tore a hole.
27 January 2008 | 4 comments
ok, it’s eight days old by now, but i’ve been thinking about the ways that virginia heffernan’s piece in last week’s new york times magazine about friday night lights and how its chances for success have been doomed in large part by its “lack of franchising” drove me batty. to sum up: it was another one of those trend stories that was obviously written by someone who’s spent too much time within internet culture to realize a few crucial points. one, the internet isn’t as reflective/directive of the mass mind as those enmeshed in it would like to think; and two, the idea of “franchising”–more on that in a second–only really works with certain types of narratives, i.e., the science-fictiony sorts of things that tend to fire up the chat rooms and slash fictioneers and the sorts of shows that invite/require audience interaction like american idol. and three, the slavish fandom of people who are into the sorts of shows described in point two only feeds the illusion that the internet is actually the world, when in fact it isn’t.
before i delve into this further, here’s heffernan’s definition of “franchising”:
An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.
This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication, the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans. It’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture. In fact, rhizome art is both lower-brow (“American Idol,” Derek Waters’s “Drunk History”) and more avant-garde (“Battlestar Galactica,” Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area”) than linear, author-controlled narrative, which takes its cues from the middle-class form of the novel.
that sounds pretty smart! but is it really true? sci-fish shows like battlestar galactica and heroes may seem popular in the internet hothouse, but looking at the current nielsens, the popular scripted dramas this week seem to not have much going for them as far as “roots and shoots” go. instead, the police procedurals that make up a good chunk of the current top 20 are pretty low on the “user-generated offshoot” totem pole (although i bet jeremy sisto’s addition to the law & order cast upped that show’s fanfiction-writer quotient by a fair amount*). one could argue that all those law & order spinoffs and csi versions are, themselves, franchising, but their genesis wasn’t “franchising” in the heffernanian sense as much it was abject laziness/cowardice on the part of programmers.
more:
Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art — at least when it takes the form of prime-time TV. They won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love of attention, and thus money, and thus life. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.
As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.
note that heffernan doesn’t make a single mention of shows that did have a fair amount of user-generated excitement–wikis, overexcited blog chatter, “save our show” campaigns involving fruit–but turned out to be flops, ratings-wise: arrested development and buffy then, gossip girl now. a small subset of viewers may want to remix and review, but do the bulk of them? i’ll answer that question with another: if they did, wouldn’t we be seeing a lot more two and a half men-related youtubing out there?
i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general. (the success of a show like lost is probably the exception to the rule, although that show is pretty compelling on a mass level, and it featured many shots of absolutely stunning people running around shirtless and/or in rainstorms. hello, josh holloway!) but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be, much like certain other phenomena that i’ve come across in the day job.
a show like friday night lights–which i haven’t seen, but which i’ve heard is quite good–doesn’t need a user-generated encyclopedia of characters in order to thrive; it needs a commitment from the network supposedly supporting it, whether it’s proper promotion or not sticking it in the ratings graveyard of friday night then claiming that said move was an effort to help dimmer viewers out there remember when it was on. that’s what has been missing from television in general over the last few years. (anyone else remember how the total time fox spent running ads for skin far exceeded the total airtime the actual show got?)
* the marty dressler thing being its own animal, obv.