April 8, 2013

As the World Stops Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo about Soap Operas (Part Three)

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Much of your writing has focused on parallels between daytime serialized drama and the rise of “quality” shows, primetime dramas which marry serialized storytelling with higher budgets, deeper production values, and much shorter, season-based dramas which pack intense meaning into typically between 10 and 20 episodes in a season, as opposed to 260 episodes per year. What do you feel is the nature of the connection between today’s critically acclaimed dramas on FX, AMC, HBO, Showtime, and elsewhere and the daytime serial drama?

 

The success of early primetime serials like Dallas (1978) and Dynasty (1981) redefined the public perception of soap opera. Larger-than-life, over-the-top characters like J.R. Ewing and Alexis Carrington, who more resembled stock characters from the commedia dell’arte, than ATWT’s Hughes family, were enormously entertaining to watch, but not because viewers found “meaning and resonance through a deeper connection.”  And while Larry Hagman’s (J.R) called Dallas as a cartoon rather than a soap opera, to the media and public these guilty pleasures were soaps simply by virtue of their seriality. The popularity of these primetime soaps coincided with Gloria Monty’s transformation of General Hospital,, and had at least as profound an impact on daytime soaps. The spirit of Dallas and Dynasty continues in current primetime soaps Revenge and Scandal, and for the teenage demo, Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars.

The Best of J.R. Ewing from Dallas

The true heirs of ATWT comprise a long list of often critically-acclaimed, always ratings challenged, and ultimately short-lived serial dramas.  While thirtysomething may not have looked anything like ATWT, the the day-to-day lives of two baby boomer families, the Stedmans and Westons, mirrored those of the Hughes and Lowells 30 years earlier. Thirtysomething ran from 1987-91 and never rose above 40th in the ratings. Its very ordinariness (tensions between career and family, visiting parents, finding a babysitter) made it, and similar shows that followed (My So-Called Life, Joan of Arcadia, Jack and Bobby, Friday Night Lights, Men of a Certain Age, to name but a few), a challenge to promote effectively.

How networks schedule these quiet, slow-paced shows creates another obstacle. Broadcast network programmers, under pressure to win time slots, often shuffle their lineup, making it difficult for viewers to find these shows, which, unlike episodic television, need to be watched in order. Sometimes networks cancel them after a handful of episodes, creating a self-fulling prophecy when fans hear about a promising new serial drama, but fearing yet another heartbreak (not being hyperbolic here:), decide not to watch.

Since cable networks rarely pull a serial drama before the first order of episodes has aired, and are able to place the show in a fixed time slot followed by multiple repeats (sometimes even daylong marathons), viewers have ample opportunity to connect with these quiet, slow-paced shows. But there are still issues beyond the obvious disadvantages shorter seasons create for serial dramas: less time to fully develop characters and their relationships means less time to fully engage viewers. When networks pick up serials dramas, the creators face uncertainty about the number of episodes that can undermine the pace of the storytelling. After a 13-episode first season, Parenthood was picked up for 22 episodes, then renewed for a 18-episode third season and 15 for the fourth. Since the season often ends before the network has announced that the show has been renewed (or not), the season finale could well be the series finale.

Sometimes, scheduling uncertainty can cause a show’s demise. When the first season of TNT’s Men of a Certain Age ended in February 2010, the show was averaging 2.6 million viewers per episode, enough for the network to order an additional 12 episodes. After the episodes were completed, TNT decided to air them in two batches.  The first set of six episodes ended in January 2011, and the show was holding its own, averaging 2.4 million viewers. But TNT held the second set until June, when average viewership dropped to 1.5 million and the show was cancelled, a fate that might well have been avoided had all 12 episodes aired as the writers intended when they laid out the second season.

The real challenge is how to describe these quiet, slow-paced shows, which, by their very nature, defy brevity, and struggle even on premium cable, where In Treatment lasted three seasons on HBO and Enlightened is currently fighting to be heard over the noisier Girls and Showtime’s Homeland. When Ray Romano pitched Men of a Certain Age to FX, he was told it “wasn’t loud enough.” The show wound up on TNT, where it never really fit in with the network’ s other original programming, procedurals like The Closer, and the light-hearted Franklin and Bash. When Men… was cancelled, critic Alan Sepinwall admitted , “I don’t always do the best job of articulating the greatness of this series, but it’s there in those moments I described above, and so many more. It is a series about small details, and those details add up into big things: big laughs and big emotion; big pain and big joy.”

Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano) has said that she always saw The Sopranos as a family drama. She’s right; but take away the mob and what are the odds that The Sopranos would have been picked up, much less become a cultural phenomenon? Peter Horton (thirtysomethings’s Gary) perfectly articulated the situation, describing how networks, cable and otherwise, are driven to create shows where something stands out: “‘I’m a mother who sells pot,’ (Weeds); ‘I’m father, but I’m a meth dealer,’ (Breaking Bad); ‘I’m a gangster, but I have therapy,’ (The Sopranos). There’s always a but, whereas thirtysomething is about people,” which is exactly how Irna Phillips described As the World Turns.

“Quiet” shows with no “buts” are the 21st-century manifestation of  the “your mother’s soap opera” dilemma that ultimately doomed ATWT. The challenge facing today’s vertical storytellers and programmers is to develop a brand evoking the appeal of “quiet” and the missing “but,” that will stand out in an ever more crowded media landscape without compromising the integrity of the vertical storytelling axis. Developing that brand demands a more precise description and definition of vertical storytelling. That means first breaking down the characteristics of these shows at the elemental, even molecular level, a task hampered by the ambiguity of language that so flummoxed Alan Sepinwall. Virginia Heffernan’s insightfull 2008 observation that Friday Night Lights “ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity,” which limits “platforms for supplemental advertising” also applies to these shows, and adds to the challenge, and urgency, of developing a brand for them.

 

What are the most interesting experiments with soap opera storytelling that you feel are capturing the unique nature and potential of the “U.S. soap opera format” of storytelling?

 

And therein lies the fundamental (and vexing) question: what exactly is the unique nature of the “U. S. soap opera format?”  There’s a vast difference between the public perception of soap opera as a melodramatic guilty pleasure populated with campy, over-the-top, plot-driven characters motivated by agendas rather than emotions, and mine. I would argue that soaps’ unique nature lies in a narrative structure that emphasizes storytelling’s vertical axis, revealing characters’ interiority, their emotional and psychological back stories, and providing time for viewers to fully absorb that information. All of which creates the opportunity for viewers find meaning and resonance through a deeper connection to characters.

A conversation to be continued. But first, the economic realities and the toll they’ve taken on soap opera’s unique nature.

From the time soaps moved from radio to television, the genre expanded: first adding the visual element, then growing from 15 minutes to a half hour, and in the late 1970s, to an hour . At the time, soaps were still a profit center for networks, and their budgets, while paltry compared to primetime shows, were sufficient to hire large casts with which writers wove rich, densely interconnected stories. After O.J., ratings took a hit from which they never recovered. Networks reduced the licensing fees they paid to the production companies, who cut the shows’ budgets. There are a number of ways for producers to reduce the cost of on-screen talent (shifting highly-paid veterans to recurring status and reducing the guarantees for contract players), so smaller budgets didn’t necessarily translate into fewer characters. What did happen was that there with fewer actors populating each episode, characters interacted less frequently, which limited opportunities for viewers to experience the full pleasure of the vertical axis. So, what had been a rich storytelling tapestry frayed and eventually shredded into the fragmented storytelling discussed above.

In July 2011, Prospect Park announced that they had acquired the online rights to two cancelled ABC soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, and planned to launch the shows in early 2012. Grateful fans cheered and the mainstream media took note. But, PP’s announcement was premature: they had not yet negotiated contracts with the unions, and their business plan, which retained the shows’ hour format, failed to attract sufficient financing. When PP said they were suspending their efforts a few months later, most observers believed the deal was dead.

Fast-forward to last December: PP announced that they had negotiated collective bargain agreements with the guilds and secured sufficient financing to begin production in February. PP had lost a credibility with many fans when they suspended their initial effort, and not surprisingly, the reboot’s reboot was met with skepticism (and barely a mention in the mainstream media). Initially, PP took a lot of heat on the boards, but as their plans solidified, veteran actors signed on and distribution deals were struck with Hulu and iTunes, fans began to believe (the mainstream media silence continues). Production began on February 25th.

What PP’s done over the the past 18 months is what the networks and Procter & Gamble Productions ought to have been doing before soaps’ economic model, so successful for so long, was no longer viable. It took PP to recognize that for soaps to survive into the 21st-century, the Web would have to be more than just an additional platform for showing and promoting shows, then come back from an initial failure to make it happen. Perhaps the most important aspect of this resurrection is that the online reboot streamlines the format: 30, rather than 60 minutes; four episodes a week, rather than five. No doubt scaling back helped to convince investors, but will PP recognize the opportunity it has to exploit the shorter format and recapture the unique nature of soaps that has been lost over the years? I’m encouraged by the relatively small, multi-generational (of the 14 contract players, eight are over 40; of the eight, two are over 50, four past 60) cast that’s been assembled for One Life to Live. All of the characters are deeply-connected, with long histories between and among them, so the elements are in place for PP to turn economic necessity into the mother of reinvention. The rebooted AMC and OLTL are slated to premiere some time in April.

When Irna Phillips blazed the trail for serial drama in the 1950s, the television landscape was minuscule, three networks, and relatively expensive to enter — the $10,000 cost of the ATWT pilot was twice the median household income at the time. Today, as the price of technology continues to drop, anyone can make and upload video to a media landscape incalculably larger than 60 years ago.  Since the mid-1990s, the Web has been flooded with mostly free content of varying quality, including an ever-increasing number of online serials designed to appeal to soap fans. Like their primetime counterparts, these Web-series are most often considered soap operas only by virtue of their seriality.  Despite barebones budgets and minimal monetization, many of these series, juggle large casts of characters squeezed into short (7-12 minute) episodes, limiting possibilities for deep viewers engagement. Only a handful have fully engaged my inner soap fan. My favorite, the critically acclaimed Anyone But Me, premiered in 2008 and ran for 26 episodes over three years before the series finale in January 2012.

Last May, while Prospect Park was off the grid getting its ducks in a row, there was a small news item on the We Love Soaps site announcing a new YouTube channel, WIGS: Where It Gets Interesting. The channel promised “high-end, original, scripted series, short films, and documentaries, all starring female leads.” WIGS co-creator, Rodrigo Garcia, had long plumbed the vertical storytelling axis in films like Things You Tell Just By Looking At Her, Ten Tiny Love Stories and Nine Lives, along with  HBO’s In Treatment. He brought the same sensibility to the work he created for WIGS.

Blue

Serena

 Celia

 

WIGS co-creator, filmmaker Jon Avnet, shares his partner’s storytelling sensibility, but even more important is how the two men went about creating the channel. With first-round seed money from Google, WIGS  became an official YouTube channel, making the project attractive to media partner, News Corp, and advertisers, AMEX and Unilever. As the pieces fell into place, including collective bargaining agreements with the entertainment unions, Avnet and Garcia invited more than a dozen writers and directors to create projects built around a female lead. Established actors, aware that their industry is in flux, were eager to participate even if it meant working for scale.

Before WIGS went live on May 14, Avnet and Garcia had produced enough content to run three episodes a week for almost seven months. Enough time to build an audience: more than 25 million views and 110,000 subscribers. The first season of WIGS included a few documentaries and short films, but the channel’s foundation was13 scripted serial dramas made up of 2-15 episodes running 7-10 minutes with small casts — sometimes as few as two characters.

Last month, FOX Broadcasting signed a multi-year deal with WIGS “to expand the breadth of offerings through the WIGS channel, and test and nurture dramatic concepts and talent in the digital realm..with an eye toward building content that can be programmed on FOX and/or other channels.” On March 15th, WIGS returns with a second season of Blue, followed later in the spring by the next installments of Lauren, and a new series Paloma.

Avnet and Garcia created WIGS specifically with women as the target audience. So, what to make of one commenter’s question, “what does it say that I, a 35-year old man, find myself addicted to WIGS?” What to make of the substantial number of women who were (and are) deeply engaged fans of Friday Night Lights and Men of a Certain Age, both shows ostensibly for and about men? The appeal of vertical storytelling clearly transcends gender; what about other demographic markers? What are the characteristics of viewers drawn to the vertical storytelling axis?

