How Did We Get So Many Great Television Shows?: An Interview with UCLA's Neil Landau (Part Three)

You and your interview subjects have a lot to say about genre across the book. Is genre still important as a means of marketing specific programs and targeting specific audiences? Are new genre categories emerging in this era of experimentation and differentiation? What genres do you see as most characteristic of the current television environment?

Marketing executives like to classify and categorize shows in order to package and sell them.  It's often an easy "pass" (rejection) when a series doesn't fit into one genre.  The network execs usually say: It's too all over the place.
But now we have some phenomenal half hour dramedies that defy classification -- and that happens to excite me: Atlanta, Baskets, Better Things, Louie, Insecure, Orange Is the New Black, Casual, Derek, Master of None, Transparent, Fleabag, Better Call Saul.  Even M*A*S*H blurred the line between comedy and tragedy, but was always known as a comedy series (with accompanying laugh track).
Are they comedies or dramas?  I say: who cares.  Just watch and have your mind blown. They don't always go for the joke. They push their characters to the edge. They make us cringe and/or recoil. But I, for one, can't look away.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt broke the traditional sitcom mold, in my humble opinion; it's created a new genre unto itself.  Ditto: Baskets.  Ditto: Atlanta which features, in random measure, dark and light, funny and serious, and magical realism. It's winning accolades and praise and deserves them all.
I don't watch TV to see the same old, same old.  I want to be surprised!  I don't want to fall asleep to my TV.  I want it to wake me up.
We're also seeing more historical series (from long ago to the more recent past) and science-fiction series that defy our expectations: The Crown, The People vs. OJ, Stranger Things, Westworld.  Game of Thrones is such a game changer because it demands viewer engagement in a multi verse, and viewers of all ages are addicted to its story lines and cast of thousands.
There's an interactive component to these out of the box genre-bending or genre-transcending series; we don;t just watch them, we discuss them. They're in the zeitgeist.  They're part of the national and global conversation.  It used to be that I'd ride the subway and everyone was reading a book or newspaper; now everyone is watching TV content on their smart phones, headphones on, fragmented attention spans processing.
Multitasking has become like breathing. We can consume content faster than ever and store that data for our social interactions; maybe it's because we've freed up our memory by not needing to memorize so many facts and figures anymore; it's all stored on our iPhones and available in a matter of seconds via google.  We're distracted, addicted, restless, and need constant stimulation or else we're bored.
Familiar genres tend to increase boredom, but familiar genres with a fresh spin can engage us in new and exciting ways.  True Detective (season one) was a tried and true detective series (the most prevalent genre), but it was an existential detective series.  Bloodline (on Netflix) isn't just a family ensemble drama/soap opera; it's a new genre: family noir. Mr. Robot provides us with an unreliable narrator and revels in destabilizing its viewers; the show dares us to guess what's going to happen next.  The Leftovers (on HBO) is also it's own genre: the rapture drama, inviting us into a world that defies explanation.  The season two opener offers a teaser that's astonishing and rapturous.  Damon Lindelof knows what he's doing, even though it's not a show for everyone.

Alongside genre there is the question of format. At places, you and your subjects suggest that the procedural will die out with the generation which grew up on the broadcast networks. Why has serial television become so central to the new media economy and ecology you are documenting here? And what do we make of the return of anthology series, such as Black Mirror, or of series with short story arcs, such as American Crime Story and American Horror Story?

I covered this one above, too.  I should have read all the questions in advance, but I enjoy the spontaneity.  Sorry!  Suffice it to say, that audience engagement is stoked by the audience's relationship with the characters.  If it's a limited series, that relationship needs to grip us right out of the gate (such as with the exceptionally engaging The Night of on HBO).
Longer serialized shows translate to long term relationships, involving shifting allegiances, and often a love-hate dynamic.  Sometimes we root for Frank Underwood, sometimes we root for Claire.
The same applies to unscripted documentary series.  Making a Murderer was a limited series but I kept changing my mind as to Steven Avery's guilt.  Ditto: The Jinx.  And this also applies to scripted series like The Night Of.  Give me a complicated mystery that's smart and airtight and I'll follow you anywhere.
The Affair on Showtime destabilizes us with multiple perspectives of the same event, Rashomon style. Sure, it's a narrative trick, a device, but it works beautifully and pulls you in.  UnREAL also provokes and destabilizes.  It's pitch black comedy and satire and soap opera and reality TV all rolled into one.  Black Mirror (which I refer to in my book as "The Twilight Zone on digital crack") is just so damn disturbing because it's not wholly science-fiction; it's already happening, or will possibly happen soon.  It's both prescient and portentous.  I can't get enough.
Yes, it's problematic that we have to wait so long for new episodes of some of our favorite series.  Between seasons of ambitious, expensive shows like Game of Thrones, Westworld, and House of Cards can take more than a year.  Due to Donald Glover's busy acting schedule (hello: Star Wars), we won't be getting new episodes of Atlanta until 2018; it's a disruptive show that's being disrupted.

One of the bigger surprises in recent years has been a resurgence of radio formats and genres through podcasts. Can we see the success of Serial and its successors as a byproduct of the same sea changes in production, distribution, and consumption you discuss here primarily in terms of television?

I can certainly foresee a TV version of Serial and other podcasts.  These radio programs are now valuable IP with built in audiences, and they're also based on the irresistible allure of a great central mystery with twists and turns.  They're both interactive (whodunit?) and voyeuristic, like the best of so-called "unscripted" TV.  It takes us inside the world of the crime and behind the scenes of the painstaking investigation. BUT ALL WITH A SLOW BURN.
Broadcast network procedurals tend to offer crime and punishment in one closed-ended episode, fast resolution, easy justice.  These serialized podcasts engage us and keep us on the edge of our seats but don't offer black and white resolution.  The investigation usually just leads to more questions.  Justice is elusive.  These podcasts and true crime stories are grounded in realism, and hook us in based upon the vicarious thrill of both being there and re-experiencing the crime, or even by putting us in the position as viewers/listeners and thinking: What if this happened to me?

Critics describe these breakthrough programs as possessing distinctive voices or perspectives, a shift that we can see as closely associated with the rise of the Showrunner as a kind of television auteur. Many of the folks you interview are showrunners, so what insights might we get from reading the book about the emergence of author-based television production?

Great showrunners have all the power in the TV business -- whether they originally created the show or have been brought in to run the operation.  Their sensibilities, leadership skills, and vision have brought them hard-earned reputations that they can and will deliver a high quality TV show on time and within a prescribed budget.  A fresh, original idea is good.  Being able to execute that idea in an exciting, authentic, visionary, accessible way is invaluable.
And several of our more famous show runners choose to run several shows at the same time: Chuck Lorre, Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, Greg Berlanti. I don't know what drives them, but running one show is arduous and requires incredible stamina.  Delegation is key.
But these show runners have stories to tell and characters to birth. They are their own brands.  We trust them to deliver on the promise of the premise.  I asked Norman Lear how he'd managed to run multiple shows.  How did he handle all the stress?  He wisely replied: "Yes, it was incredibly stressful.  But there's such a thing as good stress."  Those were the days....

Several of the new players you discuss in this book are moving away from the pilot process that shaped old television production. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Why?

 
I've covered the wisdom behind this above.  Ted Sarandos has condemned what he calls the idiotic, fiscally irresponsible, wasteful, inefficient pilot process.  I tend to agree with Ted (hey, you can't argue with success).  One hour drama pilots can cost upwards of $5 million -- and never air.  That's unsustainable and nutty.
But there is value in looking before you leap.  But in today's on-demand, binge-viewing TV landscape, the demand for fresh new content exceeds the supply.  If you're a TV network or platform, better to be first with a new series than a day late and a dollar short.  In other words, everything is moving much too fast to calculate catching lightning in a bottle.
There is no magic formula to a hit series, no matter how much a network retools an ostensibly "broken pilot."  Mr. Robot got on the air because the assistants at USA Network and NBCU rallied for it; at first, their bosses just didn't get it.  But the inner-office fandom was overwhelming.  Most groundbreaking shows had and have a rough road making it on the air.  But shows from All in the Family and Breaking Bad to Black Mirror and Atlanta beat the odds and entered the zeitgeist.  The rest is history.

 

 

 

 

 

Neil Landau ('85), teaches in the M.F.A. screenwriting and producing programs and serves as the associate director of screenwriting for television at UCLA TFT.

His writing credits include the 1991 teen comedy feature Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, starring Christina Applegate; the Pax TV series Twice in a Lifetime; MTV's Undressed; CBS' The Magnificent Seven; Fox's Melrose Place; Nickelodeon's The Secret World of Alex Mack; ABC's Doogie Howser, M.D.; and one-hour drama pilots for CBS, ABC, Warner Bros., Disney, Lifetime and Freemantle.

Landau’s 2012 3D animated feature Tad: The Lost Explorer (Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones) earned him a Spanish Academy Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is currently working on its sequel, as well as the screenplay for Paramount’s upcoming 3D animated feature Capture the Flag. He is also working on a new animated film, Sheep & Wolves, for Wizart Animation (The Snow Queen), slated for a 2016 release.

In 2013, Landau’s original screenplay, Flinch, was optioned by Avenue Pictures' multi-award-winning producer Cary Brokaw (Closer, The Player, Angels in America, Shortcuts, Drugstore Cowboy).

From 2004-2007, Landau worked as a script consultant for Sony Pictures Television International (2004-2007). In 2010, he consulted on the Goya-award-winning Lope (for Warner Bros. and El Toro Pictures, Spain) and Bruc (El Toro/Universal Pictures). He has also worked extensively with screenwriter/director David Koepp (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Angels & Demons.)

Landau is the author of the bestselling book 101 Things I Learned in Film School (Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Focal Press has published his new books, The Screenwriter’s Roadmap (2012) and The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap (2014).

How Did We Get So Many Great Television Shows?: An Interview with UCLA's Neil Landau (Part Two)

Your opening section pays attention to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Crackle, and others who have produced television style content for the web. In what ways have these networks become game-changers in terms of what we think television is? In what ways are broadcast and cable networks responding to the alternative models they represent?

Serialized content used to scare the broadcast networks because if you missed an episode or two, they were afraid you'd never come back.  But in an on-demand landscape, no one misses anything; the modern scourge is the spoiler.
I love the paradox of today's TV landscape in which people try to watch everything but it's impossible due to the number of shows. So when you start to tell someone about a great new show that they haven't seen, they usually stop you with: "I can't wait to see it. Don't tell me anything!"
Sony Crackle is advertiser supported, but they circumvent the pilot process and go straight to series (and then offering all episodes all at once for the binge viewing experience.  Hulu started as a second window platform, but soon realized they could only compete if they offered original series of their own.  Netflix and Amazon both complete for exclusivity and originality, but there's a big difference between their business models; while Netflix is a media company, Amazon in a retail company.  They're each making their own programs now and aiming to cut out the middle man studio.
But Amazon Studios exists as a magnet to their online shopping mall experience (with free shipping for Amazon Prime members).  Netflix needs to keep its subscriber base happy so they keep paying their monthly dues.  Streaming and premium cable depend on subscriptions and are considered utilities versus broadcasters, giving the subscription networks much more freedom from censorship.
The broadcast networks and basic cable networks still need to please advertisers, necessitating Standards and Practices (a form of censorship) to avoid any content that's too edgy or morally objectionable and could taint an advertiser's brand. The subscription networks are only beholden to their subscribers.  And so edgier, more provocative content on streaming and premium cable has pushed the broadcast networks to improve the quality of their shows; we now see riskier shows, niche shows, and bolder choices being made across all platforms.
Mr. Robot has helped redefine USA network.  It might not appeal to your typical zombie-loving fan base of The Walking Dead, but it's certainly darker, edgier, and smarter than most basic cable shows.  Consequently, all networks are raising the bar: This Is Us (on NBC), Animal Kingdom (on TNT), UnREAL (on Lifetime?!), American Crime (on ABC) to name a few.
And with niche content attracting viewers on streaming and premium cable, we're also seeing greater diversity and authenticity in casts, plot lines, and in writers' rooms.  

Many of the storytellers you interviewed spoke of the differences in producing series which are meant to be binged watched. What are some of the core insights to emerge about this new form of media consumption?

When you circumvent the pilot process, you're removing some of the fine tuning and audience testing checks and balances in the system. And when all or most of the episodes are written in advance of even starting production, the show runners have less opportunity to course correct.  Re-shoots are costly and time consuming.  To create a show that's intended for the full episode drop for binge viewing requires a more visionary show runner than ever before.  They have to see the whole season in advance, as opposed to finding the show throughout the season and adjusting according to audience response, chemistry among actors, and latent discoveries made.

You map a complex media ecology throughout the book. How much movement is there between the different levels of media production? For example, many of us are watching Issa Rae, who you interviewed, bring Insecure onto HBO after years of being a web television producer. Are there things we can observe there which may help us anticipate further movements of this kind in the future?

The audience is in control in the on-demand world.  But the content creators are also much more in control of their destinies if they can think like creative entrepreneurs.  Issa Rae made Awkward Black Girl at her own expense; it's funny, authentic, and she writes, directs, and stars in it.  Issa knew she had something to say and an audience who wanted to tune in. She spent her own money to make her web series, which served as proof of concept.  It wasn't a huge leap of faith for HBO to green light Issa's hilarious and superb series, Insecure; she already had a substantial fan base and three seasons of Awkward Black Girl under her belt.
Yes, it's always a risk to produce and distribute a new show, but the smart money was on Issa: her authentic voice,  grace, style, and talent.
High Maintenance followed a similar trajectory (from self-financed web series on Vimeo and i.am.other to HBO series.  In the old days, you had to start off at the bottom of the food chain as a freelancer or staff writer and work your way up the ladder.  Now, first-time creators are rapidly becoming show runners.  Look at Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) and Zander Lehmann (Casual).  Unprecedented.

Throughout, you have much to say about struggles over diversity, inclusion, and representation in the contemporary television landscape. This is clearly a core issue at the moment -- thus our recent Diversifying Entertainment conference. What did you hear from the industry insiders that might shed light on how they are thinking about this issue? In some ways, the question has to do with rapid expansion of minority-cast programming and its audience share over the past few seasons, but as you also note, some of the issue has to do with how under-represented minorities and women are both in front of and behind the camera. What factors are determining the speed with which these changes are taking place?

Before the recent Presidential election, I was getting optimistic on this subject.  Now... it's anybody's guess.
We could be entering a new era of ALT RIGHT, white-washed, unobjectionable and/or purely escapist shows.  I hope not.  I think we need a national catharsis, so I'm rooting for edgy, provocative shows that stir folks up -- both audiences and content creators (aka writer/producers).  We're not going to have a cultural revolution if everyone is sitting home watching Dancing with the Stars and Big Bang Theory.
Actually, the current political climate (it's only Trump's second week in office) could usher in a new creative Renaissance.  Only time will tell.  But I'm an optimist.  Shows like Atlanta and Mr. Robot give me hope.  It's not that I believe all shows needs to address the ills of our society (racism, greed, climate change), but I want to be challenged to think about my place in the world when I watch a great TV series.
I don't want to just be a complacent couch potato.  We don't want our country to turn into WALL-E.  We must engage, question, and resist formulaic story tropes and stereotypes.  The first question I asked Norman Lear was "Does TV reflect our lives or do our lives reflect TV?"  His response was a little bit of both, but now more than ever there are shows that reflect myriad perspectives and lives.
And TV is a global business.  Netflix is now in every country except China and North Korea.  More and more shows are being distributed in their original language with subtitles.  This also gives me hope because when we are able to get a window on people in other parts of the world, it can engender compassion and empathy.  I like to believe that storytelling can not only inspire, entertain, and delight -- but also it can change the world.

One of your section headings proclaims “niche is the new mainstream.” Is that true? How would you characterize the relationship today between niche and mainstream program? As the media market fragments, is there anything that can be characterized as mainstream programming?

I addressed this above, but Orange Is the New Black is a great example of a niche series (about women in prison) that has multiple entry points to attract a wider audience.  There's Piper, the Caucasian blond protagonist, but then there are people of color, male guards, social worker, and wardens, and many ways to connect.  Theme is also a way for showrunners and creators to broader their niche appeal.
House of Cards is not a show about politics; it's a show about powerTransparent is not a show solely about a transgender woman, it's a show about identity.  Theme is universal and can take what might seem like a niche show and make it go mainstream.

 

 

Neil Landau ('85), teaches in the M.F.A. screenwriting and producing programs and serves as the associate director of screenwriting for television at UCLA TFT.

His writing credits include the 1991 teen comedy feature Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, starring Christina Applegate; the Pax TV series Twice in a Lifetime; MTV's Undressed; CBS' The Magnificent Seven; Fox's Melrose Place; Nickelodeon's The Secret World of Alex Mack; ABC's Doogie Howser, M.D.; and one-hour drama pilots for CBS, ABC, Warner Bros., Disney, Lifetime and Freemantle.

Landau’s 2012 3D animated feature Tad: The Lost Explorer (Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones) earned him a Spanish Academy Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is currently working on its sequel, as well as the screenplay for Paramount’s upcoming 3D animated feature Capture the Flag. He is also working on a new animated film, Sheep & Wolves, for Wizart Animation (The Snow Queen), slated for a 2016 release.

In 2013, Landau’s original screenplay, Flinch, was optioned by Avenue Pictures' multi-award-winning producer Cary Brokaw (Closer, The Player, Angels in America, Shortcuts, Drugstore Cowboy).

From 2004-2007, Landau worked as a script consultant for Sony Pictures Television International (2004-2007). In 2010, he consulted on the Goya-award-winning Lope (for Warner Bros. and El Toro Pictures, Spain) and Bruc (El Toro/Universal Pictures). He has also worked extensively with screenwriter/director David Koepp (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Angels & Demons.)

Landau is the author of the bestselling book 101 Things I Learned in Film School (Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Focal Press has published his new books, The Screenwriter’s Roadmap (2012) and The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap (2014).

How did We Get So Many Great Television Shows?: An Interview with UCLA's Neil Landau (Part One)

When was the last time anyone you know spoke of television as "a vast wasteland"? Certainly, television today is as vast as ever was, actually probably 100 times more so, but there more outstanding television series available to us each week can we possibly could watch.

Some are describing the current moment is the era of peak television or the age of too much great TV. A complex set of factors have contributed to wave after wave of creative experimentation, often involving idiosyncratic personalities, genre bending narrative strategies, and appeals to niche audiences. First premium cable and then streaming platforms challenged the dominance of broadcast and basic cable, pushing innovation outward even to the most conservative players. The challenge has become directing attention and ensuring access to all of the innovative new content. 

Neil Landau's TV Outside the Box offers an essential guide to the opportunities and risks facing  the creative industry at the current moment. Longtime industry insider as well as a professor at the UCLA Cinema School, Landau seemingly had access to anyone and everyone he wanted to talk to. The book includes cogent, concise, lively and thoughtful interviews with network executives and show runners alike. Right now, the book provides the back story we need to understand what's happening with this expansive medium and in the future, the book will be time capsule that preserves a transitional moment in television history. What I would give to have an equally vivid snapshot of television's innovators in the 1950s or 1980s.

I was lucky enough to have lunch with Landau in the fall and was immediately taken by the depth of his knowledge and passion for television as a medium. We spent the entire meal tossing off one new title after another as if playing Stump the Band. This guy knows everyone, watches everything. He understands the contours of this changing landscape like no one else I have ever met. The interview that follows will give you some simple taste of his insights into contemporary television culture.

