Archive for the ‘Viewers’ Category
It’s time for another chapter of Complex TV to go live on MediaCommons Press—this time, the topic is Transmedia Storytelling. It builds on work I have done in recent years about how television narratives expand into other media, especially around Lost and its ARGs, but very few of the chapter’s ideas have been published elsewhere. As [...]
Filed under: Complex TV, Fandom, MediaCommons, Narrative, New Media, Television, TV Industry, TV Shows, Videogames, Viewers | 1 Comment
Tags: breaking bad, Lost, transmedia
Complex TV: Authorship
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 [...]
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
Complex TV: Orienting Paratexts
I’m pleased to post the next chapter of Complex TV, focused on the topic of Orienting Paratexts. Here’s the abstract: Along with shifts in the television industry and technologies, viewer practices have adapted to the digital era with new developments in how people consume narrative television. This chapter explores the range of paratexts that have [...]
Filed under: Books, Complex TV, Fandom, MediaCommons, Narrative, New Media, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 1 Comment
Tags: complex television, Lost, lostpedia, paratext
Justifying David Simon
Last week, the TV-themed corners of the Internets were all atwitter around a pair of interviews David Simon gave, first to The New York Times, then to Alan Sepinwall at HitFix. I won’t try to summarize them fully, but I did want to weigh in on one of Simon’s core arguments about the place of episodic criticism. [...]
Filed under: Narrative, New Media, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 6 Comments
Tags: criticism, justified, Lost, The Wire
Serial Orientations
Last week, I traveled to Bochum, an industrial city in northwest Germany, to serve as a keynote speaker at the conference (Dis)Orientations: (dis)orienting media & narrative mazes. I enjoyed my time in Bochum and at the conference, connecting with some interesting European media scholars and exploring another German city and university. My talk, “Serial Orientations: [...]
Filed under: Fandom, Narrative, New Media, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 3 Comments
Notes on Rewatching
Last week I had an excellent trip to Ohio, giving talks both at Oberlin College and Ohio State University. At the latter, I was on a panel about television seriality with my friends Chris Becker, Sean O’Sullivan, and Greg Smith. Below is the paper I gave entitled “Why We Watch Again: Notes on Rewatching Television [...]
Filed under: Media Studies, Narrative, Television, Viewers | 6 Comments
Tags: rewatching
Yesterday, David Bordwell blogged about television watching, and the reasons why he generally doesn’t do it (at least made-for-television fiction – he obviously watches many films on his television screen). Soon, my Twitter feed was all atwitter with anxiety about how Bordwell (one of the major figures in film studies, if you don’t know) was [...]
Filed under: Academia, Film, Media Studies, Narrative, Television, Viewers | 7 Comments
On Disliking Mad Men
As a scholar and fan of contemporary narratively complex television serials, one of my blindspots has been Mad Men, a show about which I’ve mentioned on this blog has little appeal to me. Thus it was a bit surprising months ago when I was invited to contribute to a forthcoming book of collected essays on [...]
Filed under: Fandom, Media Studies, Narrative, Taste, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 101 Comments
Tags: Mad Men
As I can’t seem to think about anything else, and it’s a fine distraction from grading, I’ve been engaging in a lot of conversation about Lost this week across a range of media. On Twitter this afternoon, my friend Derek Kompare commented in a discussion that no matter what the finale offers, a good portion [...]
Filed under: Fandom, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 25 Comments
Tags: Lost
Serial Boxes
Last summer, I was invited as a keynote presenter for a conference on serial form at the University of Zurich – I blogged previously about the conference and my presentation. Now the conference organizers are publishing the proceedings, translating all of the English papers into German. Since I spoke off an outline, I needed to [...]
Filed under: Academia, Media Studies, Narrative, Technology, Television, Viewers | 13 Comments
Tags: Battlestar, bsg, dvd, Lost, Six Feet Under, The Wire
Just a quick pointer to my newest publication: in the new issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, I’ve published “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia.”Here’s the abstract: This essay explores the award-winning fan site Lostpedia to examine how the wiki platform enables fan engagement, structures participation, and distinguishes between various forms [...]
Filed under: Academia, Fandom, New Media, Technology, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 2 Comments
Tags: Lost, lostpedia, wiki
Going Back to the Island
One of my summer projects has been rewatching Lost. When I started the show back in Fall 2004, my wife watched the pilot with me, but found it too creepy for her anti-horror tastes, so I’ve been viewing solo for the past five seasons. I finally convinced Ruth that the show rarely traffics in scares [...]
Filed under: Narrative, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 4 Comments
Tags: Lost
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 [...]
Filed under: Academia, Media Studies, Narrative, Television, TV Shows, Viewers | 11 Comments
Tags: Arrested Development, Battlestar, Lost, memory, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Veronica Mars
To Spread or To Drill?
I was invited by Henry Jenkins, Josh Green, and Sam Ford to contribute to a book project they are working on, Spreadable Media: Creating Value in a Network Culture.You can see an outline of the project posted serially on Henry’s blog, emerging from a research paper drafted as part of the Convergence Culture Consortium. The [...]
Filed under: Books, Fandom, Media Studies, Narrative, New Media, Television, Viewers | 16 Comments
Tags: Battlestar, bsg, complexity, Lost, lostpedia
random thoughts from media scholar Jason Mittell
Check out my books:
Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling
Television & American Culture
Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture-
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