As is typical for me at the end of the school year, my to-do list has a pile of publishing projects that I’ve put off to the last minute. So I’ve spent the last month knocking things off the list with general success – I revised an essay on Lostpedia that will be coming out in the next issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, and contributed a short piece to a roundtable on genre for Mediascape.
But my main writing has been focused on an essay for an anthology called Intermediality & Storytelling co-edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Marina Grishakova. I proposed to adapt my presentation given at last summer’s Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image conference; as I blogged last year, my presentation explored how American prime time television copes with the challenges of cuing viewers’ long-term memories, which often catalog years of story material. Alas my presentation was oral/slide only, so I spent the past couple of weeks converting it to essay form.
Beneath the fold I’ve included the entire essay, and would appreciate any comments, as I’ll have a chance to revise before publication. I’m particularly interested if my examples, which include moments from Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Six Feet Under, Veronica Mars, Arrested Development, The Wire, and many more shows, make any sense to readers who haven’t seen the relevant programs. And as it’s written for an international anthology not primarily focused on television, I’ve included a bit of industrial and technological context that will might be fairly redundant for anyone reading a blog called Just TV.
[And a technical note for software geeks: OpenOffice drags & drops formatted text directly into WordPress! I've never had an easier time migrating a long document into this blog - OO FTW!]
Thanks in advance for any comments, and must note that unlike the rest of this blog’s CreativeCommons license, this post is ©2009 by Jason Mittell.
Continue reading ‘Previously On: Prime Time Serials and the Mechanics of Memory’
Filed under: Academia, Media Studies, Narrative, TV Shows, Television, Viewers | 1 Comment
Tags: Arrested Development, Battlestar, Lost, memory, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Veronica Mars
Picking up Deadwood
One of the challenges of researching contemporary television narrative is time – it simply takes too much of it to watch everything that should be watched. Coupled with my day-to-day responsibilities of teaching, chairing, fathering, reading the internets, and having a life, watching TV can often fall low on the to-do list. (I know I’m garnering tremendous sympathy about this…) And thus my attempt to grapple with the trend of narrative complexity in television storytelling has some blindspots, shows that I know I should watch but haven’t yet.
One of those major texts is Deadwood, the Western that most critics put in the holy trinity of HBO David-helemed masterpieces along with The Wire and The Sopranos. My colleague Chris Keathley taught the first season as a serialized text in this spring’s intro Aesthetics of the Moving Image course, reporting that students were truly enamored of the show. And two of my favorite online TV bloggers are writing about the show this summer: Myles McNutt after watching for the first time, and Todd VanDerWerff as a return to his favorite series. So with all of that inspiration, I’ve tackled the first season of the show over the past few weeks – spoilery commentary beneath the fold.
Filed under: Narrative, TV Shows, Television | 10 Comments
Tags: deadwood, The Wire
I’ve got a few random thoughts that have been piling up without sufficient mass to justify a full post. So here’s a compilation of stuff passing through my mind, Larry King style.
- I’ve not tried to do a full account or analysis of the network upfronts or planned 2009-10 season. But in reading about the shows and plans, the one thing that struck me and gave me hope was a seeming embrace of the short season. More than any thematic, tonal, or narrative development from the rising success of cable drama/comedy series, I think the most important lesson for networks to embrace is that 20+ episodes is simply too much expect sufficient quality from a new show, especially one that aims to be innovative. So more shows (both new and returning) are being picked up for shorter runs, which bodes well for their creative success. And with the aftermarket of DVD boxes, it could be an economically wise move as well to help build and sustain a series for the long haul.
- Breaking Bad’s second season was as good as anything I’ve seen on TV short of The Wire. The first season was a good show surrounding Bryan Cranston’s brilliant performance, but getting cut short by the writer’s strike was the best thing that could have happened – based on comments on the excellent producer podcast for the series, they’d planned to make the final episodes of the first season highly explosive, escalating the stakes in more sensational ways. Once they came back to plot out season 2, they embraced a lower-key approach to charting the minute details of the characters’ lives, a tactic that has made the series leap into the upper echelon of televisual excellence.