Landau is working with UCLA's Denise man and I plan for the next Transforming Hollywood event, coming up in early May. Watch here for further details coming soon.

You seem to have been able to interview all of the key players reshaping television at the current moment. Can you provide us some sense of the scope of different players represented in the book? What can you share of the process of getting all of these folks to speak with you?

I began my research more than 3 years ago (in 2014).  I could see how the TV business was changing the way the music industry changed, first with Napster and then, of course, iTunes.  I also saw parallel "on demand" tracks in transportation (Uber) and accommodations (AirBNB) and a little voice in me said: jump on this and track where this is going to transform the TV landscape.  Honestly, I began my research with the naive idea that I was simply covering the new platinum age of great TV series.  I started out with "beginner's mind" and decided not to draw any conclusions until I went out into the field to gather data and multiple perspectives.  I knew I wanted to interview not only trailblazing showrunners (Jenji Kohan, Beau Willimon, Jill Soloway), but also network/studio executives (Ted Sarandos, Roy Price, Andy Kaplan) and a few icons (Norman Lear, Tom Fontana, Elliot Webb) to give the whole thing a historical perspective.
What I quickly came to realize was that this project was going to be much bigger than what I'd originally pitched to my publisher.  I could foresee a Digitial Television Revolution.  Being that TV Outside the Box (TVOTB) was my 4th book, along with my pedigree as co-director of the UCLA MFA Screenwriting Program and the book's sponsorship by NATPE (National Association of Television Programming Executives), these interviews were relatively easy for me to secure (despite the scheduling and resheduling of several incredibly busy people).
I'd first met one of my idols, Norman Lear, at the NATPE conference in Miami in 2014, and he immediately agreed to participate.  Beau Willimon was a friend of a friend, and we became fast friends. Beau strongly encouraged me to include the legacy perspective and introduced me to Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide Life on the Streets, Borgia); Oz was HBO's very first scripted one-hour drama series. Tom Fontana's influence over TV content cannot be overstated. He's the original trailblazer (along with Steven Bochco and Norman Lear).
The toughest interview for me to secure was Jenji Kohan whose a total workhorse and would rather write than talk about her process; but after a cold start (and fighting exhaustion), she warmed up to me.  Dan Harmon (Community, Rick & Morty) was the most entertaining interview that took place in a seedy bar in Eaglerock and involved several cocktails.  Ricky Gervais (The Office, Derek) was the most surprising because he was so gracious and kind (and hilarious).  Charlie Brooker & Annabel Jones (Black Mirror) was the most fascinating and scary for me due to their prescient stories.

TV Outside the Box traces the contours of what you describe as “the revolution.” What characterizes the dramatic shifts in the nature of television, its content, its platforms, and its audiences your book seeks to document? What were some of the first signs that a revolution in television was taking place?

The on-demand nature and scope is what's most revolutionary to me.  The audience is now in control and can dodge or completely avoid commercials.  The sheer volume of scripted TV content was and continues to exponentially rise.
When I was a kid, we had three TV networks and maybe 30-40 shows on the air, scheduled in time slots.  Now we have over 440 scripted series across too many platforms to mention here.  Are we currently in a "content bubble"?  Sure.  But I'm not sure that choice is ever a bad thing.  Is it sustainable for the studios and networks: probably not.  I see a natural form of attrition happening.
The bar keeps rising on high quality, engaging, fresh content, so the mediocre shows won't last.  In the book I refer to this phenomenon as "digital Darwinism."
Binge viewing is also a touchstone of the digital TV revolution.  Not only can we watch what we want, when we want, without commercial interruption, we can watch the whole season of series offered on Netflix and Amazon. I can foresee HBO, Showtime, and Hulu eventually following suit.
I also saw the decline of the TV industry's reliance on the overnight Nielsen rating system -- to the point where the overnight rating is virtually an irrelevant metric of a show's success.  Most younger viewers don't want TV content on televisions anymore, and they absolutely don't watch anything in its prescribed time slot -- unless it's live sporting events.  To me, the only reason linear TV still exists is for live events.
We're still in a TV ecosystem in which viewership is segmented by age and older viewers still tend to watch their favorite series in their time slot, for free, with commercials. But the younger generations are either agnostic (they find their favorite shows and don't care what network it's on) or they're only watching highlights from shows on YouTube.
A summer TV landscape dominated by reruns is also going away.  Networks and platforms always need fresh, buzz worthy, exclusive, original content -- or they're toast.
The other enormous shift in the TV landscape has been its focus from broadest and safest shows to series that might appeal to a small, but fiercely loyal and dedicated audience; a subscription, on-demand streaming network needs lots of choice, not just a series that appeals to the widest possible audience, but multiple shows that may appeal to different slices of the audience.  One of the main theses of the book is: Niche Is the New Mainstream.

You characterize appointment television as an anachronism. I’ve argued that appointment television is giving way to engagement television, which places more emphasis on the choices that audiences make about when, where, and how they chose to watch television. Engagement has been a buzz word of the industry and crops up often across your interviews. What insights can you share about the ways television producers and executives are thinking about engagement?

Audience engagement is one of the programmers biggest challenges. With so many choices, how do you break through all the noise (the glut) and actually attract an audience?  If a show is great, it will generate buzz.  But what generates the buzz is a fresh, authentic experience, something new -- and it's going to have to be provocative and controversial (aka noisy) in order to get attention from the media (critics and social media influencers).
It used to be that the major networks could program a new series in the time slot immediately following one of their biggest hits. Now the platforms need to find different ways to engage the audience via new marketing trends and via transmedia.  Some great TV series take time and patience for the audience to connect.
Breaking Bad, for example, was only a modest performer when it premiered on AMC, but it turned into a cultural phenomenon when it premiered on Netflix.  Shorter episode orders and limited/anthology series (The Night Of, Fargo, True Detective, American Horror Story) have also made it possible for big movie starts to commit to doing a TV series.
Working in TV used to be considered a form of "slumming," but that's also changed.  Once David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, and Martin Scorsese jumped into TV, it leveled the playing field.  Now everyone wants to work in TV -- but the true icons mainly want to work on premium and high quality cable and streaming.  Showrunners now have a direct relationship with their show's fan base.  Like our new president, they use Twitter and Facebook.  They live tweet during the episode.  What was once the office water cooler conversation the night after a show aired has transformed into the global water cooler via social media.

 

Neil Landau  teaches in the M.F.A. screenwriting and producing programs and serves as the associate director of screenwriting for television at UCLA TFT. His writing credits include the 1991 teen comedy feature Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, starring Christina Applegate; the Pax TV series Twice in a Lifetime; MTV's Undressed; CBS' The Magnificent Seven; Fox's Melrose Place; Nickelodeon's The Secret World of Alex Mack; ABC's Doogie Howser, M.D.; and one-hour drama pilots for CBS, ABC, Warner Bros., Disney, Lifetime and Freemantle. Landau’s 2012 3D animated feature Tad: The Lost Explorer (Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones) earned him a Spanish Academy Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is currently working on its sequel, as well as the screenplay for Paramount’s upcoming 3D animated feature Capture the Flag. He is also working on a new animated film, Sheep & Wolves, for Wizart Animation (The Snow Queen), slated for a 2016 release. In 2013, Landau’s original screenplay, Flinch, was optioned by Avenue Pictures' multi-award-winning producer Cary Brokaw (Closer, The Player, Angels in America, Shortcuts, Drugstore Cowboy). From 2004-2007, Landau worked as a script consultant for Sony Pictures Television International (2004-2007). In 2010, he consulted on the Goya-award-winning Lope (for Warner Bros. and El Toro Pictures, Spain) and Bruc (El Toro/Universal Pictures). He has also worked extensively with screenwriter/director David Koepp (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Angels & Demons.) Landau is the author of the bestselling book 101 Things I Learned in Film School (Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Focal Press has published his new books, The Screenwriter’s Roadmap (2012) and The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap (2014).

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Six): Everyday Wonders

Everyday Wonders I decided to call this installment Everyday Wonders because each of the podcasts I'm discussing here take as their core subject matter the practices of everyday life. They managed to turn subject matter that we take for granted into stories that are fascinating and engaging. In part this has to do with the skills of their hosts as storytellers and investigators. These podcasts also popularize some of the core insights of cultural studies: the culture is ordinary, that humans do not involve themselves in activities that are meaningless, and that looking beneath the surface of everyday life may help us to understand hidden assumptions and values that shape who we are and how we see the world.

I'm a huge fan of the Kitchen Sisters who were early entrants into this podcast game and they have continued to explore new subject matter in imaginative ways. I would flag two series produced by the Kitchen Sisters. The first is called Hidden Kitchens and is a global exploration of the place of cooking, food, and the kitchen. Sometimes the series takes an historical approach as with an episode devoted to the impact of the internment camps on Japanese-American cooking or a study of the bake sales held to support the Montgomery bus boycott. Other times the series explores the history of familiar objects such as Tupperware, Rice-a-Roni, or the George Foreman grill. Other episodes may deal with specific groups of people and their relationship to food -- for example, the chili Queens of San Antonio.

The second Kitchen Sisters series, Fugitive Waves deals with the history of recorded sound and often brings to our attention long-lost treasures recorded on vinyl or audio tape. I first discovered the series via an episode called "Bone Music" which dealt with the underground circulation of western pop music in Cold War Soviet Union. Pirated music was recorded on on old x-rays, with the result that underground music became known as bone music. One of the first episodes in the series dealt with the ways Thomas Alva Edison promoted himself and his phonograph. Another shared some informal recordings that Tennessee Williams made goofing around one Midsummer afternoon. One of my very favorites explores the storytellers and musicians who were hired to amuse the workers at cigar factories in Havana and Miami. This series is consistently imaginative and self-aware about its own audio strategies.

I discovered the "Bone Music" episode thanks to a crossover with 99% Invisible, another long-running podcast series. 99% Invisible deals with the history of design, in particular the design of things that we take for granted in our immediate surroundings. Episodes deal with the architecture of McMansion, the history of the NBC chime, how food gets photographed for advertising, the evolution of the Monopoly game, and the conventions surrounding the design of superhero costumes. Some episodes may explore specific historical locations like the Stonewall bar, the site of some of the earliest gay-rights uprisings or the kind of fusion architecture that shapes Chinatowns in major American cities, understood here as reflecting the complex politics of racial assimilation and exoticism that has marked the history of Asian Americans.

Nate DiMeo, host of The Memory Palace, may be the best storyteller in the contemporary podcast medium. One can imagine a history of revolutions in radio storytelling that takes us from Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion to Ira Glass on This American Life to Nate DiMeo on The Memory Palace. In each case, a distinctive personality establishes a style of delivery, a rhythm, a narrative structure, and a particular voice that sets them apart from what was there before and provides a model for the next generation that will follow. The Memory Palace, as the title suggests, is fascinated with the nature of history and popular memory. Its stories are at once personal and shared. There is an overarching sense of nostalgia and yet a willingness to debunk the past at the same time. Often we are revisiting the past to discover outlaw figures who might belong in another time and place, such as the protagonist of "Mary Walker would wear what she wanted," the story of a cross-dressing woman in the 19 century. So much can be gleaned about the tenor of the Memory Palace by reading the titles of some of their best episodes. "Notes on an imaginary plaque to be added to the statue of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest upon hearing that the Memphis city Council has voted to move it and exhumed the remains of Gen. Forest and his wife, Mary Ann Montgomery Forest." "50 words written after learning that the Arctic bowhead whale can live up to 200 years." "Six scenes in the life of William J Saitus, wonderful boy." "A brief eulogy for consumer electronics projects." Don't these sound like stories you'd like to know more about?

Sleepover starts out like a reality television series brought to podcast, something like an audio version of Big Brother. Three people from radically different backgrounds, each struggling with some personal challenge, are invited to spend the night together at a sleepover in a hotel room, during which they are encouraged to provide each other with life advice and emotional support. The strength of the series lies in its casting – the characters are always three-dimensional and we are given a chance to get to know them over an episode dedicated to each. Although personal revelations occur throughout, the series never feels voyeuristic or exploitative, in part because of the host Sook-Yin Lee's remarkable ability to bridge across differences. I leave each episode with a sense of hopefulness about our ability to overcome some of the polarization in contemporary culture. I'm especially touched by the producers willingness to treat children's experiences alongside adult's, and the willingness of the adult participants to treat the young ones as their equals as they work through issues together and as children offer insights well beyond their years.

Mystery Show and Heavyweight suggest the emergence of yet another potential genre in the podcast world – mystery shows where detectives deal with everyday dilemmas. Heavyweight is interested in the emotional dynamics and the psychological consequences of digging up chapters of our lives that might've been closed years ago. The pilot episode bring together Buzz and Sheldon, two quarrelsome brothers in their 80s who haven't spoken to each other in decades; the host Jonathan Goldstein goes along for the ride, sometimes rattling their cages, sometimes throwing a lifeline but ultimately interested in seeing whether they can overcome a lifetime of differences. Another episode deals with Gregor who has loaned his old friend Moby a cd of American folk music and whose built up resentment over the years that the techno composer never returned his record. Sometimes Goldstein revisits his own past as in an episode where he reconnects with his first girlfriend. "Julia" explores the issue of childhood bullying and what both bullies and victims remember and forget through the ears.

Mystery Show is more interested in the detecting process as a young woman, Starlee Kine, tries to solve some very complex questions having to do with popular culture, such as figuring out what happened to a video store that seemingly disappeared overnight a decade before, tracking down the owner of a distinctive belt buckle found in the streets, or figuring out what's going on in a particular cryptic picture on the side of the Welcome Back Kotter lunchbox. Kine is dogged in her shoe leather work and imaginative in her use of social media to solve each challenging question. The episodes are as interested in the wrong turns and red herrings as they are with the final solution, though both are of interest because of the insights they shed on the world we live in. Kine reminds me of Veronica Mars if she was given a chance to host an NPR show. Both Heavyweight and Mystery Show are a lot of fun, not the least of all because of the vividness of the characters depicted, as compared to the suspects on a television procedural.

I've barely scratched the surface of contemporary podcasting -- having said nothing, for example, about the revival of radio drama there, a topic to which I hope to return before much longer.

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Five): Minority Reports

My interest in the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture also led me to the Still Processing podcast. Each week Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, both African-American, offer their perspectives on current events and especially popular culture. The contents might range from an in-depth interview with RuPaul to a frank discussion of our culture's ongoing obsession with the black penis. But their strongest episode to date describes their first impressions of the new Smithsonian Museum and culminates with an extensive interview with one of the Museum's curators which helps us to understand the logic by which the Institute set out to build and display this remarkable collection. Having gotten to know the hosts over more mundane matters, it was all the more moving to hear them describe the impact this new Museum had on their sense of themselves and their appreciation of their own history. Given how often discussions of race in America center only on the black-white divide, I was excited to discover Code Switch, which has brought together a whole generation of young journalist of color currently working for National Public Radio. Code Switch brings a multiracial and often intersectional perspective to current events. For me, the highlight so far was an episode entitled "A letter from a Young Asian American to Her Parents about Black Lives Matter", which was surprisingly frank in exploring historic divides between African-Americans and Asian Americans. A special holiday episode had reporters of various ethnicities describe traditional foods that cause them particular discomfort. Following the Orlando shootings, Code Switch explored what the events meant to GLBT, Latino, and American Muslim residents of the city. More recently, they launched a series examining Obama's legacy. In the first episode they dug deep into the ways racialized rhetoric consistently shaped critiques of his public policies, including the ways that his critics crossed the lines traditionally protecting children from such public discourse. Yet they also talked about their own divided loyalties since many felt Obama had not gone far enough in addressing issues of civil rights and immigration reform.

In our recent book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, my co-author Sangita Shresthova provides an overview of the political lives of American Muslim youth. She tells us that these young Muslims were politicized in the wake of 9/11 whether they wanted to be or not: they are often forced to defend their cultural and religious identities. She describes a range of storytelling projects in the American Muslim community where these young activists find their voice and express their perspectives on changing times. Podcast are one of the many ways that we can begin to listen to what these young people have to say. #Good Muslim, Bad Muslim represents a particularly vivid example. Tanzila 'Taz' Ahmed is a LA-based activist and storyteller and her cohost Zahra Noorbakhsh is a San Francisco comedian actor and writer. These two young women share intimate aspects of their lives with their listeners as they describe their shared experience as Muslim women living in California. They explain the program's title:

"To the Muslim community, we are "bad" Muslims - we listen to music, we don't pray regularly, we date or get married to white men (Zahra), identify as punks and radicals (Taz), we perform and share our lives with comedy and writing. So we are bad. So so bad. To non-Muslims, we are "good" - we don't drink, we don't do drugs, we are not criminals, we are social justice activists and community leaders. We are successful, published, accomplished. But then of course, on the flipside, because we are brown Muslims living in a post 9/11 islamophobia funded world, we are also villanized by Western society, too. No matter how you look at it, we are bad Muslims. There's no winning!!!! As Muslim American women, we are walking this fine line between what it means to be good and bad. "

What they share is funny and alarming in equal measures and that's part of the point. Often they are turning the words of Islamiaphobes against themselves:they declare Fatawa against mundane aspects of the world around, showcase what they call Creeping Sharia -- examples of support from unexpected corners, or share awkward conversations with the non-Muslim world and debunk common microaggressions directed against them.

Another useful podcast for gaining some insights into the American Muslim experience is See Something, Say Something. I especially enjoyed a series of episodes dealing with what it is to be an American Muslim fan, including one devoted to the recent Star Wars films entitled "Wookies are Muslim." Other recent episodes of interest focused on memes as a means of challenging dominant representations or another centered on how Muslims decide whether or not to celebrate Christmas. All of these speak to the challenges of living as Muslims in a country that often wants to declare itself emphatically Christian – how to maintain your own identity while embracing aspects of the culture around you.

How to Be A Girl is perhaps the most intimate of the podcast identified today – – told from the perspective of a young mother with a transgender daughter. The podcast lacks the technical polish of the NPR podcasts but for that reason it often has an authenticity and sincerity that is refreshing as we engage in debates around gender and sexuality. We sometimes hear the young daughter's rambling stories told into a tape recorder alongside her mother's attempt to provide a fuller context of what it means to grow up transgender in the current public education system. A great episode has her grilling her friends with the questions she most often gets asked about how she knows her daughter's gender and what she will do if she changes her mind later. Along the way, the mother becomes more and more of a public educator and activist around transgender issues, but she never stops being a dedicated and proud mother who was there to support her daughter during her first steps into an unfamiliar territory. Thanks to Jonathan Gray for bringing this particular podcast to my attention.

Making Gay History is an extraordinary resource for any of us who want to understand the changing sexual politics of this country. Historian Eric Marcus shares recordings made decades ago with some of the leaders and founders of the GLBT movement as part of his research for the book, Making Gay History. Each episode to date has been a treasure -- a voice from the past -- which provides a immediate sense of the struggle which has had to be fought to reach the current moment and how much work still remains to be done.

