Yesterday, a friend tweeted a link to a fascinating example of such an original intertext: And The Man Next To You. While the source material is not quite Shakespeare, the project has a similar investment in intertextual playfulness – as the site’s subtitle aptly explains, “The Tragic Backstory of Everyone Killed in Under Siege.” The Tumblr-hosted site is a serialized slow-motion walkthrough of the fairly forgettable Steven Seagal movie, freeze-framing each death and offering a brief account of each victim’s pitiable fate, as with this entry from 70 minutes into the film:

His parents worshipped at the church of ‘no’. He heard the word so often he mistook it for his name. Banned TV and confiscated music and friends he wasn’t allowed to see were supposed proof of their love for him, and the weight of their disappointment kept him pinned down in his bedroom until he was sixteen. Then he stole everything in the house that’d fit through the door and never looked back. His first ‘yes’ was to a tattoo, small at first, but he soon gave more and more of himself over to it. Back, ribs, shoulders, and heart. Now he just regrets not dying in a knife fight with his shirt hanging off him in ribbons. He wishes everyone could see what he’s become.

The concept seems like a clever idea on its own, kind of a McSweeney’s style high-concept experiment that you could imagine spending ten minutes reading. But it goes on and on as a piece of experimental fiction, accumulating bodies for months. It just struck me as both oddly fabulous and fabulously odd, achieving weight as it piles up. So I wanted to know who was behind it – and was happily surprised to discover that the author was actually my friend who tweeted it: Martyn Pedler, an Australian writer, screenwriter, and media scholar whom I know from conferences & the internets. I couldn’t resist digging into the site, and Martyn agreed to engage in a brief conversation to try to figure out what exactly this site is all about. I hope you enjoy reading both Martyn’s accounts of these tragic deaths, and what made Martyn discover more about the victims.

JM: This project started in October 2011. How did it come to be?

MP: I’d just finished a long slog through a draft of a novel, and the constant rewriting to find the right tone had bled it pretty dry. So I wanted write something in bite-sized chunks, something with enough scope for play, something I could put online regularly to keep myself writing with rolling deadlines. That’s the boring answer.

The more interesting one is And The Man Next To You was kind of inspired by two things. One was an early story in Grant Morrison’s comic The Invisibles, where out of nowhere they dedicated an entire issue to the life of a random guard who’d been unceremoniously killed by the heroes. And the other was, of course, the “calling up the loved ones of a dead henchman” joke in Austin Powers. They both really stuck with me.

JM: So why Under Siege? I’m curious because you could see this as a work of experimental fan fiction, but I don’t know what your relationship to the film is – are you motivated by any affections and/or hostilities to it? Of all the action films you could pick, why this one?

MP: I have a lot of affection for Under Siege. (I remember seeing the sequel at the cinema!) But I have to admit it wasn’t a movie I watched obsessively in my youth like I did Die Hard or Robocop or The Running Man. I just remembered that of all these late ‘80s / early ‘90s action films, Under Siege had a particularly nasty bodycount – both of good guys and bad.

It’s been strange seeing it again, so closely, with new eyes. I purposely didn’t rewatch it before starting this project. I just sit down, wait for the next death to occur, stop the film, and start thinking about that man’s last moments. I don’t have a final tally of the dead for a finish line. (Freezeframing it for screengrabs has also shown me that one actor plays multiple villains, killed one after the other, but I couldn’t quite work out how to fit a “twin brothers turn to crime!” piece into my self-imposed word count.)

JM: What are your word count or other rules for each victim?

MP: I’ve been very strict about word count – at least until the most recent, eighteen-men-die-at-once ‘Very Special Episode’, anyway. They’re all 120 to 130 words, and keeping it between those numbers forces me to edit carefully. What else? No names. Present tense. And I try not to judge.

A few times, there have been men who don’t actually die on screen – they’re just left injured, or hanging upside down, or whatever. I struggled with what to do with these examples at first. I came to the conclusion that they must die, even if we don’t see it. Casey Ryback wouldn’t walk away from an enemy unless he knew that man was already dead.

JM: I’m interested in the serialized nature of the project – in reading it, I go through waves of feeling like it’s getting old, then getting fresh through the oldness, as the accumulation starts piling up. Have you maintained interest in it, or does it feel more like a burden?

MP: It’s stayed surprisingly fun – for me, at least. I wouldn’t speak for anyone reading it. There are certainly entries that I feel don’t sing like others do, or take a lot longer to force out. But part of a serial project like this is letting each entry be as best it can be at the time, and not working it to death before letting anyone see it. I keep myself entertained by finding variations and letting the tone shift wildly. Some are quite dreamy and lyrical, some odd and funny, some short scenes of backstory.

Fighting the feeling of repetition only goes so far, though, because it has to be about that repetition, you know? If it’s ever going to feel like more than the sum of its parts, it’s through the sheer number of deaths and stories. It wouldn’t work with just a handful of men picked at random. There wouldn’t be the same weight to it.

JM: That leads to the readership question – have you gotten much feedback? Are people reading it? And how does it feel to do such a serialized experiment without a clear community engaging with it (at least that I can see)?

MP: Barring people I know and the occasional appreciative stranger on twitter, I have no idea who’s reading it. I like to pretend it has a legion of silent admirers. And The Man Next To You feels more like writing a book in public than anything else. Interest and feedback are great when they come, but you can’t rely on them to motivate you – or at least I can’t.

JM: So has this project changed the way you consume action movies? Do you see an unnamed henchman get taken down and start mulling on his hopes and dreams?

MP: I can usually keep my delicate sensibilities in check to enjoy some cinema violence – but not always! I like the idea that every story is a massive collection of undiscovered Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns. If we veered away from the steely-eyed hero for a while, maybe we’d find a hundred other characters worth exploring. Everyone’s the star of their own story.

JM: That reminds me of one of my favorite parts of Run Lola Run, as the random people she encounters get flash-forward potential lives (which change based on her actions, so it’s still quite protagonist-centric). Speaking of random people – the title. I see it’s a quotation from the movie. Did you remember that quote before starting the project, or did it strike you as you were watching?

MP: I was going to call the project Cannon Fodder, but it was already taken, so I looked through some Under Siege quotes online. I didn’t remember that line, but it jumped out at me – and now I can’t think of anything more perfect. In the movie it’s a threat – “we will kill you and the man next to you”. For me, it’s now a suggestion that whoever’s standing beside the hero has a story, too.

JM: Final questions: how does this end? You said you haven’t watched the film ahead of time to chart the deaths, so you may hit the final one without knowing it. Any way to prepare for that? And once it is done, are you planning on doing anything with it beyond just letting the Tumblr persist?

MP: Oh god. I hadn’t thought of that! I’ll have to trust my memories of the film and familiarity with action beats to guide me. I do have something planned for a final entry, though. A kind of spiritual coda that’s been in my head from the very beginning.

As for once it’s done, I might format it as an ebook and give it away, or maybe print a small amount of books if anyone’s interested. In a perfect world, I’d love to organise a screening that pauses for each death and flashes these  stories up before starting up again. The film would probably run for five hours or so – but it’d be worth it, right?

