Three months ago, I posted information about Middlebury’s search for a comparative media studies faculty member. I’ve been quite excited about the discussion and feedback I’ve gotten, highlighting the benefits of opening up the black box of the faculty hiring process. So as the search proceeds, I want to post an update.

We have received over 270 applications for the position, a large but not unexpected number. What has surpassed my expectations is the quality of the applicants – I feel confident saying that, at least on paper, I believe that half of these applicants could be successful faculty at Middlebury and excellent additions to the department. But obviously we need to pare down the pool for interviews – this post offers some insight into the process by which we went from 270 applicants to the 30 or so candidates from whom we’ve requested more information in preparation for requesting phone interviews in December.

A brief caveat – I know that many of you reading this will be one of those 270 applicants. I obviously can only speak in generalities, not about specific applicants. I hope revealing the process of selection helps explain our rationale for advancing your candidacy or not. Given the number of applications, I’m not willing to entertain individual queries about why somebody was not advanced – but I do hope that the process sketched below helps shine a light on an otherwise opaque process.

As department chair and the faculty member most engaged with media studies, I read every application myself. Two of my colleagues read almost every application as well, with the intention that every file receive at least two reads – and unless they clearly did not meet the expectations of the position, they were read by all three of us. Since we only requested a thin file (CV, research/teaching statement, and reference letters), the primary question we all asked was “do we want to read more about this applicant?” If so, we requested a larger dossier of a writing sample and teaching materials to advance to the next round of reviewing.

What criteria did we use to decide our top candidates? Certainly there were no definitive litmus tests, aside from the basic qualifications of a Ph.D. or very-close-to-finishing ABD, but we did focus on a few core issues. First, the goal of this position is to expand the media studies offerings within our department – of the four main critical studies faculty currently at Middlebury, three focus exclusively on film with me as the only non-film scholar (and I teach a good amount of film in many of my courses). This hire hopes to balance the two sides of Film and Media Culture more fully, and as such, we are looking for somebody who is primarily a media scholar. We got a large number of applications from film scholars, some of whom (but not everyone) do a little bit of work about other media – although many of these applicants could be great additions to our department, they simply don’t fit the scope of this position. Likewise, we were looking for faculty who clearly belong in a department like ours, rather than other fields like political science, sociology, anthropology, mass communications, etc. – bringing in somebody whose work is so disciplinarily divergent from our own can be a recipe for future problems, and probably not worth any gains that might be realized by going outside our discipline significantly.

In some ways, adding a faculty member to a department is kind of like pitching a new TV show (yes, I have to live up to my blog’s name!) – there needs to be a balance between the familiar and the new. While we don’t want somebody whose profile and interests completely overlaps our existing faculty, we also don’t want somebody so radically different that there is no common ground. We’ll need a new faculty member to succeed in teaching courses that are already being taught, as well as adding new breadth and range to our curriculum. The range of courses that a candidate could teach is a central consideration for assessing an application.

An important criteria for a college like Middlebury is teaching experience. The strongest candidates have substantial teaching backgrounds, perhaps in settings beyond their graduate institutions, and ideally have designed courses that are comparable to what would be taught here. Experience teaching or attending a small liberal arts college is also a strong asset – the particular intensity and focus of teaching at a place like Middlebury is hard to understand without first-hand experience, so being familiar with the environment and expectations is useful (although certainly not essential).

A number of other factors go into assessing candidates for this position. We’re hoping that this faculty member will broaden the digital media options in our department, so their demonstrated ability to both teach about and with new media forms was a clear consideration. Potential for interdisciplinary ties is an asset at Middlebury, especially with programs like International Studies, Environmental Studies, and Women & Gender Studies. And obviously a publication track record and potential appropriate for a junior faculty hoping to achieve tenure is a must.

Another factor that’s less cut and dried involves the candidate’s cover letter. Especially for applicants whose career path might be less than typical, narrating the process by which they ended up at this point in their education or employment is vital. I can think of a number of applications who made an unusual C.V. compelling by means of telling their story (as well as others who did not), and even applicants who have followed a more typical path help themselves quite a bit by conveying a sense of drive and personality through their self-presentation. When there’s a pool of 270 letters, standing out as distinctive (in a positive way) is quite important. On top of that, an effectively written cover letter suggests that the candidate will be at home teaching writing intensive courses, which is required of all Middlebury faculty.

In the end, the process of selecting 10% of a strong application pool is daunting, and I know that there are great applicants who won’t move forward for hard-to-define reasons. But I think a key lesson for candidates to realize is that not making the cut is rarely a referendum of your worth as a scholar or teacher – it’s usually more about a sense of the position and internal needs that are hard to articulate, combined with the inevitable comparisons among the applicant pool. When I was on the market, there were jobs that I imagined that I would be perfect for that I didn’t get – later when I found who did get them or heard about the department’s process, I usually came to understand the ways I wouldn’t have fit expectations or needs. I hope this post helps provide a some insight to many of you as to why you were or were not asked for more information.

One question that I anticipate people asking: “if I wasn’t asked for more information, am I out of the running?” Technically no – we won’t send formal announcements declining applications until the position is formally hired. However, it is unlikely that a candidate whom we have not yet contacted will be considered for the next stage of phone interviews. Obviously, that’s not the answer most people want to hear, but I think it’s better to know where things stand than not.

I’m happy to entertain general questions and comments below.

October is always a rough month for academics, with the crush of midterm grading, recommendation letter writing, and administrative tasks for spring semester, plus the standard fall tasks for homeowners and parents. But it’s doubly tough for television scholars, as there’s all that new TV to watch! So I’ve been neglecting blogging, but not watching.

While I’m late to the game, I wanted to offer my take on the new and returning shows. The advantage of being late on this is that I’m able to look at more than the first couple of episodes of most shows, as often pilots misrepresent how a series will develop. Here are brief blurbs & grades in semi-random order:

Modern Family: I’m definitely following the crowd here, singing the praises of this comedy as the season’s best new show. And as of now, it might be the best show I’m watching at all.* It uses the mockumentary gimmick to great effect, getting the chance to see all the characters in unguarded moments compared to their familial behaviors. And the size of the ensemble allows for many intermixtures between characters that it should remain fresh for quite awhile. Ty Burrell’s Phil is the clear breakout here, but the whole ensemble is top notch and they feel like they’ve been working together for a long time. Plus Shelly Long’s guest spot suggests that there’s room to grow even more. A

(And one other aside: isn’t it striking that one of the season’s big hits features a gay couple adopting a baby – and nobody seems to care? Where’s the outcry from the culture warriors? Even PTC’s blurb doesn’t mention it! Crazy…)

Glee:  Speaking of crazy, the other big buzz series is far more erratic and teetering on the brink of falling apart, but I do find the sheer energy of the show compelling. There’s been some backlash lately – while I agree with most of the criticism (the characters are paper-thin stereotypes, many plotlines are beyond ridiculous, it has no consistent sense of narrative time, the vocal over-production is grating), I find myself surrending to its charms. I guess it’s just an acknowledgment of the power of originality on TV – there’s nothing else like Glee on television, so the simple sense that I’m seeing something different makes me happy. That, and Jane Lynch, of course.  B

Flash Forward:  Had I graded it after the pilot, I would have given it a B+ for its sense of danger and interesting concept, but the subsequent episodes have been much, much worse. The show has a great premise, and a strong visual style (two episodes from Battlestar’s Michael Rymer helps), and it might right its ship after a few episodes. But while it clearly is trying to be the new Lost (promos actually hyped “from the network that brought you Lost” – why not “from the network that brought you According to Jim“?), it’s shaping up to be the new Heroes: slack plotting, on-the-nose dialog, erratic pacing, tonal shifts, and when in doubt, introduce a new character. The main problem is that the show does not respect the intelligence of its audience, reminding us over and over of every flash forward, every relationship, every plot point. I have to keep watching for the whole season (it’s research!), but I remain skeptical.  C

Community:  I’m enjoying this series quite a bit – I expected the show to be much more frenetic and snarky in tone, but it’s actually a fairly traditional single-camera show. The characters still need more development and there’s been a weak storyline most episodes, but there’s a lot to work with and the performers seem up to the task. B+

The Good Wife:  One series that I always liked was Judging Amy – it doesn’t fit my demo or general sensibility, but I like a good family/workplace hybrid that respects the intelligence of its audience and presents the struggles of balancing parenting and careers. The Good Wife is cut from a similar model, with a great cast, an original premise, and a successful balance between serial and episodic elements. It might wear thin after awhile, especially if the ongoing drama with the imprisoned husband gets drawn out too long, but I’m on board. B+

Bored to Death:  A very strange show that I’m not exactly sure what to make of. I’ve let it linger on my TiVo for a few weeks, which is never a good sign, but I think I like it – but I don’t know why. It’s got tonal issues, and the humor is more of the knowing-nod rather than outright-laugh variety, but something about it makes me want to watch. Eventually…  B-