These questions, and others yet to be articulated, need to be explored before vertical storytellers can identify and maximize their potential audience. The data generated by the 110,000+ WIGS subscribers contain essential information for brand development, which, properly analyzed, can also inform the qualitative insights necessary to fully identify viewership.

 

Where has this project led you? Now that you’ve put together a personal reflection on your relationship to As the World Turns, what’s the next step in your ongoing research about the soap opera’s place in our cultural history and in our contemporary culture?

Probably the most frustrating part of writing about soap opera has been the lack of a framework within which to consider soap opera’s place in our contemporary culture. Identifying the underlying factors has been challenging because there’s no hierarchical relationship among them. Over the past several years, I’ve posted over 100 short articles on my blog. This piece represents my first effort to begin crafting those pieces into a larger context; I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I first began writing about soaps as a fan. And it’s as a fan, saddened and angered with the premature demise of show after show carrying on (consciously or not) the legacy that Irna Phillips began when she created As the World Turns, that I began exploring what it would take to carve out a place for this kind of storytelling in today’s rapidly-shifting media landscape. Personal as my efforts have been, this work can only continue with the collaboration of media scholars and professionals along with institutional support.

On related fronts, I’m currently completing the syllabus for a class, “The Influence and Evolution of the American Soap Opera, I’ll be pitching to Boston area schools, and considering the possibility of a book to follow.  Also in progress: a proposal for an Irna Phillips biography.

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, fan culture, interviews, television
April 5, 2013

As the World Stopped Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo on Soap Operas (Part Two)

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You provide a very personal account of your own gradual disconnect from enjoying and having an emotional engagement with As the World Turns. How would you describe your relationship to the show, both as a fan and as a critic, and how did that relationship evolve over time?

It’s ironic, and no small testament to the power of its storytelling, that I became so deeply involved with ATWT: Since it aired on the East Coast at 1:30, while I was at school, I was far more familiar with, and have far more vivid memories of, Search for Tomorrow and Guiding Light, which were on when my sister and I came home for lunch in grammar school, and Another World, which I could see if I came straight home from junior high school.

 

I only got to watch ATWT on holidays, vacations and sick days, a pattern that continued after I moved to Boston in 1973, found a full time job and worked on my undergraduate degree at night. In those pre-VCR days, what I remember more than specific stories is the familiarity of the characters, who were always there when I was able to watch. That was until I took a year off (1982-3) to complete my degree.  While I had been peripherally aware of the General Hospital phenomenon, I had  no idea that GH’s success was why the ATWT on my screen was so different from what I remembered.  But, I actually enjoyed what I saw and never considered abandoning the show. At the time, I was in advertisers’ target demo, so from that perspective, the change in direction was a success.

 

But, while I was enjoying the ATWT’s new direction, my mother was not. She missed the show she had loved for 25 years and eventually stopped watching. She wasn’t the only one; the show lost more viewers than it gained and a couple of years later (1984-5) the Calhoun-Marland team righted the ship and the show rose in the ratings. But, without my mother, although she continued to watch GL.

 

After college, the combination of a flexible job and a VCR allowed me to become a serious fan. I was writing about nursing (like soaps, strongly associated with women and thereby marginalized. Also, like soaps’ “not your mother’s soap opera,” nursing had internalized the belief that to be valued they had to become something else: “professional” nurses who didn’t want to be seen as “that kind of nurse,” dealing with bodily fluids at the bedside.”)  While writing an article for Soap Opera Weekly on how nurses were portrayed on soaps I interviewed Doug Marland. A few months later, what was supposed to be a short news piece about CBS ending its head writer training program morphed into a longer article about the paths of three head writers (including Marland), which got me thinking seriously about soaps.

 

In 1995, I began pitching a piece to coincide with ATWT’s 40th anniversary in 1996 to Smithsonian Magazine; it took over a year to convince the editor. By the time I arrived on the set in mid-March when the anniversary episode was taped, there was a new production team in place (see above) and the mantra of the executive producer, head writers and publicist was “we’re not 40 years old, we’re 40 years young.”  I could see that things were falling apart, and while I could identify bits and pieces of what was wrong, I couldn’t figure out how those pieces fit together (even if I could, I’m not sure Smithsonian would have been the right place), so I was forced to abandon the piece. I wrote one more article analyzing the demographics of soap opera audience, then turned my attention to writing a screenplay (isn’t everyone:) and short plays.

 

It wasn’t until Sam Ford asked me to be on his thesis committee in 2006 that I was able to begin identifying the “bits and pieces” that had undermined the Smithsonian piece. The task now is to integrate those elements into a cohesive framework within which to consider the full impact of soaps — a task made all the more challenging since there is no obvious hierarchical relationship among the elements.

 

The book begins with a deep look at Irna Phillips and how the details of her own life so intensely shaped many aspects of As the World Turns. You also recently published a piece about Irna for Harvard Magazine. What do you believe Phillips’ place is in the history of the soap opera in particular, and in the greater landscape of U.S. television?

 

Irna Phillips was a risk taker who, rather than fear failure, learned from it. In 1948, she wrote to P&G’s William Ramsey that she had doubts about televising soaps, suggesting that it would be some time before a televised serial could succeed. (She doesn’t explain why, but at the time there were roughly 100,00 television sets in the country, most concentrated in the New York area, up from 44,000 the previous year. As the post-war economy expanded, the number of sets increased exponentially; by 1953, over half of US household had a television.) Yet, just a few months later, in January 1949, Irna approached NBC about creating what many consider the first television soap, These are My Children. Accounts vary (some say the network pulled it after five weeks; Irna says she pulled it after 13 weeks when the network shifted its time slot), but by any measure, the television’s first soap opera was a failure. Whether the show failed because it was bad (according to Television World) or because the low viewership was a function of too few households with televisions is impossible to determine.

 

The success of two early television soaps on CBS (Search for Tomorrow and  Love of Life), convinced Irna that the time was right to move Guiding Light from radio, where it began in 1937, to television. But GL’s owner, P&G believed that only serials created specifically for television would succeed.  Undaunted, Irna revised two GL “highly dramatic” radio scripts (it’s not clear if she secured P&G’s permission), then spent more than $5000 of her own money (in 1952, the median household income was $3900) to tape the episodes and the show premiered on CBS in June, while remaining on radio until 1956 (when 71% of households had at least one television).

 

When Irna first floated the idea of a half-hour soap the suits were again skeptical. One executive told her, “we don’t believe in investing in a possible failure.” But, as with GL, Irna persevered, this time collaborating with longtime colleagues, Agnes Nixon and Ted Corday, to write and finance ($10,000) a pilot for ATWT. According to Irna, the nine cast members were so impressed, “they agreed to hold themselves available for six months” until the pilot was picked up.

 

In the early 1960s, Irna became a consultant for what would become the first successful primetime soap opera, ABC’s Peyton Place (1964-1969). She then created a primetime ATWT spinoff, Our Private World, which ran for 19 weeks (38 episodes) from May 5 – September 10, 1965. CBS’s decision to air the show over the summer, rather than launching it as part of the new fall season, likely contributed to its short run, and may also have reflected a lack of confidence in Irna. Since her unfinished memoir, All My Worlds, ends in late 1963 with her creation of Another World, if Irna had any thoughts about All My Worlds and the two shows she later created, Love is a Many Splendored Thing and A World Apart, they would be in her papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society archives.

 

Much of your book focuses on the ways in which management practices and corporate structure in the last 15 years of As the World Turns‘ 54-year run damaged both the quality of the story and the relationship the show maintained with its fans. In the course of your research and writing, in what ways were soap opera fans drawing these connections between industry news and what played out on their screens on an everyday basis? And what can media scholars and those who work in or study other media industries learn from studying the ongoing relationship between longterm viewers and a media property like ATWT?

 

When fan magazines covering soaps first appeared in the late-1960s, soaps had been on television for almost 20 years. Those early publications consisted mainly of interviews with actors and features that took fans behind-the-scenes of the shows. It wasn’t until Soap Opera Weekly came on the scene in November 1989 that fans had timely access to industry news and serious criticism. In addition to episode recaps, Weekly published spoilers that let fans know what would happen when. According to founding editor, Mimi Torchin, fans welcomed information that allowed them to prioritize. Of course, in a extreme example of unintended consequences, spoilers have become a vexing challenge for all serialized storytelling in the digital age.

Both Weekly and its sister publication, Soap Opera Digest, included “Comings and Goings” and “The Revolving Door,” features that alerted fans when actors left roles, or were cast as new characters. This information became a form of spoiler that allowed fans to speculate outside of what they saw on the screen. Producers and writers exacerbated this phenomenon by sharing information about who the new (or recast) character would be paired with, and the direction the story would take.  With the final years of ATWT  characterized by a seemingly endless array of new characters, few of whom were connected to the core Hughes family, when fans heard the news online, many were not inclined to give the show the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how stories played out before passing (usually negative) judgment.

Another factor to consider: the unintended consequences of rebranding, which requires a willingness to to alienate, and even lose, existing customers to attract desired customers. This worked brilliantly for AMC when the network shifted its focus from showing old movies to become the HBO of basic cable. But movie buffs had plenty of options; not so with soaps. Whether it was articulated or not, when ATWT shifted the show’s focus in the early-1980s to capture younger viewers, the show seemed willing to lose its existing viewers, like my mother, who left and never returned, even when the show corrected course a few years later. But, with all soaps trying to recreate General Hospital’s success, there was no place for disaffected fans to turn. So many stayed, and with the remote controls that came with their new VCRs in hand,  fast forwarded through many of the new characters that populated the ATWT canvas, contributing to the show’s increasingly fragmented storytelling. One consequence  of fragmented storytelling is a fragmented audience, with each segment expressing its own spin on the genre’s aesthetic. The result: divergent and often conflicting comments that made it difficult to interpret and apply fan feedback.

In 1996 P&G set up a toll-free number to provide viewers with inside information about the ATWT. At the end callers were asked who they wanted to see the troubled Emily Stewart paired with: “press 1 for Diego, 2 for Jeff.” Since “other,” “none of the above” or,”in the case of this particular character, “a good therapist,” were not among the choices, the results were  meaningless. And the way in which the question was posed (the only option to bypass the question was hanging up) made clear that this was not a serious effort on the part of PGP to engage viewers, but rather a ham-handed token.

Another example of the show’s tin ear was someone’s (probably not the executive producer or head writer, both of whom had worked in soaps long enough to understand the subtle intricacies of how time unfolds on soaps; depending on the circumstances, sometimes compressed, sometimes extended.) literal interpretation of a frequent complaint about soaps: “the stories move too slowly.” In 2008, ATWT abandoned soap opera’s traditional narrative structure and began a series of short-term story arcs, some of which wrapped up in a single episode. The combination of self-contained episodes and spoilers made at least one fan happy: “Not sure how or why TPTB have come up with this new concept, but is sure is working well. I think I’ve watched a total of one or two episodes in the last two weeks.” An unintended consequence that inflicted considerable damage in ATWT’s final years.

Without an understanding of not just what’s being said, but what it means, soliciting feedback is at best, futile, at worst, damaging. When it came to soap opera, however, there was no guarantee that those who were conducting the research had ever watched soaps. According to one former network executive I talked with, it was the rare researcher who even took the time to familiarized themselves with the show for which they were collecting feedback. So, while their empirical observations may have been accurate, without a shared experiential frame of reference with their subjects, researchers often lacked to tools to infer, then accurately interpret and apply how fans experience soaps.

When it comes to suspending disbelief, the very nature of daytime soaps demands more of viewers than other dramatic media. But as the genre’s scope expanded over the years, traditional elements — intimate relationships between family, friends and lovers — began to share space with time travel, the supernatural, omnipotent villains and characters whose repeated returns from the dead often defied both logic and the laws of physics. When ATWT’s James Stenbeck first reappeared in 1986 after being presume dead, he provided a simple explanation: “I had a parachute.”  But as explanations for his subsequent resurrections became more and more preposterous, some fans were angry, feeling that the writers were taking advantage of their willingness to suspend disbelief — even insulting their intelligence. Others chalked it up to a “it’s a soap opera. No one gives a shit if it makes sense” mentality on the part of writers and producers. By 2009, when Stenbeck returned from the dead for the fourth and final time, the writers didn’t bother to even go through the motions. And rather than get angry, those fans still watching responded with detached bemusement.