JM: Definitely. I’d watch that – or you could do a special edition of the film which freeze frames on each death with actors reading your stories in voice-over. Thanks for the conversation!

As television series have become more complex in their narrative strategies, television itself has expanded its scope across a number of screens and platforms, complicating notions of medium-specificity at the very same time that television seems to have a clearer sense of distinct narrative form. This chapter explores how television narratives are expanded and complicated through transmedia extensions, including video games, novelizations, websites, online video, and alternate reality games. With specific analyses of transmedia strategies for Lost and Breaking Bad, I consider how television’s transmedia storytelling is grappling with issues of canonicity and audience segmentation, how transmedia reframes viewer expectations for the core television serial, and what transmedia possibilities might look like going forward.

I’ve been a bit disappointed that very few people have offered feedback in the comments at the MediaCommons Press site. I know that a number of American academic readers have been waiting until the spring semester finishes, and I’ve heard from a few other people that they’re reading but not commenting. If you have any thoughts about ways to improve participation, please let me know.

And for bonus content, check out the video for one of the Breaking Bad transmedia extensions I discuss, Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E.!

In my chapter, I suggest that literary authorship is built on a model of origination, where an author is known primarily as the origin of ideas and source of creativity – I think much of the popular notion of television authorship is still tied to this idea, where the credited writer and/or known creator is hailed as having come up with all of the ideas we see and hear within the show. This is the underlying assumption when we talk about Community capturing Harmon’s vision or voice, which I’ve read frequently in the past few hours. But for television, origination is only one of the functions of a showrunner – as the term implies, running a show is more central to the job than originating it. Television is authorship by responsibility (making the final decisions for everything) and management (leading what amounts to a multi-million dollar corporation). And by Harmon’s own admission, he was a pretty crappy manager (for some insight, listen to the Nerdist Writers Panel with Harmon and his now-former 2nd-in-command Chris McKenna).

Now I’m willing to believe that Sony needed to replace Harmon as the showrunner for a number of reasons. Sony’s goal is to accumulate episodes, as the more they get, the more likely they can sell them all into syndication, and that’s where profit is made for television production companies. I’m sure in negotiating with NBC to get another 13 episodes for a fourth season, they lowered their license fee, and thus cannot face the budget overruns that a sloppy showrunner causes. Weinman suggests that Sony might be trying to make the show more conventional by ousting Harmon, but I think more than anything, they’re probably just aiming for efficiency and consistency to smooth the path to more episodes being ordered and being able to afford those that have already been  scheduled for next season.

So unlike most fans on Twitter and comment sections, I’m fine with Sony saying that they need different leadership – but the way both Sony and NBC handled it was a complete mess. Harmon explains his side here, and I have no reason to doubt his claims that he was treated with such distance and disdain. Last week when rumors broke that Harmon might not be back, I tweeted that finding a managing showrunner who could take over day-to-day operations from Harmon, allowing him to focus on what he’s best at (writing and working with writers), could be a net win for the show. (McKenna would have been a logical choice, although Sony might have seen him as too tight with Harmon – and McKenna did announce he won’t be back shortly after the news about Harmon broke. Some fans online were speculating Megan Ganz, but that’s ridiculous, given that she’s only ever working on Community and only for two years – Sony wanted “seasoned hands,” not new blood.) Maybe things were so bad behind the scenes that Sony could not imagine working with him at all, but based on what we know, they didn’t even try to find a way to keep Harmon writing but not managing the show. Sony seemed to completely ignore the fact that probably more than any other show on the air right now, Community fans know and care about who the showrunner is (aside from programs like Louie or Curb Your Enthusiasm where the showrunner is the star, of course). Harmon has 118,000 followers on Twitter, and that’s a significant part of the show’s core viewership, and his interviews are highly trafficked on the major online TV sites.

While I’m sure Harmon’s voice/vision will be missed by many, I think that aspect is easier to overcome than his authorial function – the diehard Community fans will all know he’s gone, and the fourth season will be tainted to the point that many will be searching for reasons to dislike it. In my chapter, I suggest that viewers infer the role of an author in consuming a narrative, especially when its someone as actively vocal as Harmon; this unceremonious firing fuels our assumption that Community is ultimately Harmon’s vision and poisons our attitude toward the new showrunners before they even start. But by Sony neglecting to try to work with Harmon toward this goal (as far as we know), they have effectively created a series with a giant void in the author function – when we watch, we’ll be searching for what is missing via Harmon’s departure, rather than trying to look at what is there. Things can change over the summer, but I doubt that if the show ends up being good under the new regime, the core fanbase would be willing to admit that they still like it out of allegiance to their image of Harmon as author.

Shows like Community work for the industry by creating small but highly engaged fanbases, and they can leverage that engagement to create buzz, ancillary sales like DVDs, and hopefully longer-term syndication or crossmedia deals (see Arrested Development for an example). But the downside of engagement is that fans will actually know and care about insider industry business, and when such business is tied to showrunners with a highly public persona like Harmon, this can implode in highly damaging ways. Who knows what effect this will have on Community‘s ratings or future orders, but I’m sure the fans will now be far less motivated to create a groundswell to boost ratings for next season, as it will feel like a betrayal to Harmon whom they view as the “heart of Community.” In short, you can replace a showrunner, but it’s much harder to replace an author.

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:

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 emerged to help viewers make sense of complex television’s temporality, characters, plot, and spatial orientation, spanning a wide range of programs from St. Elsewhere to Game of Thrones. Through a detailed account of the fan wiki Lostpedia, I explore the complexity of how people watch television, and foreground notions of forensic fandom and drillability as modes of television spectatorship.

Of all the chapters in the book, this is the one which is most comprised of previously published or posted material (I promise the next will be unreleased material!). The first section was built on a talk I gave in the fall and posted here. Then I adapt & compress my essay on Lostpedia published in Transformative Works & Cultures. Finally, I poached from my piece on drillability that I wrote for Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford & Josh Green’s book on spreadable media (which won’t end up in the book directly, as it transformed during publication). I post these sources here not to suggest that this new chapter is redundant and derivative (that’s for you to judge), but to highlight how writing this book is very much a recursive process, weaving the old with the new and aiming to create something that feels unified and complete on its own. Did I succeed? Let me know in the comments!

As always, please offer feedback of any kind in the margins of the text, whether nitpicky copy edits, suggestive extensions or provocative condemnations – I welcome it all for this chapter, as well as the previously posted ones. Thanks in advance for reading & commenting.

I don’t have much to say about the show itself. I thought it was a very good pilot, establishing a distinctive tone, a couple of compelling characters, and making me laugh a fair amount. It wasn’t perfect–and if you’re comparing such things, I thought that Awake was still the strongest pilot of the year–as it did leave a little too much ambiguity as to how much we’re supposed to be laughing at versus laughing with the characters, and a few of the conversations felt a little stagey. But I liked it enough to keep watching, which is the primary job of a pilot.