Curb Your Enthusiasm:  I was an ardent fan of this show for the first three seasons, found the fourth season underwhelming, and then let HBO lapse without going back to the DVDs. So season 7 is a return for me, and so far, I’m loving it. There’s still nothing more cringe-worthy than Larry being Larry, and when it’s working, the joy of watching a perfectly structured episode is unmatched – the “Vehicular Fellatio” episode was spectacular. While last week’s episode was more shaggy than I like, I can’t wait to see how the Seinfeld anti-reunion plays out. A-

Parks & Recreation: I enjoyed the first mini-season of this show last spring, recognizing that it was a work in progress with some solid talent on board. This season it’s made the leap, tackling some political topics with a great attitude and confidence. The penguin marriage episode was a highlight, and Louis CK’s guest role has been utterly charming. I only hope that NBC keeps it on despite weak ratings (but isn’t that the norm for all NBC shows these days?).  A-

The Office: Last year was a return to form for the series, and thus far the show has been solid. The wedding episode was top-notch, but I’m afraid that the Jim/Michael co-manager arrangement will feel too contrived and forced. Sure, if you think rationally about the show, Michael would have been fired years ago, but if the door is open for Dunder Mifflin to demote Michael, it might call attention to how unlikely his career stability has been. A-

30 Rock:  Granted it’s only one episode, but I’m buying into Todd VanDerWerff’s argument that the show is in decline and its limitations are becoming too apparent. Compared to its other NBC Thursday-mates, it really lacks characterization and plotting, and tries to distract us with jokes. Many are funny, but they’re starting to wear thin. (And I’m sure they’ll crank out a brilliant episode soon to assuage my doubts…)  B-

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:  Speaking of hit-and-miss, this show has a consistent tone, but still manages to create episodes that can fall totally flat or completely click. I’m in the camp that feels that too much Frank is a bad thing, and he’s best used as a side counterpoint, as in this season’s best episode, “The Waitress Is Getting Married.” But for every gem like that, there are duds to wade through, although usually there are at least a few great lines from Charlie. B

Dollhouse: Sigh. I was jazzed about this show at the end of season 1, and then “Epitaph One” raised the stakes. But the first three episodes of season two have been underwhelming for the most part. The only real highlight was the Whiskey/Topher plot in the premiere, but that prompted Whiskey to disappear. Instead, we get weak escort-of-the-week plots for Echo, and lots of brooding from Ballard. I have faith that things will get better just in time for the series to be canceled, but ultimately this series will be the most flawed & spotty entry in the Joss canon. C+

Cougartown: To be fair, I only watched the pilot. But that was enough for me – way too much strained acting, Courtney Cox at her worst, and really squirmy premise. See Heather Havrilesky’s takedown for real criticism.  D

OK – that’s what I’m watching. What am I missing?

* Yes, I’m again acknowledging the Mad Men-shaped gap in my viewing repertoire. Someday… someday.

UPDATE:

How I Met Your Mother: I’m a latecomer to HIMYM, having watched a couple episodes in season 1 with little interest and never tuned back. But the chattering class of online TV critics love it, so I thought I’d give it another go. It’s a show that seems be strongest in terms of its cast and sensibility – it strikes a clear tone, and every performer fits the ensemble perfectly. But the storylines and jokes are not that compelling to me, perhaps because I’m demographically far more in the Modern Family realm of parenting than the world of urban singles. Still, it’s a quality show, and pretty much the only multi-camera sitcom that I find enjoyable at all these days, and maybe given time with the characters it will grow on me even more. B

Lie to Me: As I’ve said, I tend to be pretty uninterested in procedurals these days, finding that there’s too many serials and comedies to watch and that the interchangeability of a procedural means that it never gets any play on my TiVo. I saw one episode of Lie to Me last season, and found it too conventional in following the House model: cast a great British actor in the lead and play everything else like a version of CSI with a strong hero. But I’ve tuned back in this year as Shawn Ryan, creator of The Shield and Middlebury alum, has taken over the show.

It’s improved markedly, taking advantage of its premise that allows for a wider range of stories to be told than a conventional procedural – as an independent contractor, the Lightman Group can tackle more types of cases than most other institution-based series. And Roth’s performance is just getting better, with layers of fascinating inscrutability. This week’s episode with Garret Dillahunt was excellent, as Lightman’s faith in his ability to see people’s emotions allows him to take huge risks in situations of peril, with a wonderful underplayed emotional payoff in the last scene. Definitely worth sticking with to see how the show develops, and hopefully Fox will give it time to continue its growth. B+

Tonight in my Television & American Culture course, I screened Buying the War, an excellent Bill Moyers PBS feature detailing how the press allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Bush administration to enable the fraudulent war in Iraq. (If you haven’t seen it, check it out online.) The screening reminded me of this piece of Thomas Friedman hackery from yesterday’s New York Times that I needed to rant about. (If you want to dive into truly artful anti-Friedman ranting, you gotta read some of these great Matt Taibbi pieces – I am but a novice cowering in Taibbi’s shadow.)

Friedman’s core point is compelling if not original or breaking news – that the right-wing’s anti-Obama anger has reached a point of divisiveness and hatred that it raises fears of violence and questions any sense of national unity. But then there’s this paragraph:

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it. And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe.

This is classic Friedman – creating a false dichotomy that he can transcend and rise above. But stop and think about this for a second. Clinton was attacked by the Republicans first for a series of manufactured scandals, and finally impeached for lying about sex (which a good number of his Republican accusers were also guilty of). And Obama has become the target of an angry mob for… trying to reform health care?

Meanwhile, Friedman’s “on the other hand” balance is Bush being criticized for winning an election when he clearly did not have a majority of votes. Of course, Friedman doesn’t mention that the Democrats rubber stamped a war sold on false pretenses (that Friedman himself helped sell), or that the Democrats stood by while Bush created a regime of torture and surveillance, only willing to fight back once public opinion had shifted post-Katrina. From 2001-2005, there was a tremendous degree of political unanimity behind Bush, with dissent treated as treason and only a tiny number of elected politicians willing to outright criticize Bush or his wars.

This equivalency parallels an argument that the Moyers documentary makes – the press doesn’t bother to counter factual claims from official sources, leaving the countering to opposition parties. (Tim Russert flat out admits that the reason he didn’t call Cheney and others on their false claims was because the Democrats weren’t doing it themselves.) The fatal model for the contemporary press is to offer two sides of an argument presented by opposing “experts,” rather than either question the factual basis for the claims, or consider that arguments might have more than two sides. You’d think that Friedman would have learned such lessons from his own failures as a war cheerleader, but instead he’s creating his own false dichotomies to avoid intellectual honesty.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m rewatching Lost along with my wife, who is watching for the first time. One of the points in the series I’ve been most looking forward to is the first 6 episodes of season 3 – not because they were my favorite, but because they were my least favorite. Almost 3 years ago, when I first watched these episodes, I wrote a pretty negative post about the show, focusing on how I was losing faith in the producers’ ability to manage the storytelling.

So working back through the series, I was looking forward to revisiting these episodes with two questions in mind. First, knowing what I know now about where the story is going, would these episodes still seem unfocused and weak? Second, how would my wife react, given that she would be watching the series straight through, without the 13-week gap that followed “I Do” back in 2006? The answers to both were quite positive, overcoming most of the weaknesses I felt originally. I’ll explain with more details (and spoilers just through mid-season 2) beneath the fold.

Looking back at my post from 2006, the main problem seems to have been the build-up to a cliff-hanger created by scheduling the first six episodes as a mini-season. That gap created a heightened importance for the first wave of episodes, setting expectations for a level of unity and coherence that few bundles of Lost episodes exhibit. It’s a show about the marathon, and these episodes as originally scheduled needed to be a sprint. It’s just not designed to be scheduled in such chunks.

The other metaphor that comes to mind is a roller coaster – much of the time spent on a coaster is slowly moving up to set-up the upcoming drops and turns. Most seasons of Lost spend a lot of time on the slow rise to focus on the pretty scenery, the characters and relationships, and a few moments on the careening drops and hairpin turns. But these first six episodes force some drops without adequate height, making them seem shallow and underwhelming. [End of strained metaphor]

But watching now on Blu-ray, there are no scheduled gaps between episodes, allowing us to binge or pause on our own timing. Had I not told Ruth about the gap between “I Do” and “Not in Portland,” she would have never even suspected that the former was supposed to be more suspenseful or climactic than any other episode. This highlights a key difference between the aesthetic experiences of watching TV serials via a schedule or through a boxed set, an issue I talked about in a presentation early this summer – the “boxed aesthetics” of a compiled serial foregrounds unity and continuity over the experiential gaps created by the broadcast schedule. Neither model is inherently better, but this example shows that sometimes one experience can be far more enjoyable. The flipside is that watching Lost in a boxed set eliminates the time for rumination, “forensic fandom,” and participation in collective conversations about what might happen next.