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Four): American Voices

In the wake of last year's divisive election, there's never been such an urgent need for Americans to be listening to each other. America is in the midst of a dynamic and dramatic demographic shift which is been building over the last several decades and extends into the horizon.  America is becoming a more diverse nation, one which will be minority – majority in a few more years. Some segments of the population have embraced these changes but others have been left out of this conversation, are less certain what the future holds for them, and were encouraged by this election cycle to react with fear and uncertainty. In this context, I feel an urgency to help build bridges between different communities. There is a classic story of Mark Twain hearing about the invention of the telegraph and being told that for the first time the people in Massachusetts would be able to speak to the people in California. His response was to ask what the people in Massachusetts had to say to the people in California. Today we might well ask what the people in Mississippi have to say to people in California. I'm very interested in the infrastructure and social capital that still holds the country together in the face of some of the sharpest ideological divides Americans have faced since the Civil War and Reconstruction. It seems a terrible burden to place all of this on the back of podcasts, but because podcasts are such an intimate medium and support such diverse perspectives, they offer a unique opportunity for us to read each other's mail. That is to say, podcasts allows us to listen into conversations that would otherwise be closed to us and as a consequence, hear perspectives we would not otherwise access. The podcasts I'm exploring today are ones that I use to bridge various cultural divides, to do my homework on race, gender and sexuality in America today, and otherwise broadened my access to minority perspectives.

Podcasts have been at the center of the movement over the last several decades to rediscover the dying art of storytelling. Alongside various forms of digital storytelling, they supported various communities interested in hearing stories of everyday life. Not since the mass observation movement in Britain during World War II has there been such a concerted effort to capture the details of how people live and make sense of the modern world. There is some tension here between podcast that emphasized the art and craft of storytelling and those which are trying for a more documentary style grittiness.

Those which emphasize highly professionalized and well-crafted stories – such as This American Life, The Moth and Snap Judgmentare often among the best-known examples of podcasting. Each has developed a distinctive voice and format but what they have in common is a fascination with the spoken word. On the other in the spectrum, I would play something like Story Corps, which sets up booths at various locations to collect more naturalistic accounts of everyday people's experiences. Story Corps is at its best when the stories are organized around larger social themes and categories, such as an extended series they did several years ago about veterans returning from recent wars or their efforts to deal with the experience of transgendered people or any number of other projects which tackle questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. We learn something about the value Story Corps places on voice and personal narrative by examining their standards mission statement: "StoryCorps’ mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters. At the same time, we are creating an invaluable archive for future generations."

After the election results, many of us woke up the following morning with the strong sense that we didn't fully understand America as well as we thought we did. Red America and Blue America were talking past each other, might've been doing so for many years. One of the best resources I've used to work through some of those feelings is a podcast that originates in West Virginia called Us and Them. This podcast explores the faultlines in American cultural and political life. It's host Trey Kay models what I would describe as ethical yet critical listening. A progressive, he never the less is seeking out conservative voices with the goal not of knocking them down but of exploring why conservatives think what they do. He certainly doesn't let anyone off the hook for misinformation or faulty logic. But he remains open to alternative vantage points and tries to provide some historical context for how they emerged. I was drawn to the podcast by his extensive reporting on the debates around the Confederate flag and its continual role in southern civic life. Us and Them has also done outstanding reporting on the textbook struggles in Texas, the so-called "war on Christmas", addictions to opiates in rural America,gays living in small and rural towns, Islamaphobia and the experiences of recent refugees moving to middle America, and many other topics. I have been raving to anyone who will listen about Us and Them as a model for what other kinds of meaningful interventions might look like that bridge between different American realities. Often when people speak about the need to listen more fully to rural and working-class America – almost always read as white America – there is an anxiety that this will mean the displacement or marginalization once again of minority perspectives. This podcast continually shows shows us the importance of bringing multiple perspectives together as we try to unravel the complex history of the current culture wars. Along a similar vein, I might recommend Home of the Brave which comes from a westerner's perspective and has been doing a fantastic job covering debates around environmental preservation and especially around native American politics. Thanks to Elyse Eidman-Aadahl from the National Writing Project for calling this one to my attention.  Both have done some compelling episodes interviewing everyday Trump supporters.

For me, as a native Southerner, part of this process has involved in thinking more deeply than I have in a long time about the American South, its culture, its politics, and its history. As I do so, two podcasts have emerged as essential listening. The first Gravy comes from the Southern Foodways Alliance, a group that "documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Our work sets a welcome table where all may consider our history and our future in a spirit of respect and reconciliation." In many ways, food is what South gets right: southern cooking bridges between different racial, ethnic and economic groups each of whom call call the South their home. My all-time favorite episode, "Southern Fried Baked Alaska" asks some core questions about what makes southern cooking southern and how "fine dining" has emerged as the South negotiates a more cosmopolitan identity. Gravy often examines the historic emergence of so-called "white trash" cooking, examining the history of particular dishes or ingredients, specifying the distinctions between different states and regions, or dealing with the history of institutions such as Coca-Cola. But Gravy offers us a vision of a multiracial South, exploring not only what black Southerners brought to the table from Africa or their experiences of slavery, but also factoring in the various foods brought to the South by immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

The second is the Smithsonian's Folkways Sound Sessions, one of a number of podcasts that have emerged from the Smithsonian Institute in recent years. I know of no other cultural institution which has made such a deep commitment to the podcast. There are probably a dozen or more podcast representing the different museums and collections at the Smithsonian. I've sampled a number of them and they seem consistently strong and interesting – ranging from short videos for children about the animals found at the nation's zoo to short docent talks about specific works found in the National Portrait Gallery. The Folkways Sound Sessions draw from a rich archive of folk music collected going back to the 1930s. I grew up listening to some of the Folkways recordings on vinyl records which I checked out of the Atlanta Public Library so some of the materials presented here are very old friends indeed. Each episode's focuses on a specific artist, their work, and their contributions. I take great pleasure listening to their in-depth explorations of Woody Guthrie, Bill Monroe, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Leadbelly. But I've also discovered new artist such as Ella Jenkins, Doc Watson, and Jean Ritchie who would not been on my playlists otherwise. Only rarely does the podcast extend beyond American regional traditions and tap into the extensive holdings the Smithsonian has in world music. Here, we get podcast dedicated to Oud music or the music of the Silk Road. Just as Gravy allows us a deeper appreciation of what food says about the region, here we learn about the ways that music has expressed the struggles of the working class South.

While on the subject of the Smithsonian, I wanted to do a shout out to the podcast they created around the opening of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Historically Black. As part of the process of building up that museums collection, the Smithsonian reached out to everyday people in hopes that they might share family treasures that shed light on his the social history of black America. Beyond putting these objects on display, the museum also collected the stories behind them and share some of them through this podcast series. For me one of the most moving ones centered around a bill of sale as a former slave purchased his wife and children. Another must listen episode recounts the story of NASA's human computers and provides valuable background for the current film, Hidden Figures. The others range geographically and chronologically including accounts of fiddle music in Missouri, a photographer capturing the Harlem Renaissance, and the Million Man March in Washington DC. My only regret is that the series was a special event rather than ongoing outreach. I loved every episode here but I'm sad that there were so few.

 

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Three): Television, Fandom and Popular Culture

Television and other popular culture Maureen Ryan is quite simply the smartest person writing about television today. Her tastes are refreshingly eclectic ranging from "quality dramas" like Rectify to genre series like Killjoys without any signs of High-Low bias. She fearlessly champions the interests of television fans, which is all the more remarkable given Variety's history as a spokesman for the television industry. She brings a feminist politics to such topics as the representation of sexual violence on HBO dramas like Game of Thrones or the female gaze into Outlander. She has been especially vocal in advocating for more diversity and inclusion both in front of and behind the camera. And no one can take down an overrated series like she can, as she demonstrated in a long rant  about the final episodes of Westworld. So when I want to get an engaging reading on new and old shows in the era of peak television, I search out the latest episode of Talking TV with Ryan and Ryan. Here Maureen Ryan is joined by Ryan McGee for a lively discussion of contemporary television landscape. As it happens, I've gotten to know Maureen Ryan through our mutual involvement with the Peabody Awards Committee and I've never met McGee but listening to this smart series brings all the pleasure of spending time with several friends who share my passions for the medium.

Rob Cesternino has parlayed an appearance on Survivor: the Amazon into a minor podcast empire. Rob Has A Podcast is essential listening for all fans of reality television. Originally, the podcast covered only Survivor with interviews with each contestant after they were voted off the island, detailed speculation and critical commentary on each episode, and ongoing exchanges with current and former contestants. Here we get a sense of what takes place behind-the-scene: being a reality's contestant becomes a point of entry into a larger social community. Given that I have never missed an episode of Survivor in its many years on the air, this is the place I go to really geek out about a series that is off the radar for most of the rest of the viewing public. Rob Has a Podcast has expanded its coverage to incorporate a range of other reality programs including Big Brother, Celebrity Apprentice, Amazing Race, Hunted and The Bachelor franchise, as well as a podcast that picks up on oddball current events and popular culture.

I would love to be able to recommend to you a really top-flight podcast about comics and graphic novels. There certainly is no shortage of podcasts out there featuring middle-aged fan boys talking about the guys in capes, which reproduces the experience of hanging out at your local comic shop. Unfortunately, I have yet to find any of them whose tastes come anywhere near what's on my current pull list. My tastes in graphic storytelling are eclectic but lean toward the margins. I certainly read some Marvel and DC material every month but I like the more offbeat titles there such as Hellcat or Squirrel Girl or Ms. Marvel or She-Hulk, even Silver Surfer. More often I like comics that combine genres storytelling with a more independent flavor (think Sex Criminals or Timberjanes), Saga or Papergirls). So if any reader out there knows of a good comics podcast, I'd love a recommendation. For the moment, the best match I found has been Word Balloons, an interview program which features long – and I do mean long – interviews with top comics writers and artists. Its host John Suintres wisely allows guests to dwell on their current obsessions and offers behind-the-scenes insights into why the comic business operates the way it does. I particularly enjoyed episodes where Brian Bendis discusses his experience at the Peabody awards for Jessica Jones or Kelly Sue DeConnick discusses the feminist politics behind her amazing Bitch Planet series.

I'm still making up my mind about The Comics Canon podcasts. Here, the hosts – again two middle-aged fan boys – explore one graphic novel per week, some old and some new, to explain their impact on the evolution of the superhero genre. If you want to understand why Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, or Frank Miller matter, this is the place for you. But, With the exception of Fun Home, they don't branch very deeply into the independent comic scene.

More recently still, I've stumbled onto Comics from Grownups -- their selection of materials skews much more towards the works being published by Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, and other independent comics publishers. I've grabbed a bunch of recommendations from them already and it is doing the job of helping me find interesting titles, but oddly, I am finding what they have to say about these books less interesting than which books they select to talk about, so this has not yet found its way to the top of my list yet.

Imaginary Worlds is my favorite podcast dealing with science fiction film, television, and literature. As its title suggests, the focus here is on world building which means we may explore the construction of a Nazi 1960s America in The Man in the High Castle one week, political allegory of the Death Star the next, different theories of magic in contemporary fantasy fiction the following week. Most episodes involve interviews with writers, both academic and popular, as well as fans and creative artist. I don't know of any podcast that gets as deep into the underlying logic of fictional worlds as this one does. Imaginary worlds has dedicated long series of episodes dedicated to various aspects of Star Wars and Harry Potter, but is also done one offs on everything from Octavia Butler, The Golem and the Jenni and The Wizard of Oz. It helps that the host Eric Molinsky in this case came with a history of having worked at Pixar and brings an insider's take on the creative choices shaping our favorite franchises. And lately, he's been exploring issues of race and representation in popular media, stepping aside to allow guest hosts of color to describe their relationships to, for example, Last Airbender on their own terms.

Harry Potter and the Sacred Text features Casper ter Kulle and Vanessa Zoltan, two theologians in training from Harvard, working their way through JK Rowling's books chapter by chapter and finding a surprising array of spiritual allegories. The two hosts are knowledgeable about the fantasy genre and its fandom and they take the books seriously in terms of exploring why they have been meaningful to so many people. On the one hand, they use the discussions of the books to explore debates about theology and moral philosophy, applying a range of different interpretive strategies just to see what will work. On the other hand, they are moving through the books in a more systematic fashion than any book club would with the result that we come away with much deeper understanding and appreciation of what Rowling accomplished with the series.

Making Oprah is a three-part series which traces the emergence of Oprah Winfrey's media empire. It touches on all the high points of Winfrey's career for her debut on local television to her provocative dialogue with a room full of racist whites from Forsyth County, Georgia, through the debut of her highly influential book club, the mass giveaway of automobiles, and her turn toward more spiritual content. This limited series interviews many of the people who shaped Oprah's career including an unprecedented level of access to the star herself. I've never considered myself an Oprah fan but I found myself consistently fascinated by the documentary series' insights into the rise and fall talk television.

No podcast out there provides as rich and as varied a depiction of contemporary fan culture and politics as Fansplaining does. I may be biased since one of the two hosts, Flourish Klink, is my former student and my son's professional colleague. But this is where I go to keep abreast of new forms of fan culture and emerging figures in fandom studies. I will be featuring an interview with the two host on my blog later this spring. An underlying strength has been the podcast's ongoing coverage of the politics of racial diversity within the fan communities, with guests including a fair number of fans and acafans of color. I'm also impressed by the podcast's ongoing coverage of research dealing with historical roots of today's fan culture. And Fansplaning has done valiant efforts to expand the range of phantoms under consideration, dealing with fans of sports, games, and popular music alongside fans of genre fiction. Both of the hosts grew up to fandom and maintain strong identification with various corners of the fan communities. Flourish Klink now consults with the media industry as they think through new strategies for interacting with their fans. Elizabeth Minkel is a working journalist often covers fan-related topics during her day job. The result is less polished or rehearsed than some of the more professionally produced podcasts, but it comes from the heart and more importantly from the community.

I am just discovering Black Girl Nerds but so far I've been impressed by the scope of the topics it covers and by the originality of perspective it brings the bear on even the most familiar science fiction series. I first encountered it in a search for good discussions of Afrofuturism but my favorite episode so far have been interviews with creative artist such as Marjorie Chiu, the woman behind this years critically acclaimed Monstress series, and Riz Ahmed, the American Muslim actor gaining visibility for his appearances in The Night Of and Rogue One. In both cases, the use of critical race theory brought out aspects of these artists' work that I've not seen in other conversations. Politics of diversity remains a hot button issue both within fandom and fandom studies. Most of the news has been focused on white male backlash against "politically correct" casting decisions. This focus allows the industry to go slow in embracing inclusion for fear of alienating their core market. But one doesn't have to look far to find discussions like those on this podcast where fandom is way out of front of the creative industries in its call for greater diversity of representation within popular media.

A Few of My Favorite Podcasts (Part Two): Cinema

This is part two in a six part series pimping my favorite podcasts. I am happy to hear further suggestions from readers.  

Popular Culture

It will not surprise anyone who knows me well that I listen to a large number podcasts focused around popular culture, media, and entertainment. The one ring to rule them all is NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, which feels like a bunch of really smart and witty friends who get together every week to talk about their most recent discoveries and passions. My personal favorite segment is when they each share "what's making them happy" that week. This can include anything from a small budget genre film, a pop song, a young adult novel, or an offbeat televisions series. The hosts are unapologetic about the pleasure and joy pop-culture brings them -- no "guilty pleasures" here. Don't get me wrong. These guys can pontificate with the best of them but they do not need to justify or explain away their passion for popular culture. These people know their stuff. My personal favorite is Glenn Weldon, NPR's resident comics and SF, enthusiast, was published book length studies of Batman and the rise of nerd culture, Superman, and Roger Corman. If you want to hear the program and best, check out their special episode long discussion of Hamilton. For a more typical example, see their discussions of Jane the Virgin and My Crazy Ex-girlfriend, two of my favorite television series. Every so often they do what they call smallbatch episodes which are more focused, often interviews with people like Amy Schumer, Stranger Things' Duffer Brothers, The Daily Show's Trevor Noah, or UnReal's Sarah Shapiro. But this also might include their field reports from San Diego comic con, their reactions of Pokémon Go, or something else that just can't wait. Cinema

In The Next Picture Show, Keith Phillips, Tasha Robertson, Scott Tobias, and Genevieve Koski, the former editorial team behind The Dissolve, provide a biweekly series focused around contemporary movies and the older films that help to inspire. I hesitate to call the older films classics since they rarely go back before the 1970s. Perhaps we can use the Turner networks phrase -- "the New Classics." The core of the program is in these juxtapositions between old and new. Some are predictable, inevitable, but still fascinating such as the Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Lalaland, Suicide Squad and The Dirty Dozen, or the old and new versions of the Ghostbusters. Some take more reflection such as Memento and Finding Dory. Once they've been disdained tackle television as a trace the similarities between the film and television versions of Westworld. These critics go deep with hour-long discussions for each film covering history, technique, genre, characters and themes. The hosts are well-informed and thoughtful without being stuffy or overly technical. They won't talk over your head but I managed to leave each episode with new insight and often an urge to dig out my DVD versions of the New Classics.

The Cinephiliacs is willing to take things in a much more ponderous direction. Its center of gravity is the realm of academic film studies. The quality of the episodes has everything to do with the quality of the guests, many of whom are old friends and colleagues of mine, such as David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Scott Bukatman, Leah Jacobs, and J Hoberman, though they might also include media makers who have a deep knowledge and passion for their medium. The host Peter Labuza annoys me at least a few times every episode, sometimes coming across as a precocious undergraduate too eager to impress. Once you get to interviews, he does his homework and talks us through interactivity jump key insights and their lifelong love affairs with the cinema. Each interview culminates with an in-depth discussion of a classic film. Here he's not afraid to go to older and more obscure works. This is where you can enjoy serious conversations about The Tall T, Out of The Past, Daisy Kenyon, How Green Was My Valley, and Only Angels Have Wings.

Somewhere in between is The Canon. Each week the hosts Devin Faraci and Amy Nicholson propose a new title for inclusion on their list of all-time favorite films, providing some justifications for their choices, and allowing their audience to determine the outcome. Sample titles might include The General, Blazing Saddles, or Stand By Me. In short, selections are old and new but nothing that won't be familiar to the average person with a Netflix account. The discussions are engaging but on the surface as in an extended debate about whether we could make a film like Blazing Saddles in today's politically correct times or another about the relative virtues of Ringo Starr or George Harrison.

If you want to learn more about film history and in particular Hollywood's dark and sordid past, let me recommend You Must Remember This which is ever so much better, more substantive, and better informed than we have any right to expect. Keep in mind that I loath the pompous old windbags in armchairs that introduce film classics on television. They generally repeat mythologies that could be disproven by anyone with an undergraduate film studies degree and access to Google. Once my eyes start rolling three or four times per minute, I put them on mute until the movie starts. So I was skeptical when my son shared his excitement about the host Karina Longworth and her hour-long episodes about Silver Screen legends. However, I've only caught her in a few howling mistakes – mostly when she tried to describe films she hasn't seen and no one else has either -- for example the sound films of Buster Keaton or the non-horror films of Val Lewton. For the series at its best, check out the season-long 16 part account of the Hollywood blacklist which offers juicy tidbits of gossip one moment and a deep dive into Cold War American politics the next.