This season broadened the depth of the rest of the cast – Cranston still shines brightest, but the other actors and performances are now almost as good, especially Aaron Paul’s Jesse. Individual episodes were little etudes of emotional intensity, especially the ones with Tuco in the desert, Jesse in the house-of-meth, and the mind-blowing final two episodes of the season. The show consistently manages to confound my expectations, deliver on its own promises, and create truly powerful emotional moments that I can’t shake for weeks. If you haven’t watched it, dive in before you fall too far behind.
- The other show I’ve recently completed is In Treatment’s second season. I missed the first season, in large part due to the daunting scheduling – even with a TiVo, 2.5 hours a week is a lot of TV to keep up with. After reading a bit of advance buzz, we signed on for season 2. The scheduling was certainly a challenge, as we ended up falling behind and finishing a couple weeks late. But we were glad that we did – the show is all about the performances, with Gabriel Byrne carrying the series on top of a number of excellent supporting performances, especially Hope Davis and Alison Pill. At times the show becomes a bit too painful to watch, as characters having emotional breakdowns or self-destructing can become tough to take; likewise, the show’s stylistic and temporal realism sometimes runs counter to the clearly compressed pace of therapy portrayed over 7 weeks. But the show was sufficiently compelling as to suggest a true innovation in how to program and schedule a series, one that it would be interesting to see other shows mimic.
- I haven’t yet watched tonight’s inadvertent finale for Pushing Daisies, but watching the previous two episodes from ABC’s summer burnoff created wistful glee – utter joy from the show, tempered by outrage from the injust way that ABC treated my beloved pie hole. Kristen Chenowith singing Lionel Ritchie was simply too beautiful to live…
- I see almost no films in theaters anymore, but my daughter and I both adored Up. Like Wall-E, it starts stronger than it finishes – for once, can Pixar make a film without a climactic chase/battle? But the photo album montage sequence is simply perfect. And I’m glad that another generation has the opportunity to appreciate Ed Asner.
- I’ve been on Twitter for about a month. Haven’t quite figured out how I’d most like to use it, but I feel obliged to be familiar with trending technologies. It’s best use for me has been during conferences, where a group of people document and discuss an ongoing event, bleeding the boundaries of the conference into a larger community. But more often than not, it’s just another drain on my attention.
That’s all for now. I’m still working on a larger post wrapping up my course on The Wire, but it’s taking too long to become articulate.
Filed under: TV Industry, TV Shows, Television | Leave a Comment
Tags: breaking bad, in treatment, pushing daisies, up
Notes on Serial Forms conference
I spent part of last week on a quick, tiring, but exciting trip to Zurich. I was an invited presenter at University of Zurich’s conference on Serial Forms, a small but well-focused 3-day conference focused on serial narratives across a range of media.
My own presentation was called “Serial Boxes: The Cultural Value of Long-Form American Television.” While I don’t expect any revelations for anyone who reads my blog, I’ve shared my paper below via a narrated slideshow – I didn’t write it out in publishable form (yet), so I apologize for the awkwardness of trying to recreate my presentation while talking to my computer in my office:
More interesting than my own presentation, I had the opportunity to meet a number of researchers whom I’ve not read or seen, especially given the linguistic and practical boundaries that often divide European and American scholars. Alas a number of presentations were in German, so I took the opportunity to wander the city rather than sit in my monolingual confusion for hours. But here are a few notes on English presentations that stuck with me beneath the fold: Continue reading ‘Notes on Serial Forms conference’
Filed under: Academia, Media Studies, Narrative, Television | 1 Comment
Tags: conferences, serial
Settle down about new Buffy film
The internets have been blazing over the last two days about the reported feature film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that would not involve Joss Whedon. While I try to not to place this blog in the maelstrom of rumor mongering and fan panic, I’m inspired to take a break from grading to share this simple message:
Relax.