The number of serialized dramas has exploded in the past 15 years, so dominating television programming that a recent piece in TVGuide suggests that serial dramas may be reaching the saturation point. The challenges facing these shows — maintaining the integrity of the storytelling in the face of network interference and the shuffling of show runners, spoilers, time-shifting, and more recent additions to the lexicon, binge watching and, perhaps most important, hate-watching — all have their antecedents in soaps. Current and future storytellers facing the challenge of attracting viewers in a media landscape drowning in serial drama have much to learn by understanding how soaps and their fans have dealt with these issues.

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 Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, c3, fan culture, interviews, television
April 3, 2013

As The World Stopped Turning: Lynn Liccardo Talks About Soap Operas (Part One)

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I have often acknowledged that fans are the true experts on popular culture: their passionate relationship with a favorite series or franchise often motivates them to research it more deeply, read it more closely, and interpret it more richly than an academic would be able to do. Not all fans know how to articulate their findings in ways that move beyond the particular details and speak to the larger context and implications of their objects of study, but those who do have much to teach us about their particular corners of the popular culture universe.

Lynn Liccardo is an extraordinary soap opera fan, who over the course of her life has moved from a passion for As the World Turns and its creator Irma Phillips, towards more and more active engagement with the soap opera industry (such as it has become) and who has written professionally about soaps for a number of years. I was lucky to meet Liccardo when she served on the thesis committee for one of my MIT graduate students Sam Ford, now co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture; she has been coming to our Futures of Entertainment conferences ever since; she contributed to Sam’s book on the future of soap operas; and now, she has an e-book of her own, As the World Stopped Turning, which shares some of what she knows about the history, aesthetics, production, and reception of soap operas.

I am the first to admit that soaps are a blind spot for me as a fan and as an academic, though I also would acknowledge that those of us who care about transmedia storytelling and contemporary primetime drama have much to learn from the soap opera tradition about expansive storyworlds and long-form serials in particular. So, I asked Sam Ford if he would interview her for the blog. Below aresome of Liccardo’s thoughts connecting As the World Turns to some of the industry trends and developments over the past six decades that have impacted serialized television storytelling.

As the World Stopped Turning is a full ebook of your essays dedicated to the soap opera As the World Turns. Why is this particular daytime serial drama so important to study, in your opinion? What is As the World Turns‘ particular place in our cultural history?

 

As The World Turns was the first 30-minute serial, doubling the standard 15-minute episode. But  it was more than its length that contributed to the show’s impact on the genre and cultural history. When creator, Irna Phillips, conceived the show, she wanted the additional time not to tell more story, but to develop “better story and characterization.” Before ATWT debuted in 1956, serials concentrated on a single family; in her new creation, Irna contrasted the stories of two families, one united and solidly middle-class, the Hughes, the other, wealthy and divided, the Lowells, “because by the 1950s divorce and separation were becoming a more pronounced element in our social structure.” Irna also believed (more than 30 years before GH’s Luke and Laura), that including teenagers as a major part of the story, “added the valuable asset of longevity to the serial.”

But what set ATWT apart from earlier soaps was Irna’s skillful juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal storytelling axes, with her emphasis on the former (character), which slowed the latter (plot), sometimes to a seeming standstill.  In fact, the first year of the show there was virtually no plot, just these rather ordinary characters going about everyday lives that resembled those of many viewers. The intimacy of the connection between viewer and character was reinforced as the camera moved slowly over actors’ faces, laying the groundwork for future audiences to recognize what a character in Ron Howard’s film, Frost/Nixon, called “the reductive power of the close-up.”

Irna gave voice to her deeply-held belief that “nobody is all good or all bad and each human being can exhibit all of these elements, often at the same time,” through stories that gave equal weight to the conflicting emotions within each character,  forcing viewers, in the words of critic Robert LaGuardia, “to grieve over the heartbreak of the human condition rather than to hang on to a fixed value judgement.”  In her outline, Irna was emphatic that ATWT “not a melodrama,” but rather “a show about people.” That ambiguity deeply permeated the cultural ground water and became the foundation of what’s now called quality television and complex storytelling, although, as I discuss below, for viewers who only know daytime soaps after Luke and Laura, the connection is not at all clear.

The episode below aired about a year into the show’s 54-year run. While it contains none of ATWT’s trademark closeups, it is an elegant example (one of the few still available) of how soap opera historically used character to move plot: a narrative structure that ties current stories to back stories and uses history and memory to contextualize current plot and character development. The power of this episode lies in its four deceptively simple scenes, each a conversation between two of the episode’s four characters. While almost nothing happens in the episode, when it’s over viewers understand the relationships, not just among the characters in the episode, Chris, his father, Pa, and sister,, Edie, who was involved with his law partner, Jim, but between every character on the show: Chris’s wife Nancy, his daughter, Penny, who became estranged from her aunt Edie when Penny’s best friend, Ellen, revealed that her father, Jim, was involved with another woman, Edie. Even a character who never appeared on the show, Chris and Edie’s brother, John, was fully contextualized.

As the World Turns #268 Part 1 

 As the World Turns #268 Part 2

 

What do you believe were the biggest factors in the demise of As the World Turns?

The demise of ATWT actually began in 1978, when Gloria Monty’s was hired to fix a show on the verge of cancellation, ABC’s General Hospital. At the time, most soap operas followed the model Irna Phillips had created on ATWT: intergenerational families made up of rather ordinary characters living rather ordinary lives that resembled those of most viewers.

 

Monty altered that model by speeding up the pace of the storytelling by shifting the focus from the day-to-day lives of the doctors and nurses of General Hospital to the young, Laura, and the hip, Luke, who, in the process of saving the world from being frozen by the Ice Princess, also saved General Hospital, thereby forever altering the public’s perception of soaps. As college lounges  filled with students following the adventures of Luke and Laura, for the first time it was cool for kids to watch soaps.

 Luke & Laura – Lover’s on the Run Volume 1

But GH wasn’t their mother’s soap opera; ATWT was. How CBS and Procter & Gamble responded to the end of ATWT’s 20-year reign at the top of the ratings is a lesson in what not to do. Rather than take a deep breath and think about ways to exploit the perception of ATWT as “their mothers’ soap opera” to the show’s advantage, the new executive producer, Mary-Ellis Bumin, approached her task from what, in light of GH’s explosive success, seemed like a logical assumption, but ultimately proved deeply flawed: the only way to attract the younger viewers advertisers coveted was by excluding older characters. So, what had been the ATWT’s  greatest assets — its 20+-year history and the multi-generational Hughes family — was seen as its greatest weaknesses. Soon after Bunim took over familiar characters were pushed to the sidelines and viewers found themselves watching Tom and Margo (Oakdale’s Luke and Laura) chase a dwarf named Mr. Big — ATWT’s version of the Ice Princess.

 As the World Turns: Vintage Tom and Margo

But what had worked so brilliantly for GH never caught on with ATWT’s core audience. When Laurence Caso took over CBS’s New York daytime operation in 1983, he realized that ATWT would never succeed by continuing to copy what the ABC soaps were doing. He pushed Procter & Gamble to replace Mary-Ellis Bunim with Robert Calhoun, then hired head writer Douglas Marland, who rebuilt the show around Hughes. ATWT thrived until Marland suddenly died in 1993. A year later, the show was still in the process of rebuilding as the country obsessed over the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

ATWT’s missteps of the early 1980s have to be understood in the context of GH’s unprecedented success, which threw all soaps into uncharted waters. But CBS and P&G had clearly failed learn from history when, in 1995, a new regime once again distanced the show from its history and the Hughes family. As the show floundered until its cancellation in 2010, no one even tried to right the ship by reestablishing the centrality of the Hughes. Even if they had, it might well have been too late. P&G’s other two shows, Guiding Light and Another World, were in even worse shape than ATWT. In 2005, P&G eliminated the position of executive in charge of production and subsequently transferred the shows’ day-to-day operations to a subsidiary, TeleNext Media. Then, in 2008, the TeleNext logo replaced P&G’s in the show credits, sending a clear message that P&G was content to let the clock run out on their soaps.  

 

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, fan culture, interviews, television
March 29, 2013

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About The Future of Television (Final Installment)

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Suzanne Scott:

Thanks, AJ, for doing the heavy lifting by synthesizing the tensions emerging out of this conversation, and for tackling the industrial context. You’re absolutely right, fans and producers both know the score, and I think it’s vital to acknowledge fan agency in this discussion, despite my qualms about how the campaign frames fan participation and labor.  That said, I’d add a couple of corollaries to the core tensions you’ve identified above, drawing on the framing of fans across the past few exchanges.

First, I want to revisit Maurício’s point about the ultimate “winner” of the shifting power dynamics between media audiences, producers, and distributors being the story itself.  Both Maurício and Henry make a strong case for the how this emerging model might be most beneficial for liminal producers and properties, those that don’t fall neatly into the categories of “mainstream” or “independent” production.  But there’s a catch with fan-funded stories, and it’s already visible in the discourses around the Veronica Mars Kickstarter.  It’s baked into the FAQ’s nod to shipping and fan expectations (see image), and it’s directly addressed in this remark from Thomas after the success of the campaign:

“I had some desire, as a filmmaker, to take Veronica in a slightly new direction and do something adventurous with her. Or, there’s the ‘give the people what they want’ version. And I think partly because it’s crowd-sourced, I’m going with the ‘give the people what they want’ version. It’s going to be Veronica being Veronica, and the characters you know and love. Certainly, I think I can make a fun, great movie out of that, and I’m excited about that, but it was a creative debate I had with myself, and I finally made the decision that I’m happy with it, to go with, ‘Let’s not piss people off who all donated. Let’s give them the stuff that I think that they want in the movie.’”

 

It’s the “give them the stuff that I think they want” that troubles the notion that story emerges the clear “winner” in this particular case.  Whether Thomas is justifiably hedging his bets in response to the intense scrutiny that has accompanied the campaign’s success (“If the movie ultimately sucks, don’t blame me, my vision was hindered by fan service…after all, they paid for it…”) is beside the point.  To return to the first tension AJ identified, fan “satisfaction” is clearly the central concern here, but it’s ultimately framed as a potential detriment to Thomas’ creative control.  There is something empowering about the fact that, in Maurício’s terms, we can now frame fans as studios.  But what I think might be getting lost here is the fact that fans are independent creators too, and it’s often their dissatisfaction with a story, or the industrial structures and strictures that limit it, that drives their textual production.  Henry’s right that fans will always be read, first and foremost, through an economic lens.  But, fans aren’t just storybuyers, they’re storytellers.  They make their own satisfaction.

 

On a second and related point, you all make a compelling case for how distribution on Netflix, or similar platforms, might help reshape industrial investments in media properties, encourage experimentation with transmedia or non-linear textualities, and cater to pre-existing fannish consumption patterns such as binge watching. Our conceptual understanding of what “television” is (who produces and distributes it, and where, when and how we consume it) continues to be radically reimagined in the post-network era.  Within the Netflix television model, the television temporalities of seriality and seasonality are effectively eradicated. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but I do wonder how these new “telelvision” models might fundamentally alter our conception of television fandom.

 

If fans produce their richest work in the gaps and margins of a television text, they’ve also historically used the temporal gaps and margins between episodes and seasons to their advantage.  I return, time and again, to Matt Hills’ Fan Cultures and his useful notion of “just-in-time” fandom to describe how fan practices have “become increasingly enmeshed within the rhythms and temporalities of broadcasting” (178).  Moreover, Hills cautioned (back in 2002, no less), that eradicating time lags function “ever more insistently to discipline and regulate the opportunities for temporally-licensed ‘feedback,’ and the very horizons of the fan experience” (179).  So, what happens when we begin to reconceptualize the afterlife for cult television series strictly as films, or in one large seasonal installment with no lag time between episodes?  The pleasures of television fandom are deeply tied to its form, and the impact of these shifts deserves further consideration.