Rewatching the show, I can appreciate how those first six episodes do set up a lot of key story arcs for the rest of the season and series. Watching Ben’s role with the Others, Juliet’s ambivalent allegiances, and the dynamics between Kate and Sawyer, I appreciate these moments more through the knowledge of where its going in the long-term arcs. Sure, Eko’s death still feels too abrupt, but that was beyond the producers’ control. But the second time through, these episodes feel no worse than any others, and my post from years ago seems way off-base for a boxed viewer.

However, “Stranger in a Strange Land” is still a crappy episode.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m on the SCMS Public Policy Committee and one of our main initiatives is to draft formal policy statements on how cinema & media scholars deal with copyright and fair use. Two years ago we released a best practices document outlining guidelines for teaching and pedagogy. Now I’m happy to announce the second document: “Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Statement of Fair Use Best Practices for Film & Media Studies Publishing.”

One of the important points that this new document makes is that the scholarly community believes that using copyrighted material in digital publications and bundled multimedia supplements for academic commentary or pedagogy is transformative, and thus constitutes fair use. A number of scholars I know have worked on projects that have been curtailed by publishers because of concerns that the innovative ways that they reuse and integrate copyright media will require permissions and licensing. While the SCMS statement is not a legally binding document, we hope that it will empower scholars, artists, and publishers to take a more open approach to fair use, and provide backing for experimentation and risk-taking.

Please share the report (which is Creative Commons licensed) broadly, especially to editors and publishers who often serve as unintentional policy-makers for such decisions. If anyone has any questions on this report or related issues, post them here and I’ll try to find an answer.

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 of content, including canon, fanon, and parody. I write as a participant-observer, with extensive experience as a Lostpedia reader and editor. The article uses the “digital breadcrumbs” of wikis to trace the history of fan creativity, participation, game play, and debates within a shared site of community fan engagement. Using the Lostpedia site as a case study of fan praxis, the article highlights how issues like competing fandoms, copyright, and modes of discourse become manifest via the user-generated content of a fan wiki.

I’m quite excited about publishing in this journal for a few reasons. First, the issue has a great line-up of authors and articles that I’m looking forward to reading soon. Second, as an open access journal, its politics of publishing are in the right place – it’s a peer-reviewed journal that is freely available to anyone online, clearly placing value on disseminating ideas more than subsidizing journal publishers through expensive closed-access subscriptions. After participating as an author, I can say that the review and editing process was the most rigorous and detail-oriented of any article I’ve ever published, with quick turn-arounds and excellent copy editing suggestions. If anyone still thinks that an online journal is inherently less valid by lacking a paper version, I can attest to the impressive rigor of TWC’s process as superior to most print journals. Kudos to Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson for their editorial prowess!

Finally, I’m happy to support TWC as an author (and as a member of their editorial board, which has no bearing on my article being published) because they are an impressive facet of an important organization, the Organization for Transformative Works. You can read all about OTW on their site, but I’ve been impressed by how they’ve created a group with a wide range of outlets for serving, publicizing, archiving, and advocating for fandom and fan practices. It seems like a much more satisfying way to collaborate than the traditional insular academic society, and am excited to see how they continue to grow and thrive.

The semester launched this week at Middlebury. Due to a little enrollment shuffling, I’m only teaching one course this semester: Television and American Culture. (I’ll certainly be sufficiently busy reading the hundreds of job applicants and actively working on the college website makeover project!) This is the first time through using my textbook, Television and American Culture, in published form, so it’s quite exciting to see people reading it around campus. I’ve heard from a few other folks who are teaching with the book this fall, but if you are and have a link to your syllabus, please share it here!

One of the new wrinkles I’m trying in the class this semester is to use Twitter as a discussion stream – I’ve squatted on the hashtag #tvamcult for things related to the class, and certainly invite other people using the book to join that conversation. I was inspired to do this after hearing a presentation by Eric Gordon and David Bogen about attention in the classroom – essentially, they argued that instead of fighting to eliminate distractions and split focus, try to channel other media back toward the class content and dynamic. So I plan on having a second projected screen of the Twitstream running beside the main screen with my slides and videos, allowing a backchannel conversation to emerge publicly as the lectures proceed, as well as extending beyond.

The permeable boundaries of Twitter conversations emerged today in an interesting way. Last night, we watched the Homicide episode “Subway,” and this morning I offered a prompt for students to share their thoughts about the show. Of course, that was seen by not only my class but by anyone who follows me on Twitter or searches for terms of interest. So far, more people outside of the class have replied to my prompt than actual students! One of the responses was from Shawn Ryan, who besides being a Middlebury alum and a friend to our department, is a very successful television writer/producer (The Shield, The Unit, Lie to Me). So while I have no idea how successful the Twitter conversation will be as a pedagogical tool, it’s already surpassed the threshhold of “how cool is that?” to have a major producer drop by the class like that!

I’d love to hear from anyone else who has channeled Twitter into their courses for any tips for managing the conversation and/or encouraging participation – as well as anybody using the book this fall.

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 and horror, and we’ve been burning through the Blu-Rays for the last month. She got hooked halfway through the first season, so it’s been a win/win!

We’re currently midway through season 2, hoping to catch up by the spring season 6 debut. I have a few thoughts to share beneath the fold about the rewatch. Note that these do contain a few vague spoilers about the entire run (so far), so if you’ve not seen beyond the first two seasons, tread lightly.

One thing that struck me about season 1 is how slow it now seems, as the first season is operating on a very different pace than the rest of the series. This makes sense, as the goals of the first season are all about setting up who each of these people are/were before the crash, what threats are out there for the castaways, and how will this emerging society sort itself out. Compared to what is still to come in seasons 4 and 5, these are fairly low-stakes stories – boars and drug addiction is nothing compared to what is coming. Given that many fans put season 1 on a pedestal as Lost’s finest hour, I’m surprised at how much I remember loving the show back in its initial run – and how much less compelling it is the second time through.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy rewatching s1, but just that I feel that where it’s going is more fun than where it starts, both in terms of the characters that are still to come (Henry Gale just appeared over the past couple of days… heh heh!) and the ramped-up storylines that we’ll encounter. Many fans also gripe about how s3 flashbacks and “filler” stories (“Trisha Tanaka” for instance) seemed like wheel spinning, but in many ways they resemble the storytelling model of s1 most of all.

Whereas s2 has been mostly excellent (“Fire & Water” still is one of my least favorite episodes in the series). The tail section storyline takes far less time than I remember, and in general the story moves at a steady clip. Some characters also seem more fully realized in the second season – Locke in the first season is erratically charming and creepy without much rationale, whereas he seems more human and consistent once he gets into the hatch. (In fact, his persona in s1 is so enigmatic that many fans have wondered whether the revelations of the s5 finale might have been relevant from Locke’s first appearance on the island – I don’t buy it…) Even Ana Lucia is far less of an annoyance than I remember – perhaps all this is simply about expectations, as the aspects I anticipated disliking were better than I remembered.

One thing I’ve definitely enjoyed is seeing all the pieces that were lined up for where the show goes early on, and watching enigmas that are later paid off be introduced. The Rousseau story is satisfying in retrospect, and I’m fairly happy with the how s2 and s5 connect the dots around The Swan. Speculating about how the producers are making it up on the fly is a common gripe among fans – like I’ve written before, it’s less important whether they have a plan or not, but rather that it feels as if they did. Thus far through the rewatch, I have no doubts that the text feels unified in its sense of a plan.

In returning to season 2, I am struck by the difficulties of creating complex serials for television – knowing that Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s personal choices interfered with the plan for Mr. Eko makes my affection for the character bittersweet. And I can’t help but wonder what might have been with Libby had Cynthia Watros been more available and amenable to working on the show in future seasons. As it played out, it seems quite odd that the entire tail section story ultimately only serves to reunite Bernard and Rose in the long term! Such are problems that Dickens or J.K. Rowling never had with their fictional characters.

I’m also reminded that one of the most compelling pleasures of the show is its melodrama and sentimentality about relationships. While I’ve never been too invested in whom Kate ends up with, the Sun/Jin relationship, the friendship between Locke and Claire, and Sayid’s mourning for Shannon are all highly engaging human moments within a storyworld that trends toward the outlandish and pulpy in its narrative. I think there’s just something about Jack that I can’t connect with, but I feel that the lack of chemistry between Kate and Jack is what makes that aspect of the storytelling (and much of early s3) fall flat. (Bracing for the flames of the Jaters…)

Finally, I just wanted to itemize some of the things so far that I really hope get addressed in the final season: the whispers, Adam & Eve, Kate’s horse, a bit more on the numbers (yeah, I know all about the Valenzetti Equation, but I need more tie-back), the transition of the Swan after the incident and why the DHARMA-ites thought there was a quarantine. Back to the Blu-Rays (which do look fabulous!)…

First, I should indulge in self-promotion to link to this well-done profile of me and the Film & Media Culture program at Middlebury, from the local free weekly, Seven Days. Aside from reminding me of my rapidly graying hair, I’m quite happy with how it turned out!