But I did want to talk more about was the swirling commentary around the show (see Christine Becker’s roundup), where the critics who love it (based on the first three episodes that HBO sent in advance) might have set the expectation bar a little high–in large part, that’s probably because the next two episodes are reportedly stronger. Additionally, the marketing (which I’ve been ignorant of in Germany) seems to frame it as more of a “statement show” than it is–Hannah’s line about being “the voice of my generation” seems to have been decontextualized in the ads, stripped of the vital framing situation where she’s bullshitting her parents for money & high on opium. I also think the title is so broad as if to suggest that it’s universal, which it is decidedly not. So the show’s paratextual frame probably did Girls little favors in managing expectations, especially based on a single 30 minute episode.

However, the backlash seems equally unfair, if not more so. This backlash ranges from the outright misogynistic (mocking the weight & appearance of characters) to closeted sexism (calling Hannah whiny & bitchy for being unhappy, when comedy is full of unhappy leading men) on one side, with another strain critiquing the show’s focus on privileged, straight white characters living in an unrealistic, non-diverse vision of New York (which could describe many other big city sitcoms as well). To all of those criticizing the show on such grounds, I’d urge a little patience–after all, we’ve only seen 30 minutes of the series. This is particularly troubling when commenters & critics raise other programs in comparison, as I’ve seen people hold it up negatively (as well as positively) to a range of shows, including Louie, Seinfeld, Entourage (yeah, really), and Sex & the City.** But all of those programs have had years under their belts–and none of them started particularly strong themselves. Comparing a pilot to a long-running series is hazardous terrain, as you need to imagine that you only know its first installment, while still framed by how it develops into a long-running and/or acclaimed series. And, of course, this all echoes my last post about the dangers of trying to assess a program mid-season.

So how can we judge pilots? I’ve written at length about this–in fact, go to my book Complex TV and read a full chapter all about the poetics of pilots! In that chapter, I suggest that the two goals of a pilot are to educate viewers on what the show is, and inspire us to keep watching. It seems fair to give up on a show if the pilot fails at these two tasks: if you’re left uncertain how to make sense of the tone or storyworld, or if that which you do understand turns you off. If you find the characters on Girls annoying, find the humor unfunny, or find the milieu off-putting, then I’d guess you should stop watching, as that’s unlikely to change. (Of course if the grounds for being put off is thinking that the characters are fat and bitchy, then it’s not the show’s fault that you’re a judgmental prick.) But judging the politics of the show, its inclusion or exclusion of certain types of people or storylines, or its treatment of particular topics seems incredibly limiting based only one episode. Not to say that the first impression might not be correct, but it’s based on a small sample size, and I’d be loathe to condemn a show (especially publicly) without giving it a chance to fully express and develop its voice.

In any case, I’m sure that the hyperbolic praise, backlash, counter-backlash, and now meta-discussion will all fade. At the end of the season, we’ll have a show that’s distinctive and unlike most of the things it’s been compared to, and perhaps will be immensely pleasurable or painful for many. But it seems far too soon to invest much time in trying to figure out what Girls will be before it has a chance to get there.

** Note that Girls raises the Sex in the City comparison directly in the pilot, and I take that meta-moment as an explicit articulation of the show’s attempt to both update and undercut HBO’s previous take on four sexually active women in the city. The comparison that springs to mind is Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville as a response to The Rolling Stones’s Exile on Main St., but perhaps that’s only because both Phair and Girls‘s creator/star Lena Dunham both struck it big in high-profile cult realms after graduating Oberlin,*** succeeding in realms typically reserved for men using a forthright sexuality and highly literate tone. But it’s too soon to judge–I’ll reassess at the end of the season.

*** Yes, I stuck this in here mostly as a shout-out to Oberlin pride.

Part of Simon’s gripe is his annoyance over Grantland’s “Best Wire Character” bracket, especially in the site’s silly write-ups, if not the fan voting itself—even though I did vote (Bubbles 4EVA!), I agree about the way that type of fandom missed the point of the series. More interesting is his critique that weekly reviews of long-form serialized television often misconstrue a series, lacking the perspective of how any episode or plotline fits into the whole. I fully agree with his points on this for many series (including Simon’s own), where the long arcs often include moments in earlier episodes that might be less than satisfying or clear without the context of the whole. This is not to say there is no use for episodic reviews, which function (as Noel expresses eloquently) more as sites of conversation than definitive assessment. And as a media scholar, I find those in-the-moment evaluations and conversations essential windows into reception practices—what I wouldn’t have given to be able to look at such evidence from earlier programs in television history that I’ve written about, like Soap or Dragnet! But the rush to judgment, and the associated critical consensus that can develop around a show from week to week can be more damaging than illuminating to understanding the larger picture in the moment.

Case in point: Justified. Yesterday saw the conclusion of the third season, ending in a fantastic episode that brought together many of the season’s diverse plot threads and wove them into an emotionally powerful tapestry about fathers and sons, family, and going home. Before the finale, the online critical consensus was that season 3 was a let down from season 2′s superb tale of the Bennett crime family, with too many competing criminals and lack of thematic consistency. While I actually liked the season overall more than many critics, as I always found the performances compelling and the moment-to-moment dialogue and tone so pleasurable, there was a real sense of concern in the critical sphere of “what happened to Justified?” and could it regain its footing next year. But in the wake in the seemingly universal praise of the finale, perhaps those critics and commenters should revise their assessments of the show’s strengths. At least I would hope that they would notice how the themes and threads were subtly there throughout, even if they were not always apparent in the moment – I certainly have thought back on previous episodes and reconsidered how Arlo’s ramblings, Quarles’s backstory, and Winona’s pregnancy all relate in ways that I’d never picked up on.

My own experience doing weekly reviews is modest, as I blogged the final season of Lost for Antenna. In that process, I kept wanting to put a pin in certain moments and plotlines, withholding judgment until the final revelations help explain what we were watching and why. Certainly many people felt let down by Lost‘s finale, and I would argue in large part it was due to so much weight being put upon that reveal of the sideways universe’s true meaning, and the concept couldn’t quite support that much pressure. While I loved the opportunity to pontificate & converse about the show each week, I also saw how that evaluative context changed my reactions and expectations in ways that I might wish it had not.

There is no “pure” way to watch a program, but that doesn’t mean that all contexts and practices have equal impact – writing and reading episodic reviews, and engaging in such sites of conversation, changes our expectations and experiences in palpable ways. Some shows benefit from that – from an outsider’s perspective, it seems like Mad Men does, and I’d say that many comedies do as well – but others can get mired down in parsing out details or filling in gaps that we might need to reevaluate down the road. But two things that online culture is particularly poor at is withholding judgment and reevaluating experiences, as people tend to double down on their own perspectives more often than not. There is no simple answer here, as the benefits of weekly reviewing & conversations are compelling enough to keep going, and I’ll still read & write them. But I’d hope we could all dial down the absolutism, and try to step back and imagine larger contexts, and be open to them when they reveal themselves, rather than needing to revise our earlier scorn (or praise) in light of how things end up.

UPDATE:  Check out Matt Zoller Seitz’s excellent response to a number of pieces, including my own. And if you want some excellent Wire criticism that definitely looks at the series as a whole, watch Erlend Javik’s great video essay:

Although long-form television serials are notably marked by their potentially eternal narrative middles, they all must start somewhere; this chapter explores how serials are launched with television pilots, considering the core functions of pilots as setting up the direction of a serial’s narrative thrust, teaching viewers how to watch the ongoing narrative, and inspiring them to commit to ongoing serialized consumption. The chapter uses a detailed case study of the Veronica Mars pilot to demonstrate how serials establish intrinsic norms for ongoing narratives, with references to strategies found in pilots of Twin Peaks, Arrested Development, Alias, Awake, How I Met Your Mother, Pushing Daisies, and Terriers.