 

My concern here isn’t just the horizons of the fan experience, but the horizons of the industrial and cultural framing of fans and fan participation. Whether we’re talking about fan-funded film extension of a cult television series, or an entire new season of a cult show dropping on Netflix, these temporal horizons are potentially less generative for fans, which in turn might make it increasingly difficult to discursively shift our understanding of them as producers of anything but capital.  If I’m being totally honest, as a Veronica Marsfan, what I really want is another season of Veronica Mars.  And as an Arrested Development fan, I will absolutely binge watch the new season (and, let’s be real, I’ll binge watch the prior three seasons as an amuse bouche the day before the launch).

 

Understandably, we all want to focus on what we’re gaining.  I’m admittedly more interested in what’s potentially being lost or overlooked, but I don’t want that emphasis to be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm about these developments.  I do think they have game-changing potential, particularly as the beginnings of a creators’ rights movement.  I just worry that fans’ legacy as creators in their own right will once again be obscured in favor of celebrating industrially sanctioned modes of fan engagement.

Mauricio Mota:

From all of our contributions so far, the ones that mostly intrigued me were the ones related to roles (fans, producers, distributors) and business models.

And both rely on a discussion that, if not well explored, can become a “chicken or the egg” equation.

Some questions to provoke that discussion:

Would Veronica Mars raise all that money on Kickstarter if it was an independent movie from a new director with an unknown actress about an unknown character?

Do we really need algorithms to figure out that BBC Format + David Fincher + Kevin Spacey + Washington politics is a success formula for House of Cards?

Is 60 thousand people as a Box Office number for a movie a sufficient number for a studio to green light to produce it?

When fans “invest” or donate for IP development and or production they are looking for some sort of creative control or ownership or just wanting the story to come to life?

We are entering – with or without the help from the Studios – an era of what we like to name as  ”Grassroots Blockbusting”: where IPs are nurtured to the ground up and more independent of the “normal” way of becoming a success. All Studios have what we name “Dormant IPs” – stories that have already a whole world built, good story arches and some sort of audience built through generations. But very few of these IPs (and even less Studios) are being developed in a way that allows them to become something profitable and successful.

Unfortunately it is still naive to come to a studio or any big show runner in town and tell them to “hand over IP”. This is not only a conversation about studios focusing on blockbusters and mainstream stories because of shareholders. They are also investing on their libraries and keeping as much control of that IP as possible. Their framework is built around owning as much % of the IPs as possible since the same framework is built around giving more power and control for the part that invests more to make a story happen. And although roles are blurring,  very few creators can say they can make their own shows without a major investment from a studio.

In Brazil, the Government is making an immense effort to grow our TV industries by creating a new law that makes every cable channel to invest massively on original content produced by Brazilian companies (like mine). It is a huge achievement but it has also been very tricky and challenging for the producers to convince studios and networks ( still the most important distribution channels) to give up on a big percentage of an IP they would air because of that new law. Simply because it forces them to not own majority of brazilian original content. So, better said than done.

However, there are independent funds – in the US, Latin America and Asia – that are starting to invest into new green IPs or buying turnaround scripts from studios/production companies to re-start them from the ground using transmedia and the digital tools to start them small and sustainable. Like I said before, lines are blurred, roles are confused and money and knowledge about what works is more democratized.

The existing cases we have been discussing are actually good starters for a possible different model where fans and creators are closer by sharing a common dream and making it happen. And by doing so more and more the Studio system will then have new competitors among the same people they see as consumers. Which is a good thing since humans and companies tend to pay more attention to things and people that threat them than to people that they take for granted. And to AJ’s points looks like creators and fans are paying more attention to what is happening around them.

 

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

 

Filed Under: branded entertainment, fan culture, interviews, participation, television, transmedia entertainment
March 28, 2013

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About the Future of Television (Part Three)

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Henry Jenkins:

Suzanne, I share some of your concerns about the ways that fan power is being evaluated here primarily in terms of economic capital. Interestingly, the Veronica Mars campaign was preceded by another effort — David Fincher’s effort to raise funds to produce an animated film based on Eric Powell’s cult comic book series, The Goon. This project had set a goal of raising $400,000 in order to fund a story reel as proof of concept for a proposed feature film, and instead, they raised 441,900 from 7,576 backers, which was, as of November, a record-breaker for the micro-funding company, now dramatically surpassed by the Veronica Mars juggernaut. At the time, there was considerable pushback from fans who felt that these funds should be raised by the studio through traditional means rather than tapping the fan network for investments that would be repaid through merchandise but not through either revenue or creative control.  As Cartoon Brew’s Amid Amidi wrote at the time:

“Should the film be made by a corporate film studio, that company just saved themselves half a million dollars on the backs of dedicated animation fans who believe they’re funding an indie project, when in reality they’re funding a mainstream Hollywood feature….while I’m sure Fincher and Blur Studios are well intentioned in their desire to make an animated feature, their approach of mixing their fans’ money with those of media corporations, the latter of whom will receive all the profit from a Goon feature, leads to an uncomfortable situation that is contrary to the entire spirit of Kickstarter. Artists should use the generosity of backers in crowdfunding campaigns to fulfill a creative vision, not to help corporations make money, as The Goon Kickstarter is currently set up to do.”

These are, to my eyes, legitimate concerns in both of these case but these projects also potentially represent a transitional point in the degree of creative control which cult producers may yield in this still emerging system. Neither The Goon or Veronica Mars were likely to be produced in the absence of a strong show of audience support; both fall into an awkward category of production that is neither fully mainstream nor fully independent. They are both genre series that gain strong support from a substantial niche that is too small to move the levers to greenlight a project under traditional industry logics. Yet, this is why the recent developments seem to me to be game-changers, both in terms of the ways they strengthen the hands of creative producers and of the ways they allow fans to exert a greater influence on production decisions.

I see this as especially true when coupled with the new systems for content production and distribution we are seeing emerging in recent months via the web. We have talked so far about Netflix funding both original programming (House of Cards) and rescuing orphaned cult series (Arrested Development).  Hulu has also announced similar plans and is already importing imaginative content from Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom as exclusives for their subscribers. YouTube has recently developed a system for funding content production. And Amazon has announced that they will be presenting fans with a range of pilots later this year, both comedy and children’s series, and asking consumers to weigh in on which ones should be put into full production.

These alternative arrangements offer much to program producers, starting with the fact that with the exception of Amazon where they are introducing content to consumers at an earlier point in the negotiation process, they seem to be making upfront commitments for entire seasons of programs, allowing them to exert creative integrity over entire story arcs, rather than subjecting them to the uncertainties of the ratings, where they might well get cut off after the first few episodes, never resolving any of the enigmas they have set into play. One can be successful in these platforms with a much lower viewership than network television, creating a space for programs that can command a strong niche of intense support, as opposed to the diffused viewership that gets rewarded on the major networks. These programs can have a more unique perspective because they are never designed to appeal to everyone.  Some producers may be much better served in this context: this may no longer be right for Joss Whedon who is turning down Star Wars to keep working with Marvel, but it would certainly be true for someone like Bryan Fuller, who is already revisiting Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls in the wake of the Veronica Mars news.

The example of The Goon above is an interesting one in this context, since The Goon is a creator-owned comic book series, that has been successfully sustained since 2002. In comics, a creator’s rights movement in the 1990s helped pave the way for more sustainable models of content creation: creators now have multiple options for publishing their own work, with or without the challenges of self-distribution. We are seeing some top talents move project by project between the mainstream publishers to self-publishing models and now, through Kickstarter, crowdsourcing models. Kickstarter now ranks just below DC and Marvel as the number three source of comics funding in the United States. And even artists who work with the majors have somewhat greater creative control than before and have been able to cut better deals as a result of the option of going independent.

The space of indie comics, as opposed to underground and alternative comics, has long been smart and original genre content — pushing comics beyond the superhero genre that dominates DC and Marvel, but also having broader appeal than the more experimental space represented by alternative comics. This seems like the niche that is apt to be filled in this new world of crowd-funding and web distribution that is taking shape week by week before our eyes right now. In such a world, there might not be a need for Rob Thomas to depend upon Warner Brothers to distribute his content, or perhaps, there might be a chance for him to retain more of the IP rights going into his negotiations so that there are more options for series which gain a hardcore audience that is too small to sustain broadcast. Netflix’s decision to release all of the episodes at once, allowing for binge viewing, also seems to point towards this kind of program production — i.e., allowing for more intricately woven stories, which reward this kind of intense viewer commitment.

Such arrangements would help get us out of the paradoxes of these current cases, where producers are appealing for fan support, but ultimately have to work within a system which gives most of the rewards to the same studios who have always controlled production decisions. Clearly, what we need is a creator rights movement for television, which learns as much as it can from the creator rights movement in comics, which is still struggling to fully achieve its goals.

Of course, the costs of television production dwarf those of comics production, meaning that it is unlikely to see fan-support television be fully realized in the short term. Veronica Mars may work as an early example because it is going to be a lot less expensive to produce than some of the cult science fiction or fantasy series that have been mentioned alongside it this week. But, part of what’s interesting to me is that Veronica Mars has a fandom that I would describe as mid-level intensity: there are shows out there with much more dedicated and active fan bases. And so, if they can raise the funds, there is apt to be many other series which could, in theory, command this same level of support.

The reality is that in a capitalist-mode of production, fans are always going to be read first and foremost through an economic lens. The old model saw us primarily as a commodity — eyeballs — that could be sold to advertisers. More recently, Web 2.0 has treated us primary as a source of creative labor — for which we are never directly compensated. And now, this model treats us as investors, who may gain some greater creative control as a consequence of advancing gifted producers money they need to get their dream projects into production. For me, the key thing is that the relationship here needs to be transparent: fans need to understand what is being offered and what role they can or will play in the process. In most cases, fans are not seeking to take creative control away from the producers whose work they admire, but they do hope to prevent series from being “retooled” in order to broaden their support, often at the expense of cutting out elements that drew fans to the program in the first place.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian

Whew, this is enthralling!

It sounds like we’ve zeroed in on a couple key tensions. One pits creative control for producers and satisfaction for fans against the profit-focused motives of the conglomerates. Another pits their impulse to mainstream against the increasing popularity of indie and digital production, from television to comics.

We can’t resolve these tensions here, but I’ll give it a go! To start, some context. And the most important context is the financial health of the studios and distributors. As Mauricio said, it is hard to be a studio, and media executives have always worked in tense environments permeated with fear.

But the truth is the studios are richer now than they’ve been in a decade (after the heyday of the 1990s). Movies are still popular. People watch almost as television as they ever have, albeit across more devices and technologies. Media stocks have joined the broader market rally after lows in late 2008 and early 2009. From that low, Viacom, Comcastand Lions Gate stocks have quadrupled. News. Corp has quintupled. Time Warner and Disney’s have tripled. There are lot of reasons for this, but the underlying factor is there is much more power in distribution these days. Since there are so many niche markets, distributors with resources can grab our attention. Everyone knows when the next Star Wars is due.

Studios seek market share to keep stocks afloat, and that’s why they’ve been spending hundreds of millions marketing new film franchises. And now web networks are taking a cue, hence Netflix outspending legacy TV with House of Cards. These investments in franchises pay off. They are rich, even as they underfund niche markets (Viacom cable channels Logo and BET, for just one example, are criminally under-resourced, with some shows actually written by freelancers!).

Which brings us to our conundrum, and the tensions above: clearly fans and producers know what’s going on. They know, instinctually, studio money is being funneled to bigger and bigger “mainstream” products, as companies reach for market share amidst the tidal wave of digital production.

As Derek Johnson argues in his new book, we have to view bottom-up dynamics in the context of the growth of franchising, the studio’s (logical) way of responding to complex market dynamics. As Suzanne rightly noted, crowdsourced projects really are a message to distributors from fans and producers to studios that they’ve gone too far, channeling investments in IP higher and higher. Why, even with the lowered production costs of digital, have mid-range projects dried up? As Rob Thomas has noted, the $2-$20 million film is struggling, but there’s no reason it should be. Veronica Mars is an important reminder, if an ambivalent one, since Thomas also noted they need Warner Bros. to work out gifts.