The author found me first through a link to the course I taught last spring, “Urban America & Serial Television: Watching The Wire.” All summer, I’ve been meaning to write a blog reflecting on the course, but it never happened. At first, it felt too fresh and I wanted time to reflect, but then I fully shifted into summer mode of writing, watching, and playing (not necessarily in that order). But now as the fall semester looms and my mind turns back to syllabi and scheduled screenings, it’s time to look back at the spring spent in virtual Baltimore.

First off, this was the most satisfying course I’ve ever taught. It truly felt like a shared community of learners exploring the program and its contexts, with nearly every student fully engaged and excited about what we were working on. In large part, I was blessed with great source material – the show clearly rewards close attention, and if anything, I felt myself holding my students back from wanting to just keep watching episode after episode. Even though we met for 7.5 hours a week (5 of which were spent watching episodes), I felt there was not enough time to discuss everything that was on people’s minds. Luckily, the class blog captured the overflow, making it the most vibrant online discussion I’ve ever run.

The rest of the credit for the course’s success was the caliber of the students – the course filled with all seniors, and they spanned majors broadly, from Political Science to Computer Science, with a good dose of humanists of course. If anything, I wish I could have taken more advantage of these differing backgrounds – when I teach the course again in Spring 2010, I’ll assign more open-ended writing projects to allow students to apply their various methodological backgrounds to understanding The Wire. But because of the students engagement and backgrounds, we had great discussions about the possibilities of drug legalization, education reform, and shifting economic conditions of 21st century America. (And yes, about TV too…) While there’s a tendency at Middlebury for seniors to mail in their final semester while working on theses and job searches, almost everyone was as present and engaged as any class I’ve taught.

While I don’t want to undermine the success of the course, I have been thinking about how in many ways it was the most traditional course I’ve taught. Typically my courses span a broad range of material, whether it’s the history and systems of television, an international survey of animation, an overview of cultural theory, or the gamut of digital media. The Wire course was closer in scope to a single-author literature course on Shakespeare or Melville, looking in depth at a single set of texts and their broader significance. Obviously, there’s no inherent hierarchy between courses focused on breadth vs. depth, but it feels quite odd to have had such pedagogical success with a mode of teaching that seems quite rare within my media studies paradigm.

It’s also a shame that this model of teaching probably couldn’t work for other television series. Some of those concerns are logistical – at 60 hours, The Wire is just the right length to be able to teach in full over a semester without seeming too rushed, but other programs that might demand dedicated pedagogy are simply too long to fit into a semester. And few shows offer the rich contextual dimensions, allowing us to explore major social and political issues through the lens of television – sure, you could do a course on The Sopranos and tackle the history of organized crime and the like, but it wouldn’t feel as vital and important as The Wire. While I do believe that television can offer an aesthetic richness comparable to other media like film and literature, I can’t imagine teaching a single series just focused on aesthetics without equal consideration of the social and cultural dimensions it explores.  Do readers have ideas for other shows that could sustain a semester-long focus with such textual and contextual depth?

As mentioned, I’m planning on teaching the course again next spring (and am already fielding requests for students trying to get in!). I’m definitely going to shift some readings and assignments – it was quite difficult to assign readings that are actually about The Wire, as they typically referenced events from future episodes and spoiled some first-time viewers. I may actually compress the viewing into the first 10 weeks, leaving the final 2 weeks for reading about the show and talking through the broader implications for television. I know I’ll approach the course with some hesitation – I don’t want to try to recreate the experience of Spring 2009, but it will certainly cast a shadow on the course, making it hard not to compare the new crop of students with my first crew of Wire-philes. Hopefully there will be new discoveries and surprises, both within the show and the pedagogical experience.

I joined Twitter this past Spring, in large part because I saw the great usefulness of the platform at a conference – I was at MIT6 and surrounded by people having backchannel conversations via Twitter. So I joined on the spot, and spent a few months trying to figure out how it fits my own social media uses. I’ve been mulling the idea of posting my thoughts for awhile, but am inspired to share my own not-particularly-profound impressions after reading Henry Jenkins’s take on Twitter.

What I like best about Twitter is the ability to follow people’s reactions in real time. When focused on an event like a conference, hashtags enable a distributed conversation and real time reaction to what’s going on. It’s been interesting to watch my Twitter feed react to breaking news, like the deaths of Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite, getting a real sense of what matters to people and how they process events.

So for me, the key dimension of Twitter is its immediacy and temporality – and in this way it’s close to how I use Facebook. I always have a FB tab open on my browser, and regularly refresh it to see what people are up to. Like what Henry wrote about Twitter, this information is both about “Here I Am” texture of everyday life, and “Here It Is” sharing of news, opinions, amusements, and what have you. I use both Twitter and Facebook to aggregate things I find interesting in my browsing, automatically feeding my Google Reader shared items and Delicious bookmarks to both platforms. I do post textural updates on my life as well, but see Twitter’s value both as reader and writer to point toward things longer than 140 characters.

The other aspect of Twitter that I half-like is the potential for public conversation. When someone I follow posts something worth replying to, I can – whether they know me or not. And as Jenkins suggests, this can lead to a conversation or a new opportunity for getting to know somebody. And it’s always interesting to see who finds what you have to say interesting enough to reply.

But the interface for these conversations is so difficult to follow that it makes them almost pointless – unlike Facebook, where all conversation stemming from a post thread beneath the original, all Tweets are equally arranged chronologically. Thus if a group of people you follow are having a conversation, you see each post on its own, forcing you to reassemble the bits into something coherent. Perhaps the open API of Twitter will yield a smart app that reorganizes conversations into threads like on Facebook, but as of now, I find the current interface too much work to make following conversations viable.

But my biggest problem with Twitter also concerns its immediacy and presence – I cannot keep up. I follow a lot of people, so I’m always swimming in tweets. And enough of the posts are of sufficient interest that I don’t really want to miss what people have to say. I’ve heard people talk about having a Twitter client always on as background noise, checking in whenever you’ve got time – or similarly, a friend posted that “Twitter is like radio, not email,” a constant stream to tune in, not a feed to attend to. But I listen to podcasts, not radio!

I have the type of personality who doesn’t like an information flow passing me by, so I find it hard to ignore the stream and avoid backtracking. Some people have sad they’ve abandoned RSS feeds for Twitter, assuming that anything worth reading will find their way to them via the Twitterstream. I can’t imagine unsubscribing to my regular reads, even though many of them are posted to Twitter as well. But I need to know that they’ll be there when I’m ready to read them, not just as they’re posted.

At the end of July, I spent a week on a rustic island with no electricity. I checked in on email every couple of days on the mainland, but was pretty much cut off from the daily information flow that I’ve become accustomed to. In the post-island catch-up, I found myself reluctant to return to Twitter, leaving Tweetdeck unopened for another week, long after I’d reached equilibrium with my other information flows. I still knew that I was posting via my autofeeds, but was not part of any conversation. I’ve slowly waded back in, with Twitter now running as the background radio tempting me to check-in and look back. But I’m less-than-enthusiastic about it, with ambivalence as my primary attitude toward the platform.

So, dear readers, is it just an incompatibility of temperaments between me and Twitter, or is there something I could do to establish a more healthy use of Twitter?

On my writing docket this summer were three essays that I’d committed to: a write-up of my SCMS presentation on Lostpedia (which will be coming out in Transformative Works & Cultures this fall), my piece on serial form and memory, and a long-delayed chapter for an anthology about the series Veronica Mars, edited by Sue Turnbull and Rhonda Wilcox. As summer winds toward the end, I’ve thankfully finished up all three! And as I’ve taken to doing, I’m sharing a prepublication draft of the Veronica Mars essay here for feedback and dissemination.

A couple of notes: the essay, entitled “‘These Questions Need Answers’: Narrative Construction and the Veronica Mars Pilot,” deals quite closely with the debut episode of the series – if you haven’t seen it, the essay will probably make little sense. Since it’s written for a series-specific anthology, there’s not much filling in of the details for novices who are unlikely to read the book without knowing the show. And I’m particularly unsatisfied with the conclusion, which more stops than concludes – any feedback would be appreciated!