This chapter reworks an older piece of mine about the Veronica Mars pilot, that had been drafted for an anthology but I pulled from print in order to maintain its open access here (as I described previously). I have also incorporated my previously-posted thoughts on Awake‘s pilot, while updating both of these pieces to account for some new ideas and vocabulary for describing pilots and their strategies. Since I talk at length about the Veronica Mars pilot’s opening scene, here it is for your viewing pleasure:

As always, I invite feedback on the MediaCommons Press site – and even though I’m serializing the release of chapters, I’m still carrying on conversations in the margins of every chapter, so feel free to catch up whenever you can!

Over the past two decades, American television has undergone major transformations in terms of technology, industrial structure, viewer practices, and the rise of new genres like reality programming. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex Television offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative in order to understand how the medium’s storytelling operates and how it fits into broader cultural contexts. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, The West Wing, and How I Met Your Mother, I trace the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues like viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial structures, fan engagement, and authorship. By applying theories of narratology and poetics developed in literary and film studies to the more culturally devalued medium of television, I hope to argue for a vision of television as the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

I will be posting it serially, with chapters going live every week or two for the next few months, with the book’s introduction and first chapter available now. This serialized format is in (large) part because I am still writing the book, but also because I want to give time for people to read each chapter and participate in the conversation, as well as the nice form/content resonance for a book about serial narrative. Much of the book’s content has been previewed here on this blog and in other publications, but hopefully the new versions are improved and more integrated into a long-form argument. As discussed in the introduction, the book’s chapters are not designed to be read cumulatively, so could certainly jump around with ease. You can follow updates for the book via Twitter, Facebook, or an email list for announcements. I hope to see you in the margins of the book!

I just watched a pilot that seems to do it all: NBC’s new show Awake, Kyle Killen’s second attempt to do a network show about a man leading a double life (after 2010’s Lone Star became the season’s best-reviewed and least-watched show). You can watch it online if you’re in the U.S., and I highly recommend it—Awake is one of the best pilots I’ve ever seen, ranking alongside other favorites like Alias, Veronica Mars, Lost, and Pushing Daisies. If you’ve watched it, read on for some thoughts about how I think it might overcome some pitfalls of complex television—and if you haven’t watched it, seriously, follow that link!

The premise of Awake is seriously high concept: police detective Michael Britten gets into a deadly car accident with his family, and when he sleeps, he switches between a reality where his wife was killed but his teenage son survived, and one where his son died but his wife didn’t. The premise is easy to describe, but hard to convey what it means as a series—and the most common refrain from critics about the show is that it seems like it would be a great movie, but how will it work as an ongoing serial? I think the answer is there in pilot, less in terms of the concept and more about the tone, characters, and approach to storytelling.

As always with a pilot, the opening sequence is the key to set the parameters for what is to come. The show opens with the car crash, presented with painful violent energy culminating in three shots: unconscious wife Hannah, unconscious son Rex, husband Michael waking up. This last shot pulls back and rotates in corkscrew fashion to show the inverted wreck of the car, visualizing Michael’s world turned upside down (a visual effect that doesn’t come across as a bad pun unless you write about it). Over this shot, we hear the voice soon to be revealed as Michael’s therapist Dr. Lee say, “So tell me how this works.” Michael’s voice replies, “I don’t know. I close my eyes, I open them. Same as you.” We then cut to a shot of Hannah and Michael grieving at a funeral, clearly suggesting that Rex has died. Lee’s voice then says, “let’s just start at the beginning,” to which Michael says, “No.” We cut to Michael sitting in his therapy session to continue his line, “let’s start it right now.”

This starting 50 seconds is not particularly rich in narrative details—we learn that there was a car accident, and presumably Rex was killed in the accident—but it does give us some key clues on how to watch the show. First, the camerawork and editing is established as unconventionally stylized and free-roaming across time frames without explicit motivation, inviting us to pay attention to overt visual style in a way that few network programs do. The dialog sets up two poles for how to approach the story that will prove to be crucial—Lee takes an analytic tactic, as befits his profession, trying to understand how things work and grapple with origins. Michael wants to live in the now, downplaying that anything unusual is happening to him. These poles of engagement help structure the show’s narrative, as his dual (and dueling) therapists want to make rational sense of what’s happening to Michael as he flips between reality and a presumed dream, while Michael just wants to enjoy his split lives where he effectively can live without loss. As he says at the end of the pilot, “when it comes to letting one of them go, I have no desire to ever make progress.”

These dual approaches mirror how we might engage with the unusual scenario as well—we can try to make rational sense of it to solve a mystery (“so tell me how this works”), or we can enjoy the now by accepting the premise as it is, not as a problem to be solved. As I’ve written about at length, much of complex television fosters a mode of forensic fandom where viewers are encouraged to solve such high-concept puzzles, to ask “why?” and presume there’s an answer to be found by drilling down and analyzing, much like with therapy (or academic analysis). But I read Awake’s pilot as an invitation to side with Michael, not only as our story’s protagonist, but as a role model for accepting what we’ve been given without wanting to know the reasons why—as viewers, Michael asks that we don’t focus on cracking the mystery of what is “really” going on here, or deduce which reality is real. [Spoiler: neither. It’s a TV show.]

The rest of the pilot focuses our attention on what matters most: Michael works on rebuilding his relationships with son and wife in the wake of the massive losses that each suffered, but he did not (at least fully). Michael learns how to make his condition an asset for doing his job, as experiences in each world seem to inform the cases he solves in the other. Michael develops coping strategies to orient himself across realities with colored bracelets as visual reminders, a technique mirrored in the dual color schemes and film tints that the show uses impressively to demarcate (and subtly blend) the two realms.

In many ways, the pilot might be seen as situating Awake within a specific subgenre: the supernatural detective drama. Although very different in tone and style, there’s a parallel here with the show Medium, which focused on Allison DuBois, a psychic who worked with the police to solve crimes. (And though I never watched it, Ghost Whisperer might be another apt parallel as well.) On Medium, there was never any issue as to whether Allison really was a psychic or how her powers worked—we simply accepted the fantastic premise that she communicated with the dead and enjoyed watching how it offered a twist on procedural cop plots and impacted her personal life (and as an aside, Medium’s portrait of a marriage and parenthood is one of the most compelling I’ve ever seen on TV). So might we read Michael similarly as a character with a special, somewhat inexplicable gift that both enriches and complicates his life? What if the overarching narrative of the show isn’t trying to “start at the beginning” to understand what is happening, but to “start it right now” to understand how his condition matters to him and others in his life?