In this environment, mainstream distributors are both essential and inadequate. Focusing on the breadth and depth of bottom-up efforts at value creation points the way to reform: producers and fans are already leading, but they can only go so far on their own. Their efforts, niche-driven, are largely unseen, because they are sporadic. Individual scholars and journalists are aware of the robust growth in indie production in gaming, comics, film, music, television (web series), radio (podcasting) and publishing (blogging to e-books). These are all markets dominated by conglomerates, in various ways, and yet we rarely talk about them in conversation (Henry’s work a significant exception).

Which is why it’s good we’re having this conversation! Can we imagine a different system than what we have now? I think we can. And it starts with independents.

Why, for instance, don’t studios have internal mechanisms for nurturing franchises from the ground up? Studying web series has shown me how we can think of TV development differently: certain niches can nurture small but passionate fan bases for budgets well under the cost of marketing Avatar or ambitious series that flop like Terra Nova or Smash. And it’s not just in low-fi comedy; special effects heavy series like Video Game High School indicate there’s a lot of value yet to be mined. The indie comics Henry mentioned are an excellent source.

All of this activity can be streamlined and aggregated. The studios could market one less blockbuster a year and incubate dozens upon dozens of projects, with enough to support union (read: trained, skilled) labor from the oversupply of art/film-school graduates. They don’t do this because they have to report quarterly to shareholders, so they think short-term. It takes years to grow such projects, but the pay-off could be huge. Projects that prove successful at a smaller scale could argue for more resources and broaden narratives with fans in conversation. “Bombing” rates could go down.

Conglomerates do support small-scale projects, but not consistently. Veronica Mars is only a higher-profile example;The Goon is another. Of the web series I’ve tracked that have been picked up for television – like super-grassroots YouTube series Fred and The Annoying Orange, which spent years cultivating millions of fans – most are successful enough to go beyond one season. Now cable networks are looking to artier showrunners like Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, creators of the brilliant sketch series Broad City that Comedy Central just picked up to series (with a little help from Amy Poehler, no stranger to YouTube). I’m running a series of essays on “Indie TV Innovation” on my blog next month, with contributions from Jane Espenson (Husbands), Glazer and a dozen others, to show how there’s a lot of value being generated in these spaces at very low-cost.

The problem is these examples are scattered and dispersed. The effect of studio neglect is we get a small number of outrageous case studies like Veronica Mars that present ethical conundrums because there aren’t structures in place. Under-investment also means, even if projects can generate fans, they often do so at lesser quality, which perpetuates the myth that indie projects are artistically impoverished.

We are indeed in a capitalist mode of production that privileges conglomerates and publicly-traded companies, and the culture in Washington suggests that won’t change anytime soon, which is fine. But the takeaway from Veronica Mars et al. should be a call for distributors to: invest in the growing segment of smaller and mid-range projects, hand over intellectual property and creative control (something web series creators like Felicia Day have been fiercely advocating for years) and nurture more fan-driven projects before producers face the crowds. They have the money. It’s better for business, for workers and the culture at large.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

 

Filed Under: branded entertainment, Comics Culture, interviews, participation, television
March 27, 2013

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation on the Future of Television (Part Two)

By

 

 

Suzanne Scott:

Hi everyone, I’m looking forward to this conversation.  I’ve been attempting to work through my ambivalent response to the Veronica Mars kickstarter for the past few days, particularly where it bumps up against my unadulterated fannish glee that Netflix Saved Our Bluths.  Two of my favorite cult TV series are being revived.  It should feel like a win-win, but I can’t shake this sense that the Veronica Mars Kickstarter (or fan-ancing generally) sets a problematic precedent for what constitutes fan “participation.”  Or, to AJ’s point, my concern doesn’t stem from the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, or even the value that fans are generating from this kickstarter campaign, but how producers are increasingly and strategically generating value from fans.

 

My work broadly engages with industry-fan relationships within convergence culture, and how those relationships are gendered.  In particular, I’m interested in which types of fans and modes of fannish engagement are valued, normalized, or incorporated, and which remain marginalized or are subject to containment.  I’ve written in the past about how industrial efforts to engage fan culture often function as re-gifting economies, or planned communities that strive to “repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new, something unwanted (or unwieldy) as something desirable (or controllable, or profitable).”  I’ve also blogged about the problematic legitimization discourses that surround industrial efforts to co-opt fan practices and retain ownership over fan texts.  Many, myself included, are inclined to view the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a prime example of fan empowerment (or, in Henry’s terms, as a techno-realization of a longstanding fannish frustration with audience measurement metrics, and a desire to revive media properties that were cut down in their prime).  But, I still worry about what it means to discursively celebrate fans’ power in purely economic terms.

 

I’m a frequent donor to Kickstarter campaigns, especially those like Womanthology or Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games that are attempting to make a transformative intervention into media industries and fannish subcultures that can be unwelcoming to women.  I’m also all for using Kickstarter to launch creator-owned projects.  For example, I get why Batgirl writer Gail Simone, who was recently fired and rehired by DC Comics after a massive pushback from fans, would want to kickstart a graphic novel where she’ll have full control over the creative direction and, more importantly, the intellectual property rights. I’ll probably pull the trigger and donate to the Veronica Mars movie before the days tick down to zero…or, let’s be realistic, probably before the end of this conversation.  But it’s not because I want a t-shirt, or a digital download of the finished product from Flixter, Warner Bros.’ proprietary video platform.  What I want is information, however filtered through Warner Bros. publicity brass that it might be, about how this grand experiment is playing out, and to see if fans are addressed primarily as partners, or promotional agents.

As AJ rightly notes above, crowdfunding may not be the great equalizer, but it is a vital emergent tool that allows minority voices and audiences that are too often underrepresented by media industries to carve out a space to be heard.  The figures that you’re tracking on your blog are vitally important.  They aren’t just dollars, they’re pointed messages sent to media industries by media audiences.  Can we view the massive success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a call to television executives that there’s a market to be tapped for programs with compelling, complex young female protagonists?  Hopefully.  Would I feel better if Rob Thomas had Kickstarted an original web series, where the profits would be funneled into developing the next Veronica Mars, rather than into Warner Bros.’ coffers?  Absolutely. It’s the slippage between crowdsourcing and outsourcing financial risk here that I find troubling.

Mauricio Mota:

Ok, here comes the black sheep-capitalist storyteller from Brazil ;-)

I was born – literally – at the intersection between Academia, Commerce, Storytelling and Marxism. While my parents were academics and Marxists during the 70-80′s, my mom was a fiction writer trying to figure out how to keep working, teaching, studying, paying bills and finally get picked by a publisher to bring her words to the world. The funny thing of that intersection is that till I was 8 I thought one of my grandfathers was Karl Marx – because of a picture my parents had in the home office. But actually my grandfather was considered the Latin-American Shakespeare.

That mix of backgrounds, struggles and opportunities trained my eyes and perceptions (with some scars and learnings) to always pay deep attention to the relationship between Creators (Storytellers), Distributors (Storysellers) and Readers (Story…buyers?) and to keep on the pace around one of the most fascinating dynamics ever. In the past, the roles were so clear, the imposed status quo was so comfortable/a given and people in general were just having fun with their stories that the Veronica Mars/House of Cards models were impossible to imagine.

Kickstarter didn’t invent crowdfunding for storytelling. Neither did Felicia Day or Joss Whedon. The most efficient systems of crowdfunding for storytelling that I ever seen in my life are the Catholic and the Evangelical Churches. People have been funding saints, bibles, sagas, music concerts, souvenirs or tokens for more than 2000 years. In Brazil, the evangelicals own one of the top three tv channels (where they air religious programs, produced telenovelas and bought series from the US like Veronica Mars). So the whole conversation about “exploring” fandom or using fans to fund a movie owned by a big studio is a little bit strange for me because generally people want to watch and share an experience around a story: be it that story about a guy who could regenerate fast (no, I’m not talking about Wolverine, I’m talking about Jesus), Veronica Mars or about an elite group that uses people’s trust to do whatever they want (I’m talking about House of Cards).

The line between owning something and owing was completely blurred when the Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign started. Many fans donated something because they feel such an emotional connection to that cannon that gave them so many good times that they feel the owe something to it and they want more of the pleasure that story gives — with or without having something material back (a shirt or equity). It is the difference between Profit Sharing and Sharing Collective Value.

The roles are also blurred, thanks G’d — both on Veronica Mars and House of Cards. And today I’m able to fund the stories my company creates from different sources: fans, non-profits, global advertisers, studios, networks or a toy company.

Because the Veronica Mars campaign is like advance money given by fans to the creator that implicitly says: “Hey, here is the money I would already buy for this and that, so now go make that extension so I can have the storytelling experience that no money nor a shirt can give me. Oh, I can also make it with my Mastercard and don’t need to wait for someone to decide to fund it?”. Instead of investing money on the IP after it airs, fans are doing it before.

Everyone, on the House of Cards case, was mesmerized by two things: launching 13 episodes at once on Netflix and the fact that some of the decisions to produce were based on algorithms. In the end of the day, the “series marathon” culture is something that is part of the fabric of pop culture consumption; Kevin Spacey is a great actor and amazing villain; politics brings eyeballs, fans add value whenever they watch something and the British version was already really good. If we build it, they will come. And with David Fincher behind, maybe (just maybe), the execution will be good. ;-)

By the way, The funders behind House of Cards are also “outside” the regular model as the Kickstarter examples: Goldman Sachs, WPP Group (one of the largest advertising groups in the world) and AT&T.

Netflix move to offer exclusive content at once was brave and risk taking strategy in a town where networks kill shows on episode 3. VOD changes the importance of focus groups and research to a level that makes me love where all this is going. Because so many amazing pilots or shows would have survived if Netflix, Amazong, Hulu and Kickstarter existed and gave that opportunity to fans, creators and last but not least, studios to make a decision.

Yes, studios.

Because everybody loves to blame the Studios for Hollywood’s lack of innovation. Being a Studio is HARD. Crowdfunding is also hard. But what happens next is the point I’m trying to make.

The Veronica Mars case will show how sending the gifts and tokens for all the 50k+ backers (including movie sessions into remote cities) is really, really, really hard to accomplish but a Studio knows how to make something like this happen. And before the tomatoes come, the discussion is not if the studios do it well or not, but they make it and they have a system. If fans, indies, academics and writers believe there are improvements to be made, fight for it or kickstart a project and start your own Studio. It is about re-allocation of power and responsibilities and not resetting a whole organism that has brought to the world amazing stories – including Veronica Mars.

The Studios used to have the formula of success. Using Henry’s recent book as a reference, the formula was “If doesn’t get picked by studio it is dead”. Now it probably would be “If doesn’t get picked, lets talk to the fans and other distribution channels” (not so charming as “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” but really fascinating).

Now nobody has is total control, decision-making power is more shared. But Studios/Networks still have the most efficient marketing and logistics machine in the world and they deserve their share. Fans and storytellers that know how to build their own micro-networks also deserve a share.

Fans are now Studios. Advertisers are Studios. Amazon is a studio. Netflix too.

So, the roles are not only changing, they are blurred and the winner is the story. Because generally we don’t know what we want until a story is in front of us and we say: I want more of that. And I will pay with my time, my emotions, my network of friends and my money.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

 

 

 

Filed Under: branded entertainment, fan culture, interviews, participation, television, transmedia entertainment
February 15, 2013

Announcing Transmedia Hollywood 4: Spreading Change

By

UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television,
and
USC Annenberg School of Communication &
USC School of Cinematic Arts

Transmedia, Hollywood 4:
Spreading Change

Presented by The Andrew J. Kuehn, Jr. Foundation

Friday, April 12, 2013
James Bridges Theater, UCLA

9:00 am – 6:00 pm

 

Transmedia, Hollywood is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today’s entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood 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. Transmedia, Hollywood is 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 4: Spreading Change

Transmedia entertainment has been advanced within the Hollywood system primarily through a logic of promotion, audience building, and engagement, offering the ideal tools for capturing the imagination of networked audiences through the creation of immersive and expansive imaginary worlds. As transmedia has spread around the world, especially to countries with a much stronger tradition of public media, these same practices have been embraced as a means not of building fictional realms but of changing the world:

  • As advertisers seek to construct their own “brand communities” as a way of forging strong affiliations with their consumers, many are embracing cause-based marketing. In the process, these brand marketers are recognizing young viewers’ capacity for civic engagement and political participation, one of the hallmarks of the millennial generation. While sometimes these brand messages end up advancing cultural movements, in other instances, they simply coopt these shared generational concerns.
  • Educational approaches to entertainment, popular across the developing world, are now extending across multiple media platforms to allow fans to develop a deeper understanding of health and social policy issues as they dig deeper into the backstories of their favorite characters. Alternative reality games, which seek to encourage grassroots participation as a marketing tool, have shifted from solving puzzles to mobilizing players to confront real world problems.
  • Fan networks, organized to support and promote favorite media franchises, are taking on the challenge of training and mobilizing the next generation of young activists, using their capacity as thought leaders to reshape the attention economy by increasing public awareness of mutual concerns.
  • Nonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters.