I have to confess to being a lifelong obsession with the Oscars. I get much deeper into the weeds about industry buzz than most. I am often the ringer who wins your parties prediction pool year after year.  Little Gold Men is my favorite Oscar prediction podcasts. It is created by the entertainment reporters at Vanity Fair. They use the Oscar prediction frame to focus attention on a broad range of contemporary releases, dealing with everything from the sexual assault charges that largely destroy the chances for Birth of a Nation to the films that won the hearts critics and audiences at the Toronto film Festival. While they focus on the top five or six categories like everyone else, they're willing to spend time on documentary, animation, or technical categories and if you want to stay competitive, this is what separates the newbies from the pros. They also can provide back story on the negotiations around eligibility such as why Moonlight is competing for best adapted screenplay, why Viola Davis is up for best supporting actress for Fences, or why Arrival was disqualified for musical score.

The Talkhouse Film Podcast is in a league of its own. Each week it brings together two filmmakers, mostly from indie circuit, to engage in a serious but freeform conversation about anything they want. The host get out of the way and let the gas guests interact with each other. So you can geek out with Joe Dante and Max Landis, do some female bonding between Amber Tamblyn and and Aisha Tyler, go goofy with Paul Rubens and Kid Cudi, ponder the nature of the universe with Laurie Anderson and Darren Aronofsky, debate media violence with Abel Ferrara and Gasper Noe, or sound world-weary with Allison Anders and Wim Wenders. Here the quality of the episode rests with the guests and as my descriptions suggest, the tone varies dramatically week by week. Thanks to Jocelyn Kelvin for introducing me to this one.

Film Comment was one of my favorite magazines when I was an undergraduate: every issue yielded intense lunchtime conversations with my cineaste friends as we debated various claims made about the state of contemporary cinema or the value of particular films. I was so happy when Virginia Wright Wexman told me that they had a podcast. This one is full of love of movies, new and old, and there's an atmosphere of passionate friends getting together to replay old debates and score new points. I am just digging into it, but it is a last minute addition to this post.

I am also now digging into the Aca-Media podcast, produced by the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Here, the focus is decisively academic, including information about archives and new research initiatives, but along the way, you get to hear smart people sharing their insights about film studies, broadcast history, sound studies, cultural studies, comic studies, game studies, transmedia studies...  I particularly enjoyed a recent oral history interview with Constance Penley, an old friend and an important voice in feminist media studies.

A Few Of My Favorite Podcasts (Part One): Intro and Politics

This is the first of a Six Part Series. Like many of my friends, I became fascinated several years ago with the pleasures of longform audio storytelling as represented by the successful Serial. When that series ended, I found myself searching for other examples of podcasting as an emerging media form, a search that is only intensified as I've ended up reviewing a range of podcast and my roles as the jury member for the Peabody Awards. This fall the series of health setbacks left me with more time on my hands, I have fallen even more deeply down that particular rabbit hole. Since I want to share with my loyal readers some of my personal favorites -- some of the best examples of contemporary podcast across a range of different genres.

As I reflect on my favorites, I'm still trying to decide what makes a podcast good. People in public radio talk about the driveway moment – times when you have gotten so caught up in a particular story that you do not want to turn off the car engine and come inside. This analogy emerged because of the ways that so many of us listen to radio while driving. We tune into a particular network in search of compelling content as we move around the city and we listen until we reach our destination in most cases. We may form a relationship over time with a particular network or host but for most of us, radio is not an appointment based medium.

The podcast, on the other hand, is an engagement based media. We actively seek out specific series, often searching for them by name at the iTunes Store – which makes it imperative that the podcast offers us something fresh and distinctive, something we will not find anywhere else, something that we will want to return to on a regular basis. In some cases, we are pulled towards niche content, shows that address underserved audiences, shows of narrower but more intense interest than can be supported on broadcast radio. This focus on specialized interest reflects the relatively open market of podcasting today. There are growing number of companies such as Panoply that focus on podcasts. Podcasts are emerging from public institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution which has made a major commitment to public outreach. NPR and PRI are developing podcasts as extensions of their existing programs and as a farm league for emerging personalities. But there also a wealth of grassroots and independent producers working in the space. I'm especially interested, for example, in various fan communities as early adapters and active users of this platform to share content that thrives here but would never reach the airwaves. And we're seeing rich examples of podcast producers that serve the needs of racial ethnic and sexual minorities including for example American Muslims.

Not only must the podcast provide me distinctive content that I will actively seek out on a recurring basis but the host has to be someone with whom I want to establish a more intimate relationship. The radio host comes to the speaker in my car. I tend to listen to podcasts through my ear buds as I ride the bus, as I walk around downtown Los Angeles, as I'm laying in bed next to my sleeping wife during my frequent bouts of insomnia. For me to want to engage them in this way, the host has to adopt a different tone of voice and a different kind of address than a broadcaster might. I don't want deep booming voices -- I want something that is more casual and conversational. I will listen to a single person tell me a story via podcast in a way that I expect multiple voices and perspectives on a typical radio broadcast.

Each of the examples I am sharing here the six cell by these two criteria – distinctive content and a compelling host that I enjoy spending time with.

How do you identify good podcasts? Well, apart from personal rec list like this one, you can sample from the featured podcast from top charts at the iTunes Store. I certainly try to be aware of the shows generating the most buzz at iTunes but many of my favorites are lower ranking shows that I would never find by that means. A fair number of the shows referenced here were brought to my attention by The Big Listen, an NPR podcast which showcases other podcasts. Each week its host Lauren Ober showcases 5-10 different programs, each organized by shared interests. Sometimes she interviews the host of top-rated programs and ask them to recommend other interesting shows in their space. She also offers her own reviews of programs she finds engaging. Her tastes are eclectic but also refined. I've ended up sampling two or three programs from most of her episodes and I found many of my favorite off the beaten path examples in this way. So The Big Listen is an ideal starting point if you want to explore the variety the contemporary podcasting offers.

Politics

Through the fall, a good portion of my podcast listening was bound up with the election. I sought regular updates from NPR's Politics podcast, which during the closing weeks of the campaign was posting new episodes every night, offering contexts for today's top stories but also going beyond the headlines. A strength of the series is its responsiveness to listener questions, which often encourages the reporters to provide a fuller explanation of how the political system operates than what we found on the evening news. A common complaint is that American journalism offers few points of entry for first-time voters. I can't say that this podcast fully addresses that problem but it goes a long way towards offering a more transparent version of the US political system while also digging deeply enough to provide new insight for us more hard-core politicos. The podcast output has slowed down twice a week through the transition and the early days of the Trump regime. But they offer more intense updates when breaking stories demand them.

Some of the best podcast this past year provide in-depth interviews with key political figures, not only the candidates but also their campaign managers and advisors and score journalists and commentators. My favorite was Politico's Off Message. Veteran reporter Glenn Thrush (who recently left the series) digs deep through interviews with key players from both the Republican and Democratic parties. I stress this ideological diversity because so many podcasts like blogs or online news sites start with partisan bias. But here, my favorites are often conservative figures such as Donald Trump's current Atty. Gen. nominee Jeff Sessions, Trump advisor Roger Stone, House Speaker Paul Ryan, right-wing talk show host Hugh Hewett, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. His interviews help me to understand who these people are and what motivates the positions they advocate, even where we fundamentally disagree. Thrush's questioning is rigorous but also cordial and open-minded. The picture that emerges could not be more different from the shouting matches many of these figures engage with on cable news networks. Thrush also explores emerging figures on the left – from current Democratic National Committee chair candidate Keith Ellison to the Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, from rapper Chuck D to New York Sen. Kristin Gillibrand. He also takes us behind-the-scenes to get to know other journalists such as Nate Silver better.

There are other great interview podcast in the political space – for example check out The Axe Files with Obama adviser David Axelrod. Axelrod has great conversations with cultural figures such as Hamilton's Lin – Manuel Miranda or Van Jones. But Axe tends to focus on left of center guest and thus I find fewer surprises here then on Off Message. The number of conservative and Republican guests has picked up a bit since the election season.

Another interview series I would recommend would be Candidate Confessional which features in-depth briefings with former presidential and Senate candidates about what went wrong for them on the campaign trail. Among my favorites here are exchanges with Martin O'Malley, Howard Dean, Anthony Weiner and Michele Bachmann, each of whom are much more frank on this podcast that I've seen them in other venues.

For those of you who are interested in the history of American politics I have two recommendations – Presidential and Whistle Stop. Across the past year Presidential's Lillian Cunningham from the Washington Post has produced a profile of each of the countries presidents down through Donald Trump. For each episode, she interviews key archivist especially the Library of Congress and draws insights from the deep bench of political reporters and history buffs at the Post. Cunningham is at her best when digging into some of the characters than most often are overlooked in our history classes. So check out her account of the disputed election that brought Rutherford B Hayes to the White House, of the complex and secretive emotional life of James Buchanan -- our only bachelor president, of the tragedy that surrounded the administration of Franklin Pierce and so forth. She often ask historians what it would've been like to go on a blind date with these guys which can seem awkward and inane but often yields rich insights into their personalities.

Slate's Whistlestop shares an in-depth account of a key moment from the history of presidential campaigns. Host John Dickerson often selected his stories to draw parallels to the contemporary campaign. So for example he uses Ross Perot, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace to explain the rise of Donald Trump. He prepares us for the debates by discussing Gerald Ford's biggest gaffe in debate history. He dipped into 19th century campaign history with for example accounts of the disintegration of the Whig party or of the charges that Grover Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child. But he's at his best when he can fold in a few soundbites as he does effectively in his account of Mario Cuomo's status as the front runner who refused to jump into the race, of John F. Kennedy's attempts to address concerns about his Catholicism during the West Virginia primary, or the prolonged struggle at the Republican national convention between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Dickinson is such a compelling storyteller that you listen with baited breath to accounts of events you already know well. He offers insights into cultural context also -- for example, how Betty Ford emerges a feminist First Lady. As the campaign concluded, the pace has slowed but he's beginning to share stories of presidential administrations, again using history to provide background for current events.

Next Time: Cinema

Superheroes and the Civic Imagination

 

In early December, I delivered -- via Skype -- some opening remarks for the Superhero Identities Symposium at Melbourne's Australian Center for the Moving Image. Angela Ndlianis, one of the event organizers, has let me know that an audio podcast version of my remarks and those of some of the other sessions are now available online. You can access my remarks here.

 

My remarks built upon Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Liana Gamber-Thompson, “Super-Powers to the People!: How Young Activists are Tapping the Civic Imagination,” in Eric Gordon and Paul Mihalias (eds.) Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 295-320.

Here's the abstract for the talk:

“What Else Can You Do With Them?”: Superheroes and the Civic Imagination

By Henry Jenkins

“If a superhero can be such a powerful and effective metaphor for male adolescence, then what else can you do with them?” -- Kurt Busiek, AstroCity

In his 2015 book, On the Origin of the Superheroes, Chris Cavalier traces one origin story of the superhero back to the figure of popular rebels, such as Robin Hood and Guy Fawkes, suggesting the ongoing struggles to contain these larger-than-life protagonists operating outside the system into the constraints of corporate ideologies and political institutions.  From the start, the superhero had a politics and from time to time -- when Superman was “Champion of the Oppressed” rather than the defender of “Truth, Justice, and the American way,” when Green Lantern and Green Arrow set out to discover a troubled 1960s America, when Captain America questions the military-industrial complex, and when Wonder Woman inspires the birth of Second Wave Feminism -- that politics threatens to get out of hand. It is one thing to kick Hitler’s butt and another to stand up for GLBT rights, challenge Islamiphobia, or support African self-determination.

My interest here, though, is not first and foremost in the way politics is depicted in superhero comics, but rather the ways superheroes are stepping off the page and the screen and becoming resources for the Civic Imagination. Around the world, activists are struggling for immigrant rights, battling rape culture, questioning the police state, asking for homes for Syrian refuges,  or condemning wealth inequality while deploying iconography and mythology borrowed from the American superhero tradition.  Before we can change the world, we need to be able to imagine what a better world might look like, we need to believe that change is possible, we need to see ourselves as agents of change, and we need to develop empathy for the plight of others whose experiences are different from our own. The Civic Imagination refers to the often shared mental constructs and rhetorical devices through which we inspire these potentials for social and political change.

Recent research on participatory politics in the United States suggests that more and more the Civic Imagination is being fueled by popular culture, especially among youth, and we have begun to see such patterns elsewhere around the world.  There is a blurring of the lines between fans and activists as characters from popular culture are being reimagined, redrawn, and re-performed to speak for non-dominant peoples who often want contemporary heroic narratives they can pass along to their own children and help them imagine a different role for themselves as political and civic agents.

And this process has gone global as the success of the Marvel franchises has introduced the superhero genre to countries, especially in the global south, which have had limited exposure to it before. As countries seek to create mythologies that place them on the map of an increasingly transnational culture, as they seek narratives of personal and collective empowerment, they are seeking to insert their concerns into the framework the superhero genre provides us.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of this phenomenon, situating it within the larger contexts of participatory politics and the Civic Imagination. I will consider what about the superhero has made this popular culture trope such a flexible and generative tool for sparking the Civic Imagination. And I will close with some reflections on the strengths and limits of conceptualizing struggles for social justice within the terms the superhero genre offers.

 

You can go here for information about the conference and links to other presentations, including featured interviews with Hope Larsen, Paul Dini, Nicola Scott, and Tom Taylor,  among others.

 

Angela also shared with me some great videos produced for the event interviewing Australian fans and artists from local comics conventions. Enjoy!

Do Fans Generate Transtexts?: An Interview with Melanie Bourdaa and Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz (Part Three)

An important contribution of this book is expanding the range of exemplars of transmedia practice to consider the role that transtexts play in relation to the contemporary sitcom and professional wrestling, among others. What are sitcom producers doing differently from those working with speculative fictions and how might expanding what we look at further sharpen our conceptual vocabulary for thinking about transmedia?  

Derhy Kurtz: Thank you. Sam Ford’s chapter on wrestling and the chapter on sitcoms do offer perspectives which are... under-represented, we could say, in academic literature on transmedia; as does yours, on a totally different level, with regards to geographically and conceptually different types of transmedia. This was precisely the point of this book: not only to develop the analysis of key and often-discussed topics through new case studies, as Matt Hills and Paul Booth skilfully have, but also to bring new elements and perspectives to the table.

And some sitcom producers using transmedia strategies, indeed, do things differently, on a number of levels. In our chapter, Simone Knox and I explain that in this TV III era, TV channels, and US networks in particular, are struggling for audience share, and sitcoms are thus turning to smaller but more engaged audiences; with the producers encouraging invested viewership by using transtexts. This is where we came up with two new notions (albeit not specific/limited to comedy). Transtexts give their audiences the opportunity to willingly (continue to) suspend their disbelief, play along and ‘believe’ that the transtexts are ‘real’ (for example, that books and or tweets were in fact written by the characters); this is what we have called Accepted Imaginative Realism. It is, therefore, an imaginative game between the producers, who invest in creative labour to provide a more compelling and life-like storyworld, and the audience, who becomes further engaged and chooses to ‘believe’ in the transtexts (in a manner reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s ‘we-know-they-know’ double-codedness of the postmodern). But of course, one can also express the situation from the production perspective, rather than the reception one, through the concept of the Reality Envelope, where the producers have a specific agenda: attempting to push this (reality) envelope so as to penetrate beyond the TV set’s screen and thus bring this sense of reality to the audience. We chose that expression because, in addition to the ‘pushing the envelope’ idiom, an envelope is a spatial object, alike transtexts ‘hovering’ around their storyworlds, and also because envelopes are fragile, a notion which we must be kept in mind in relation to these concepts of ‘realism’. But I wish we had more time / space, because there are many more elements to talk about, which are used within transtexts by sitcoms producers, such as issues relating to texture, performance and the actors’ input. To sum up, individually and collectively, such concepts can enrich debates on transtexts, and in our conclusion, we invite others to engage with them and test them out through other case studies, whether from or beyond the sitcom genre.

While most accounts acknowledge that many transmedia texts function as both storytelling and branding, the emphasis has largely been on identifying their contributions to the story. Yet there are several places in the book where this emphasis is reversed. What might readers learn about branding by looking more closely at transmedia franchises?

 

Derhy Kurtz: Yes, I think this is another important element as well, and it is interesting to finish on that note. Besides studying what transtexts and branding can bring to a story, one could and should also look at what transmedia stories can bring to branding, and marketing, and communication. As it happens, the answer is: a lot! I have long been interested in that aspect, in fact, and aside from guest-editing a special issue entitled ‘Branding TV: Transmedia to the Rescue’ a few years ago, I actually teach transmedia as a communication and a branding strategy to communication postgraduate students (it was only natural, therefore, that this emphasis would be reversed at times in the book, as you note).

Regarding transtexts and branding, and the text-brand, Hélène Laurichesse, by applying concepts such as the galaxy system and the brand universe to transtexts, and by clarifying the place of fans in this brand-centred analysis, brings a rare insight into how the two can work with one another. But aside from branding, transmedia franchises (for which a whole new legal framework must be considered, as explained by Jennifer Henderson, due to the presence of extensions under many forms) can be used as an example to create an engaging marketing or communication strategy around a product, which will be more immersive and more compelling than a traditional advertising campaign could ever be; as was done, for instance, by Chipotle and its scarecrow campaign a few years back. But it can also be used in order to create a new storyworld, the transtexts of which would be the ones to be sold to the public, like LEGO (through the help of various right-leasing devices, in order to use a number of comic books or other fictional characters), which have created a universe where people are... ‘legos’, and directed the audience to the transtexts themselves: videogames, films, etc., which are sold to the consumers, rather than to the original product itself: the toys (as opposed to using transtexts as a decoy to hide the advertising purpose, while bringing people back to the original product; in the case of Chipotle: sandwiches).

Transtexts are, therefore, not ‘simply’ a persistent – and rising – narrative form for a variety of cultural products anymore; they are also part of the future of communication, marketing, branding and advertising.

Melanie Bourdaa is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in Communication and Information Sciences, and a researcher in Transmedia Storytelling and fan studies. She ran a MOOC entitled « Understanding Transmedia Storytelling » in France. She created the GREF, a research group gathering scholars working in the field of Fan Studies.  She co-created the CATS, a consortium on Transmedia Storytelling, gathering researchers and professionals in this field of expertise. She runs the research program “MediaNum”, dealing with the valorization of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling, funded by the Region d’Aquitaine.

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Sciences Po (IEP) and Ecole Polytechnique (X), as well as at various communication and business schools. He created undergraduates/postgraduates courses, including on Transmedia, and holds experience in marketing and in institutional/promotional/political communication and consulting. His PhD, at the University of East Anglia, explores ‘success’ in the TV industry.

Do Fans Generate Transtexts: An Interview with Melanie Bourdaa and Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz (Part Two)

  There has been an international conversation amongst fans, producers, and academics about the nature of transmedia entertainment over more than a decade now. What do we know now that we did not know a decade ago? Why is now the right time to publish a new book on this topic?

Bourdaa: We are in a more mature time to analyze transmedia productions and strategies. A decade ago, production teams were experimenting, trying to find the good balance between expanding stories, the use of the right platform to tell their stories and engaging the audience. When projects blossomed a decade ago, there was this sense that transmedia was all about marketing and digital production. I am thinking of the interactive platform NBC launched, called NBC 360, to enhance the stories of their TV shows. Now producers realize that transmedia content could be deployed on different media platforms and non-digital ones, such as comic books, novels, billboards, radio podcasts for example. Moroever, Jeff Gomez introduced the term Transmedia Producer in the Producer Guild of America, creating a job with rules to develop extended universes.