First off, I’m willing to take zero-money wagers that this film never gets released. The reports suggest potential development deals, but in the world of the film industry, that’s quite far from actual filmmaking. Look at the principals involved: Roy Lee and Vertigo Entertainment is leading the development, but he has over 30 other titles listed in development at the moment. Lee is quite effective in getting his projects produced, mostly by remaking Asian genre pictures on the cheap, but only a small portion of the projects he starts moving will actually get made.
On the other side, Fran Rubel Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui, who own the rights to the original Buffy film, have pretty much done nothing notable in film and television since the 1992 film – they’ve happily cashed checks from the success of the TV series and its multi-media spin-offs. My faith in them actually ushering a new film through the development process is pretty low.
So looking at the track records of the people attached to this project suggests that the odds are low that the film gets made. And perhaps the reaction amongst Whedonites who’ve made the title appear like a bankable project will make Lee pause on pursuing the project too aggressively.
And even if it does get made, who cares? There’s a lot of mediocre material in the Buffy-verse, from the original film to weak tie-in games and books. The idea that a “Feature Film” is the pinnacle of a media franchise’s value has long since dissapated, in large part due to the successes of boxed set television like Buffy. If the film comes out, it will probably be a fairly low-profile genre release like most of Vertigo’s projects – Buffy fans often imagine that their favorite show is a lot higher profile than it actually is, so don’t expect a Batman level tentpole summer blockbuster.
Even though I’m skeptical that it will get made, I’m a bit curious to see how it turns out – it will certainly be different than Whedon’s version, probably by turning up the horror and lowering the snarky wit. Does the inherent concept allow for this genre jiggling? I’m doubtful, as I view the success of the show as less about the concept and more from the characters – and a 2-hour genre film can’t offer much characterization beyond shorthand stock characters and simple oppositions. The best we might hope for would be a standard entertaining vampire film whose heroine happens to be named Buffy, probably more inspired by Twilight than BtVS.
And for the Whedon die-hards, stop worrying about “tarnishing” the franchise – if the film is decent, it will reflect well on the original vision; if it sucks, it will affirm Joss’s authorial power. So relax, and focus on seeing if Dollhouse can take advantage of its second season to turn into the show whose promise was just starting to shine through.
Filed under: Film, Film Industry, TV Shows, Television | 1 Comment
Tags: buffy
The Lost Payoff
Gotta take a break from grading to write about Lost’s rollicking season finale, and season 5 in general. Spoilery goodness beneath the fold.
Filed under: Genre, Narrative, TV Shows, Television | 9 Comments
Tags: Lost
First off, I just wanted to mention that I’ll be at Media in Transition 6 this weekend, so if you’re in Cambridge, say hi! I’m a respondant on a panel about using moving images as a rhetorical mode of film & media criticism on Sunday morning – it should be an interesting discussion.
In the past, I’ve noted how talking with the press can be both gratifying and frustrating, as often quotes are decontextualized, cut-off, or otherwise misconstrued. So to give credit where it is due, I want to point to Amy Rosenberg’s piece on the Susan Boyle phenomenon in The Philadelphia Inquirer for capturing our conversation effectively in a compelling article. Let me elaborate beyond the quotes here:
I’ve mostly been mystified by the online spread of Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent, watching dozens of Facebook friends link to the video, celebrate it in their status updates, and join her fan page. I watched the video, and didn’t make it through the whole thing once I got the point (note: I hate Les Miz, so the song does nothing for me). As quoted in the article, I didn’t quite understand why the crowd, judges, and online fans all assumed that Boyle’s appearance would indicate anything about her singing, so the surprise seemed unwarranted.