Each of these productive, participatory, community-based activities have been facilitated over the past decade by a widening web of 2.0 social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The millennial generation’s mastery of “play” has now expanded to include a growing number of apps, casual games, short-form digital entertainment experiences, and expansive alternate reality games. Millennials, who have been acclimating themselves with the tools of connectivity in times of play, now have at their disposal the means to harness a global community to solve such pressing issues as global warming, ethnic, racial or religious genocide, labor unrest, the inequities associated with class, and countless other modern-day assaults. Many of today’s thought leaders—baby boomers that witnessed an earlier social revolution during the late sixties—marvel over the subtle but pervasive shift that is underway in the web 2.0 era and beyond as social connectedness is becoming reframed as a means for large-scale community action.

Transmedia producers in Hollywood have much to learn from a closer examination of these other forms of entertainment and educational discourse, which we might describe as “transmedia for a change.” When is it appropriate for the big media companies to incorporate such themes and tactics into their pop culture franchises? And when should they tolerate, even embrace, the bottom up activities of their fans which have used their content as vehicles for promoting social justice and political change? What does it mean to produce entertainment for a generation which is demanding its right to meaningfully participate at every level — from shaping the stories that matter to them to impacting the governance of their society?

For more information, see http://www.liquid-bass.com/conference/

For conference Registration, see : http://transmediahollywood4.eventbrite.com/#

Also, that same weekend, 5D Institute, in association with University of Southern California, invites you to join us in The Science of Fiction, our first Worldbuilding festival. This groundbreaking event will take place on April 13, 2012 in honor of the unveiling of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media complex. For more information, see http://5dinstitute.org/events/science-of-fiction

9:00—9:10 am: Welcome and Opening Remarks – Denise Mann & Henry Jenkins
9:10—11:00 am: Panel 1 Revolutionary Advertising: Cultivating Cultural MovementsIn the web 2.0 era, as more and more millennials acquire the tools of participatory culture and new media literacy, some of this cohort are redirecting their one-time leisure-based activities into acts of community-based, grassroots social activism. Recognizing the power of the crowd to create a tipping point in brand affiliation, big media marketers, Silicon Valley start-ups, and members of the Madison Avenue advertising community, are jumping on board these crowdsourcing activities to support their respective industries. In other words, many of the social goals of grassroots revolutionaries are being realigned to serve the commercial goals of brand marketers. In the best-case scenarios, the interests of the community and the interests of the market economy align in some mercurial fashion to serve both constituencies. However, in the worst case scenario, the community-based activism fueling social movements is being redirected to support potato chips, tennis shoes, or sugary-soda drinks. Brand marketers are intrigued with the power and sway of social media, inaugurating any number of trailblazing forms of interactive advertising and branded entertainment to replace stodgy, lifeless, 30 second ads. These cutting edge madmen are learning how to reinvent entertainment for the participatory generation by marrying brands to pre-existing social movements to create often impressive, well-funded brand movements like Nike Livestrong, or Pepsi Refresh. Are big media marketers subsuming the radical intent of certain community-based organizations who are challenging the status quo by redirecting them into unintentional alliance with big business or are they infusing these cash-strapped organizations with much needed funds and marketing outreach? Today’s panel of experts will debate these and other issues associated with the future of participatory play as a form of social activism.Todd CunninghamFormerly, Senior Vice-President of Strategic Insights and Research at MTV Networks.

Denise Mann (Moderator)      

Co-Director, Transmedia, Hollywood / Associate Professor, Head of Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Rob Schuham

CEO, Action Marketing

Michael Serazio     

Author, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing

Alden E. Stoner     

VP, Social Action Film Campaigns, Participant Media

Rachel Tipograph

Director, Global Digital and Social Media at Gap Inc.

 

 

 
11:10 am—1:00 pm: Panel 2 Transmedia For a ChangeHollywood’s version of transmedia has been preoccupied with inspiring fan engagement, often linked to the promotional strategies for the release of big budget media. But, as transmedia has spread to parts of the world which have been dominated by public service media, there has been an increased amount of experimentation in ways that transmedia tactics can be deployed to encourage civic engagement and social awareness. These transmedia projects can be understood as part of a larger move to shift from understanding public media as serving publics towards a more active mission in gathering and mobilizing publics. These projects may also be understood as an extension of the entertainment education paradigm into the transmedia realm, where the goal shifts from informing to public towards getting people participating in efforts to make change in their own communities. In some cases, these producers are creating transmedia as part of larger documentary projects, but in others, transmedia is making links between fictional content and its real world implications. 

Panelists

Henry Jenkins (Moderator)     

Co-Director, Transmedia, Hollywood / Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School for Communication

Katerina Cizek     

Filmmaker-in-Residence, National Film Board, Canada

Katie Elmore Mota     

Producer, CEO of PRAJNA Productions

Sam Haren

Creative Director, Sandpit

Mahyad Tousi     

Founder, BoomGen Studios
1:00—2:00 pm: LUNCH BREAK
2:00—3:50 pm: Panel 3 Through Any Media Necessary: Activism in a DIY CultureA recent survey released by the MacArthur Foundation found that a growing number of young people are embracing practices the researchers identified as “participatory politics”: “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.” These forms of politics emerge from an increasingly DIY media culture, linked in important ways to the practices of Makers, Hackers, Remix Artists and Fan Activists. This panel will bring together some key “change agents,” people who are helping to shape the production and flow of political media, or who are seeking to better understand the nature of political participation in an era of networked publics. Increasingly, these new forms of activism are both transmedia (in that they construct messages through any and all available media) and spreadable (in that they encourage participation on the level of circulation even if they do not always invite the public to help create media content).

Panelists

Megan M. Boler     

Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education OISE/University of Toronto

Marya Bangee

Community Organizing Residency (COR) Fellow, OneLA, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)

Erick Huerta     

Immigrant’s rights activist

Jonathan MacIntosh

Pop Culture Hacker and Transformative Storyteller

Sangita Shreshtova (Moderator)

Research Director of Media Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism

Elisabeth Soep     

Research Director and Senior Producer at Youth Radio-Youth Media International

 

 
4:00—5:50 pm: Panel 4 The e-Entrepreneur as the New PhilanthropistNonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters. While the boomers treated the cultural movements of the late sixties as a cause, today’s e-citizens are treating their social activism as a brand. They are selling social responsibility as if it were a commodity or product, using the same strategies that traditional business men and women used to sell products.

Sarah Banet-Weiser

Professor, USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and Department of American Studies and Ethnicity

 

Sean D. Carasso

Founder, Falling Whistles

 

Yael Cohen

Founder/CEO, Fuck Cancer

Milana Rabkin     

Digital Media Agent

Sharon Waxman (Moderator)

Editor-in-Chief, The Wrap

 

 
6:00—7:30 pm:RECEPTION

Filed Under: branded entertainment, c3, Civic Paths, games culture, television, transmedia entertainment, University of Southern California
January 7, 2013

Spreadable Media Spreads New Joy For 2013

By

So, we are now roaring into 2013 with the next installment of essays associated with the launch of Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, which I co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. The book is due out from New York University later this month. Each week, we are releasing a series of commissioned essays associated with the book, written by various friends, colleagues, former students, most of whom have at one time or another been affiliated with the Futures of Entertainment Consortium. The Consortium, among other things, runs two conferences per year — one on the East Coast (Futures of Entertainment, hosted by MIT) and one on the west coast (Transmedia Hollywood, which is jointly hosted by UCLA and USC).

These essays are tightly integrated into the book’s argument, but they are also intended to stand alone as spreadable content, and we hope that you will feel free to pass them along through your various social networks.

I have been writing about the core concept of Spreadable Media via this blog for several years now, and it has already inspired rich discussion. I thought I would share with you an outstanding video, which uses Spreadable Media concepts, to explain the Caine’s Arcade phenomenon. If you do not know the original Caine’s Arcade video, check it out below.

Now, here’s the video explaining what happened produced by Stephanie Linka, a student in a class taught last Spring at George Washington University, by USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism alum Nikki Usher.

How Caine Won the Internet from Stephanie Linka on Vimeo.

And now onto our regularly scheduled series of essays. Today’s crop are focused around forms of participation within a networked culture.

The Moral Economy of Soap Opera Fandom
C. Lee Harrington

Soaps accompanied my real life as a stay at home mother, chronicled my years as a working adult, kept me company when I was alone, gave me something to bond with my mother, sisters, daughters, and daughter-in-laws over.

—52-year-old soap opera viewer who has been watching General Hospital for 46 years, One Life to Live for 41 years, and All My Children for 39 years; quoted in Harrington and Bielby 2010

I have long been fascinated with daytime soap operas, both as a source of pleasure in my own life and as the central anchor of my research on media industries, texts, and audiences. Soaps are distinct from other media forms due to their longevity in the U.S. television landscape (the average age of soaps airing in 2011 was 40 years), the daily installments of “primary” text (260 new episodes per year, per soap), their celebration and magnification of emotional expression, and the possibility of lifelong relationships forming between loyal viewers, soap characters, and the communities in which those characters live and work (see the epigraph). No other form of media fiction offers comparable dailiness, intimacy, and familiarity over the long haul.

Soaps’ longevity poses challenges to researchers, who struggle with the sheer volume of textual material produced, as well as to the soap industry, which struggles with staying true to shows’ long narrative histories and developing characters in “real time” while aligning those narratives with contemporary tastes of both newbies and lifers. Balancing these potentially competing demands generates a particular moral economy within soap opera fandom. The research on soap fans that Denise Bielby and I conducted in the early 1990s (Harrington and Bielby 1995) captured the beginning of fandom’s migration to the Internet, with viewers experimenting with electronic bulletin board discussions as a supplement to their investment in other aspects of “public” fandom (attending industry-sponsored fan events, buying fan magazines, joining fan clubs, etc.). In our book, we made a distinction between legal ownership over soap narratives and what we called “moral” ownership over them—fans’ sense that soap opera communities and characters are “theirs,” rather than belonging to the writers, actors, directors, or producers.

This sense of ownership is rooted in at least three factors. First, “soaps’ very success at creating and sustaining a seamless fictional world [. . .] creates a space for viewers to assert their claims when they perceive continuity is broken” (Bielby, Harrington, and Bielby 1999, 36). Second, viewers regularly outlast soaps’ revolving writing and production teams. Many long-term fans have been invested in their show(s) longer than the people creating them (as, often, have several of the actors playing the characters, leading to interesting ownership struggles within the industry [Harrington and Brothers 2010]), and they often do know their show’s history better. (The same point can be made of long-term sports fans or movie-franchise fans, contexts in which transgenerational fandoms outlast coaches, players, actors, directors, etc.) Third, soap production schedules allow the industry to respond relatively quickly to fan complaints and concerns, giving fans a sense that their opinions can make a real difference.
MORE

How Spreadability Changes How We Think about Advertising
Ilya Vedrashko

You can’t spell “spreadability” without “ad.”

The vision of unpaid people cheerfully passing around ads they love has been a guiding light for marketers for more than a decade now. And what’s not to like? An ad that gets passed along receives extra attention. The Good Housekeeping stamp of consumers’ approval that such transmission suggests is assumed to add trustworthiness to the message. An ad that “goes viral” scores extra eyeballs.

But while the demand and the budgets for “viral” have been growing, it’s been surprisingly difficult to find a permanent box for spreadable media on the modern agency’s org chart. While many different disciplines—creative, media, public relations, social—are claiming ownership, a systemic problem has prevented spreadability from gaining a true acceptance.