This book is published at a perfect time for scholars to look back and take a step back on transmedia projects. They have the background to know what worked, what didn’t work, they had time to delve into the strategies, play with them, engage in the stories, go from one platform to the other to unravel new contents. They played the role of the fans, and that gives them the legitimacy to analyze the strategies from within, giving new insights on practices both from a production point-of-view and an audience one.

 

Early definitions of transmedia placed a strong emphasis on the “coordinated” and “systematic” unfolding of content across media platforms and thus on the central role of the author, not necessarily an individual but a creative team or design network, in insuring consistency and continuity across the story world. Reading fan works as transtexts, alongside the commercially produced paratexts and intertexts, requires us to adopt a different model of transmedia authorship. What do you see as the implications of this shift towards a more participatory account of how transmedia takes shape around a fictional property?

 

Bourdaa: When you coined your definition Henry, it was around a Hollywood IP, The Matrix Trilogy, and the case study has some specificities, besides an obvious marketing one: the use of multiple platforms to tell chunk of an overall story, bridges between those platforms to form a coherent whole and the creation of a coordinated narrative universe. The goals were to extend the stories and to engage and immerse hard-core fans in the storyworld, hunting for clues and moving from one platform to the next. This is what Brian Clark called the West Coast model, based on a franchise property, where ancillary contents are created around a mothership. Your definition was a bit restrictive in terms of effectiveness and feasibility for production teams and you developed 7 principles to soften it.

With the integration of fans’ works, of paratexts and intertexts, we are in a more flexible definition of transmedia strategies. The term Transtexts as we explained earlier and in the book considers both production strategies and fans’ tactics in the creation of a common, bigger, more shifting narrative universe. Of course, this requires from the production to include spaces to welcome fans’ creativity and opportunities to participate and collaborate in the narration. Transmedia strategies are very effective around entertainment strategies with a solid fanbase, as fans will create and produce their own content and own meaning, and they will engage in the collaborative spaces required by the production design. I am thinking of ARG (alternate Reality Games), which are participatory storytelling, asking for a huge collaboration between players to advance in the storyworld and discover clues and Easter eggs, on media platforms and in the real world.

One of the basic principles of Transmedia Storytelling or Transtexts is the creation of a narrative universe, a process called world-building. The stronger the world-building, with reliable characters and imaginative places, the more audiences and fans will play with it, will create around it, will discuss it. This is the key to a successful transmedia strategy.

 

Derhy Kurtz: Of course, industrial transtexts (or transmedia storytelling) need to be coordinated by someone, or an intellectual entity in relation to the copyright owner; this is why, for instance, the Marvel strategy is a coordinated one, with the various transtexts forming one storyworld, while one could not have a transmedia strategy with elements from BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary, even though both programmes revolve around the character of Sherlock Holmes; indeed, most of Conan Doyle’s stories being part of the public domain now, there is no way to coordinate or oversee one version, one universe of Sherlock Holmes (a strategy could be made around the Elementary version, specifically, however, as one could exist around the Sherlock one).

When it comes to fan-made extensions, such transtexts can – and, from the fans’ perspective, are meant to – be seen as paratexts, surrounding the main text(s), the source text(s) as I call it/them, and completing them in the way desired. Similarly, other fan-made transtexts can take the role of intertexts, shaping the meaning of industrial transtexts, often (with so many fanfictions, fanvids, etc.) to give a slightly different interpretation than originally intended by the producers (for example, imagining a romance between two characters, or saving a character implied (or shown) dead, etc.).

In that sense, the model of media authorship that we can adopt should be a collaborative model, where industry and fans collaborate together, although not one along the other, and thus create a number of transtexts around one central piece, the canonicity of some being often up for discussion (or not, as most fantexts are often considered as non-canonical by fans, which gives the latter no less pleasure in producing and ‘consuming’ them). As a result, this model is quite complicated and paradoxical, as the relationship is not reciprocal in the majority of cases: while fans make transtexts around the institutional ones, the industry typically does not make transtexts revolving or acknowledging fan-made ones (although some exceptions exist). While this overall, mutually-constructed universe (by industry practitioners and engaged audiences alike) should be considered and acknowledged, and while fan-produced extensions developed across different media must be recognised as transtexts as such, this non-reciprocity in terms of interaction between the two types of transtexts incites one to make that very distinction: consider them as two types of transtexts, revolving around, and within, one common (initially industry-built) universe.

Part of what had initially interested me about transmedia storytelling was that we were seeing the kinds of textual expansion, backstory elaboration, and development of secondary characters that I had long associated with fan fiction but being incorporated officially into the franchise and thus becoming part of the canon. Although I appreciate the intellectual rationale for doing so, I also worry that our ability to make meaningful distinctions about the status of different textual extensions may get lost in your more expansive concept. What do you see as the continued value of canon and fanon in this transtexts paradigm?

Bourdaa: This book offers a new perspective in Transmedia, as it was so often analyzed from a production point of view, i.e. studying the canon and authentic texts produced by the industrial and executive team at work.

Canon productions and fanon ones have to be both distinct and yet, if we think in terms of transtexts, they have also to be linked together in a shared storyworld. When I quoted Geoffrey Long earlier on negative spaces, I think we have here the core aspect of transtexts: those space left by the production teams are inevitable going to be filled by the creativity of fans. A dialogue, a co-creative process have to be envisioned by both parties. The extended universes have to be built by both the production teams and the fans.

Of course, that can create monsters and controversies like for example Star Wars, the paragon of extended universe. The Star Wars stories are augmented by hundreds of novels and comic books, video games and TV series (animated or not). And fans complete this huge narrative universe with their own productions, sometimes creating alternate universes within the canon. When Disney bought the franchise, before launching Star Wars 7, they created a clean slate for the canon, keeping only a few ancillary content such as The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels for example. But the fans’ texts are still out there, still part of the storyworld. To control fans’ productivity and play with the canon, J.K. Rowling created the interactive website Pottermore, which contains original content from the Harry Potter universe, thus extending the stories. But the author, wishing to regain control on the fanon productions and especially on the proliferation of slash fictions, created a creative space where fans could write their own stories but would have to follow some rules if they wanted to be published on the website.

 

Examples here from Hunger Games and Doctor Who suggest ways that fans and other audiences actively accept and reject bids for authenticity and canonicity rather than taking all commercially produced texts at face value and we’ve seen with Star Wars that the producers, themselves, may actively retract the canonical status of particular transtexts if they block potential future developments in the franchise. On what basis do fans arbitrate and resolve these conflicting bids on what constitutes the canon? Why does it matter if we have an agreed-upon sense of what constitutes the canon?

 

Derhy Kurtz: To go back to the origin of the term, canon, of course, initially refers to what is considered as ‘officially part of the “story”’ by a legitimate figure of authority, with the Rabbis deciding on which texts to include in (and reject from) the Old Testament (Tanakh), twenty four books / texts in total, and later on the Church, making slight adjustments to the list of texts from the Old Testament and making a new selection for the New one (with, interestingly, a number of variations: the Samaritan canon only retaining the Pentateuch and the various Christian denominations having certain dissensions on the final version of the canonical Bible). From this, we see that decision on what is considered canonical or not comes from the authoritative figure, rather than from the ‘audience’.

As developed in the chapter that I wrote about canonicity and transtexts, institutional figures still have a major role in whether a text is recognised as canonical or not when it comes to, as you say, the commercially produced texts. In many cases, once they weigh in, fans would not typically challenge the ‘official version’ (I’m still talking about transtexts from the same ‘universe’ here; not, say, adaptations). When things are left unsaid, however, without the show-runner, the channel, the writer or whichever authoritative person, everything is left to discussion, and fans can engage in heated debate over the status of a given transtext. In such cases, issues of credibility and consistency with the rest of the canonical texts arise, and, when such elements are debatable, long debates are sure to ensue.

As for why it matters to have an agreed upon sense of what constitutes the canon, I guess this comes back to the historical original sense of the term and purpose thereof: for the community to have a collective understanding of the ‘story’ in question so as to bring consistency and togetherness to its members with regards to a shared culture and ‘myth’, to know what did ‘happen’ and what did not; what is, what was, and what could be.

Bourdaa: When it comes to fans’ creations and works, there is often, if not always, a tension between what is considered by the authoritative production as canon and what is considered by fans as fanon. Fans play with the universe in the sense that when they produce their videos, write their fanfictions, draw their artworks, they poach what they think is interesting and re-work it into something new. They produce a new meaning, new contexts, new relationships.

In the Hunger Games case study, fans went against the authoritative canon of the movies because they thought it was not faithful enough to the books. The marketing campaign and the movies were glamorizing the stories and characters, thus weakening the purpose the books. So, they “took back the narrative” and organized themselves to build a transmedia activism, on multiple media platforms and social networks, and make something positive out of a negative narrative. This form of “resistance” from engaged audiences and this activism can be cultural, social or even political. A more recent example: the science-fiction show The 100 (broadcast on the CW) killed off Lexa, a lesbian character in episode 3x07 and a fans’ favourite, by a stray bullet, continuing the Bury Your Gay trope, that is infamous among LGBTQ fans. This trope shows how gay characters can be killed off to make a straight character’s arc move forward (see Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead, The Vampire Diaries for example). In this case, LGBTQ fans felt betrayed and enraged but they chose to re-direct their energy towards a good cause: raising money for the Trevor Project and bringing awareness on lesbian and more largely on LGBTQ representation on TV and media. Moreover, fans created their own alternate universe with fanfictions and tumblrs in which Lexa is still alive and still in her relationship with Clarke, her lover. These fanon productions and creations do not match with the canon since Lexa is dead but give fans an opportunity to make Lexa live again and build their own imaginative storyworld, emphasising on a positive representation that is lacking now in the canon.

 

Melanie Bourdaa is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in Communication and Information Sciences, and a researcher in Transmedia Storytelling and fan studies. She ran a MOOC entitled « Understanding Transmedia Storytelling » in France. She created the GREF, a research group gathering scholars working in the field of Fan Studies.  She co-created the CATS, a consortium on Transmedia Storytelling, gathering researchers and professionals in this field of expertise. She runs the research program “MediaNum”, dealing with the valorization of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling, funded by the Region d’Aquitaine.

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Sciences Po (IEP) and Ecole Polytechnique (X), as well as at various communication and business schools. He created undergraduates/postgraduates courses, including on Transmedia, and holds experience in marketing and in institutional/promotional/political communication and consulting. His PhD, at the University of East Anglia, explores ‘success’ in the TV industry.

Imagine Us, 2040

Recently, my research group, Civic Paths, released a special project, "Imagine Us, 2040," which we developed using the Medium Platform. We've been spending more and more time as a group theorizing what we describe as the "civic imagination" and running world-building workshops with various groups as a means to inspire more progressive visions of political change. This process has seemed especially urgent to us in the aftermath of the November election and at the start of the Trump administration, given how many people have lost hope in the direction our country is going. We decided to apply this process to our own community and "Imagine Us, 2040" is what emerged. In an introduction below, Gabriel Peters Lazaro describes the process which generated the project. You can visit the issue here. There you will find short essays on, for example, the future of technology and labor, alternative models of journalism, native rights, social justice, and my own reflections on what an ideal health care system might look like, to cite just a few examples.

The goal is to describe the kind of world we want to live in -- an act of advocacy rather than simply critique. We'd love to see others experiment with this mode of analysis and critical writing.

If you'd like to know more about our workshops, check out this documentation of what we did last summer at the Salzberg Academy for Global and Media Change. I am just back from running a similar workshop with the good folks at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Introduction to Imagine Us, 2040 written with Gabriel Peters Lazaro

“Imagine it’s 2040 and everything turned out OK; in fact, things have have turned out fantastically. What does the world around us look like?” This was the opening question of the worldbuilding and civic imagination workshop that we, the members of the Civic Paths research group based at the University of Southern California, asked ourselves on November 28th, 2016, only three weeks after the presidential election. After brainstorming our collective answers to that question we each wrote a personal projection or story envisioning that future world and we share those stories here.

Imagining the United States as we would like it to be in 2040 may seem like an unusual way to respond to what may well be one of the most divisive moments in America’s history. It might seem that it is a reaction that rests on escapism and distraction from vital issues. But for us at Civic Paths it seemed like the best way to respond to a difficult moment. It felt like exactly what we needed to do to begin to collect our thoughts, mobilize as a community, and figure out how to guide our own responses to issues of politics and justice as they continue to evolve and arise. Giving ourselves a little space to take a deep breath and reflect on what we really care about and channel just a little bit of energy into visualizing a future world that we really want to live in seemed like a good way to face that moment and all the moments ahead. Now, having seen what the transition and inauguration have brought, we feel all the more affirmed in the necessity of this approach and invite you to read the stories we came up with about the world in 2040 and maybe even share your own.

Our decision to run this internal workshop was not simply an intuitive reaction to the election but in fact an application of insights gleaned from our previous research. Founded in 2009 by Henry Jenkins, Civic Paths uses public conversations, workshops, research, and the popular arts to bridge between participatory culture and civic engagement. Civic Paths’s previous efforts resulted in the NYU Press book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism and the byanymedia.org online resource for educators. For that project, the team interviewed several hundred young artists and activists to identify tactics and strategies by which networks of youth are able to expand civic participation via the practices and infrastructure of participatory culture. As Civic Paths learned, these networks also place an emphasis on personal and collective storytelling to effectively harness what we call the civic imagination.

We define civic imagination as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Beyond that, the civic imagination also requires the capacity to see one’s self as a civic agent capable of making change, as part of a larger collective which has shared interests, as an equal participant within a democratic culture, and as empathetic to the plight of others different than one’s self. Working with community partners, Civic Paths developed several workshops around the civic imagination with the hope that they would help communities tap into and expand their inspirational and organizational potentials. The workshop we ran internally with our group in November is a variation on our “Think Critically, Act Creatively” workshop, which is a future-focused experience highlighting the power of stories as tools for fostering civic imagination and inspiring real world change.

Although our interests and perspectives are generally transnational in scope, we felt that the current moment called for a focus on the United States. Our brainstorm on November 28th was divided into two parts. The first part was a free-wheeling, anything goes brainstorm where we defined some key characteristics of the world we envision for 2040. The second part invited Civic Paths members to contribute their own autobiographical or fictional response to the world. It gave each of us an opportunity to really delve into that positive future vision that we had generated collectively, but in very personal terms.

The outcome is a collection of short stories and reflections that we share with you in this publication. We feel they capture our thoughts and visions at this particular moment, a moment that we feel will one day be historically significant. We also feel that by taking this time both collectively and individually to articulate some of our values and hopes for the future, we will be better equipped to make tough choices and take action in the world today. Each story includes links to other writings or organizations that are working in the areas addressed in each of the pieces and include topics such as healthcare, immigration, education, social justice and financial security. We also want to extend an invitation to others who may want to respond with their own aspirational vision for the world of 2040 and have included the full prompt here. Anyone can author their own piece and submit it to us for inclusion in this publication.

Do Fans Generate Transtexts?: An Interview with Benjamin Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa (Part One)

Over the last few installments, I've been sharing an interview with Matthew Freeman, the author of a new book which takes us into the history/prehistory of Transmedia entertainment. Today I will introduce a second interview also focused on current research which revises our understanding of the concept of Transmedia entertainment – Benjamin W. L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa, editors of The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities, which was published late last year. This is a rich collection which includes new essays by some of my favorite thinkers about all things transmedia, including Louisa Ellen Stein, Geoffrey Long, Matt Hills,Aaron Delwiche,  Paul Booth, Sam Ford, and yours truly. My contribution explores what it means to locate transmedia production within particular media ecologies and economies, asking for example whether transmedia looks different in a public service based media economy as opposed to a commercial economy. The book's primary contribution and provocation is to broaden the category of transmedia storytelling to include works produced by the audience and in particular by fans. For me, this is been a somewhat vexing question. Early on, what drew me to transmedia entertainment was the degree to which producers were replicating forms of extensions that I previously only seen in fan fiction and other fan works. Fans had long demonstrated a fascination with back story for example or with fleshing out secondary characters or exploring uncharted corners of a fictional world. Heck, in Textual Poachers, I noted that fans were pushing for a more serialized form of storytelling at a time when network television was still highly episodic. So initially, what seemed important about transmedia storytellingg was that these fan reading practices are being recognized and replicated within the official Canon. So in that sense, transmedia and fan works operate in parallel with the difference that one is authorized and the other is not.

That said, if we think of transmedia stories less in terms of continuity and more in terms of multiplicity, then it is hard to argue for a sharp distinction between fan works and other kinds of transmedia extensions. More and more, transmedia entertainment has become a sprawling inter-textual system which includes text that are not easily located within a master plan for the unfolding franchise. When readers encounter the franchise online, their experience of say Star Trek includes both authorized and unauthorized works.

Building on our observation, The Rise of Transtexts ask us to consider this new category – transtext – which can be used to discuss the relationship between the two. Many of the contributors here are making a strong case for factoring audience produced text into our consideration of the transmedia system as a whole. I'm going to be very curious to see how people respond to this argument. My hunch is that the new concept is more likely to be embraced by academics and active fans rather than industry insiders and creative practitioners.

Regardless of how you fall down on that particular question, The Rise of Transtexts represents an important next contribution to the growing literature around transmedia entertainment. One could not reduce its contributions to the question of fan works, since it has much to say about the history of transmedia practices, the genre categories in which transmedia production operates, the industrial context that yields transmedia entertainment, and much much more.

This interview with the books editors opens up a wide range of such topics and offers some preview of the challenges and opportunities the books title describes. I will be running it over the next three installments of my blog.

Let’s start with some core concepts from the book’s title. What do you mean by Transtexts? What does this concept include that might normally be excluded from our understanding of transmedia storytelling?

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: Ok, let’s go. First, thank you for inviting us to do this interview, it is a pleasure to be featured here. The questions were challenging (as they should) and enjoyable to answer, and so very relevant in this day and age when talking about transmedia and transtexts.

The term Transtexts first appeared in 2012, for a study proposal I had made (with the same title / subtitle of the book, and of which this book would be a spin-off, if you pardon me the TV-pun), as I felt it a necessary step to build on, or rethink the existing concept of Transmedia by reinserting the agency of power of engaged audiences within the concept (which, incidentally, is very much the purpose of this collection. The term ‘transtexts’, in fact, could be seen as an ‘acronym’ / abbreviation for ‘transmedia storytelling and fan-produced texts’. Because, of course, two types of transmedia texts can be identified (and were thus addressed in the book).

Firstly, industrial transmedia texts, produced by supposedly authoritative authors or entities (we go back to canon and what is seen as ‘authority’ in this interview and in the book), and directed at active audiences, in order (hopefully) to foster engagement. Secondly, there are fan-made transmedia texts, which are made by the very engaged audiences which are targeted by transmedia strategies. Fans are, therefore, making and spreading original texts across various media (and social media platforms) which, in turn, expand the content and presence of this narrative universe. As such, as explained by several of the book’s contributors (especially Louisa Stein), such fan-made texts could / should be considered as transmedia narratives, on the same level as industrial transtexts.

This new concept was introduced to provide a category where they can both fit, and giving equal attention to the audience’s texts. Since the concept of transmedia storytelling, as generally understood, mostly positions itself on the side of institutional transmedia practices and thus leaves little place for fan-produced transmedia narratives, using the same expression while widening its scope would not be enough (due to this inherent industrial connotation). It thus seemed that a term encompassing both notions at once could be of use.