I desperately hope that Awake will not fall into the trap that plagued other high concept series in recent years, like Flash Forward, The Event, and Day Break, where concerns about a compelling central mystery overrode all other storytelling imperatives. The quality of Awake’s writing, performances, visual style, and emotional realism give me faith, as it’s already produced a more compelling 45 minutes than any of those shows could cobble together out of their singular seasons. But I fear that the pull of forensic fandom might make it seem like the goal of the show is to provide answers to the mysterious concept, rather than exploring its consequences in the lives of characters whom I already care about. Of course a pilot is always a promissory note for what is (hopefully) to come, more than a blueprint to be followed, and much can change as a series develops. But after watching this excellent pilot, I hope that the series respects Michael Britten’s wishes by accepting him for who he is, not trying to solve his problem, and letting us immerse ourselves in both of his lives.

McGee’s main argument is that The Sopranos and the HBO model of serialized drama has undermined the individual episode as a stand-alone unit that “contributes to the whole, but works on top of that as a singular, stand-alone hour of televised entertainment as well.” Instead he says that a novelistic approach to television emphasizes season and series arcs over individual episodes, treating them as “installments” without its own payoffs and pleasures, rather than episodes. (I’m not sure why he doesn’t extend the novel metaphor to call them “chapters” instead of “installments,” which I think is actually more apt.) As he writes, “An episode functions unto itself as a piece of entertainment, one that has an ebb and flow that can be enjoyed on its own terms. An installment serves the über-story of that season without regard for accomplishing anything substantial during its running time.”

I think his analysis of many specific shows is spot-on, especially in his praise of how Justified and Breaking Bad achieve this balance. I quibble with his nomination of The Sopranos as the cause of this phenomenon – within the main HBO canon, Sopranos is actually the least novelistic show, as individual episodes were (as David Chase has said a number of times) structured more like short stories in a thematic collection rather than chapters in a single novel. I’ve read a great (forthcoming) essay by Sean O’Sullivan that explores this point, highlighting how two of the show’s most acclaimed episodes, “College” and “Pine Barrens,” are highly stand-alone entries, and as a whole, the show is far less serialized than most other acclaimed 21st century dramas.

The Wire is a much better culprit in McGee’s scenario, as its episodes offer almost no self-contained plotlines – it’s nearly impossible for new viewers to watch a random episode of the show out-of-context and make sense of it, aside from season premieres. (I’ve written at length about why the novelistic metaphor fails for The Wire elsewhere, but focusing on different issues.) But does that mean that each episode doesn’t “accomplish anything substantial” or lacks its own internal structure and logic? Hell no. The Wire‘s approach to episodes is less about plot structure, and more about thematic and tonal parallels – episodes early in a season are less unified by any one plotline providing narrative satisfaction, but the pleasures of how they bounce off one another and raise thematic issues about the show’s portrait of urban America. They are undoubtedly installments or chapters in a greater whole, but also highly satisfying and effective hours of television.

But my main gripe with McGee’s argument is that he falls into a common trap for critics trying to chronicle a problematic trend: find a few examples that seem to fit his claims, then extrapolate on why those failures point to a larger problem. Yet there are many other counter-examples that run against that trend by successfully balancing the episodic/serial elements - The Good Wife, Doctor Who, Homeland, and Revenge all come to mind as currently airing shows, with older examples like Lost, Terriers, Battlestar Galactica, Pushing Daisies, and all the Joss Whedon shows.

The shows he picks out as demonstrating this problem all can be explained as suffering from different problems: Flash Forward failed in part because it had too much plotting (which I’d argue was not trying to mimic The Sopranos but Lost, which itself always aimed for that arc/episodic balance), but also because the plot was ludicrous and counter to effective dramatic suspense. Plus it changed showrunners three times in a single-season, and had an awful lead actor in Joseph Fiennes. He mentions The Killing, but I’d say it doesn’t fit the case at all – the show’s dramatic momentum stalls precisely because it tries to create more self-contained dramatic arcs that end up functioning as red herrings. The Walking Dead, which I’ve only watched the first season of, seems not particularly interested in long-arcs – zombies! run away! – but fails to find any investment in the characters’ survival aside from the visceral fear of evisceration. (He leads the essay with Luck, which I haven’t seen yet so I cannot comment.)

The achilles heel of all three of these shows is not the failure to create effective episodes, it’s the failure to create effective characters – we’ll happily spend time watching McNulty put together an Ikea bunkbed, or Walter White cleaning the superlab, not because we care about what is happening, but about who is doing the mundane action. Many great shows offer a central pleasure of hanging out with people who are enjoyable to spend time with, whether it’s the struggling musicians in Treme or wacky judges in The Good Wife. It is true that many of these shows’ opening episodes play better in retrospect rather than in the moment, as the characters need time to grow on us and allow us to discover their complexities and relationships.

Clearly the shows McGee laments didn’t create such people and environments (at least yet), but I don’t think that’s due to an over-reliance on arcing plots over episodic structure, nor are The Sopranos or The Wire to blame. We always need to remember that most new television shows fail, either commercially or creatively (or both) – whether it’s a complex long-arc drama or a light family sitcom, television programs always fall apart more frequently than they succeed. Such failures cannot be summed up in a trend that blames successful innovators for imitations that fall short. Failure is because of the most insightful and truthful sentence in McGee’s piece: “Creating a layered, lengthy narrative is really fucking hard.” Indeed.

I’ve enjoyed browsing the results, which range from examples that reinforce a film’s inherent melodrama, as in the climax of Toy Story 3, to unusual juxtapositions that add emotional heft where it never existed, perfectly exemplified by Jeanne Dielman peeling potatoes, to goofy tonal redefinitions like the credit sequence to The Jetsons. One of my favorites is this brief scene from Mean Girls, where the music both undercuts and reinforces the scene’s actions. As of this writing, there are 65 entries, with the contest closing on Friday – so if you’re inspired, get remixing!

I was convinced by Catherine Grant, who runs the essential Film Studies for Free site, to join the fray. Catherine posted about the pedagogical & scholarly uses of such mashup projects to really understand a film sequence, and contributed her own entry to the project. In browsing the entries to come up with my own submission, I noticed that nobody had contributed a scene from a television show – while the rules specify “a film,” I assume they’ll be open to a television program (which was, of course, shot on film).

I chose The Wire, not only because I know it well and love it so, but also because the series followed strict rules about its use of music: with only three brief exceptions, non-diegetic music never appears in the show until the final montage of each season. There is no score, as scenes are produced to feel as authentic and naturalistic as possible, with dialogue and performances serving providing most of the emotional triggers. So adding a highly emotional (some might even call it manipulative) piece of music to a scene is a drastic transformation. And to serve as this experiment’s subject, I chose one of the show’s most emotionally affecting scenes to get Vertigo-ed:

If you want to contrast, here’s the original unscored version:

What do we learn from this experiment? For me, the score certainly reinforces the emotional breakthrough Bubbles delivers in this scene, but it feels cheaper. One of the pleasures of The Wire is its comfort with silence – many of the show’s most memorable moments contain few sounds – and the lack of music allows the vernacular poetry of The Wire‘s language to shine through more fully. This sequence is in many ways the emotional climax of the entire 60 hour series, as we have followed Bubbles through many ups and downs – just as he has earned his sobriety chip, we have earned the emotional release of his testimonial. The score sweetens this to the point of overdose, making the emotions feel less earned.

Of course, I’ve seen this scene many times, so any changes are bound to feel artificial to me. I’m curious what people less immersed in The Wire might think of these dual versions – what do you think?

