features a piece based on Abigail De Kosnik's interview with Rogers about changes in the soap opera industry, audiences, and texts. Melissa C. Scardaville is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Emory University who has published her work on soap operas for American Behavioral Scientist and previously served as the Guiding Light editor for Soap Opera Digest. Scardaville's essay in the book is entitled "The Way We Were: The Institutional Logics of Professionals and Fans in the Soap Opera Industry." For readers who are not soap opera fans, where do U.S. soap operas find themselves today? Barbara Irwin: Soap operas today find themselves at a crossroads. With diminishing ratings, intensifying scrutiny focused on the bottom line, and a new media landscape, questions are being raised as to their lasting power. In the last year and a half, we've seen the cancellation of two long-time CBS/Procter & Gamble shows, Guiding Light (the longest running scripted series ever in broadcasting) and As The World Turns. On the heels of these cancellations was the recent announcement that the Disney/ABC-owned cable network, SOAPnet, will end its run in January of 2012. Viewership of soap operas has declined dramatically over the last 20 years, with three-quarters of the audience vanishing. In their heyday on radio in the early 1940s, one could listen to as many as 65 different soap operas on any given day. In 1970, there were more soap operas on television than at any other time - 19 in all. Today, just six remain. Evolutionary changes in industry and storytelling have brought us to the present state of soap operas. For their first sixty years (1930-1990), there was little change in soap opera storytelling, due in great part to the close ties the writers and creators had to the originator of the form, Irna Phillips. Just less than 20 years ago, nine of the 12 soap operas on the air were being written and/or executive produced by individuals with a direct connection to Irna Phillips - what I would call the "second generation" of soap opera creators. Most of these individuals have by now been replaced, and some have passed away, leaving the writers of today farther removed from Irna and her way of creating and writing soap operas. The changes evident in storytelling reflect this distance. Industry forces are also at play. Today, even the most powerful headwriters are not insulated from the corporate executives whose job it is to ensure that their creative branches remain profitable. The soap opera industry has made numerous attempts to reduce costs and at the same time regain or build new audience. Some of the cost-cutting efforts are invisible to viewers, such as going to a 4-day production schedule. Reducing the size of casts and writing out long-standing characters played by high-paid actors, however, changes the soap opera landscape and potentially alienates viewers. Other cost-cutting measures that have affected the soaps include fewer sets, smaller production staffs, and the near elimination of the large production "roxie" scenes and remotes as stories climax. New means of distribution have been implemented in an effort to regain lost audience and build new audiences. SOAPnet, launched in 2000, provides same-day re-broadcasts of soaps and weekend marathons in an attempt to provide soap viewers with an opportunity to watch their shows at convenient times. DVRs offer another avenue for time-shifting. The Internet offers network soap opera sites, YouTube, and other platforms through which viewers can see full episodes, clips, and features related to the soaps. But with these new technologies comes the end of habitual, ritualistic viewing. Webisodes and online soaps represent an innovation in soap opera storytelling, though, with limited story arcs and definite start and end points, these diverge from the traditional soap opera. This form of storytelling is in its infancy, but it does offer the possibility of driving lost viewers back to their network soaps and to build a new and different audience. With the proliferation of mobile devices, delivering soaps to viewers on the go may hold some promise. Advancing technology is something of a double-edged sword. While it has the potential to help the ailing soap industry, it also has created an environment in which viewers have wide-ranging options on their televisions and an unlimited online world that has increased the competition for viewing soaps immensely. How would you explain the shift of the soap opera industry's popularity and place in U.S. culture over the past few decades? Giada Da Ros: Soap operas, as a genre, are at a difficult conjuncture right now. Reasons are different. The main one, in my opinion, is that they are opaque and therefore hard to "read." On the surface, they appear easy to follow. In reality, giving meaning to what is seen on the screen requires time and commitment to the program. I love the genre, yet the idea of following a new soap makes me cringe. I don't care for it. I know that if I want to follow one, I have to give myself time, know to learn who the characters are and what the relationships are. Like in real life: love at first sight can happen, but, for the most part, you need time to care about someone and to learn what is that makes them special, when they are having a good or a bad day, what is the norm or the bizarre about them. It doesn't happen instantly. The shift in people's behaviors and the fact that they don't give themselves time, I believe, reflects in the shift in the soap opera industry's popularity. Soaps are always in flux, yet you must keep a zen-like quality of viewing: you are in the moment, always. You don't know what the future holds. They say it takes at least six months to build a soap audience, and that is for a reason. Also, viewers are more aware of TV genres and tropes and have expectations that they didn't use to have in the past. They are more visually educated and critical. Trusting this knowledge and the expectations they often incur is a common