Finally, Hélène Laurichesse argued in this collection that it was this twofold nature of transtexts (industrial and fan-produced), rather than transmedia storytelling alone, that constituted the foundation of a text-brand’ identity, while Aaron Delwiche provided a fourfold typology of transtexts. Nothing is ‘lost’, therefore, by this new terminology, which simultaneously allows the study of wider-ranging phenomena than were usually studied, and encourages the search for more precision through in-depth analyses or case studies.

There’s a productive tension running through the book. On the one hand, you discuss transmedia or transtexts as something that urgently must be addressed because it is exerting such a strong influence on the contemporary entertainment industry. On the other hand, many of your authors seek to situate today’s transmedia in relation to a much broader history of telling stories across media. Given this tension, how much weight should we place on the idea of “the rise of transtexts” as opposed to the persistence of transtexts? What factors contribute to the increased visibility of such practices at the current moment?

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: I think this point is a key one. As explained in the introduction, the term rise does not refers to a supposedly new start of the phenomenon, as transtexts must be understood through a complex framework involving a history and development of this form and use, a recent one, and a much older one (as demonstrated by Denzell Richards, for instance), since we can find examples throughout history dating back even to Biblical times and state propaganda in Ancient History; this rise of transtexts refers to its incredible expansion over the past few years.

As stated in the introduction, and further in Melanie’s chapter, it is the combination of these three revolutions, I believe, which has fostered, and continued to encourage, this increased visibility – but also development in use (which is undeniably becoming increasingly widespread) – of transtexts.

M. Bourdaa: Of course, the art of extending narrative universes existed before what we are witnessing today with such pieces as Star Wars and even before that with the Disney Universe, the Wizard of Oz or the Marvel and DC stories, with ancillary contents spread across radio shows, novels, cartoons, comic books and comic strips. A history and archaeology of Transmedia strategies is needed to understand why and how they have been evolving, as Matthew Freeman proposes in his more recent book or as Denzell Richards publishes here in this collection.

I agree with Benjamin on the evolutions of the media landscape. As I have stated in my article on The Hunger Games in this book, I think that three mutations paved the way for a more systematic use of Transmedia strategies in the entertainment industry, bringing awareness on a rise of Transmedia and transtexts.

First, we have witnessed the implementation of technologies in production strategies, mixing traditional media with new ones, leading to what Jennifer Gillian calls “must-click TV”, and to stories spread across multiple media platforms.

Then, narrations have evolved into a complex system and more seriality, developing cliffhangers and negative spaces, where fans could fill the gaps with their own productions and creations.

Finally, fans and audiences are more and more engaged in narrative universes, leaning on a convergence and participatory culture. They work together, share, discuss, create, organize in their communities and often productions rely on these fans’ works to promote their shows, as it is the case with Game of Thrones, Orange in the New Black or Hannibal when they ask fans to create artworks that would later be used to advertise seasons of the show.

So of course, transmedia and transtexts are not new strategies in the entertainment industries, but there are definitively factors and mutations that are leading to a more visibility and acceptance of these practices and tactics.

 In his Foreword, Toby Miller raises some ethical considerations about transtexts: “In moving rapidly between platforms, genres, and sites in order to tell stories, how good and how well-informed are those stories and those involved in telling and reading them?” Up until now, the focus has been on identifying models and practices associated with transmedia. Transmedia has been read as something like a talking dog -- who cares what it says. But at some point, we need to be asking the kinds of evaluative questions Miller is pointing us toward. What criteria might we use to evaluate whether a given transtext is good or more importantly whether the shift towards transtexts is good for the society?

M. Bourdaa: The question of evaluating transmedia strategies, especially around audiovisual contents such as TV series or blockbusters, has been a problem since the beginning because it implies economical and marketing issues. How many people follow the strategy? What are the rates of engagement?

The only way to measure that is to look at the number of likes on a Facebook page or the number of people following a Twitter account and that is not very reliable, because people can like a page and never come back on it or have no interaction with the content.

Transtexts are focused on creating storyworlds both by the production teams, thus deploying stories that are canon, and by the fans themselves, expanding the universe in a fannish approach. One criterion to evaluate transmedia projects could be the degree of engagement by fans, and by that I mean what fans do with the media text, how do they re-work it, what meaning do they produce with it. Fans are the target audience of transmedia projects, because they are the expert audience and because they will share the canon content within their communities and via social networks. But they will also create new content, using fan fictions, viding, fan arts, discussion boards, games.

Louisa Stein gives a good example, when she analyzes the way Jane Austen’s fans re-worked the stories in a more contemporary setting and produced the webseries The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, focused on the iconic character of Pride and Prejudice. Fans can also resist the marketing aspect of the transmedia strategies and organize themselves to produce transmedia activism, as it was the case with fans of Hunger Games.

Geoffrey Long in this collection offers a framework to analyze such successes by evaluating the negative spaces left in the storyworlds, spaces that will later be filled by fans’ productions. He sums it up here: “the key lesson is that successful vast transmedia storyworlds find a balance between saying what they say in a unique fashion, such as in the unique franchise characteristics at both the storyworld and character levels, and in strategically not saying everything there is to say, both inviting audiences in to imagine who they themselves would be in these storyworlds and filling in the negative spaces in the storyworld with their own imaginations”.

Melanie Bourdaa is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in Communication and Information Sciences, and a researcher in Transmedia Storytelling and fan studies. She ran a MOOC entitled « Understanding Transmedia Storytelling » in France. She created the GREF, a research group gathering scholars working in the field of Fan Studies.  She co-created the CATS, a consortium on Transmedia Storytelling, gathering researchers and professionals in this field of expertise. She runs the research program “MediaNum”, dealing with the valorization of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling, funded by the Region d’Aquitaine.

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Sciences Po (IEP) and Ecole Polytechnique (X), as well as at various communication and business schools. He created undergraduates/postgraduates courses, including on Transmedia, and holds experience in marketing and in institutional/promotional/political communication and consulting. His PhD, at the University of East Anglia, explores ‘success’ in the TV industry.

Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part Three)

Marsha Kinder’s Playing with Power introduced the concept of “transmedia” in relation to characters and not stories, characters that travel between texts without necessarily carrying large amount of backstory with them. Her examples were Mario Brothers, Ninja Turtles, and Muppet Babies. Is the same true for the earlier examples you discuss? Does a more character-centered notion of transmedia allow for a looser set of relations between texts and less dependence on audiences “catching them all,” seeing every installment in order to make sense of the connections between them? Might this suggest that what was distinctive about more contemporary forms of transmedia is precisely the tighter integration of story enabled by new networked forms of production, distribution, and reception?  

I don’t think so. I would argue that there has been a tendency in some of the earlier work on transmedia storytelling to perhaps over-emphasise the ‘complexity’ of contemporary transmedia, suggesting – directly or indirectly – that the new era of digital convergence is somehow more effective at producing tight integrations of networked plots across platforms.

For me, such an assumption is to greatly undermine and to underestimate the storytelling prowess of the past. It’s true that characters are an important part of a story that transcends multiple media – if nothing else, they help to ‘link’ different texts together in the eyes of audiences. But that’s not to assume that the tight integration of interconnected storytelling across platforms wasn’t going on in the past, albeit in ways informed by largely different strategies and practices.

Here’s a nice example to show just how integrated and ‘complex’ the transmedia storytelling was in the past. Even in the face of industry experts that warned authors of the 1930s not to produce media stories across multiple platforms on account of the perceived risks that one version might compete against another versions, Edgar Rice Burroughs was especially detailed in his weaving of plot details across multiple media for his Tarzan adventures.

In one case, the words ‘red star’ were used to link a pulp magazine with a later novel, pointing readers across both texts. The novel then gave readers some added insight into how and why the pulp story’s plot occurred as it did. So the novel incorporated a new kidnap sequence, which explained how a particular map was attained by characters in the pulp story, whose own narrative began after the map had been stolen. New characters were added into the novel – one that was revealed to have kidnapped Magra, a character rescued by Tarzan in the pulp story. This story then continued over into the newspaper comic strip and the radio serial, which, crucially, were published and broadcast almost concurrently to one another. Thus in the first edition of the comic strip, readers were told that Tarzan had travelled to hold a meeting on the outskirts of Bobolo, a town on the Congo River hundreds of miles inland. But readers were not told where Tarzan had actually travelled from – until, that is, the broadcast date of the radio serial, when exactly four weeks later listeners were informed that Tarzan had in fact travelled from the village of Loango, a town which lies one hundred miles downstream the Congo River from Bobolo, thus interconnecting the tales of comic strip Tarzan and the radio Tarzan simultaneously.

All of which is my way of highlighting just how complex and ‘involved’ transmedia storytelling could be in the past. In this case, after all, Burroughs had crafted a quest narrative comprising of a large number of supporting characters, each in rival expeditions with hidden agendas, and with the audience’s careful following of small details of plot across pulps, novels, comics and radio all being crucial to the story.

 

You argue that of all the media, cinema proved most resistant to transmedia practices. Why? How might today’s “mothership” model of transmedia reflect the desire of contemporary transmedia producers to work around or work with the resistances of the film industry to a transmedia model?

 

Ah yes, the ‘trouble with the cinema’. Whereas some media forms – namely, comics – greatly afforded transmedia storytelling in the past, the cinema almost consistently militated against the telling of stories across multiple media. The problem with the cinema was not inherent to the medium itself and its mode of telling stories, but was instead related either to its cultural distinction from other media around the turn of the twentieth century or to the mode of vertical integration that had come to typify Hollywood by the 1930s.

With regards to my first comment, what’s important is that directing certain audiences to the cinema in the 1900s and 1910s was often difficult, since the audience composition that built up novels and Broadway was so different to that which made up the cinema’s audience: Whereas novels and Broadway belonged to the rising middle class, the cinema was still mostly associated with its lower class nickelodeon origins. And this lower-class perception was reflected in the price of buying a novel or attending a Broadway play compared to the cost of seeing a film: A nickelodeon entry admission was around five cents, whereas a novel cost around $1.50 and the average admission price to see a Broadway show was $1 to $2.

And in later decades, secondly, the system of vertical integration that came to characterise the major Hollywood studios meant that these studios occupied a producer-distributor-exhibitor model and had therefore grown accustomed to working internally. Without a regulatory influence forcing different media industries to work together, it was much more difficult for creative personnel to author storyworlds that crossed in and out of the cinema. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, but it’s certainly interesting to see that Burroughs’ Tarzan films were arguably the least transmedial of all of his Tarzan ventures in the sense that many of these films failed to connect with the plots occurring in other media, while DC Comics later resorted to producing many of their Superman films with relatively minor-status companies so that they could manage screenplays whose plots weaved closely into the plots of their comics.

 

Your conclusion makes some provocative suggestions about planned obsolescence in today’s transmedia as compared to the long-standing franchises from the early 20th century. Oz, Tarzan and Superman are still present in our culture in a way that The Matrix is not. How might you account for this shift in the life span of intellectual properties?

 

Interestingly, there’s a case to be made that the transmedia storytelling of the past century centered on a more individualistic notion of authorship compared to the more corporate ideas of authorship now associated with the franchised transmedia worlds of the contemporary era – and for me this difference is key to answering this question.

Today’s convergent media culture has certainly allowed transmedia storytelling to gain urgency as producers now make use of a host of internal corporate connections so to craft stories across media. But there’s a sense that the corporate scale of today’s industrial convergences breeds a form of ‘departmental’ authorship as transmedia storyworlds now pass through the hands of so many creative personnel, working across many sub-divisions and subsidiaries (and often farmed out to many different transmedia consultancy companies such as Starlight Runner Entertainment). As such, many of today’s transmedia franchises tend to be short-lived projects that come with a high turnover rate. We are perhaps more accustomed to the idea of the ‘reboot’ in today’s Hollywood cinema and popular culture than we’ve ever been before.

By way of comparison, my own exemplars of historical transmedia storytelling (Oz, Tarzan and Superman, all of which are still part of today’s culture of course) continued to be built for a substantially longer period of time – for twenty years in some cases. These historical cases, and unlike the conglomerate-produced cases of today, were typically produced by one author, or at least by a smaller number of creative personnel working together across media. For example, it’s quite remarkable to note that, with the exception of one instance, the basic story told in each and every Land of Oz text produced across novels, comics, theatre and films between 1900 and 1918 came from the imagination and the pen of L. Frank Baum. Though the same cannot be said of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the many Tarzan stories that emerged between 1918 and 1938, there is the sense that the most effective transmedia storytelling strategies to emerge during that period came when Burroughs carefully managed his various licensing contracts himself. And this was also true of DC Comics and their Superman stories between 1938 and 1958. Here, only a very small handful of creative personnel worked on Superman across multiple media forms.

Importantly, across my three cases of Oz, Tarzan and indeed Superman, almost all of the authors and creative personnel that brought these storyworlds to life often relied on the continued transmedial growth of their storyworld to make a living, with the need to find new revenue streams driving the desire to expand the story. What’s more, the fact that these authors depended so heavily on their respective storyworlds growing partly explains why many of the strategies used to tell stories across media in the past were so varied – revolving around everything from colour-coding to spectacle, from comic-strip characters to printed maps, from posters and reviews to licensing and franchising, from merchandising and sponsorship to propaganda.

The main reason for this more ad-hoc formation of transmedia storytelling in the past – in turn spanning such a diverse range of industrial and technological strategies – is quite simply because many of the strategies that underpinned how stories were told across media in the past were themselves emergent in nature, with the likes of Baum, Burroughs and DC Comics reacting to new developments as and when they arose.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.

 

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds was published on December 6, 2016:

https://www.routledge.com/Historicising-Transmedia-Storytelling-Early-Twentieth-Century-Transmedia/Freeman/p/book/9781138217690

 

Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part Two)

To continue with questions you pose yourself, “what does it actually mean to understand the industrial contingencies and practices of historical transmedia practices”? To break this down further, what does it mean to focus on shifting industrial conditions as opposed to say the technological affordances of media, the constitution of audiences and the conditions of reception, or the thematic and narrative conventions of the period, each of which might also help to explain transmedia practices?  

For me, only by understanding longer histories of production and consumption can we begin to make sense of the contingencies and the affordances of our contemporary transmedia landscape. In that sense, the model of transmedia storytelling today is not the only one; past builders of fictional storyworlds employed many different strategies that showcase just how many possibilities there really are for telling tales across multiple media. In other words, understanding the workings of transmedia storytelling in the past means exploring the shifting industrial conditions and the technological affordances of media and the constitution of audiences and reception and the thematic and narrative conventions of the period. All of these factors had important and often overlapping influences on the ways by which a story expanded across media.

Allow me to point to an example to explain what I mean. Elaborating on the ideas of advertising I mentioned previously, we can trace the links between advertising at the dawn of the twentieth century and the strategies of transmedia storytelling that it afforded via the case study of L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz.

Here, we can detect the importance of colour, spectacle, comic-strip characters and also posters and reviews as key promotional mechanisms for building storyworlds across media at that time. While colour and spectacle allowed audiences to see that some stories in one medium belonged, as it were, to stories in another medium, comic-strip characters and posters worked to point audiences directly to other media where new pieces of that story were told, meaning that the adventures of Oz and its characters existed not solely within the actual texts (novels, stage plays, films, etc.), but also folded across multiple sites of media paratext (printed maps, posters, reviews, competitions, faux newspapers, etc.).

All of these outputs were based on industrial conditions and technological affordances. But on the other hand, the concept of the media-migrating audience was very different to its status today, and much of this cross-platform activity stemmed from the rather middle-class culture of consumerism and shopping that came to define the early twentieth century. Audiences were by now absorbed in the so-called ‘society of the spectacle’, with images that pointed them to other images and across to other sites of (media) consumption a characteristic of the period. In other words, gauging the manoeuvrability of audiences across multiple platforms at that time means understanding the wider historical culture, just as exploring the associated patterns of narrativity of each of that period’s media forms can shed new light into why particular media of the era tended to specialise in particular parts of a given transmedia tale.

 

If we broaden transmedia to incorporate earlier media and industrial practices, how does this shift our definition of the concept? Some fear that transmedia has already become so elastic that it describes anything and everything. Does this historical expansion of the concept make the problem worse or does it help us to identify something particular that links these various practices together?

 

This is a very important question. I, for one, agree with some of the criticisms of that say that transmedia, as a term, is becoming too elastic. Since I argue throughout the book that both the industry strategies and wider cultural contingencies informing transmedia storytelling have varied substantially over time, I believe that it is even more important to theorise a different conceptual model for examining transmedia storytelling as part of the industrial-cultural configurations of the past, rather than simply trying to apply its present model to the industrial-cultural configurations of the past.

However, as you imply in your question, this archaeological approach does raise one notable problem: If transmedia storytelling is indeed closely linked to twenty-first century media culture and its industrial or technological configurations, then how can one go about classifying earlier forms of media culture and divergent industrial configurations as the same phenomenon? Doing this successfully really means understanding transmedia storytelling according to a few general characteristics that can be seen in both the media of the past and of the present, with only the industrial configurations informing those characteristics varying one from period to another.

So, in so far as it must ultimately work to expand established fictional storyworlds and extend the arcs of characters and plots across multiple media platforms, I would argue that transmedia storytelling can be understood in terms of the following three general characteristics: (1) Character-building; (2) World-building; and (3) Authorship. Most basically, if character-building is a smaller aspect of world-building, then authorship is crucial for achieving both of the former.

Thinking along these lines allowed me to explore historical cases of transmedia storytelling by focusing on how each of these three general characteristics were determined by particular industrial workings in the past. And I show that the strategies for holding the past’s transmedia storyworlds together and indeed for pointing audiences across those multiple media were informed largely by different determinants and configurations from case to another, from one era to another.

For instance, looking through the lens of world-building, we can understand the Land of Oz in the early 1900s as a playground of fantasy where systems of advertising across novels, magazines, newspapers, reviews, etc. afforded a host of characters to roam free and for different adventures to be told transmedially. Later on in the 1920s and 30s, analysing the empire surrounding Tarzan in terms of authorship lends itself to correlating the affordances of corporate practices such as merchandising and sponsorship to the interlinking of Tarzan’s stories across the likes of pulp magazines, radio serials, movies and toys. And, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, analysing the iconic red cape of Superman in terms of character-building across comics, radio, cinema, etc. really led to a very clear understanding of how practices of propaganda, war cinema and B-movie production throughout the 1940s and 1950s ultimately gave way to forms of transmedia storytelling as a response to the Second World War.

 

 

In other words, each of these cases serve as a demonstration of how very different industrial configurations in the past led to the same transmedial results. In revealing how differently structured media industries still had very strong impulses towards what is now called transmedia storytelling, I like to think that my work serves as an important example of how contemporary developments can actually re-focus the ways in which we think about the past, and indeed the ways in which bygone historical perspectives can in turn reframe current scholarly debates of, in this case, transmedia.

 

You note that your emphasis on American developments in transmedia are not intended to reflect “any kind of general explanation” of transmedia’s industrial history, but it seems to me that your account tends to assume that transmedia is an extension of commercial or market logics that dominate the American entertainment system but do not necessarily shape other media ecologies. Would transmedia have necessarily emerged in cases where there is a much stronger emphasis on public service broadcasting or state funding for the arts? Or would transmedia at least have taken a different shape if storytelling was kept separate from marketing and promotional practices?