So in the spirit of open access, I want to float an idea – one that is certainly underdeveloped and needs a lot more input, but hopefully a community of fellow travelers can make something meaningful out of it. I think we need a set of standards for open access self-declaration - if you believe in open access, you need an effective way to publicly label your own practices in to state your individual standards and connect them to group norms. And these standards need to have cute little pictures.

This idea is inspired by CreativeCommons, which said instead of copyrighting a work with “All Rights Reserved,” you can use this set of standards to offer “Some Rights Reserved.” The power behind this model was, besides the legally binding fine print, the ease of selecting options – do I want to allow commercial derivatives or not? Share-alike? – and thus establishing a simple-to-understand set of parameters that creators might choose from, and translating it into iconic pictures & codes that gain widespread acceptance and understanding.

What might a similar set of open access practices look like? First, remember that these are standards of self-declaration, meaning that you are publicly saying what you will and will not do, not tied to individual works like with CC. Right now, the only comparable declarations I know about are individual blogs stating personal pledges (like danah boyd’s or others linked here) or blanket statements inviting signatories (like Research Without Walls). The problem with the former is that it’s too atomized & individual – how do I connect what danah does with what I do to call it a “movement”? The problem with the latter is that it’s too sweeping and inflexible, not applicable across disciplines, employment situation, and the like – I would never sign it as written, as it effectively closes off reviews of most book manuscripts and conferences, which are central to my field.

So we need someway to publicly declare our limits and practices that is more than individualized, but flexible enough to embrace multiple options. What I imagine is a website that allows you to create a profile, and then gives you a number of statements that you can opt-in to via checkbox. Then it creates a personal “Open Access ID Card” (with cute icons) that you can post to your personal website, faculty profile, Facebook, email signature or whatever, stating your practices publicly – and provide a quick URL to send to editors requesting you to review something that violates your declarations. The website would be searchable, so you can see other people’s declarations, and search for people who all selected a given practice (which could be useful for junior scholars to justify their choices with senior company). The type of declarations I imagine that would be options are:

• I will only publish in journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
• I will only peer-review journal articles for journals listed in the DOAJ.
• I will only serve on editorial boards for journals listed in the DOAJ.
• I will only sign publishing contracts that include the SPARC Author Addendum.
• I will only contribute book chapters to publishers that allow me to pre-publish a version of my manuscript to my personal website or institutional repository.

So that’s the idea. I know there are probably many reasons why it would be hard to come up with uniform options that are sufficiently flexible to span disciplines & appointments, specific enough to be coherent, and simple enough to be manageable. And I know that I have neither the time nor expertise to actually implement such a system. And maybe there’s something out there already that accomplishes these goals (if so, please link!). But I think it’s a useful idea to discuss and leverage our open platforms to devise some solutions for uniting our individual practices. So please discuss in comments, reblog, and run with it (after all, this post is CC licensed to be copied with attribution!). Just let me know where I can sign up.

Stephen asked me to answer a number of questions about my perceptions about blogging and other digital work concerning tenure & promotion issues. He pointed to my “Birthday Blogging” post where I had discussed the value of the blog to my career, and I highlighted a couple of other posts that raise these issues, such as the unusual history of my Mad Men essay and the excerpt from my own tenure self-evaluation where I frame my digital work. But he asked one question that got me thinking & writing: although I post most of my essays on this blog, some might ”take the position that the final product (or goal) of this work is still a traditional print publication, and that’s what the profession should continue to evaluate and reward.  How would you respond to that?” I wanted to share & expand upon that response publicly here.

I’m very torn about the question of blog (or the more descriptive term “digital self-publication”) as end-goal vs. step along the way to traditional print or peer-reviewed online publications. I generally follow the model of working toward traditional publications supplemented by blog versions. In the case of my Mad Men essay that will not be published traditionally, I think its function as an online publication is self-rewarding, with the conversation & readership generating value rather than serving as a line on a C.V., a position that’s easy for me to embrace post-tenure with a good number of traditional publications. However, I can imagine situations where a junior scholar might want to tout a self-published piece (or portfolio of a digital project) as part of their dossier – that would raise questions that I don’t have definite answers about. I’ve collaborated with Kathleen Fitzpatrick on MediaCommons and have been inspired by her scholarship on academic publishing, and firmly believe in the value of publish-then-filter forms of open-review, but I don’t believe that a self-hosted blog is necessarily the best venue for such publications – obviously anyone posting comments to my blog knows it’s my turf, and I can edit or delete comments as I please. I would think that the “review” that happened in the comment thread of my Mad Men piece would be seen by a review committee as substantive & suggestive of the piece’s scholarly value (if not uniform embrace), but the context of it being on my own blog would be important to consider.

Here’s what I would hope would happen for reviews of candidates with a blog or other digital work as part of their dossier (and this is how I’d mentor my junior colleagues or evaluate such dossiers as an internal or external reviewer): the candidate needs to make the contexts of their digital work incredibly clear, explaining the relationship between this mode of publication to other forms, in terms of audience, subsequent versions, parameters for review, goals for why they pursue such forms, etc. If there is a peer review aspect, the candidate needs to clarify exactly how that works and how evaluators might understand the review functions – that might be explaining that it’s a traditional blind review journal published online, an open-review site like MediaCommons, or a self-hosted comment thread like on a blog. The more clarity of context that the candidate can bring to their own work, the better, as we should assume that a candidate understands their own publishing platforms better than a review committee or external reviewers – and I think this is a way that junior faculty can educate more senior faculty & administrators as to why digital publishing can be a scholarly asset.

For review committees or external letter writers, it is essential to try to understand the context for every item in a dossier as presented by the candidate. Ideally, we would approach new formats with an open mind, not trying to apply the standards of older forms onto new platforms (unless we’re invited to by the candidate). We should try to evaluate the content of every piece regardless of its publication or review status, and then try to understand the contexts that provide some evidence of its value to the field. When review material like open-review discussions or comment threads are available, we should read them as well, in the context of the platform as framed by the candidate. We cannot rely on outsourcing evaluation to unseen blind reviewers and assuming that if a university press or established print journal has published something, its value is assured—nor should we assume the opposite, that the lack of traditional review & publication is evidence of lacking value. And when a candidate does embrace digital publishing, we should make the case for its value—to quote one review I did for a candidate who maintains a blog: “I believe his blog has helped him establish a solid reputation within media studies as an emerging scholar. While self-published commentary is not “tenurable” work per se, I do believe it is part a broader part of a scholar’s commitment to disseminating knowledge and promoting critical engagement with culture, and as such should be commended and encouraged.”

I think another question that reviewers should ask about a candidate’s dossier (and candidates should be mentored to address in their self-evaluations) is how well they seem to understand their own publishing possibilities and rationales. That means decentering the assumed norm that the proper measure should be a book and/or series of scholarly journal articles; instead, we should be treating each dossier more holistically to evaluate not just the content of someone’s research, but their appropriate choice of publication venues and modes. For many candidates, that will be the conventional forms of books & articles, but we should also expect that such candidates justify those choices as more than just defaults. If the university press book is the best way to reach a project’s ideal readership, then explain why; if another format is better, make that case. I think this is particularly important when the topic and/or method is potentially multimedia, whether dealing with audio-visual material as analytic object or digital methodologies – the reasons why a print book/journal is the best way to disseminate such scholarship seem more tied to precedent & norms than actual best practices for scholarly dissemination, and candidates should either be honest about those pressures & concerns, or reviewers should be open to the riskier forms of digital publication.