In fact, anyone who knows BGT or its previous spreading video of Paul Potts should have expected Boyle’s performance. Potts was a similiarly unassuming working-class, middle-aged singer with an impressive voice who wowed the crowd and judges, going on to win the first season of BGT. I remember seeing Potts on YouTube, and being surprised by his performance – less because an unattractive person was singing well, but because his working-class demeanor didn’t fit with his preferred musical genre of opera. Potts established the narrative hook for BGT that distinguished it from the Idol franchise: highlight people based on talent instead of celebrity/stardom potential, and craft feel-good narratives of people who seem truly commonplace with exceptional abilities.
Boyle fits with this narrative too well – so well that the surprise on the judges’ faces seemed disingenous. Certainly Simon Cowell, who is a producer of the show, would know better than to be truly surprised by Boyle fulfilling the perfectly cast role of diamond in the rough. But everyone played their parts: Boyle seeming out-of-place on stage until she started to sing, the crowd voicing skepticism based on her appearance only to immediately transform into a cheering throng upon hearing her voice, and the judges melting their cynicism on demand. It is a perfect example of how reality television can be both unscripted and completely plotted – through casting and genre conventions, the show offers surprise exactly as we might expect it to.
What I don’t understand is why so many people have embraced this as a marker of the triumph of the human spirit. For me, it’s a confirmation of how the media creates untenable beauty norms and ideals – the judges and crowd’s dismissive tone toward Boyle before she sang confirmed the ridiculous assumed linkage between conventional beauty and talent. Their shift in attitude was not Boyle’s triumph, but an indictment of this assumption – which will certainly last no longer than Boyle’s run on the show. Boyle herself is irrelevant to this narrative – it’s not about her talent (which, to be honest, is fine but not truly exceptional) or her story, but rather she is just a vehicle to make us feel good about how open minded we can be about frumpy people.
One last point: BGT is now in a bind. Boyle clearly has to win the competition, or her swelling fanbase will rebel (and the Cowell led record contract will suffer). But after Potts and Boyle, the formula will be laid so bare as to make the presumption of “unscripted” untenable. Obviously the economic gains of Boyle’s success is all that counts in the short-term, but the genre conventions cannot be made so obvious and predictable that the premise of the show suffers in the long-term. At least until next year’s token ugly singer “surprises” everyone yet again.
Filed under: Genre, Press, TV Shows, Television | 11 Comments
Tags: britain's got talent, reality tv, susan boyle
Back in January, I wrote about my disappointment in the third season of Friday Night Lights. After a wonderful first season, I found the second season more palatable than most fans did, but found the missteps more glaring in the third season, despite the consensus praise for the season as a return to form. Now that the season has ended (and I’ve caught up), I’m sorry to say that I haven’t improved my opinion on the show and where it’s going – I still find it overall a good show, but I’m frequently annoyed by how much better it could be based on what worked so well in the first season.
The show’s main appeal for me in the first season was its sense of texture – you got a feel for both the place of Dillon, Texas, and the relationships between the characters. The way they spoke to each other, the way they spent their days – this felt both dramatically engaging and new for television. Season 2’s flaws seemed to be with the directions the writers took the stories – they added new characters to disrupt relationships, and they created the unrealistic murder plotline. But, and I know I’m in the minority here, the show still worked because the feeling of place and characters still felt true – the texture between the Taylors, the conflicts over fitting in versus getting out of Dillon, the multifaceted dimensions of the town (including the new dimensions of the church culture and Santiago’s Latino neighborhood). And even thought some of the plots might have been unreal, the way they were told felt true to Dillon – the murder wasn’t about the crime, but how it mattered to Landry and Tyra’s characters.
Season 3 played to the show’s weaknesses instead of its strengths. The worst part of the show for me has always been the way it portrays the football games – contrived plays and scenarios to maximize artificial drama, a skewed sense of focus that makes it seem as if the team has no defensive or special team players (have we ever seen a kick or punt?), and an inability to offer a sense of what type of team the Panthers are, aside from a tendency toward improbable come-from-behind victories. I can generally overlook this, as the games are usually a small part of the episodes and the surrounding character drama is more relevant. But unlike the rest of the show, the football games lack a sense of texture.