Ad agencies, like factories of the industrial era, are a particular arrangement of means of production, highly specialized labor force and scarce resources optimized around efficient mass manufacturing of a particular type of output. For agencies, this output consists of ad units placed in print, television, online, radio, outdoor, theaters, events, and so on. An average agency produces and places thousands of such units on behalf of its clients each year.

These ads—paid announcements that appear in media—come in a finite variety of formats and sizes, and their production is scalable to the point where much of it can be, and has been, automated and outsourced. Ads are designed to elicit responses along the vector “see, like, remember, buy.” The agencies are structured around maximizing the number of these responses. Media departments craft media plans that try to ensure the highest number of the right people see the ad at the lowest cost. Creative departments are judged by the number of people who like and remember the ad. Ultimately, the agency’s output is evaluated against the number of people who buy the advertised product. The more people see, like, remember, and buy, the more successful the agency is in the long run.
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Soulja Boy and Dance Crazes
Kevin Driscoll

During the summer of 2007, U.S. pop media seemed saturated with talk show hosts and pro athletes dancing along to “Crank Dat (Soulja Boy).” By the time an official music video was shot in late July, the dance craze was already approaching an apex, with new videos appearing daily on MySpace and YouTube. Close inspection of the phenomenon reveals a diverse array of overlapping audiences exploiting “Crank Dat” as a producerly framework for the expression of personal, social, and political messages. Steeped in southern hip-hop’s independent tradition, teenage rapper Soulja Boy Tell ’Em championed the songs, dances, and videos produced by these audiences in pursuit of his own commercial success. “Crank Dat,” for all its confusion, contradiction, and welcoming incompleteness, is a valuable demonstration of spreadability in practice.

In the dominant narrative of the 1990s, hip-hop was driven to pop dominance by a rivalry between Los Angeles and New York City. Excluded from mainstream media channels, artists living in the southern U.S. were forced to develop an alternative hip-hop industry supported primarily by locally grown “indie” record labels with connections to regional radio personalities, nightclub DJs, and mom-and-pop record-shop owners (Grem 2006). This independence enabled the southern artists to develop innovative sounds and styles quite distinct from their coastal peers. In 2003, with CD sales flagging, major record labels turned to these indies in search of new talent to revitalize the industry. Among the many southern styles attracting attention, snap music deviated the most from the conventional hip-hop template. Snap’s minimal drum programming and repetitive lyrics destabilized unquestioned hip-hop norms such as the value of complex wordplay and the use of funk and soul samples.
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Television’s Invitation to Participate
Sharon Marie Ross

In Beyond the Box: TV and the Internet (Ross 2008), I argued that television shows starting in the late 1990s increasingly seemed to be “inviting” television viewers to become actively engaged with the TV text, often through the Internet. I saw three forms of invitation emerging: overt invitations, where a TV show obviously invites a viewer to become involved (e.g., American Idol’s calls to phone in a vote); organic invitations, where a TV show assumes that viewers are already actively engaged and incorporates evidence of this within the narrative of the show—or, in some cases, television network (e.g., Degrassi: The Next Generation’s attention to the role of new communications media in teens’ lives, and The N network’s use during Degrassi episodes of interstitials that feature teen viewers texting and IM chatting via The N’s website); and obscured invitations, where a TV show’s narrative complexity demands viewer unraveling that drives fans to online applications (e.g., Lost’s dense referencing of philosophers and artists as clues to the “hidden” meaning of the island and its inhabitants).

In discussions with Henry Jenkins since, I have suggested that organic invitations are likely to become the dominant form of TV invitations to participation. Today’s texting, IMing, web-surfing teens will become tomorrow’s multimedia-tasking adults, who will likely only be followed by a new wave of teen TV watchers who will be engaging in yet-to-be-imagined forms of new media communication.

Such developments are reverberating throughout all of media, from increasing demands on print journalism to be more present online to the use of branding in the spread of media franchises across TV, film, and music in such a way that demands more widespread knowledge of marketing from all media professionals. And such changes tend to spread throughout the TV landscape—even CSI has popular online applications, after all.
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What Old Media Can Teach New Media
Amanda D. Lotz

While it may be the case that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the question remains whether that old dog can teach a new dog anything useful from its existing repertoire. Or, in terms of spreadable media, can the “old”—or, as I prefer, “established”—processes of media industries for creating entertainment content teach those who are endeavoring on the creation of spreadable media anything of value? In the overinflated rhetoric of new media, media revolutions, and change, too often we lose track of basics and fail to consider that most of what seems new and different isn’t really, either. In this essay, I identify some of the established characteristics of entertainment-based media industries that remain relevant in an era of spreadable media and explore how some of the strategies these industries have developed to deal with their particularities do or do not apply to the spreadable media context.

A key starting point for understanding entertainment-based media industries is acknowledging that they are different from most other business sectors—often in particularly frustrating ways for their practitioners. This “difference” of media industries means that the rules and practices that hold for and prove productive to commercialization practices elsewhere simply don’t work, or at least don’t work as effectively, for these media companies. One of these key differences is captured in the maxim “nobody knows,” also expressed sometimes as the acknowledgment that such media industries are “risky businesses.” This sense that nobody knows results from the fickleness of audiences when it comes to creative and entertainment goods. Conventional focus-group testing or the combination of known “successful” features tend not to be particularly predictive of success in the design of a new media good. In other words, you can’t test or engineer your way to a hit with any certainty.

Considering the spreadable media successes of the past few years, I suspect the “nobody knows” maxim is likely to be true of the circulation of spreadable media to the same degree it is for the distribution of established entertainment media. Try as we might to identify common features or characteristics, we fool ourselves if we think we can anticipate a formula for producing creative content likely to catch the cultural fancy of any particular audience at any given moment. But all is not lost; these media companies have developed a number of strategies designed to counter some of the uncertainty of their established platforms, and some of these strategies might prove productive for making spreadable media as well.
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For those of you who were at the Modern Language Association conference this past weekend, you might have had a chance to buy an advanced copy of the book. If you did, we’d love to hear what you think, so feel free to drop a note here or even better on the Spreadable Media website.

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, c3, Spreadable Media, television, transmedia entertainment, University of Southern California
September 26, 2012

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part Two)

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You suggest that the news media made “common cause” with the civil rights movement in bringing some of their concerns to the American public. What motivated the national news media to embrace this story? What were the limits of their commitment to the cause?

 

It was a limited common cause. Around issues such as integration of schools and public spaces, along with voting rights, the media was largely supportive.  But Presidents Kennedy and Johnson also embraced those goals.  The news media, television in particular, tended to be very positively inclined to JFK and was as well to LBJ in the early period of his administration when he appeared to be trying to carry out the Kennedy agenda, particularly the Civil Rights Act that passes in 1964.  The legislative goals of the movement were “legitimated” by the fact that there was significant support among both Democratic and Republican officials outside the South. These were somewhat less partisan times, certainly in media coverage.  Television news deferred quite a bit to the president.

But one thing surprised me as I examined TV news coverage.  Reporters tended to become far more critical of civil rights activists and civil rights campaigns when things turned violent.  In reading transcripts of NBC coverage of the sit-in movement, I was surprised to discover that the reporter refused to identify who was being violent.  The reporter kept using the passive voice so it wasn’t clear that white segregationists were the ones pummeling sit-in demonstrators.

At other times, however, when the violence was so clearly marked between victim and aggressor, there was less criticism of the civil rights activists.  When voting rights marchers in Selma were brutally gassed and beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in full view of a battery of cameras, there was no attempt to suggest that the marchers were participating in creating the mayhem.  However, in another news story from Selma that I viewed, the CBS reporter was somewhat critical of very youthful demonstrators who, unlike their elders, did not present docile bodies, but ranged around the streets and back alleys during their march.  In general, there appeared to be more anxiety about the activities and potential threat of black youths (who were, of course, fundamentally important to the success of civil rights campaigns, particularly those of direct action and civil disobedience).

It’s a weird paradox: TV news was drawn to the civil rights story to some extent because it provided dramatic visuals of violence and a powerful good versus evil narrative, but reporters tended to criticize the violence that drew them to the story in the first place.

You write in the book about “a moment [in the 1960s] of non-stereotypical, respectable middle-class blacks” on fictional television. What factors gave rise to this moment and which led to its decline? How do these fictional black characters relate to the idealized civil rights subject that you suggest was constructed through the evening news?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcOlcDUQ29M

It seems that every era of media representation of African Americans is attempting to respond differently to the era that precedes it.  I open the book with a consideration of The Beulah Show and Amos ‘n’ Andy, the early 1950s shows featuring blacks in starring roles.  We tend to consider them to be stereotyped and degrading images of blacks.  At the time, however, the thinking about these representations was somewhat more complicated.  Beulah, the black housekeeper to a white family, was seen by some (including some in the black press) as equal to her employers, middle-class in deportment, not using dialect, and in general a good role model.  In developing Amos ‘n’ Andy for television, CBS very deliberately elevated them and the Kingfish to middle class status presumably to make them appear less disrespectable and buffoonish.  Nevertheless, both shows, and especially Amos ‘n’ Andy, were subject to high profile protest by the NAACP, and were off the air by 1953.

Prime time becomes a very “white-washed” world from then on till the early-mid 1960s.  Network programming philosophy was: appeal to the most, offend the least.  Black performers tended to cause controversy – witness the case of Nat King Cole and his 1957 variety show which couldn’t secure a sponsor.  The “integrating” of prime time entertainment programming is, of course, a direct result of the civil rights movement.  It was becoming more of a problem to not show at least occasional black performers or black characters.

Herman Gray came up with the concept “civil rights subject” when he was writing about how television tended to remember civil rights.  The civil rights subject in his original formulation is the latter-day beneficiary of the movement: an exemplary figure signified by hard work, individualism, middle-class status.  The Huxtable family of The Cosby Show is the quintessential example of this concept.  What I argue in my book is that this “civil rights subject” is also evident in television representations (both in news coverage and in prime time entertainment) during the civil rights era.  The most notable early example in prime time drama is Bill Cosby again!  In 1965 he’s paired with a white partner in the Cold War espionage series, I Spy.  Cosby’s character can’t just be a spy, though: he’s a Rhodes scholar who speaks eleven languages and is clearly superior to everyone around him (except that his white buddy gets all the girls).  I Spy gives us a colour-blind, post-integrationist world where our two heroes can range around the world to Cold War hot spots (typically in Asian countries that look “exotic”) and represent a black-and-white America that doesn’t have anything to do with racism.

 

Bill Cosby’s character is the opposite of a victim, but another form of early 1960s programming did focus on blacks-as-victims – the “social problem” dramas that appeared in direct response to both the idealism of the Kennedy New Frontier and also industry anxiety about tougher regulation by the new FCC chairman, Newton Minow who castigated television as “a vast wasteland.”  One show I look at, East Side/West Side, focuses on the crusades of an idealistic white social worker in New York City.  One very high profile episode examines the plight of a young Harlem couple dealing with the lack of jobs for black men and horrendous ghetto housing conditions (their baby dies after begin bitten by a rat).  Even though the couple is obviously poor and living in degraded conditions, they are presented to us as middle-class seeming, dignified, hard-working, eminently respectable – although James Earl Jones, as the husband, portrays a barely contained rage against his oppression.  The characters, nevertheless, are presented to white viewers as ones deserving of help – the only thing standing in the way of their achieving middle-class status and integration into the white world is employment discrimination and slum housing.  So there’s that similar appeal that we see in news and photojournalism coverage: helpless but worthy blacks, enlightened, caring whites as potential rescuers.

 

But shows like East Side/West Side were a bit grim for prime time Nielsen families.  The quintessential civil rights subject after Bill Cosby in I Spy was Diahann Carroll in Julia, which came on air in 1968 and was the first TV series to star an African American since the days of Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah.  Julia was colour-blind integration fully achieved.  She’s a nurse with white co-workers and she lives in a LA apartment building with white neighbours.  Except for mostly humourous instances of “prejudice,” Julia and her adorable young son personify a world of interracial harmony.  The show was controversial because as network television’s first high profile attempt to center a show around African Americans, it ran up against the rapid shifts in the black empowerment movement and what was going on with race in the US at that point.  By 1968 with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts having passed, the attention shifted North and there’s more of a focus on economic oppression and “de facto” segregation and the situation with black inner city “ghettos.”  The movement also shifts into more confrontational directions that are more discomforting to liberal and moderate whites.  Julia was a popular show but arguments swirled around it suggesting that the show was out of touch with what was really going on: the show wasn’t “telling it like it is.”