This shift raises a question for me that I have confronted a couple of times as an external reviewer: do you call attention to a candidate’s lack of engagement in digital publishing venues? I’m torn on this. On the one hand, I do believe that if an institution expects its faculty to move their field forward, then faculty need to be engaging in every appropriate form of scholarly dissemination; for a media scholar especially, online distribution has many assets that print lacks. We need to dismantle the norm that print publishing is all that counts, and one key way to do that is to expect candidates to have a broader scholarly profile – raising the question as an external reviewer is a good way to put it on an administration’s agenda. On the other hand, as an external reviewer, you have no idea how a candidate was mentored nor what the internal norms of an institution might be – you don’t want to create a red flag for an otherwise strong candidate for lacking publishing innovations that their department may have expressly discouraged. As an external reviewer of someone who you think meets your own expectations for rank, a guiding principle is “first do no harm,” as the politics of a review can always grasp onto any negative comment as a wedge. Thus I’ve refrained from calling attention to a lack of digital work, even in a couple of cases where I really wished the candidates had been more public and innovative in publishing their work.

Stephen also asked me about metrics for blogs, and how I measure the perceived value & circulation of posts. I mentioned WordPress’s internal stats, trackbacks, Google Alerts, and the like, but added an important qualifier. I do think that metrics need to be understood comparatively in relation to other sites, but there are issues with generating any uniform standards: I know that my topic of contemporary television is likely bound to generate more traffic than a more historical and/or obscure research area, so “popularity” needs to be contextualized. Likewise, a subfield with a robust online presence is bound to have more links & networking than one where a scholar is charting newer terrain for their specialty. And as my own site shows, readership grows over time, so we cannot expect a new site to instantly generate traffic & links.

One last issue I want to raise – it’s important that there be institutional support for digital publishing in a scholar’s institution, and that the review process account for such support or its lack. For instance, I hope to do a digital app version of my newest book to incorporate multimedia elements; however, I have little development support at Middlebury to help me accomplish this, so I need to either learn it myself (taking time & resources that will likely be unrewarded & unavailable) or outsource development at my own expense. Obviously no institution can provide support for everyone’s unique needs, so it’s important to build connections across institutions or provide internal funding to supplement the resources available locally. I think this is a role that a large scholarly organization like MLA could help facilitate, connecting scholars with support staff & developers across institutions, or offering funding streams (or advice for finding them) to enable innovative development.

In the end, it’s great that a huge organization like MLA is serving as a leader in discussing these issues rather than representing an entrenched status quo (as well as hiring forward-thinking people like Kathleen to help lead reforms). But of course the irony is that a face-to-face workshop at a convention is such a traditional, limited-access format that doesn’t leverage any of the technologies that they’ll be discussing to open up the conversation to a broader array of participants – it’s great to have such workshops, but there need to be opportunity to involve more participants & voices. Hopefully this post, and others from people addressing similar issues (please share relevant links!), will broaden out the conversation, building on the ideas raised tomorrow in Seattle – and I welcome comments below to continue the conversation.

Update: after posting this, I discovered that the MLA had recently published a set of essays about evaluating digital scholarship, and made them free to download. Check it out…

As always, I wait until the actual end of the year instead of how other sites run their lists in early December, as I’ve been catching up on a few things this month. Also, I don’t rank numerically or limit myself to any arbitrary number like 10 – I do have a Top Tier of the four shows that I do think are above the rest, but everything else is in alphabetical order. These are the best shows that I watched from this year, and there are probably some great ones I haven’t seen (Boardwalk Empire is one I know I need to watch, along with Downton Abbey, Misfits and the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm - and perhaps the insanity of American Horror Story). So please weigh in about what else I’ve overlooked & should seek out in 2012.

Top Tier Breaking Bad: No surprise here, as I’ve written about how much I love this show and I’m not alone among TV critics & fans. But I think season 4 was an interesting shift – many of the show’s followers were lukewarm on the first half of the season (after a great opening episode), frustrated by the slower pace & lack of explosive action. However, the phenomenal final string of episodes seemed to please most everyone, and it’s landed near the top of most critics’ lists with little mention that the show was questioned by some early in the season. I think this is telling for how the program shifted its structural strategies this year.

The most signature format for a Breaking Bad episode is what we might call the “trap and escape” plot: Walt and/or Jesse are stuck in a seemingly unescapable situation, and the episode follows their improbable means of escape. The first of such episodes was “Grilled” in season 2, as Walt and Jesse were taken to the desert by Tuco, and other notable examples have followed in “Peekaboo,” “Four Days Out,” “Sunset,” and “Fly.” Season four contained none of these episodes, with the closest being “Salud,” although Gus was in much more control of Jesse’s seeming captivity than in any of the previous traps. But if we step back, the season as a whole functions like a long-arc trap & escape – Walt is stuck in Gus’s servitude, forced to either submit or die. He spends the first 2/3 of the season discovering the depth of the trap and feebly trying easily foiled escapes. But in the final episodes, he devises a caper sufficiently devious (and morally bankrupt) to trap Gus, and that resolution was so satisfying to most viewers that it redeemed any ill will toward the initial set-up. (Note that I actually loved the whole season, as I felt the character work of the early episodes was engaging and didn’t need to the action-heavy drive of other seasons.)

Louie: I’ve already written about this season at length, but along with his downloadable special, Louie C.K. is clearly Entertainer of the Year.

Parks & Recreation: No show is more consistent in delivering its pleasures than Parks & Rec, which this year entered the upper echelon of sitcom history alongside Seinfeld, Cheers, and Mary Tyler Moore. Every character is pitch-perfect, every relationship is unique, and the storyworld is distinct and rich (and decorated with the world’s best historical murals). It feels like the perfect use of the mockumentary form, playing to the style’s strength while avoiding its biggest clichés & cheats. And this year, it showed how to pull off effective sitcom romance, nailing two great relationships in Andy & April and Ben & Leslie. If only more people were watching, because I have no doubt that it could grow into a major hit if people gave it a try. But we’ll have to be thankful that its mediocre ratings are not a problem for NBC, where it’s surrounded by underperformers and hopefully can stay on the air for years.

Justified: The other three shows in the top tier are all best-of-breed for me – Best Drama, Best Comedy, Best Experimental Art-Film/Standup Hybrid. Justified is a notch below the three, but in season 2, it made the big leap up into the realm of television’s best shows. In large part, the leap stemmed from finding the right balance between episodic and serial plotting that was a challenge in the very good first season, which bodes well for the show’s future. However, much of the season’s success was from the brilliant arc around the Bennet clan, especially Margo Martindale’s murderous matriarch – it’s unlikely that the show will match her as a foil for Raylan, so let’s hope it continues to develop other great supporting characters to fill out the world. I was disappointed with the sidelining of Ava (and foregrounding of Winona) in season 2, but hopefully the Boyd/Ava team will get more time next year. Regardless, it’s a remarkably compelling show, and the finale was as riveting an episode of television this year.