Season 3 seemed to construct nearly all of its plotlines like its football games: maximized contrivances for exaggerated drama, last minute twists and reversals, inconsistency in tone and style, and rushing through moments that lack overt drama in favor of the sensational plays. As I wrote before, the entire Tami as principal scenario felt completely forced and unreal – and how it enabled the finale’s twist of Coach Taylor’s firing and switch to East Dillon was even more unearned as a plot development. The McCoy’s came in as caricatured villains, setting up obvious conflicts that were played for their extreme drama rather than nuance. And instead of portraying the potentially intriguing portrait of how McCoy’s money and influence poisoned the town’s attitude toward the extremely successful tenure of Coach Taylor, we fast-forwarded to the final minutes of the game to see the contrived twist that felt overly forced and unearned. In essence, season 3 sacrificed the texture of storytelling to emphasize narrative events – while that’s typical of much television, it’s not what makes FNL distinct or enjoyable.
For me, the dual emotional centers of the show are Tami Taylor and Matt Saracen, characters with rich depth that are often put in situations with conflicting priorities. In season 2, Tami’s portrayal of a mother grappling with an infant, teenager, absent husband, and career goals was one of the most satisfying and nuanced portraits of contemporary parenting I’ve seen on TV. In season 3, all that disappeared (including Baby Gracie), with Tami’s function shifting to a plot contrivance to facilitate other people’s stories – Tyra’s attempts to get into college, Buddy’s quest for the Jumbotron, the McCoy’s entree into Dillon, Julie’s teenage rebellions, etc. Connie Britton’s still great, but Tami’s character is a shadow of what she’d been in the first two seasons.
Matt seemingly had more to do this season, what with dealing with his grandmother’s decline, the return of his mother, being benched as QB1, and his reconnection with Julie. But some of his decisions were unrelated to his emotional motivations than conveniences of plotting – for instance, I never got a sense of what he wanted out of college, just that he needed to sacrifice something to stay with his grandmother. (I will say his attempts to switch to receiver was a high-point for the season.) The micromoments between Matt and Julie are golden, and his relationship with Coach Taylor continues to be a complex tangle of emotions on both ends; but Matt was too often buffeted by the plotting needs of the series to create conflicts.
Another aspect of season 3 that really disappointed me was the whitening of Dillon. The first two seasons presented interesting intersections between race and class, highlighting how the town was divided along a number of axes and the potentials (and limits) of football to enable cross-cultural dialogue. But with the conclusion of Smash’s storyline and the disappearance of Santiago and Carlotta, season 3 presented an all-white vision of Dillon, personified by the new additions of the McCoys. Perhaps the East Dillon plotline next year will rectify this, as it appears that the East side is the “wrong” side of the tracks in town, but it also seems that NBC’s strategy for the show is to create teen heartthrobs to draw in an audience, who are assumed to be white in the logic of commercial television.
Anyway, I’m curious to hear from some of the defenders who weighed in on my last FNL post, as I’m pretty burnt on the series. I’m on the fence as to whether I should return to Dillon for season 4, as I increasingly gripe at the TV more than getting swept away into its world. What am I missing here?
Filed under: Narrative, TV Shows, Television | 7 Comments
Tags: friday night lights
I’ve been asked by my friend/colleague/Dean/Provost Tim Spears to contribute to his blog, One Dean’s View, offering a post on a few digital tools that I find essential for navigating my digital life. Here’s what I had to say, reblogged:
I am known as one of the more technologically engaged/addicted faculty members at Middlebury. Luckily, it ties directly into what I teach: media studies, focused on contemporary popular culture, television, and digital media. So the hours I spend on my MacBook Pro are mostly part of my broader “field research,” whether it’s Facebook social networking, writing on my blog, or reading articles from dozens of sources I regularly monitor.