misconception. Most viewers when approaching soaps expect to see Caravaggio, not Picasso, and they judge it accordingly. Despite appearances, soaps are more conceptual than mimetic. They do not portray reality; they use realistic elements to create a different reality: one of the mind, abstract and symbolic, which borders with the superficial "illusion of reality." Several planes of reality intersect, and the emotional reality emerges. Conventions of the genre, narrative and of other kind (like recasting, being back from the dead, the twin sibling, or inside jokes) are proof of how an intellectual leap beyond reality is required of the viewer. Awareness of this gap comes only progressively. The occasional viewer mistrusts and misjudges these aspects that are specific of the genre. I believe this misjudgment was less likely to occur in the past because people had fewer expectations about TV in general. What are the primary reasons for the decline in U.S. soap opera viewership in the past few decades? Barbara Irwin: Two critical factors appear to be related to the decline in audience. Most of today's viewers, from the oldest to young middle-age, likely established their soap opera viewing habits directly as a result of their mothers' or grandmothers' viewing. But, as the overall viewership declines, the likelihood of being "taught" soap opera viewing at the knee of one's mother is diminishing. If soap opera creators are to initiate a new generation in the habit of viewing, they will have to connect with them directly. And a second factor making an impact on the diminishing audience of soap operas today is the proliferation of alternative viewing options. With the dramatic increase in the number of television channels available in US households and increased time spent online, competition for viewing time is fierce. The soap opera audience's awareness of alternative viewing options may be linked to the 1995 broadcast of the O.J. Simpson trial. For thirty-seven consecutive weeks, the daily soap opera line-up was preempted and interrupted regularly. The trial also received wall-to-wall coverage on cable's Court TV (now truTV). It could be argued that the real-life drama unfolding before viewers' eyes was more dramatic than what the soaps had to offer. Many viewers did not return to their soaps after the trial ended, having discovered that the reality played out on Court TV and other cable networks was more worthy of their viewing time. While the Simpson trial cannot be blamed for single-handedly causing a crisis in the soap opera industry, it points to the larger picture. During this time, loyal soap opera viewers became aware of the vast array of viewing options available to them, and broadcast and cable programmers noted the types of programming viewers responded to. Reality-based programming began to flourish, and the sordid lives of real people were played out on myriad talk shows, court shows, magazine, and tabloid shows, all competing for - and many winning over - the soap opera audience. Giada Da Ros: I truly believe two main elements work against soap operas and help their decline at the present moment: their cultural standing in the public opinion and the way they are sold to the audience. In the mainstream, the regard for the professionalism and skill of soap operas is quite low. In a culture that relishes being media-savvy and hip, choosing soap operas is not desirable, quite the contrary. This is an obstacle insofar as, to go against the current, you must truly love the genre. Otherwise, it is simply not worth it, because you do not get "rewarded" for it; you get "punished." Fans are bullied into thinking they are not cool and, for the most part, they are afraid to come out as defenders of a genre they love. Hence the decline. Also, I believe the way soaps are promoted to be misguided at best. Promo ads are packed with the gist of twists: short, fast segments. This is the way it is done in primetime; this is the common sense. But I don't think it's the smart choice for soaps. It may bring a viewer to check out a soap, but it doesn't guarantee you stay. You see fast; you want fast. I argue you should go the other way. Show just one segment: plain, ordinary, yet meaningful. Don't go for what attracts; go for what pulls you in, for what ultimately lets you stay and gives you pleasure in watching soaps. Give a half-a-minute soap in the ad spot that leaves you with the idea that there is abundance, that there is more, and that you can have it by watching the program. You want two things from the audience you need to attract: that it craves the ritualistic, soothing return to the show and that it is able to see beyond the genre's rhetoric and conventions and use them as tools to enjoy the narrative. You don't want a viewer that is so fixed on the grammar and syntax of the genre that he or she is unable to understand it but rather one that speaks its narrative language. The only way to do that is to concentrate on what soaps do best without having them try being something else and being sold as something else. The way the industry is selling its product helps its decline. Jaime Nasser: The shift of the soap opera industry's popularity and place in U.S. culture over the past few decades is partly linked to the decline in U.S. soap opera viewership in the past few decades. There are two reasons that stand out which are interconnected: First, the increasing popularity and availability of television programming on demand and DVD means that there will be a decline in viewership of programs of limited availability. By "limited availability" I refer to programming that is available only via traditional broadcasting such as the case with most soap operas. Second, the shift in prime time programming from primarily an episodic to serial format offers similar, or comparable pleasures to the daytime soap opera format. I am not saying that prime time serials are the same as daytime soap operas but they share strong similarities that increasingly blur the lines between d |