 

Absolutely, I very much believe that, at least in the context of US history, transmedia storytelling emerged out of large-scale commercial and market logics driven by industrialisation and consumer culture, with modes of storytelling across media coming out of certain industrial and culture needs to reproduce and distribute media products for the mass-market.

Yet, be that as it may, I also don’t think that my conclusions are globally applicable. What I realised is that when you examine transmedia in its present context compared to its historical contexts, it is totally different – even if it’s in the same country. In my eyes it’s much more useful to think about context specificity – that is, that different things at different moments in different cultures for different reasons inform transmedia in different ways. It would be wrong to say that the commercial or market-based ideas that I propose of transmedia’s past in the US can be used to explain transmedia in other countries. Instead, it is much more accurate to start again, as it were, and to look at the specific country, its cultures, industries, society, etc. and ask: What role is (or was) transmedia playing here? And what are the specific mechanisms informing it?

A perfect example of this would be Colombia, which I’ve started researching lately. Colombians very passionately reject the idea that transmedia is commercial. Some Colombian researchers actively oppose the link between transmedia and Hollywood, say, or transmedia and branding or franchising. Instead, in Colombia transmedia is a long-standing social tool, a way to unite a dispersed Colombian nation – people who have gone through terrible social ordeals and violent conflicts in the past.

I’m also currently working with others who affirm similar ideas about the specificity of transmedia in different countries: Melanie Bourdaa, for example, argues that transmedia occupies a role of cultural heritage in France, while Indrek Ibrus and Maarja Ojamaa explore the dual role of transmedia in Estonia as both a mechanism for supporting cultural heterogeneity and for enforcing coherence and stability in culture via maintaining the relevance of historical media texts. Marie-Eve Carignan, too, is doing very interesting research that analyses the media coverage of terrorist attacks in Canada to show the key role of transmedia in the radicalisation of that country.

Not to simplify things, but in each of these cases it is documentary that seems to have shaped the form of transmedia. And because of this, in a country like Colombia transmedia is now fundamentally perceived not as a tool for brand-building but rather for community-building, with the spreading of content across multiple media serving to re-create lost cultural memories and to re-build broken societies.

 

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.

 

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds is published on December 6, 2016:

https://www.routledge.com/Historicising-Transmedia-Storytelling-Early-Twentieth-Century-Transmedia/Freeman/p/book/9781138217690

 

Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part One)

From the start, there have been competing claims about the origins of Transmedia storytelling. Many read my discussion of The Matrix in Convergence Culture as indicating that transmedia was a new phenomenon emerging from networked culture. Transmedia in that account lay where old and new media collide. Indeed, at the time I wrote Convergence Culture, I was excited about the prospect of a new storytelling paradigm which I was trying to piece together from the glimpses provided by a range of contemporary projects -- from Dawson's Desktop and The Blair Witch Project to the early ARGS to The Matrix. So my understanding of Transmedia in Convergence Culture reflected a sense that something new was happening here. Yet, if you look closely at my discussion of "The Art of World Building", you will see references throughout two Homeric epic, Joseph Campbell, and the Christian church in the Middle Ages, as points of comparisons to the world building and extra-textual references found in contemporary Transmedia storytelling. I was certainly not arguing for a total break with the past, and I was hinting that people have been using every available media to tell stories fora long, long time. Derek Johnson in his own book, Media Franchising: Creative Licensing and Collaboration in the Culture Industries and through his contribution to Spreadable Media has consistently made the case that today's Transmedia is simply a reconfiguration of much older industry practices. Similarly Avie Santos has used the example of the Lone Ranger to make the case for earlier forms of product licensing as prefiguring Transmedia. See his recent book Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing. Other contemporary books such as The Rise of Transtexts explores a range of historical analogies. I will be sharing more insights from that boo'ks editors in a subsequent interview in this blog.

But to date, the most thorough and convincing exploration of the prehistory of transmedia has emerged from the pen of British media scholar Matthew Freeman. Freeman recently released the book Historicizing Transmedia Storytelling: Early 20th century Transmedia Story Worlds which represents the state-of-the-art in terms of exploring historical antecedents. Across this book Friedman develops case studies of the Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman as significant media franchises of the early 20th century. In each case, fictional characters and worlds were extended across a range of contemporary media platforms. For example, L Frank Baum, the "Royal Historian of Oz", wrote not only books but also comic strips, stage plays, films, games, and other print ephemera, each of which told us something we didn't know before about his magical realm. Within the first few years of Superman's existence, the character was appearing in both comic books and comic strips, animated shorts, live-action serials, and radio dramas. Each of these platforms contributed significantly to the development of Superman as we understand him today and of the superhero genre more generally. Freeman explores why each of these producers were willing to take a chance on a new genre and a previously unexplored audience. There were not necessarily the same strong links on a narrative level across these different versions, but there certainly were examples of additive comprehension as sophisticated as anything found in today's Transmedia franchises.

Freeman's book must be regarded as a essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how the modern sense Transmedia emerged and what forms it might've taken in earlier eras. Freeman is deft in his ability to move between contemporary theoretical and critical accounts of Transmedia and detailed historical accounts of earlier media practices. I was honored to serve as an outside reader on Freeman's dissertation and have watched with great interest as he's translated that document into the current book. I was delighted when he agreed to conduct an interview for the blog in which he explores a range of issues concerning both contemporary and historical forms of Transmedia entertainment. I will be sharing his insights over the next three installations of my blog. Enjoy!

Let’s begin with the question which frames your first chapter -- why “historicize” the study of transmedia? What has been lost by keeping the focus of discussions of transmedia on the current moment, on an emerging or evolving set of practices within the entertainment industry?

Most pointedly, I have attempted to show in Historicising Transmedia Storytelling that there is far more to transmedia storytelling than meets the eye. It may well be a practice of industrial convergence that affords media content to spread across the subsidiaries of a conglomerate. It may also be a system of technological convergence that grants audiences the power to themselves spread stories across a web of digitally connected media platforms. But transmedia storytelling is also a form of historical production, distribution and even regulation, and one that had a very important role to play in historical media culture long before such modern convergences existed.

That said, I do agree with those who claim that transmedia storytelling is the future. The concept and practice of transmedia has really come to define the workings of today’s (commercial) media industries, speaking as it does to the ways that the spread of content across platforms comes to encapsulate the networks and convergences at the core of today’s media.

And yet the perceived newness of transmedia storytelling – or rather the perceived importance of newer convergences on the rise of transmedia storytelling – has indeed left a sizable gap in our understanding of this practice and its importance across the face of history. Derek Johnson once remarked that ‘one of the newest dimensions of contemporary transmedia entertainment is our recognition of it as such’, and the practice of telling tales across media has not only fed into the workings of media industries over the past hundred years or so, but transmedia storytelling can actually be used as a lens through which to make better sense of some of the biggest industrial, cultural, social and even political developments characterising the fin-de-siècle, the rise of modern advertising and Hollywood.

For example, I explore modern advertising at the turn of the twentieth century, itself a fast-developing industry and system of cultural and commercial communication. That period’s advertising can provide us with a source of early industrialised transmedia storytelling. At that time, new trends in modern advertising invited authors to apply promotional techniques based on branding, collectivity, colour printing technologies, etc. to their storytelling practices. In essence, everything from the giant billboards on the side of buildings and the artistic arrangements in shop windows to the promotional forms of newspaper comic strips served to attract an audience’s attention with content (characters, images, spectacle, etc.) before steering them elsewhere, often across platforms to other related content in media texts and consumer products in an overtly transmedial fashion. In this instance, only via the process of historicisation can we more fully understand transmedia as itself the industrialised slippage of commercial logos, fictional characters and brands across platforms well over a hundred years ago.

In mostly conceptualising transmedia storytelling as part of digital or industrial convergences, it is fair to say that many scholars have thus far had a tendency to neglect such workings of the past – thus leaving us all with a limited and narrow understanding of what is actually a far longer, far broader and far more complex historical development. In other words, only by looking to the past can we fully see the contingencies of the present, and by searching for historical precedents it can force us to be far more nuanced in describing what is truly specific to our present media moment. To be clear, my work is in no way a ‘corrective’ to any particular scholarly understandings of transmedia storytelling. Simply, it is an expansion of those understandings, adding new information, insights and perspectives that enhance the characteristics of this important phenomenon as it evolved across history.

If we are historicizing transmedia, why should our focus start with the dawn of the 20th century? Set the stage for us in terms of what conditions were emerging then which would push storytelling in a more transmedial direction.

There’s no denying that the notion of stories that span multiple platforms pre-dates the dawn of the twentieth century. Derek Johnson and Roberta Pearson, in particular, point to the mythological narratives of Ancient Greece and to the cross-platform narrative architecture surrounding the figure of Jesus Christ as possible (almost pre-historical) forms of transmedia storytelling. Mark J. P. Wolf also points to things like Homer’s Odyssey as a storyworld that exists transmedially and trans-historically.

And so while identifying ‘the first’ transmedia stories is surely well and truly beyond our abilities as researchers, there were nevertheless some major and fundamental transformations associated with the United States circa 1900 that became intrinsically tied to the rise of transmedia storytelling on an industrial scale. Most broadly, two of these key transformations were industrialisation and consumer.

I should probably explain that statement a little. In many ways, telling stories across media is not really about stories converging as it is about stories building – rather like a series of extensions that are added to a building to form a larger and ever-expanding house. This analogy of a house hints at a central point: The industrial strategies of the past century that became most significant to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling were all practices or developments that afforded a way to build and to spread that which was built. Industrialisation was all about building and spreading. Just as media convergence allows content to flow across multiple media platforms, so did industrialisation, albeit in different ways.

Of particular importance were the technological changes that made the production of new forms of culture possible and the concentration of people in urban areas that created significant audiences for this new culture. At the turn of the twentieth century in the US, indeed, larger cultural factors concerned transformations that saw a predominantly rural-farming economy eventually develop into an emerging urban-manufacturing landscape. It may have only fully characterised particular cities such as Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, but this period unquestionably witnessed the full force of industrialisation and became characterised by related developments to do with new models of mass production, fresh industrialised systems of modern advertising, and evolving developments in methods of mass communication.

What is important to stress is that, come the turn of the twentieth century, new forms of mass production technology, which led to a new and characteristically American form of manufacture, emerged only around the turn of the twentieth century. And this American form of mass production was vital to transmedia storytelling at this time.

Consider the era’s new archetypal model of industrialised mass production – the assembly line. The assembly line’s significance on what is now called transmedia storytelling ties most straightforwardly to the fact that production fast became a reproducible system of adjoining interchangeable parts during this particular time.

If imagined only from a strictly manufacturing perspective, transmedia storytelling is similarly about the reproduction of many media texts as much as it is about the creative expansion of fictional storyworlds and the migration of audiences. If the entire process of transmedia storytelling is ‘like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side,’ as Heroes’ Tim Kring once put it, then those additional ‘rocket ships’ are essentially interchangeable extension parts. And it is for this reason that the assembly line – this quintessentially American form of mass production – is so crucial to comprehending the industrial context through which transmedia storytelling emerged as an industrialised practice.

After all, in the same way that transmedia storytelling is the integration of multiple forms, or a process where elements of a larger product work like components of a unified experience, so too was the model of early-twentieth-century mass production: The assembly line was a process whereby one component was produced according to its relationship with others, which in turn was designed to be joined with another component, and with each of these adjoining components eventually all coming together to form one larger product. Conceptually, the assembly line and transmedia storytelling both work on the basis that separate product-pieces are each added one by one to form a larger product, like individual bricks building a proverbial house. In short, mass production afforded the sheer reproducibility of fiction as multipliable products for the industrial age.

From there, we then reached a phase in US history where consumer culture emerged, and this too was crucial. Economically, transmedia storytelling operates on the basis that audiences will gain both a richer and fuller understanding of a given story if they consume more of its media texts. Any attempt to historicise transmedia storytelling must therefore account for consumer culture as a broad contextual backdrop; the consumerist ideology ingrained into many current definitions of transmedia storytelling suggests that its history is closely related to the rise of consumer culture.

Specifically, the rise of consumer culture around the early twentieth century was important to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling for two reasons. First, the new models of mass production described above would lead to increased mass distribution, spreading the array of new products across media and audiences whilst further intensifying the importance of standardised differentiation on the production of products. Second, this mass distribution gave rise to the business of a number of interconnected licensing practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function, and in turn transmedia storytelling became corporatised. Put simply: If industrialisation afforded ways to build media on an industrial scale, then consumer culture afforded the means to spread and market that media across platforms.

 

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.

 

Presenting the Videos of Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment Conference

Today, I am happy to share with you the videos capturing our Oct. 21 event, Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment, hosted by the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, in partnership with our colleagues in UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s Producers Program. The event was organized by Denise Mann, Henry Jenkins, and Stacy Smith and sponsored by JK Foundation, Fusion/Univision, George Foster Peabody Foundation, and the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. The day was incredibly rich, full, and generative, so we are hoping that the discussions captured here can provide resources for others who are exploring issues of diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry. Final conversation with Melissa Rosenberg, Series Creator/Showrunner, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, was not recorded at the request of the speaker, but everything else is here. WELCOME Ernest J. Wilson III, Dean, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism Denise Mann, Head of the Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California

STATE OF THE FIELD

Stacy L. Smith, Director, Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, Associate Professor of Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

In February 2016, the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at USC Annenberg released the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity (CARD). The CARD report examined films, television and digital offerings of 10 major media companies from 2014-2015. Looking across gender, race/ethnicity and LGBT status, the study provides a look at what its author, Dr. Stacy L. Smith, calls an “epidemic of invisibility” in media. Dr. Smith will present findings from the CARD report and her most recent studies to give attendees a glimpse of the current state of entertainment media and the progress still needed.

PANEL 1: WHY DOES INCLUSION MATTER?

Moderator: Robeson Taj Frazier, Director of the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg (IDEA); Associate Professor, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

After hearing about the dismal representation of marginalized groups in entertainment, one question remains: What can be done? As the conversation on diversity and inclusion continues to escalate, several voices stand out from the crowd with solutions, strategies and attempts to address disparities. This session brings together industry members and experts to discuss four essential topics. First, the panel will address why inclusive entertainment matters. Second, individuals will discuss the underlying causes at the heart of why under- or skewed-representation persists. Third, the group will overview what efforts are underway in Hollywood to effect change. Fourth, panelists will cover the challenges that remain and the work still needed to increase representation on screen and behind the camera.

PANELISTS:

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Head of Equity and Inclusion, Pearl Street Productions Bertila Damas, Actor and National Chair of the Ethnic Employment Opportunities Committee, SAG-AFTRA Melissa Goodman, Director of the LGBTQ, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project, ACLU of Southern California Danny Woodburn, Actor, Vice Chair SAG AFTRA Performers with Disability Committee, Member International Council on Disability, Ruderman Family Foundation

PANEL 2: WHAT ALTERNATIVES DOES SOCIAL MEDIA OFFER?

Moderator: Denise Mann, Co-director, Transforming Hollywood; Professor and Head of the Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

This panel explores social media as a powerful tool for artists, activists and influencers to express their voices of diversity and dissent outside the Hollywood mainstream. Social influencers are a new breed of online creator whose ability to thrive in the platform economy depends on their facility with social media connectivity to amass a dedicated following of online users. Fans who become invested in a favorite artist or musician can help spread their messages of change across an exponentially wider circle of social media communities. While guaranteed a paycheck via “work-for-hire” contracts, Hollywood talent lack essential power and agency because they don’t control the copyright for their artistic work. In contrast, actor-creator-entrepreneurs such as Freddie Wong and Issa Rae are running mini-studios of their own making and retaining part or full ownership of their creations; at the same time, they must use a variety of social media tools to keep their voices heard above the din of clickbait and app fatigue. This new breed of online creator also needs powerful advocates: TV showrunners who understand how to navigate the Hollywood system; talent managers who know how to connect creators with alternative voices to their fans; and tech experts who can tweak algorithms so that streaming content aggregators serve artists as well as platform founders. Welcome to the platform economy.

PANELISTS:

Troy Carter, Founder, Atom Factory; Global Head, Creative Services, Spotify Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor, Arizona State University; author Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America Prentice Penny, Executive Producer/Showrunner, HBO’s Insecure (based on Issa Rae’s web series, The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl) Freddie Wong, Director, Co-Founder and CEO, RocketJump; online video pioneer and VFX artist

PANEL 3: HOW DO WE CHANGE THE SCRIPT?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California

Within the entertainment industry, genre conventions help to shape what stories get told and how productions get promoted and marketed. Many of today’s creators find themselves pushing against taken-for-granted assumptions and long-standing formulas, and as a consequence, often fall back on old tropes and stereotypes. Both realist and fantastical genres offer opportunities for “changing the script” but they also bring historical baggage — old ideas about race, gender, sexuality and disability. The news media like to focus on the white male backlash in fandom but many active fans are embracing these changes and, indeed, modeling through their creative responses what more diverse genre entertainment might look like. Activists are asking critical questions about the ways even more diverse and inclusive productions fall short of our hopes. So, how do we change the script? How do we embrace new stories? How do we tell the old stories differently? And what role can the fantastical or speculative genres perform in imagining alternatives to current racial realities?

PANELISTS:

Grace L. Dillon, Professor, Indigenous Nations Studies Program, Portland State University; Editor, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Writer/Producer, Lost, The Middle Man, The 100, Xena: Warrior Princess Nakul Dev Mahajan, Dancer/Choreographer, So You Think You Can Dance Dodai Stewart, Executive Editor and Director of Culture Coverage, Fusion Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Young Adult Writer; Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Phil Yu, Founder/Editor: Angry Asian Man

A gliche cut off the very beginning of this program, but the core is here.

PANEL 4: HOW DO WE MOVE FROM STEREOTYPES TO MORE COMPLEX CHARACTERS?

Moderator: Maureen Ryan, Chief Television Critic, Variety; Juror, Peabody Awards

The challenge of creating more diverse representations often centers on the construction of characters. It is not enough to put diverse faces in front of the camera: We need to depict those characters with nuance and complexity, in ways that audiences will recognize from their own lives, in ways that inspire their imaginations. Where does the responsibility rest for generating compelling characters in contemporary popular entertainment? What roles do producers, writers and actors play in defining who these people are, what they desire, how they react, what goals they pursue and what relationships they form? And how should we respond when bad things happen to good characters, when subsequent production decisions undercut or marginalize characters whose presence is particularly significant for underrepresented segments of the population?

PANELISTS:

Evelyn Alsultany, Associate Professor; Director of Arab and Muslim American Studies Program, University of Michigan; author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 Desmin Borges, Actor, You’re the Worst Effie Brown, Producer, Dear White People Kathy Le Backes, Vice President of Research and Development, Wise Entertainment Melissa Silverstein, Founder and Publisher, Women and Hollywood Jeff Yang, VP of Cultural Strategy, Sparks & Honey

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 6)

How important is it that we share what emerges from our imagination with others -- that we think of imagining as a collective rather than personal/individual process?  

This is such a powerful and important question - one worth devoting much attention to, as you have!