Everyone has different technological preferences and tendencies – while I’m always on my laptop, I never carry a cell phone except for travelling out of town, and I have no interest in having a Blackberry or other mobile device (except as a way to play audio and video on the fly). So when Tim asked me to offer some tips for his readers for some essential technology tools, it should be noted that these are potentially more appropriate for laptop or desktop computers than for mobile browsing.
My two core tools are the Firefox browser and Google suite of applications. Firefox is my browser of choice both because of its open-source core and its suite of extensions. My personal favorite Firefox add-ons are AdBlockPlus to eliminate flashing banners and annoying pop-ups, Download Helper to save YouTube videos to my computer, Interclue to preview links, and Tab Mix Plus to manage tabs (and I usually have at least 6 tabs open in my browser).
I’m a convert to the Google platform of tools – I use Gmail as an interface for all my email, have iGoogle as my homepage, plan my days through Google Calendar, and obviously search via Google. One tool I’ve found a lot of Google users don’t know about is Google Reader, an RSS reader. In brief, RSS is a way to subscribe to websites that frequently update, such as blogs and periodicals; an RSS reader allows you to manage feeds from as many sites as you want, sort them by date, tag, topic, etc. Google Reader is the slickest RSS reader I’ve found, with the excellent feature to share items with friends, and even publish your shared items to your own blog or your Facebook profile. (My own shared feed is here.)
Another key tool I use is delicious, a “social bookmarking” site. When I find a website that I want to bookmark, I save it to my delicious profile (via a Firefox extension, of course), where I can tag it with relevant categories and notes. I can also share my bookmarks with friends, follow other people’s bookmarks, browse similar links via tags, and publish my links to my blog or Facebook profile. Essentially, delicious turns the private act of collecting links into a public shared resource of collective web-surfing wisdom – not to mention helps avoid the trauma of a crashed hard drive erasing your bookmarks!
Sometimes a bookmark isn’t enough – if I find a site that I want to use for my research, whether it’s an article from an online newspaper, a PDF of a scholarly journal, or a particularly interesting blog entry, Zotero helps me catalog it. Zotero is an open source bibliographic tool that runs as a Firefox add-on. When you find a site you want to cite, Zotero saves the content and stores the bibliographic information; you can then use Zotero to output bibliographies or citations directly into a word processor. It’s essentially a browser-based version of EndNote or RefWorks, but free and more useful for online research.
When it comes time to write with all that “research,” I’m still searching for the right application. I’ve used MS Office for years, but have grown frustrated with it, as it really is ill-suited for Macs. I’ve tried GoogleDocs, which is great for collaborative writing and sharing, but lacks the formatting flexibility I need (such as footnotes and handling longer documents). I love Keynote, Apple’s far superior-to-PowerPoint slideshow application that’s part of iWork, but was disappointed with some of the limitations of Pages and Numbers. I’m currently using OpenOffice, which is powerful but I’m still getting used to its quirks and bugs. I will use Scrivener to help organize my next book, but it’s not the right tool for everyday writing. If anyone has anyone has tips for the best Mac-friendly alternative to MS Office, I’d love to hear it!
Filed under: Academia, Middlebury, New Media, Technology | 2 Comments
Tags: tools
Vermont’s Governor Wallace
Today Vermont had an opportunity to lead the nation in the fight for equality and justice by becoming the first state to legislate marriage equality without a mandate from the courts. Today, Governor Jim Douglas stood on the wrong side of history and vetoed the bill that had overwhelming support from the legislature. There is a decent chance that the veto will be overridden, but either way, Douglas has sealed his fate in history’s eyes.
Douglas is a graduate of Middlebury College and a resident of Middlebury. I wanted to take the opportunity to share the letter I wrote to him last week, which clearly made no impact on his attempt to impose his own beliefs upon his neighbors. Let’s hope Vermont can field a strong competitor to unseat him in 2010.