I talk at length about the opening sequence – to refresh your eyes and ears, here it is:

And special thanks to my student research assistant, Ross Bell, who provided many crucial insights into the episode’s timing and storytelling strategies as I made him watch it over and over again…

“These Questions Need Answers”: Narrative Construction and the Veronica Mars Pilot

The “Pilot” episode of Veronica Mars is a remarkable piece of television. It manages to introduce over a dozen major characters and relationships, probe numerous backstories, plant the seeds for two season-long story arcs, establish a genre mixture of teen melodrama and film noir, and convey a tone combining complex mystery, snarky humor, relationship drama, and social commentary—all within a running time of just over 40 minutes. At the same time, the episode is quite typical of television pilots, presenting an encapsulation of what a series might be like on an ongoing basis while providing an exceptional degree of narrative exposition, and appealing to the dual audience of prospective viewers and network executives fishing for a hit. Pilots are at once the most atypical episodes of commercial television, and the highly conventional means by which television series get sold to both networks and viewers.

For those of us who study television and thus watch a good bit of it, pilots seem to be almost self-explanatory in their function and structure. But looking closely at a pilot episode can yield greater insight into the way that television tells stories, and how the pilot works to launch an ongoing narrative universe. Likewise for critics exploring Veronica Mars, we need to get a clear handle on how the show started and set the stage for its serialized stories and compelling characters. To offer such insights, we need to zoom in closely on the pilot’s formal mechanics and structure, detailing the strategies used by the producers to start the narrative as both a window onto the series as a whole and the broader function of pilots.

When approaching VM’s “Pilot,” there is a further complication—the episode aired originally on September 22, 2004, in a different form than the version published on the season 1 DVD that came out a year later. The most important difference between the two versions concerns how each open: the UPN-aired pilot begins in the sunny parking lot of Neptune High, with Veronica’s voiceover setting the scene of class conflict and teen politics in beautiful Southern California.¹ This scene was pushed back to after the opening credits in the DVD version, which starts instead with a pre-credit flash-forward to Veronica staking out the seedy Camelot Motel along with a highly-noir style voiceover narration, a moment that will be returned to at the 18-minute mark of the episode. Yet another version might be imagined from the original pilot script available on creator Rob Thomas’s website—this script mirrors the DVD version, although with a number of changed names like the town of Playa de Costa, or Logan Hewitt instead of Logan Echolls, a few altered plot points, and saltier language and content more appropriate for Thomas’s original pitch for cable distribution.² Or we might seek out the original unaired pilot that UPN bought, which circulated amongst television critics and in bootleg versions online, following the structure of the DVD version, but with a few minor differences in casting and dialogue.

I’m choosing to focus on the DVD version as my analytic object, not because of its status as the “preferred” edit by Thomas. Rather, the series exists beyond the timeframe of its initial airing, and any attempt to revisit the narrative is bound to turn to the published DVDs. While certainly the original aired version set the stage for the show’s small but dedicated initial fanbase, our long term engagement with the series will by necessity treat the DVDs as the permanent lasting text. However, we can learn something from the changes. UPN’s decision to eliminate the opening flash-forward was certainly trying to make the show easier to comprehend, avoiding the temporal leap that might confuse a naïve viewer. But it also redefines the initial genre emphasis—by starting with the high school scene, the UPN version cues viewers that this will be a show about teenagers, with a brave and active heroine guiding us through the perils of adolescence. As Thomas said in an interview, “the network handed me a note that basically said that since the show is about high school, it should start in the high school…. They were sure that getting young people to watch would be too tough with the original pilot.”³ Thus even though UPN bought the show based on the original pilot, they reimagined it to better fit the genre emphasis that they felt better suited their network brand and target audience.

A close look at the DVD version, following the template of the script and unaired original, reveals a vastly different genre tone, starting with a dire proclamation via Veronica’s voiceover far from the terrain of high school drama: “I’m never getting married. You want an absolute? Well, there it is.” The style helps set the tone, with the mellow bassy groove of Air’s instrumental “La Femme D’Argent” (a music cue Thomas iterated in the original script) accompanying a slow crane up on the nighttime scene outside the Camelot Motel, highlighting the red neon glow of the “No Vacancy” sign. The visuals cut to a shot of a draped window with a silhouetted couple having sex, while the voiceover says, “Veronica Mars, spinster. I mean, what’s the point. Sure, there’s the initial primal drive. Ride it out.” For the first-time viewer, the impulse is to try to piece together the emerging story information from the scatter textual cues. All we know is that we’re listening to Veronica’s voice, but don’t have much to gauge where we are and who Veronica Mars is. Might she be the long-haired passionate woman seen atop her lover in this shadowed shot? The language of “primal urge” and “ride it out” suggests a link, while Veronica’s emotionally detached vocal tone suggests a more observational role.

Our hypotheses shift along with the camera, as a continuous shot pans right to follow a man in an ill-fitting feminine bathrobe walking by the window and descending the stairs to fill his ice bucket. Veronica continues, “Better yet? Ignore it. Sooner or later, the people you love let you down. And here’s where it ends up: sleazy men, cocktail waitresses, cheap motels on the wrong side of town. And a soon-to-be ex-spouse wanting a bigger piece of the settlement pie.” This sequence refocuses our attention away from the shadowy lovers and toward the larger significance of the Camelot—Veronica cues us that these people are merely stand-ins for a larger situation of adultery and distrust, thematic signifiers rather than actual characters. The continuous camera movement helps establish a broader narrative impulse toward mystery and problem-solving, as we seek answers to questions that are then redirected and reframed, often away from red herrings and misleading dead-ends. And the sequence helps us rank the relative reliability of the different sources of information: we trust what we see, but Veronica’s voiceover appears to be more authoritative in helping us interpret and prioritize the images. Thus we view the visuals as objectively true, but the voiceover provides the preferred subjective approach toward the action that orients us as among Veronica’s intimate confidants.

The next sequence solidifies this relationship. The visuals jump to a reverse angle nestled in the C of the neon Camelot sign, with the other side of the No Vacancy sign centered over the deserted street, save for four parked cars. The camera slowly zooms in, but after only one second, it cuts to a medium shot of one of the cars, continuing the zooming pattern in a somewhat disorienting jump edit. The voiceover ties the action to our protagonist: “That’s where I come in.” This clichéd bit of dialog evokes film noir, although it might be more tied to the noir-influenced television crime show Dragnet—the line appears in the 1967 episode “The Big LSD,” but probably appears in at least one of the hundreds of opening sequences during the show’s 1950s run. Veronica’s line clearly sets up her authority as expert on adultery and betrayal, an expertise that will later be revealed as more than a professional knowledge, and activates all of the previous film noir cues into a clear generic identity: the sleazy motel, surveillant gaze, tawdry affairs, and cynical worldview. Just 40 seconds into the series, we already have a clear genre demarcation and an evocative persona for our titular narrator, who thus far seems exceptional primarily for being a woman in a masculine-dominated genre.

What we don’t yet know is that Veronica is in high school. The next shot highlights this aspect of her persona, as we enter the car on a close-up of a book entitled Calculus of a Single Variable. The book’s connotative meaning will matter more later, as we learn of Veronica’s dual attributes of being a singular free agent and having a talent for problem-solving and puzzling calculations—in fact, “Calculus of a Single Variable” would be an evocatively apt title for the episode as a whole. For now, it serves as a small enigmatic detail in an otherwise genre-consistent storyworld. As the shot drifts from the book toward a camera, Veronica continues, “$40 an hour is cheap compared to the long-term financial security sordid photography can secure for you. Your offspring. Your next lover.” We are still deep in the milieu of noir, as Veronica reaches for a steel thermos—a concession to the teen drama, as were it a hard-boiled adult noir, she would certainly be drinking whiskey out of a flask. The first bit of Veronica we see is her right hand, which is adorned with an ornately designed thumb ring. When paired with her anti-marriage proclamation, the thumb ring instantly marks Veronica as a non-conformist with her own personal style, contrasting to the feminine norm of rings used to mark a coupled status. Veronica’s ring highlights her status as a single variable.

The shot continues to follow the thermos as Veronica pours herself a cup of coffee. A seven-second pause in the narration accompanies our first glimpse of Veronica’s face, giving us time to drink in the close-up sight. Certainly she is young, but we cannot be sure of an age yet—actress Kristen Bell was 24 at the time of the show’s debut, but easily passed for younger. She is looking off-screen to her left, and the pause in narration gives us time to do the spatial calculations to gather that her viewpoint is the perspective from the first shots, surveilling the lurid action at the Camelot. The earlier voiceover, point-of-view shot, and facial close-up cements our perspective as Veronica’s, making her our guide to this still-emerging narrative universe.