 

You see the book as seeking to correct some common misunderstandings about the role of television during the civil rights era. What do you see as the most widespread misinterpretations of this period?

 

I think it’s similar to the misunderstanding about television and the Vietnam War.  Television did not embrace the cause of the anti-war movement and thereby lead the US population to demand the war’s end.  (See Daniel Hallin’s The “Uncensored War.”)  Similarly television didn’t cause the success of the civil rights movement.  Television was not a mouthpiece for the movement; news coverage did not transmit or reflect the positions, perspectives, and arguments of the movement in some simple, one-directional sort of way.  I see this over and over again in histories of the civil rights era: the nation saw it on television and the nation acted.  This reifies the medium, gives us television as a neutral mirror reflecting what’s in front of the camera.   No attention to television as an institution and industry, or to textual construction, or to reception practices – all the issues that we as media scholars explore.  This is preaching to the choir when I say this to fellow media studies folks, but I’m hoping my book gets read by non-media scholars, too!

Was network television in general sympathetic to the legislative goals of the movement?  Yes.  But as I’ve already noted, so were powerful political players.  Was the movement sympathetic to many of the movement’s strategies, including demonstrations, direct action, civil disobedience?  In general, no.  For instance, in the run-up to the March on Washington, the media (and not just television) was very critical of the prospect of a hundred thousand and more black people converging on the nation’s capital.  The recurring news peg was “violence is inevitable” and “mass marches won’t sway congressional votes anyway.”  When violence didn’t occur on the day of the march, the live coverage became largely celebratory with images mostly focused on dignified, middle-class-looking marchers – ideal “civil rights subjects” – who presented docile, smiling, and unthreatening images.  But newsmen covering the event continued to insist that the quarter of a million marchers wouldn’t sway votes, so what was the point of the march.

So I really want to undercut and question a certain amount of technological utopianism and determinism that I see in civil rights historiography and also in popular memory.  Television coverage was crucial to the movement, of course; the movement did not, however, fundamentally control either the medium or its messages.  The medium and the movement were not one and the same; that fact tends to get lost.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Televisionand New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

 

 

Filed Under: book shelf, civic media, Civic Paths, interviews, television
September 12, 2012

Fan Studies at the Crossroads: An Interview with Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen (Part Four)

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Hurt/Comfort, which is a major focus of this book, has gotten far less attention than slash in recent fan scholarship, despite Bacon-Smith’s assertion that it is at the heart of fandom. Why has this genre been neglected and what do you see when you examine it?

 

Lynn: H/C seems like the last subgenre to remain determinedly in the closet. Slash has been written about. BDSM has come out of the closet with a flourish thanks to 50 Shades of Grey. Hurt/comfort remains less discussed and more hidden – perhaps because it is less displaced and therefore more vulnerable to shaming. In some ways, H/C is a more primitive drive than even sex. We are all, at some level, still helpless and frightened little children, dependent on others for comfort and, quite literally, survival. H/C fic taps into those primal needs, expresses the depths of pain and fear, and then rewrites the ending of the story to include the healing that may never have happened in ‘real life’ but is continually wished for. The increased ability to comfort and heal oneself seems to result from the unfolding of the narrative, and especially from the willingness to accept the support and comfort of the group after the telling.

 

While H/C fanfiction carries the built-in displacement of using recognized fictional characters instead of being autobiographical, the genre seems less displaced than slash. In the Supernatural storyfinders community on Live Journal, posters commonly request fanfic about their own physical and emotional afflictions, explicitly seeking mastery through reading H/C fic about their own challenges. Writers in the genre are less likely to tie their topics to their own experience, maintaining the distance that displacement offers, but some do discuss their motivations as the same drive for mastery.  This tendency to consciously recognize the individual writer or reader’s motivation may be part of the need to keep H/C secret.

 

H/C fic tackles themes that cultural norms strongly discourage us from expressing openly – namely vulnerability and rage/revenge. Acknowledging vulnerability only makes one feel more vulnerable. For women especially, rage is disallowed and unacknowledged, the human desire for revenge something nobody wants to accept. Incorporating all of these themes into H/C fic is both subversive and personally dangerous, but the drive to do so is powerful. Bacon-Smith recognized the role of emotional expression as integral to coping and healing twenty years ago when she identified hurt/comfort as the heart of fandom, but she also recognized her own negative reaction as one of the reasons that heart remained so hidden.

 

I think the genre’s secrecy has made it less visible to researchers. It seems, at least at first inspection, to be a smaller genre than slash, but that may just be a reflection of the layers of protection that have grown up around it and the fact that fanfiction which tackles H/C themes may not be labeled H/C. It may be labeled slash, het, or gen, yet essentially be hurt/comfort.

 

Kathy: It’s another one of those things that seems to reflect badly on women – the desire to see our men bloody. It’s a real turn on for (some) women to see men vulnerable, exposing aspects of themselves that are normally so closely guarded.  H/C knocks down those barriers, and it’s sexy as hell. It’s another glimpse into female sexuality.

You talk throughout the book about the “fourth wall” that many fans feel needs to exist between the producers/stars and the fans. What do you see as the value of this “fourth wall” and in what ways has Supernatural threatened the “safe space” of fandom as it has sought to reconfigure the relations between the industry and the audience?

 

Kathy: I should preface this by saying that I’m all for fourth wall breaking.  Fan practices serve as critical engagement with the text and breaking that fourth wall encourages dialog which enriches both sides.  That said, it can be done well or poorly and I think Supernatural in particular has done it both ways. “The Monster at the End of This Book” acknowledged fan practices (detailed knowledge, writing fan fiction, factions within fandom, criticism of story lines) and allowed the characters to playfully respond.  Where it erred, in my opinion, was in choosing to portray a particular fan “Becky” who is over invested, inappropriate, and eventually crosses the line into plain creepiness.  She eventually becomes a sad figure of derision and all playfulness is lost, all dialog suspended.

 

As far as protecting the “safe space” of fandom, I don’t think it was ever really in jeopardy.  The actors don’t have the time or the inclination to hang out in fan spaces (with a few notable exceptions – Joss Whedon commenting on a fan video or members of various bands acknowledging that they’ve regularly read fan fiction about themselves) and showrunners are more interested in what fans think about particular episodes – what works and what doesn’t. There was some anxiety in the SPN fandom when Becky was portrayed writing slash, but this anxiety was more over “outing” fans and exposing their fan practices to non-fans (among them family, friends, co-workers).  Given the levels of shame that surround being a fan this was certainly understandable.

 

Lynn: Fans see the value of the fourth wall as keeping their valued (and yet shamed) practices secret – and thus safe – from outsiders, including the actors who might be starring in their fanworks. As recently as Comic Con in July, someone asked Supernatural actor JaredPadalecki, “What do you think of this?” and showed him (and the entire gigantic Hall A audience) a piece of fanart depicting him and his costar Jensen Ackles in a slashy embrace, both shirtless in only low-slung jeans. Padalecki, ever the diplomat, replied dryly, “I never wear jeans without a belt.”  Fan response (directed toward the fan who crossed the line)  was predictably scathing.

 

When Supernatural first changed the rules by depicting fanfiction – and even Wincest – in canon, fan response was mixed, but the ever-present fear of being “outed” as a kinky, slash-writing fangirl prompted many meta posts and some powerful fanart, including a widely-circulated comic expressing a fan’s fear of her husband’s disapproval of her fannish community and interaction after seeing the episode. Most of Supernatural’s forays into fourth wall breaking have been affectionate insider portrayals of fans, poking fun but also affirming fans, and often giving them the role of hero or heroine at the end of the day – or even having them end up in bed with the creator of the show himself (or at least the character who was not-so-loosely portraying him). That changed with a much reviled episode in Season 7, “Time For a Wedding.”  Becky the fangirl somehow morphed from an overly amorous but ultimately heroic Wincest-writing fangirl to a scheming, manipulative stalker, who drugged Sam Winchester and tied him to a bed ala Misery. Fandom was not divided this time – gone was the affectionate poking fun, and in its place was a mean-spirited, seemingly misogynistic and shaming censure. That episode is how not to do fourth wall breaking – at least not if you want to keep your fans.

 

You spent considerable time interviewing the production team around Supernatural about how they perceive their fans. What surprised you the most about their response?

 

Kathy: Given the continuing tone of most mass media coverage of fans and fan practices (crazy, needy, cranky, a force to be courted but not necessarily embraced) what we found most surprising was how appreciative the production side was of the fans and how normalizing the encounters were between fans and producers at every level, and how willing they were to understand fan practices.  In many cases we’d get just as many questions about the fans from the production side as we asked.  The actors would often ask us to clarify something – the level of investment, a particular fan practice.

 

Lynn: What surprised me most was the level of appreciation and respect. Fans continually step up to the microphone at conventions and ask the actors “What’s the craziest thing a fan has ever done?” Actors continually shake their heads and say “Actually our fans are really cool.” That’s not to say that we haven’t heard cautionary tales about fans being outed to actors as ‘slash-writing perverts,’ with very real repercussions. Bacon-Smith writes about the Professionals actor who became close to many of the female fans writing fanfiction about his character, but was so disgusted by his discovery that some of them were writing slash that he banned those fans from his ‘inner circle’ and attempted to get them banned from fandom itself. He didn’t succeed, but that and other cautionary tales have been passed down through the decades and continue to inspire fear in fans of all genres. We heard similar – and more recent – stories from several fans we interviewed for this book, but none of these occurred within the Supernatural fandom.

 

In our own experience interviewing the Supernatural production team, we never heard a negative reaction. Surprise, even shock – but not censure or judgment. Most of the people on the creative side had worked out where the boundary should be between them and fans. They had been able to locate areas of commonality and connection, but also maintain a distance, especially from fan activities that they understood were intended as fan-only spaces. The vast majority self-identified as fans themselves, and could empathize with fannish passion, even if it seemed jarring when directed at them. They tended to code fans as same instead of different, and thus to avoid too much stereotyping.

What might the back and forth between Supernatural fans and creatives suggest about the future of fandom, given the increasingly personal exchanges facilitated by social media as opposed to the more controlled, regulated access fans historically had in an autograph line?

 

Kathy: I would caution against reading too much into the “personal exchanges” or the power of Twitter and Facebook.  The technology is quicker, more immediate, and gives the illusion of intimacy,  but by and large these are still anonymous exchanges – the 21st century version of the snail mail fan letter.  It allows producers to have a better idea of what appeals to fans (and what they will absolutely hate), but I don’t think it influences the actual product all that much.  Fan service is just that – in many cases merely a marketing tool. (A fantastic example of this would be the MTV sponsored video asking fans to vote for Teen Wolf as favorite summer show.  The video plays up the slashy relationship between the two main characters.)  Which is not to say that actors who tweet birthday greetings are doing it simply to further their careers, or that meaningful relationships don’t occasionally occur, they certainly do.  I just think too much has been attributed to social media exchanges between fans and producers.

 

Lynn: It’s a mixed blessing. While the lines of communication are more open than ever, they are also filtered and constricted and misunderstood on both sides. Many of the actors have confided their struggles with how to use Twitter and Facebook effectively – they’ve found out how easily one sentence can be misconstrued, and how sensitive fans can be about what the celebrities they fan are saying to them (and might think of them). If a celebrity tweets you back, it’s too important to dismiss – if it’s received positively, the fan is euphoric. If it’s received as a negative, the fan is crushed – and in turn may lash back at the celebrity to save face and self esteem.However, the new expectations for communication are not going away, and are likely to expand as platforms proliferate. Both sides are likely to continue struggling to accommodate as technology and associated cultural norms change faster than any of us can keep up with them!

 

Lynn Zubernis is a clinical psychologist and teaches in the Counselor Education program at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

Katherine Larsen teaches courses on fame, celebrity and fandom in the University Writing Program at George Washington University. She is the principal editor of the Journal of Fandom Studies.

Dr Zubernis and Dr Larsen are co-editors of the forthcoming Fan Culture: Theory and Practice. They have also published four articles in Supernatural Magazine.

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, fan culture, interviews, television
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