Second Tier (in Alphabetical Order):

Archer: I didn’t watch the first season of Archer, as the visual style irked me and it seemed too much like a standard kind-of-screamy Adult Swim absurdist cartoon. But I listened to the accolades and jumped into season 2, which was truly some of the funniest and most inspired animated comedy I’ve seen in years. It’s consistently unpredictable and truly demented, but the characters have grown on me to be vaguely compelling in their reductive way.

Bob’s Burgers: I love low-key animated comedies that could work as live-action in their tone and pacing, and this great Fox series comes from producers of old favorites King of the Hill and Home Movies. It blends the sense of a real inhabitable world, compelling family dynamics, and absurdist deadpan humor in a remarkably compelling way. Can’t wait to see if the show gains confidence in its next season, as later episodes definitely showed progress toward something special.

Community: I have a strange relationship to Community, as I always feel like I should enjoy it more than I do, and often experience my enjoyment of the show at an emotional remove. It simply doesn’t click for me the way most comedies on this list do, but I do respect its ambition and usually find a few episodes each season to be quite brilliant. This year, my standouts were “Paradigms of Human Memory,” “Critical Film Studies,” and “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,” among others, all of which would trump most any of the other comedies on this list – but still, I can’t embrace it fully. The best explanation I can come up with is that the show’s storyworld is not a place that I find inhabitable, whereas other great comedies feel lived-in – it’s not a live-action cartoon like 30 Rock, but it’s also not a world that feels tangible, like…

Cougar Town / Happy Endings: I’m lumping these shows together, as they feel quite compatible in my list, and the latter replaced the former on ABC’s schedule this fall. Next to Community, neither of these shows are as ambitious, innovative, or able to come up with gut-busting comedic bits. But both feel more tangible to me, with people & places that I could imagine visiting and hanging out with, and lightweight relationships between characters that I care about. I don’t mind if I miss an episode of either show, but I always enjoy those that I see.

Doctor Who: I’m a latecomer to NuWho, having started regularly watching series 5 last year, and slowly catching up to the Tennant years. Although I enjoy Tennant’s performance, I must prefer the tone & structure of the Matt Smith/Steven Moffat era, with significance serialized arcs and heavy-duty timey-wimey-ness. I found the whole River Song plot extremely satisfying, and many stand-alone episodes were quite satisfying as well. It’s ultimately a lightweight fluffy show, but an often supremely satisfying televisual confection that this year presented its best season I’ve yet seen, and capped it off with a moving Christmas special.

Enlightened: A truly odd series, with each episode striking a unique tone & approach to the basic scenario, but one that consistently impressed me with its daring & earnestness, even when layered with irony. I just finished catching up on it, so I’m still processing the finale, but I will say that the grocery store scene between Diane Ladd and Barbara Barrie in episode 9 is one of the most powerfully subtle scenes I’ve ever seen on television. I’m quite excited that HBO renewed it, as I have no idea where the series might go in its second season.

Friday Night Lights: I’ll count season 5 as a 2011 affair, as we watched it on DVD as it was airing on NBC. FNL is a maddening show for me, as it excels so tremendously at what it does well – creating a sense of place, tone, and mood; portraying an honest adult marriage; letting Matt Saracen be awesome – but flubs other things that drive me nuts. In the final season, its portrayal of Julie Taylor’s college life literally had me yelling at the set, and the contrived way it made Tami Taylor into a desirable candidate for an admissions dean position despite never having worked in higher education was almost as ludicrous. But just as it embraces short-cuts and contrivances in its football scenes, FNL has never offered much consistency in portraying realistic plotlines or institutions. But as a character piece, the final season soared, making me so thankful for the time spent in Dillon with these people that I (mostly) forgave the contrivances and gave myself over to the understated melodrama.

Game of Thrones: I was skeptical of this series, as fantasy is not my thing, and it seemed like “serious fantasy,” which is even worse. But after reading many raves, I dived in, bingeing the season in about a week. That’s definitely the way to watch it, as you get wrapped up in the story and avoid too much confusion about who’s related to whom – I found myself caring about the political intrigues as well as fates of the warring clans, but mostly I just enjoyed spending time in the world. Consistently excellent performances, bold storytelling, and overall quality without taking itself too seriously helps it pull off the rare feat of a good fantasy television series.

The Good Wife: Certainly the best network drama on-air right now, the back-half of the second season rivaled anything on television for balancing serial & episodic storytelling, and creating compelling relationship drama. Even though it’s not a fully-rendered vision of Chicago (especially given that it films in NYC), I love how much the show remembers its past episodes, with callbacks to old cases, judges, and opposing lawyers in nuanced ways that assume its viewers are paying attention. I’ve been a little bit disappointed in the third season so far, as the Will/Alicia relationship was handled with too much ambivalence and Grace has gotten too much screen time. But the show still delivers great comedic undertones – the cheese lobby! – and hopefully Will’s investigation will continue to build to a morally ambiguous climax.

Homeland: We’re still a few episodes behind finishing this show, but based on what I’ve seen I’d call it my favorite new series of the year. The acting is uniformly stellar, and the plot feels propulsive without being forced – it has a bit of that 24 thing where episode ending cliffhangers can seem more designed to shock than actually move the plot forward, but it overcomes this with more actual characters and emotional investment than 24 ever had. I’ve heard some mixed reactions to the finale, so I’ll revise this once I get there…

Men of a Certain Age: Of all the shows ending in 2011, this is the one I’ll really miss. Relentlessly low-key, the show just loved its characters despite their many flaws, always letting stories trickle out amidst scenes of three friends spending time together. I understand why it failed to find an audience, as it didn’t fit with TNT’s brand and was hard to classify, but it’s a show that deserves to be rediscovered on DVD.

Revenge: My favorite new network drama of the year – it’s by no means great, but it’s an awfully good time. The show plays close to the line of campy melodrama, but also offers some good characters & relationships to sustain the ridiculousness. I will say I have no idea how it will move forward, which is the best you can expect with such a serial.

South Park: I don’t watch every episode anymore, but instead follow internet buzz to seek out the highlights of each season. It’s on the list for two truly great episodes: “You’re Getting Old,” where the show seemed to acknowledge a sense of needing to mature and grow with some unexpected sincerity (even though future episodes returned to its scatological roots), and “Broadway Bro Down,” a brilliant homage/satire to musical theater. When it’s on, there’s still nothing quite like a great South Park episode.

Treme: By now, it’s obviously not The Wire in NOLA, but instead it’s an art film/travelogue/music video, unlike anything else in television history. Ultimately it’s about people living their lives, getting by in really tough times, not structured by clearly demarcated plotlines or messages but united by an affection for a city. No show loves its characters more, redeeming even its most unlikeable character Sonny. I often find it hard to want to watch the show, but always enjoy it when I do, finding its unique tone and rhythm hypnotic. It definitely plays better on DVD/download, as waiting too long between episodes disrupts the pace, but unlike most serials, there’s little drive to tune in the next week aside from wanting to check in with friends and hear some tremendous music.