Bell’s youthful beauty stands in contrast with her cynical, cold narration that continues as she pours and drinks some coffee: “But do us a favor if it’s you in there: dispense with the cuddling. This motel tryst, it is what it is. Make it quick. The person sitting in the car across the street might have a calculus exam in five… make that four hours, and she can’t leave until she gets the money shot.” This sequence helps narrow down the possibilities of Veronica’s narrative status. Her glance to the car clock as she corrects the timetable for her exam grounds the voiceover within the present-tense thoughts of the character, ruling out a retrospective commentary on the action. The mention of the calculus exam identifies her as a student, although she could be either advanced high school or college, and strengthens the link between the textbook and character. Most importantly, we realize that Veronica leads a double life—private eye by night, student by day—setting up the tension between the dual worlds that will dominate the series.

At this point in the teaser, our first question has been answered in a cursory manner—who is this voice lecturing us about marriage?—but deeper questions are raised about the character: who is this Veronica Mars, why is she so bitter, and what’s the deal with her double roles as student and P.I.? Any further pondering is interrupted by the off-camera sounds of revving engines and a musical shift into a more driving and faster synth groove. Veronica looks up and we get an eyeline match of a band of motorcycles driving down the deserted road. The editing pace quickens to match the music, with 11 cuts in 15 seconds reversing between Veronica watching the bike gang and the bikers turning around to park in front of the hotel. The shots emphasize the contrast between the bright vehicle lights and the dark night streets, with the lights reflected off Veronica’s car and mirrors. This shift in music and visual style changes the show’s television cop show allusive frame of reference from Dragnet to Miami Vice, with the latter’s glossy style masking something dangerous and sinister beneath the surface. Veronica deadpans, “Well, this can’t be good,” suggesting a calm exterior but raising doubts about her future safety.

The next sequence begins with a shot tilting down the length of the vertical Camelot Motel sign, ending on street level as the lead biker rolls to a stop in the center of the frame. A series of reverse angles show Veronica staring down the biker, who removes his helmet, beckons her to roll down her window, and then menacingly says, “Car trouble, miss?” We end with a shot of Veronica inhaling as she ponders her next move, as we cut to the credits, starting with upbeat music and a much different shot of a smiling Veronica sitting in the sun. In just under 1:40, the teaser has set-up a great deal of information and context for the episode and series as a whole. We have established the title character as a savvy and brave young woman, juggling life as a student and paid private investigator. The neo-noir style serves to set a cynical and world-weary tone, with clever narration encouraging a more sophisticated take on conventional crime stories. The frank sexual content signals a level of maturity unexpected in a program that will later be shown to be based around a high school. And the cliffhanger ending suggests that suspense and action will be a prime ingredient of the dramatic action.

It’s not hard to see both why Thomas might have preferred this opening to his pilot, highlighting maturity, unconventionality and suspense, and why UPN forced the more typical opening at Neptune High to appeal to its core teenage target audience with a familiar milieu, style, and set of characters. These two openings highlight a core challenge of any pilot: demonstrate how the show will feel both freshly distinct and familiar enough to be recognizable and comfortable, the delicate balance between similarity and difference that structures commercial television as a format. The UPN opening starts with the familiar and slowly complicates it with intrigue and genre mixture, while the DVD version puts us in the midst of something unconventional for television, a young female-centered film noir, and then links it to the more conventional facets of teen drama.

To further analyze the Veronica Mars pilot, we could continue such a slow-motion replay of the episode, highlighting how each shot, sound, line, and sequence adds to our understanding of the storyworld and sets the stage for the series. But the length needed for such an analysis would turn this essay into a book, along the lines of Roland Barthes’s S/Z! Instead, we can zoom back a bit and look at some broader trends and strategies that play out across the entire episode, and consider how they work to teach viewers how to view the series as a whole. Such an account builds on a model of narrative comprehension explored by David Bordwell for film, exploring how a text draws upon both external norms (like genre and stylistic conventions) and intrinsic norms unique to the film itself to cue viewers how to construct the story in their minds and posit answers to ongoing narrative questions.⁴ For a television series, a pilot is the primary site for establishing intrinsic norms for the ongoing series, and making clear connections to the relevant external norms of genre, narrative mode, and style.

One aspect that quickly becomes apparent is that Veronica Mars will tell its story using complex narrative techniques. One major trend in television storytelling over the last decade has been toward narrative complexity, using self-conscious devices that call attention to themselves and make the process of decoding a narrative more challenging to encourage active participation from viewers.⁵ The pilot contains a number of hallmarks of such narrative complexity—the teaser highlights the show’s direct address voiceover narration, which is common in a range of series across genres, from comedies Scrubs and Malcolm in the Middle to dramas Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives. The frequent flashbacks and jumps in timeframe are similar to other narratively complex programs like Lost, West Wing, and Alias. Most centrally, the pilot establishes long-term mysteries and story arcs that will traverse the entire season and beyond, comparable to innovative serialized programs like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of these techniques clearly situate Veronica Mars within the mode of narrative complexity within minutes of the pilot’s opening.

We must look more closely at how the show uses narrative complexity to establish particular intrinsic norms that will guide viewers throughout the series. After the opening credits, we are brought back into the storyworld not at the moment of cliffhanging suspense, but into the sunny parking lot of a high school. Veronica’s upbeat voiceover, in stark contrast to the world-weary cynicism of the first scene, quickly sets the scene for the moments that opened the pilot as originally aired on UPN: “This is my school. If you go here, your parents are either millionaires, or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California: a town without a middle class.” The DVD version adds a bit more exposition to explain the temporal shift—a caption reads “20 Hours Earlier” as Veronica continues, “So how does a girl end up surrounded by a motorcycle gang at four in the morning on the wrong side of town? For that answer, we’ll have to rewind to yesterday.” Thus we are reoriented to the story going forward, with the two versions becoming mostly identical for the rest of the episode.

Starting an episode midstory and then flashing back to reveal how the characters got to that point, a device nicknamed “How We Got Here” on the useful TV Tropes wiki, is a common technique in narratively complex programs, featured on a number of West Wing episodes (most notably the first season finale, “What Kind of Day Has It Been”) and frequently on Alias, including its pilot.⁶ However, the use of voiceover on Veronica Mars allows the explanation of the temporal jump to be more obvious than typical on these other shows—while Alias and West Wing normally use only captions to reset their timelines, Veronica’s narration explicitly notes that we are rewinding the story, making sure that audiences can follow the complex plotting. More interestingly, the narration frames the rewind as a question, explicitly asking how she got there and providing an answer through the narrative logic. This explicit framing of the story as a series of questions and answers, or “erotetic narrative” as termed by Noël Carroll, is a vital aspect of the show’s narrative structure, a thematic dimension that is repeated throughout the episode (and one I will return to later in the essay).⁷ By framing this temporal shift explicitly and self-consciously, Veronica Mars informs us that it will employ some complex storytelling techniques, but suggests that it will try to keep us oriented through a range of devices, aiming for comprehension over confusion.

This opening rewind is not the only example of temporal complexity in the pilot. The episode contains eight flashbacks that run approximately nine minutes in total, accounting for more than 20% of the pilot’s running time. While flashbacks remain an important part of the show’s narrative toolbox, the pilot uses them far more extensively than almost any other episode. In large part, the use of flashbacks in the pilot are expository, providing backstory on the characters and situations that precede the present day timeline. These flashbacks are quite important to set-up the show’s major plot arcs, as they posit the three key questions that will motivate the narrative for the season: Who killed Lilly Kane? Who raped Veronica? And why did Veronica’s mother leave the family? All of these major narrative events occurred long before the series begins, so flashbacks serve to build mystery about the storyworld’s past events, a storytelling strategy that creates a great deal of depth and richness about the narrative universe.

Just as the opening rewind is explained clearly and redundantly, the flashbacks are all highly cued and demarcated as narratively distinct. The first flashback comes at the episode’s 5 minute mark, with Veronica sitting outside in her high school courtyard, introducing her classmates via voiceover. In telling of her previous status within the “in crowd,” she admits, “The only reason I was allowed beyond the velvet ropes was Duncan Kane, son of software billionaire Jake Kane. He used to be my boyfriend.” The camera alternates between a shot of Veronica sitting alone staring wistfully at Duncan, and her perspective on him as he mingles with his friends. The camera slowly tracks in toward Veronica on her final line, as the image blurs via quick dissolve into another shot with an accompanying “swoosh” sound effect. The new shot of kids in the high school hallway is tinted blue, with soft focus and streaky images to clearly distinguish it from the bright colors and sun drenched lighting of the courtyard. The music shifts as well, to a breathy atmospheric vocal track from the previous subtle guitar rhythmic background in the courtyard scene. We soon see Duncan and a longer-haired Veronica in the center of the frame, with a jump-cut forward to a close-up of them kissing, before the image oversaturates with white light, and shifts into slow-motion. All of these stylistic techniques, from film stock to soundtrack, color scheme to editing style, serve to demarcate the flashback sequence from the norms established in the present-tense scenes. There is no ambiguity about this temporal shift, as the sequence is clearly framed as a subjective memory presented to us by Veronica, our narrator.

