Complex TV: Authorship

04May12

I’m happy to announce that the next chapter of Complex TV has been posted. It’s focused on Authorship in contemporary serial television, and I think it’s all never-before-published material. I’ve been giving a talk based on this chapter for this spring, and have been really happy with the conversation it provokes – and I do intend the chapter’s conclusion as a provocation in a number of ways. I look forward to reading people’s comments and feedback on the MediaCommons site. Here’s the abstract for the chapter:

Contemporary television has fostered a unique form of creative authorship, establishing the role of “showrunner” within its production contexts. This chapter discusses the technologically-enabled paratexts of podcasts, making-of documentaries, DVD commentaries, Twitter feeds and blogs that have enabled television creators to speak directly to viewers, and how such paratexts have helped constitute a new model of the star showrunner like Buffy’s Joss Whedon, Community’s Dan Harmon, and Lost’s team of Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse. In exploring the textual and paratextual presence of showrunners, I consider how viewers rely upon an inferred author function to make sense of contemporary television serials.

See you in the comments!

And if you want to see the presentation version, here’s a video of it from my presentation in March at University of Groningen in Holland:

Filed under: Books, Complex TV, MediaCommons, Narrative, Television, TV Industry, TV Shows, Viewers   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: authorship, breaking bad, buffy, community, Lost, The Wire