 

I don’t think we can ignore that it starts with the personal/individual process – this question of the collective imagination, I mean. As individuals, as children, we learn about the world through our imagination. Playing with things, imagining what they can do and then feeling the pushback to learn about the world. As we grow, we use the same mental capacity to create the stories through which we participate in social life and then, ultimately civic life. We assimilate events and build stories that construct our individual identities inside of a larger group. So all the tools and capacities and tricks of the imagination that we employ as individuals are in preparation for both social/civic life and a larger kind of civic imagination. If we aren’t using our imagination fully to somehow close gaps between novel things and events and what we know, the stories we hold and the identities that they sustain, then we atrophy as authentic individuals – we become part of a pack. And if we are not using our imaginations fully to imagine alternate stories, to experiment with those stories, then we also atrophy. We succumb to inertia in a world that is far from inert. Resilience requires being able to imagine and then act on alternate pathways.

 

Imagining as a collective scales off of the personal/individual process. We know that as a child grows, they begin to participate in a social group of peers through play where the imagination gets shared through language – beginning language and simple stories. As they interact with family, school and then ultimately increasingly larger social groups, the friction between stories of their own – the stories of their embryonic identity - with and without peers - and those of the larger body require some kind of resolution. This resolution is the beginning of participating in a social group and then civic life - public life with a sense of responsibility to the group. The moment one stops using their imagination for that resolution – accepting unaltered the stories and rules of the social context they are entering – is the moment when one loses the faculties needed for a civic imagination as a collective imagining.

 

In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about the personal/individual process of imagining as an intra-psychological process that occurs in a short amount of time – from nano-seconds to seconds. The collective imagination is a shared cognitive/psychological/emotional process that is mediated through language or images and over some amount of time.

 

So when I think about the collective imagination, I think if it in two ways: as a sustaining imagination and as an evocative – propositional - imagination. The sustaining imagination is contained in the stories of a social or civic group – those stories that provide the shared identity and frames through which a group interacts with the world. ‘Images’ of how a group sees itself, the historical events from which it derives this perspective, and even what constitutes viable futures. Just as a child resolves novelty through the imagination, the civic body does as well. This is why ‘history’ is always an interpretation of facts. Biases of a group are a function of this. The fact that a group of people might actually see something – believe they see something – that does not intersect with the actual event, means that they are all working off of similar banked mental images – the stories of collective self. This is why contested geopolitical boundaries are so contested and so emotionally charged. The stories of events rarely overlap. This is also how we have things like the Salem witch trials and mass hysteria of all sorts.

 

But in addition to a civic imagination that sustains a civic body, there is the civic imagination deployed to either participate in civic life for the betterment of the whole and the potential for a civic imagination that works to evolve the civic – to shape the civic body anew.

 

If the collective imagination relies on a current of language and images, today, with all the new media we have, and with the way in which it can spread quickly over vast distances, clearly there is a new capacity for engaging people in collective imagining: for finding and building social community, for sustaining stories, for presenting the stories of others in order to hold up a mirror to a situation, cultivating understanding and empathy, and for engaging others in imagining possibilities in order to create authentic and impactful action at many scales from the personal to political. The pervasiveness of media and the ease with which individuals can participate as both creators and consumers has created hyper-performance around stories and images that are the currency of any communal imagination.

 

You have made great use of J.K. Rowlings quote “We do not need magic to transform the world. We carry all the power we need inside of us already. We have the power to imagine better.” Again that seems to imply the individual BUT when it is part of the Harry Potter fan base – a collective group that takes seriously that challenge and call to action – the imagination transforms into real civic engagement – engagement with a sense of responsibility to make the world better – and real civic action. This is pretty spectacular. Your new civic imagination atlas project is a testimony to the scale of this endeavor of using collective imagination for social change. And again, whether it is change to be catalyzed by empathy or by actual projects – a kind of activism of the imagination.

 

Another thing about media today is how engaging it is because it surrounds us with multiple inputs that challenge the boundary between the real and virtual. To be able to not only hear about something, but to see it, to be in it, virtually, and then to even participate in the story through media intentionally designed for participation (games, args, world building, fan fiction), has heightened the potential for identifying with people, situations and events as stories. The potential in this is that one slips beyond understanding into empathy. This is fascinating. John Dewey spoke of the Moral Imagination as a capacity to imagine oneself in the shoes of another in order to act better. But he also spoke of rehearsing better action. So imagining and then rehearsing, with the intention of this spilling over into real life. The ability to use media today to, not only rehearse, but to be in the situation with all of its texture is an opportunity to super-charge Dewey’s concept. I, myself, am fascinated with empathy. Empathy is a state that does not go away. Sympathy does. Too often the two are confused and little sustained action comes from sympathy.

 

It may seem like I am digressing but for me, empathy is engagement that transports one into a different place. Beyond understanding as a cognitive intellectual process, it compels you to act as if it were you. Collective imagining that can attain this and then open up possibilities for alternate futures – possibilities either not imagined or not seen as viable before - and then possible action - the how to get there – this is very powerful for shaping desired, not default, futures.

 

As I talk about this I am reminded that one must also understand how all of this can be used for bad as well as good. The capacity is agnostic. Collective imagining (ISIS’ new caliphate) can be as powerfully bad as it can be good. Understanding how it works is necessary for counteracting as well as acting.

 

So, yes, imagining as a collective and imagining at scale. The potential is enormous. Which makes me wonder . . .

 

In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about how the imagination engages in an entire spectrum of cognitive activity from perception, through reasoning, speculation, experimentation, and free play. This is a spectrum, not different categories, and different locations on the spectrum correspond to different degrees (proportions) of using the imagination for sense-making and sense-breaking.

 

So if you permit me to riff off this relative to the collective. Although I am not quite clear how yet, I think there is something super interesting in thinking about how the spectrum works on a collective, even civic, level both operationally and cognitively . . . Certainly networks are forging an entirely different set of scaled public spaces of imagination. I think it could be productive to unpack how the civic imagination (let’s stay with that phrase) operates and could operate all along a similar spectrum. We’ve talked about its value for creating understanding (at least) and empathy (at best), for speculating on possibilities around civic action and then carrying them out (that’s the pragmatic part – instrumentalizing the products of the imagination), and for building/widening communities around this social action . . . We know how the imagination functions collectively to perceive/interpret events that come along (often emotionally) but is it used for ‘reasoning’? And on the far side of the spectrum, towards experimenting and playing (without specific goals in mind), how to think about that . . . at scale . . . could we engage a civic collective at scale in imagining a different future? For instance, could we get a nation to imagine an alternate ‘american dream’ in a way that scaffolds ownership and commitment and leads to political action and redesign.

 

Benedict Anderson used the phrase Imagined Community in 1983 to define nation as a socially constructed community imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group despite the very real differences, inequalities and exploitations that exist. It is an imagined political community that shares, what he calls, a deep horizontal comradeship. As testimony to this he talks about the willingness of millions of people over the last two centuries ‘to die for such limited imaginings.’ Writing this today on 9/11 2016, it is pretty clear that that statement has become much more true in certain contexts and much less true in others. What would be interesting is to pragmatically construct a process to catalyze the civic imagination of us at the scale of all of us in order to, not only find coherence of nation, but to imagine a nation that holds all of our diversities[1] in a productive culture[2] of cacophonies.

 

So yes, to answer your question, sharing what emerges from our imaginations with others is invaluable. Finding pragmatic ways to instrumentalize what emerges is even more critical. And imagining collectively for civic purpose (on the good side) and then finding pragmatic ways to set that imagination on the ground running towards a better future at any scale is even more valuable. I want to emphasize the ‘at any scale’ part because small actions, smartly deployed, can have disproportionate impact. BUT, there is a caution in this. And that is that ‘smart’ is critical. Intention and capacity to imagine better is not enough. In a complex world that is constantly changing and hyper-connected, where contingencies override absolute conditions, unintended consequences or even just unforeseen consequences can override intentions. Knowing how to navigate this world is critical for civic action. This is what Design Unbound is about - a kind of manual for how-to-think-about and tools-to-do. Pragmatic Imagination is what we call both parent and child to DesUnbound because without the imagination, it is hard to get beyond incremental change and default futures. But also, it, as a specifically human faculty, is the way we evolve as individuals, as societies and cultures, and as a globally distributed species. At all scales, imagination is, as one of Frank Underwood’s writers, Beau Willimon, says, its own form of courage. In context of the show, he did not mean imagination itself, but the willingness to follow where it leads and act on it. Of course, in his case, we can’t ignore that there was/is some degree of evil involved.

 

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).

 

 

[1] Diversities is pluralized to indicate many kinds of diversity from physical to cultural to socio-economic to educational to dispositional and so on – a whole host of diversities.

[2] by culture I mean like the culture in a petri dish – the growing of organisms in or on a medium.

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 5)

You cite designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Ruby as saying, “The purpose of speculation is to unsettle the present rather than to predict the future.” Does this imply that science fiction and other speculative genres might have a particularly powerful role to play in fostering the Pragmatic Imagination? What do you see as the relationship between speculative fiction and speculative design?  

Yes, absolutely, and in two ways. Speculative genres serve as provocation, whether as a challenge directed at society through speculation as critique, or as an evocative object/text/construct, that sets the imagination in motion in the reader - orchestrating their participation in the speculation. But speculative genres can also serve as methodologies, meaning that one can engage in the making of speculative fiction – writing scenarios of one’s own as part of a larger process of speculation around a topic or problem. In Pragmatic Imagination, we have a chapter on this issue of setting the imagination in motion – tricking it to appear when one has something they need it for.

Speculative genres are powerful because they are much bigger than merely predictive. When done well, they honor the same muses of prediction – they understand the need to find trends in the present that will impact the future - but they don’t stop there because they do not assume that the future is pre-written, nor are they uncritical of trends and their possible trajectories. Dunne and Raby’s statement hit a chord with me because of the opportunity that is inherent in shifting from prediction to speculation. Prediction implies that the future is something playing out and that predicting it in advance puts us in a better position when we get there. Unsettling the present is about actively accepting the responsibility that we are all constructing our future with the decisions we make and the things we do. Trends then are merely trajectories with a history but also with an alterable future. Both speculative fiction and speculative design work to question trends and their interactions by speculating on what might play out (for good and bad) and presenting alternatives that may be either worse or more desirable. Science fiction and speculative fiction can do both. They can play out trends the authors see emerging – alerting us to the monster in the backyard or pointing out the angel of opportunity in the driveway – but they can also break with the logic of trends, unsettling the present by speculating on futures that would demand action in the present to get there.

Speculation comes in different genres – is present in different genres. We see it as fantasy and horror, as science fiction, and even as satire or mock non-fiction. Speculative fiction and design can be extreme fantasy or it can be just one note shy of reality.

The kind of speculative fiction I have always been most drawn to is the one that is just a note shy of reality; one that opens up a gap of dissonance between what you think you know and some peripheral parallel possible reality. I remember discovering Ray Bradbury when I was very young . . . Growing up in the Midwest – not one particular place – but lots of the same kinds of places – suburban towns-not-quite-towns – where the trees never grew taller than 5 feet (seemingly – we moved a lot) and the back yards blended into one unending undifferentiated lawn. Under-stimulated intellectually and emotionally, I took to reading Ray Bradbury. I remember discovering Something Wicked This Way Comes, October Country and The Illustrated Man (preparing me for my obsession with Magical Surrealism later on). These are not what we think of when we think of science fiction – perhaps closer to an American surrealism that blends some aspects of science fiction with liminal horror and fantasy. These novels completely captivated me because they revealed an edge or crack in reality. Inside that crack was a mirror reflecting back a hyper-perspective – an uncanny space alive with possibilities, both good and bad. This instilled in me the sense of alternate spaces and stories just out of reach, simultaneously just beyond the big-sky horizon at the end of my street and embedded in the folds of too much time on my hands. I became captivated by the notion of what else might be out there, especially possibilities that might make little or no sense in the calculus of the present, although one might reverse engineer them to.

So back to your question more directly, I think the value in science fiction is that it speculates on what the future might look like if we play out certain trends in science and technology. This helps us see where we might be headed. If we don’t like it, then that certainly unsettles the present, emotionally. The Matrix is one very good example of this as is Stephenson’s work. Socially oriented science fiction tends to critique the world, show us the repercussions of our ways, and in a space that we emotionally respond to whether positively or negatively. Science fiction when it is story based tends to create an emotional look and see. But science fiction can also speculate on what one might accomplish in the future. This is where the fiction of Jules Verne or Asimov might fit in. Jules Verne’s work not only socialized the science and technology but created desire for.

Science fiction helps readers imagine alternate scenarios constructed on playing out science and technology trends or desires. There has always been a gap between those who are scientifically and technologically sophisticated, or even knowledgeable, and those who are not – usually the majority of a population. This gap is only increasing. Science fiction brings this science and technology into the realm of the social. It does so to entice and to warn, playing out fantasy and fears. The unsettlement is the emotion of being confronted with these. In a complex evolving world, there are always unintended/unforeseen consequences of things we do – the sciences and technologies we develop. But when a monster appears in the back year, most of us believe it will disappear because it wasn’t there yesterday or the day before. We believe it must be an aberration. Science fiction writers recognize these monsters – the good and bad ones – for what they are, imagine what they might become, and construct stories around them. This is valuable. But the problem with science fiction (why I am less interested in most of it) is that it doesn’t necessarily speculate on possible alternative states that may or may not be about trends. And science fiction often does all the work for the reader.

Science fiction that engages in world building goes beyond science fiction that is meant to show us something. In creating an entire world context with texture and coherence, the reader is now asked to participate in that context. In doing so, they contribute, they speculate. They write new stories and build out more of the world. This moves one from the big picture of, for example, machines dominating the world in The Matrix, to the texture of a prototyped near future – Minority Report – in which the big picture cascades through all facets of the world in which we participate. In this kind of science fiction, we run into conflicts as things bump up against each other. Driving for coherence, we seek to resolve, or wrestle with these conflicts: marketing and surveillance and bio-engineering and cars and family life . . . So beyond the message and themes, one participates and wrestles with the world one is speculating about. This is valuable.

I am much more interested in fiction that explores and tests boundaries to stimulate insights about the world around us - to challenges us to see the world less naively – and then provoke a space of possibility in which we can imagine – non-naively – the world differently – different for better, whether only incrementally better or hugely better.

World building can do this.

But this brings us also to speculative fiction. It would be fair to say that all fiction is speculative but of course what you mean, what we mean, when we refer to speculative fiction is fiction where one is speculating, usually about a world space, around some theme or idea. For me the paradigmatic example of this is the short ‘story’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by the Argentinian poet/writer/intellectual Jorge Luis Borges. Tlön is written as a narrative account of finding a piece of an encyclopedia for a supposedly real, but obviously fictional, world. In parallel to telling the story of the discovery of this encyclopedia, it cites from the encyclopedia, providing a textured sketch of the world of Tlön, which is built on a specific philosophical ideology that exists in the society in which Borges lived. He speculates on what a world based on Berksonian Idealism would look like – in all domains from language to animals to social and economic systems. He does this in order to speculate on how this idea would play out – what a world based on this concept would look like. This kind of speculative fiction is stunning in that it allows us to play with concepts or trends or anything in order to see a different possible world. This disrupts how we think and act in the present. Borges did not set Tlön n the future. Instead it was an alternate now (actually, an alternate then – it was first published in 1940) that was intended to disrupt and influence – unsettle – the now (then).

Speculative fiction can be in the realm of futurism, but it does not have to be. This is where it parts company with science fiction. I am actually much more interested in speculative fiction that is used to interrogate the present, unsettling it so that we might actually act differently (so back to the quote from Dunne and Raby).

Another one of my favorite books, which is speculative in nature, is The City & the City by China Miéville. Alex McDowell introduced me to this when we were doing the RiLao world building studio. The City & the City interrogates the notion of two cities that exist overlaid, or interleaved. One city is wealthy and modern, while the other is struggling and not modern. There are forces that believe the two cities were one city and forces that are responsible for policing the difference. Citizens of each city are required to ‘unsee’ the other city, even if a car from the other city is hurtling towards them – stepping out of the way without ‘seeing’ the car. To travel between cities requires going through customs and immigration even if the person you want to meet with lives in the building next door to you. Miéville denies different interpretations that frame the book as only a critique of given conditions in our cities today. I suspect it is because he is more interested in the speculation than the critique - interrogating what this condition means for one’s love life, business, etc. and then speculating on how to get around it. The novel is a who-done-it set in a world of ‘what-if’. As we participate in the who-done-it aspect, we begin to engage with the premise and try to see a few steps ahead. Speculative fiction allows us to see a story or a world based upon a ‘what if’. And usually, it engages us to participate in speculating on that what if. But it stops there. It might emotionally and intellectually motivate us to action but it does not really ask us to, nor does it provide a framework for action.

Speculative design on the other hand is a call to action, even if only for the designers. Design that is speculative, even if existing on a very theoretical plane, is always a call to action because design by nature goes from ‘what-if’ (the speculative question) to designing ‘as if’ if were real (fiction and world building does this as well) but because design is engaged within a practice that is geared towards ultimately producing things in the real world, it puts speculation and imagination around speculation to purpose. Even when not realized, it is there ready to be released into the real world because speculative design is meant to circulate. It “depends upon dissemination and engagement with a public or expert audience” – those who are in a position to do things in the real world.

Speculative design can be about small things (Superflux – a camera to photograph 5 dimensions) or it can play a social and possibly political role, “combining the poetic, critical and progressive by applying excessively imaginative thinking to seriously large scale issues,” quoting Dunne and Raby again. Dunne and Raby have a project called “The United Micro-Kingdoms”, which they talk about in their book Speculative Everything. They refer to it as ‘big design’ because it is societal systems level design. But it actually does both. It speculates at the ‘big’ systems level and then designs artifacts that both manifest and interrogate the ‘big.’ The project speculates on four different possible futures based upon a set of four different political ‘what-if’ scenarios that are derived from crossing degrees of personal freedom with degrees of economic freedom. They used a scenario planning framework where two axis cross representing two different current trends one wants to focus on, creating four quadrants that represent four possible scenarios. Unlike traditional scenario planning though, the axes are not associated with real world trends but (conflicting) political positions, and the scenarios are not anticipated scenarios but imagined states. Instead of “it will play out this way”, they ask “what if we could imagine it this way.” The project creates four concurrent micro-Britains, each of which is based upon an alternate ‘what if’ scenario. Not stopping there, they then do a partial world build of those scenarios and then focus on the automobile and its infrastructure as a physical artifact and system that manifests many aspects of that world. In the end, the results play out, critique, and interrogate current positions and trends. But they do so by speculating on alternate courses of history based upon other values and intersecting ideologies.

While being a type of research, it is more. It opens up a public imagination (speculative design is meant to be disseminated – the United Micro-Kingdoms project was extensively exhibited and published) to possible future realities. Speculative design, even in its extreme form, is not fiction. It is meant as research into possibilities. And like all good research, the most successful speculative design can be rigorously interrogated and assessed.

This is part of the pragmatic dna: to not imagine gratuitously or for personal pleasure only, but also, for public influence and agency. For me, as an architect, this is when it becomes very interesting – when it leads to agency in the real world.

Speculative design is a space between reality and the impossible. It focuses on how to think about reality in a sophisticated, complex, world-space way. To use the imagination both freely and synthetically - for sense-breaking and sense-making to radicalize reality. In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about setting the imagination in motion and then instrumentalizing the products of the imagination for action in the world. Speculative design offers a framework for setting oneself in motion within the context of a big question or problem that draws on the pragmatic imagination. It also suggests a practice of design speculation that instrumentalizes the products of the speculation through public dissemination. But one need not stop there.

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).