The next flashback is similarly demarcated, but differs in terms of perspective. Veronica is sitting at lunch with Wallace, as she asks him two related questions: “So what did you do?… Why are you a dead man walking?” These questions trigger the similar blur and sound effect to signal a flashback of Wallace reporting a robbery while working at a convenience store, with Wallace narrating events to Veronica. This flashback, briefly interrupted by a line from Veronica, is the only scene that Veronica does not appear in throughout the entire episode and thus the only story material portrayed without Veronica’s first-hand experience—future episodes certainly focus primarily on the titular character, but feature scenes and plotlines with Veronica absent. Although Wallace’s flashback follows comparable stylistic markers as Veronica’s, its narrative status is different: Wallace is clearly retelling the story to Veronica within the storyworld, while Veronica’s voiceovers and flashbacks are internal monologues, shared only with the non-specified “you” of the television audience.

Veronica’s second flashback, immediately following the scene with Wallace, appears more subjective, motivated by a triggered memory rather than expository narration. In the courtyard to her apartment, she hears the song “Just Another” by Pete Zorn playing on a radio as she is walking by the swimming pool. She looks up at the radio, and then we hear a splash from the pool. Veronica looks down as we “swoosh” into a flashback image of Duncan emerging from the water, saying, “Hey babe, it’s our song.” The scene shifts abruptly to Veronica’s friends circling a large birthday cake being held out by a previously unseen woman, who says, “Happy birthday, Veronica! Are you surprised?” Veronica says, “Mom” twice—first within the flashback, and then in a quick switch back to the present day narrative, as she spins her head mistakenly thinking that another woman in the courtyard was her mother. While this flashback is stylisticly cued as a memory, its narrative function is more opaque, not answering questions explicitly posed by Veronica’s narration, but rather raising a question still to be addressed: where is Veronica’s mother? All of Veronica’s flashbacks offer a balance of narrative information and emotional depth, with this one furthest toward the emotional end of the spectrum.

The next flashback comes more than five minutes later, and includes the most narratively significant revelations. While Veronica is staking out Jake Kane for her father, she narrates the details of Kane’s business and prominence in Neptune. As she begins to talk about her relationship with the family, we flashback to a scene between Veronica and Lilly Kane, introducing this deceased character and revealing her murder and how Veronica learned of her friend’s demise. The sequence notably presents an important but understated enigma, with Lilly telling Veronica “I’ve got a secret – a good one,” in a conversation that Veronica identifies as “the last words Lilly and I ever shared.” Lilly’s secret is not highlighted as a key narrative question, but it returns in importance later in the season as Veronica begins to unravel the case. Although the events being portrayed are clearly emotionally fraught for Veronica, with her best friend’s murder and the subsequent scapegoating of her father for a botched investigation, the tone of the narration is detached and factually-driven, presenting the story more as an investigator than a loved one.

This flashback also helps situate the narrative status of Veronica’s narration. After revealing Lilly’s death, she says, “But everyone knows this story, the murder of Lilly Kane…. And, of course, everyone remembers reading about the bungling local sheriff, the one who went after the wrong man. That bungling sheriff was my dad.” This narration suggests that Veronica is explicitly speaking to an audience within the storyworld, assuming their familiarity with the tabloid-covered events. While the narration is never explicitly identified as fitting a particular frame of reference, like an online journal or therapy session, the mode of address distinguishes it from a more objective narration like the police report tone of Dragnet. The effect of the narration is to firmly embed the viewer within the storyworld, making us an unspecified but important aspect of the diegesis that functions as a sounding board for Veronica’s inner thoughts and plans.

Subsequent flashbacks follow these parameters, presenting crucial backstory plot, relationships, and lingering mysteries. Questions remain central to the use of flashbacks, as with the sixth flashback that is introduced with the voiceover, “You want to know how I lost my virginity? So do I,” before showing the scene of Veronica’s drug-induced date rape. The seventh flashback is cued by another character’s questions—Logan is taunting Veronica about her absent mother, asking, “Do you know where she is? Any clue?” Veronica stares him down as he drives away, but then answers the question via voiceover: “It’s been eight months since I’ve seen my mother.” A flashback shows the morning after Lianne left, setting up the season-long arc about her status and Veronica’s relationship with her mother.

The flashbacks also cue some important parallels and repetitions that serve to draw characters together, deepen the storyworld, and cue narrative pleasures. For instance, in Wallace’s flashback, Sheriff Lamb mocks Wallace by saying, “You need to go see the wizard, ask him for some guts.” Veronica follows up in the present tense, “’Go see the wizard,’ he said that?” a comment that seems unremarkable at the time. 22 minutes later, the comment becomes clearer—during a flashback to Veronica reporting her rape, Sheriff Lamb cruelly dismisses her by saying, “I’ll tell you what, Veronica Mars—why don’t you go see the wizard, ask for a little backbone.” Besides clearly aligning Wallace and Veronica together against Lamb, and setting up the revenge plot implicating the Sheriff’s department in exchanging favorable treatment for a strip club for sexual favors, this moment offers a distinctive narrative pleasure. Since the show does not call attention to this parallel dialog, viewers who have been paying attention can get a brief frisson of pleasure upon recognizing the repetition. Such moments of recognition and connection are an important facet of watching serial television, as drawn out links that may span across episodes or even seasons offer dedicated viewers a sense of acknowledgement of their efforts and dedication. Although this intra-episodic repetition requires no long-term commitment, the moment helps establish the broader norm that the series will expect viewers to pay attention, forge connections, and reward their dedication via pleasurable connections and revelations.

Another narrative pleasure is signaled by a subtle repetition. Around halfway through the episode, Keith returns home from an attempt to collect a bounty on a bail jumper—Veronica greets him with an inquisitive, “And?” Keith pauses for drama, and then offers a pseudo-cool, ““Who’s your daddy?”, which Veronica dismisses with adolescent exasperation, “I hate it when you say that.” This exchange creates a bit of playful tension between father and daughter, as Keith goes on to mockingly claim a degree of coolness that amuses Veronica, but underscores their generational divide. Toward the end of the episode, a parallel scene occurs as Keith finds Veronica in the Mars Investigation office at night, where she has discovered that Keith has been keeping information from her. He tempts her to leave with promises of pizza and the South Park movie, and offers a repeated “Who’s your daddy?” This time Veronica sighs and smiles, and warmly replies, “You are.” The repeated moment reconciles the earlier tension like a musical phrase, replaying a dissonant theme with a resolved harmonious chord. The effect, at least for me, is to both highlight the stability of this relationship that will anchor the entire series, and to call attention to the show’s well-crafted storytelling, using an overt parallel to inspire confidence in viewers that the producers are in full control of their fictional form. It’s a self-aware moment of narrative construction that, at least for some viewers, inspires a moment of playful pleasure in admiring the show’s creative craft, and serves as a major appeal for the consumption of narratively complex television.

As is typical of all pilots, the episode introduces and focuses our attention on a number of characters and relationships. Clearly Veronica is the central figure of the storyworld, and virtually every character exists in relationship to her. The credit sequence introduces the list of major characters in the order Veronica, Wallace, Duncan, Logan, and Weevil, with Keith getting the final billing as “and Enrico Colantoni,” a position conventionally reserved for more established actors in supporting roles as well as parents in teen dramas. The actual screen time for characters is differently balanced—Wallace appears in around 25% of the episode and Keith in 20%, a proportion that effectively establishes those two characters as Veronica’s most trusted and stable allies in the ongoing series. Duncan’s third billing seems contrary to appearing only in 7% of the episode, an imbalance that persists throughout the series—the character is narratively central to many of the ongoing arcs, but his presence is less vibrant and active than the other supporting actors, culminating in the character leaving the show midway through the second season. While certainly the romantic link between Duncan and Veronica is a core dramatic element to the show, the pilot shows little of their connection and effectively confines Duncan to the margins over more colorful supporting players.

Logan was not initially conceived as a main character, but Jason Dohring’s compelling performance prompted the producers to make Logan more central to the show and establish a romance with Veronica. In the pilot, Logan and Weevil share nearly equal time at around 13% of the episode time, helping to establish the two as rivals to each other culminating in their confrontation toward the end of the episode. Functionally the two characters both share a volatile bond with Veronica, serving both as allies and enemies at various times. These proportions also mirror a legalistic aspect of storytelling unique to the television medium—contracts often stipulate the number of episodes per season each actor will appear in. Thus the actors playing Veronica, Wallace, and Keith were obligated to appear in every episode in season one, while those playing Weevil, Logan, and Duncan were only available for approximately 75% of the episodes, forcing the producers to devise stories that allowed them to disappear for a week.⁸ The pilot effectively establishes this balance in character prominence that carries throughout the first season.