March 30, 2009
Dear Governor Jim Douglas,
I write with great disappointment regarding your proclaimed intention to veto the Marriage Equality bill working its way through the Vermont Legislature. As one of your neighbors in Middlebury, I can assure you that your position on the issue does not accurately represent the will of the people of Addison County. With a single signature, you stand to disempower the voices of the 300 people that gathered on Sunday, March 29, at the Middlebury town green to support marriage equality, and thousands of other supporters of equal rights around the state.
As a faculty member at your alma mater, I hope I can appeal to your sense of history that was forged at Middlebury College. I teach American media history, and regularly show footage from the Civil Rights demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s. A striking image from this era is of Governor George Wallace, standing on the steps of the University of Alabama in an effort to block integration. It was clear even then that Governor Wallace was fighting a losing battle, and today he is best remembered for being on the wrong side of history. I sincerely hope that in decades to come, I will not be showing similar footage of you as this generation’s Governor Wallace standing in the way of today’s battle for civil rights.
You have an opportunity to be on the right side of history. Your personal beliefs about the meaning of marriage should not stand in the way of progress toward equality and justice. If you personally choose to oppose the bill, please leave it unsigned, allowing overwhelming legislative intent to move forward without you standing on the steps to block the civil rights of thousands of Vermonters. I hope that your sense of history and justice will win out over bigotry and political grandstanding, and ensure you will not be the Governor Wallace of the 21st century.
Sincerely,
Jason Mittell
East Middlebury
Filed under: Media Politics, Middlebury, Vermont | 2 Comments
Tags: gay rights, marriage equality
Since I moved to Vermont in 2002, I have been on the board of Middlebury Community Television, our local public access channel. Yesterday, the board sponsored a community media forum, where we invited members of our community to come together to discuss the role of a small public access channel in a small town today – for a frame of reference, the population of Middlebury is only 8,000, and the subscriber base for cable is even smaller than that.
As Middlebury’s resident television expert, I gave an opening talk at the forum that outlined the context of PEG (Public / Educational / Governmental) channels, the role they served in the 20th century, and the threats to that role in the new media landscape. My presentation slides are below, which should be fairly self-explanatory.
I share them here to invite a broader conversation about the potential future of PEG channels. As I see it, the transformation away from the old television model, in which the distribution bottleneck meant that the only opportunities for individuals to contribute to television as a producer were going through a PEG channel or working through the complex world of the commercial or public television industries, is good thing overall. Certainly the rise of online video, nearly ubiquitous access to the tools of production, and a multiplication of distribution avenues is a net boon for democracy and creativity.
However, PEGs traditionally have served as community media centers, local anchors in a media system that has skewed toward national and global models. While online distribution certainly allows for localism, it does not privilege that model. Additionally, the digitial divide persists, especially in a state like Vermont with one of the oldest and most rural populations, so organizations like MCTV reach citizens who will never find their way to YouTube. (For instance, I was one of the youngest people in the room yesterday and one of the few who’d ever been to Hulu, YouTube, etc…)
PEG has more competition today from other ways for consumers to become producers, making the exclusive access to the tools of production that public access used to provide less essential for many – again, this is a net gain for democracy, but a tough hit for PEG channels. Additionally, as Jonathan Nichols-Pethick discussed in his recent Flow column, regulatory and corporate shifts threaten to undermine the legal and financial basis of PEG channels.
So I pose the question: what should be the future path that PEG channels take to sustain themselves? Or is this simply an example of a business model that has outlived its necessity, suggesting that those of us involved in community media should repurpose our energies into different models and structures? Are there national/global answers here, or is it all locally-specific?
I’m eager to hear what people might have to say…
Filed under: Media Politics, Middlebury, TV Industry, Technology, Television, Vermont | 3 Comments
Tags: public access
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random thoughts from media scholar Jason Mittell
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