The pilot also sets the show’s standard for balancing multiple plotlines. Although like many pilots, much of the episode’s time is spent introducing the setting, characters, and relationships rather than focusing on narrative events and storylines, the episode does offer a remarkable number of events and plots. Typically, Veronica Mars episodes feature a self-contained A plot concerning a case that is introduced and solved within an episode, and B and C plots more concerned with long-term arcs and relationships. The pilot is less rigidly structured, with six definable plotlines: the robbery at Wallace’s store, the investigation into the Seventh Veil strip club, the Jake Kane infidelity investigation, Lilly Kane’s murder, Lianne leaving the family, and Veronica’s rape. As is typical for the show, the plotlines are not rigidly distinct, as they interweave both in terms of events and themes—the strip club plot ends up merging with the robbery case, and the theme of sexual indiscretion and mystery permeates many of the storylines. It would be hard to define a clear A plot; although the Jake Kane investigation takes up the most time at nearly a quarter of the episode, it blurs into nearly all of the other plotlines and lacks the resolution common of A plots. The Wallace and strip club cases are resolved, but lack the central focus typical of other episodes’ A plots.

Despite a more fuzzy distinction between plotlines than will become the norm for the show, the pilot’s atypical story threads do help orient viewers on how to watch the series. The self-contained plotlines are presented with Veronica in firm control of the action, rescuing Wallace, manipulating the sheriff’s office, and demonstrating more knowledge of the situation than viewers—for most of the episode, we are unsure of the relevance of the strip club plotline, and Veronica’s multiphase plan to swap videotapes is revealed at the moment of Lamb’s humiliation rather than positioning us as riding shotgun to the procedures of Veronica’s investigations. For most episodes, the self-contained cases do little to challenge Veronica’s investigational mastery, and they function more as games for viewers to try to guess the culprit, outcome, or Veronica’s investigative strategy.

The long-term story arcs align us more closely with Veronica’s knowledge, as we learn about new developments along with her and she treats us as a confidant sharing vital backstory. Veronica’s investigative approach foregrounds posing and answering questions, and the show’s serial storytelling follows this paradigm. In the final minutes of the episode, Veronica poses a number of questions: “The Lilly Kane murder file – what’s Dad been up to?… My surveillance photo from the Camelot – why is it in the Lilly Kane file? What was Mom doing there, and what business did she have with Jake Kane? And the million dollar question: why did Dad lie to me?” After the scene with Keith in which she reconciles his deception, Veronica narrates, “I’ve got too many questions swirling around in my head to wait until he’s ready to share. These questions need answers—that’s what I do.” The narrative logic of this sequence sets up the key season-long arcs while clearly establishing the show’s erotetic narration, as well as making sure that these arcs will not dangle unanswered—Veronica’s final monologue asserts, “I promise this: I will find out what really happened, and I will bring this family back together again,” a statement that serves to also assure viewers that these questions do have answers that will be revealed in good time, as long as the network allows the show to continue to air.

The only question during this sequence that gets answered immediately is Keith’s “Who’s your Daddy?”, which gets Veronica’s sentimental assurance to cement the stability of their relationship in the face of broader uncertainties. This answer helps divide the long-term arcs into two categories: plot arcs that posit enigmas and mysteries, and relationship or character arcs that are more clearly delimited in the moment. This division is typical of many primetime serials, where plot mysteries use complex narration while character drama is more conventional in its presentation. These differing modes of presentation allow for distinct modes of engagement and narrative questioning—the relationship status plots encourage us to ask “what will happen?”, as with Veronica’s romantic entanglements and rocky relations with her mother. Conversely, the mysteries frame the narrative as “what really happened in the past?”, privileging the forensic mode of hunting clues, connecting pieces, and positing theories alongside Veronica’s own investigation. We know that the relationship answers, however temporary and fleeting, will likely arrive soon in the story, but the mysteries might linger far beyond our expectations and take unanticipated twists along the way.

The dual narrative modes of mystery and relationship drama are tightly tied to codes of gender and genre. Robyn Warhol has effectively argued that serial form has been tightly linked to “effeminate feelings” of sentimentality and overt emotional expression. She contends that recent modes of serial storytelling clearly bifurcates gendered pleasures by genre, with soap operas and melodramatic literature appealing to effeminate audiences, and action-adventure serials like Patrick O’Brian’s maritime novels and science-fiction television addressing an anti-effeminate audience.⁹ But I believe that many contemporary narratively complex serials embrace both of Warhol’s “technologies of feeling,” marrying the effeminate affects of sentimentality and weepiness with the masculine responses of heart-pounding thrills and rational puzzle-solving (89). Veronica Mars is exemplary of some of the key ways these appeals are balanced and structured into contemporary narrative forms.

The cast of characters establishes this balance at the show’s core—the titular character is clearly the female center of the narrative universe, but she is surrounded almost exclusively by male figures. However, Veronica herself is far from a simple embodiment of feminine norms—her present-tense persona is defined in opposition to her pre-rape femininity, with shortened hair, heightened sarcastic attitude, and an emotional detachment that makes her alienated from nearly all of her high school peers. As established in the opening scene, Veronica eschews romantic sentiment and embraces personal risk in the service of her rational, procedural detective work. In terms of narrative pleasures, Veronica’s core storylines fit more neatly into the anti-effeminate mode of action and detective drama than the effeminate realm of romantic melodrama. And arguably the male characters serve more effeminate roles—Wallace as supportive counselor and confidant, Keith as nurturing parent, and Duncan as sensitive romantic who eventually becomes a single parent himself. Even Logan and Weevil, who first appear as hyper-masculine, aggressive, and hostile threats to Veronica, undergo a process of becoming more sensitive, emotionally engaged, and feminized throughout the season. There is no regular character who neatly fits into typical gender norms, as each embodies some contradictions and complexity.

Gender norms also are blurred within the show’s plotting. The self-contained detective stories seem consistent with masculine crime narratives, but the low-stakes high school setting and Veronica’s status as savvy P.I. willing to use both traditionally masculine and feminine traits to solve mysteries complicate this simple gender identification. The ongoing serial storylines contain both the effeminate and anti-effeminate traditions Warhol discusses—the relationship arcs generally follow the patterns of serial melodrama typical of teen dramas, but often interweave with the detective mysteries, as with the connections between Logan’s budding romance with Veronica and his potential involvement with both Lilly’s murder and Veronica’s rape. The serialized mysteries offer the emotional thrills Warhol labels anti-effeminate, but are tied to the emotional and feminine realms of rape, motherhood, and murder growing out of dysfunctional romance. While the series clearly embodies both modes of narrative pleasure Warhol discusses, it does more than offer parallel pleasures, as its storytelling structures complicate and intermingle such neat gendered binaries.

The pilot comments on its own atypical gender norms—when Veronica gives Wallace the incriminating videotape, he thanks her and tries to get her to acknowledge that she did him a favor. He says, “underneath that angry young woman shell, there’s a slightly less angry young woman, who’s dying to bake me something. You’re a marshmallow, Veronica Mars, a Twinkie!” Veronica’s dual gender identity is echoed in the pilot’s final lines—following Veronica’s assertion that she will solve the mysteries and reunite her family, she say, “I’m sorry, is that mushy? Well, you know what they say: Veronica Mars, she’s a marshmallow.” The prominence of this repetition as the show’s final moment contrasts with the highly rational procedures that Veronica has followed in both explicating and pursuing the mysteries, reminding us that she’s acting not just out of a masculine mode of justice and detection, but a sentimental and effeminate urge for family unity. Thus the final scene sets the stage for the broad range of gender appeals and identities that will be explored within the series, and cues us to be alert to the complexities of both character and plotting rather than assuming clear cut binaries and conventions.

In the end, the pilot of Veronica Mars teaches us how to watch the series and manages our expectations for what is to come. Most pilots focus on establishing the setting, characters, and narrative situation, and thus are quite atypical of what future episodes might bring. The Veronica Mars pilot employs more flashbacks, voiceover, and exposition than typical, but also establishes many norms of tone, style, and theme that future episodes will typically adhere to. As such, it is one of the more effective pilots for a complex serial drama, performing an astounding degree of narrative work while also offering clear pleasures and moments consistent with the series as a whole. Thus any attempt to understand the lasting impact and importance of this unique television series needs to start with how the pilot set the stage for the show’s ongoing narrative form, themes, and story arcs.

One of the most interesting, exhausting, frustrating, and exciting things you can do as a faculty member is serving on a search committee–interesting to see the broad range of work that emerging scholars are doing, exhausting from the time it takes to read hundreds of files and conduct lengthy interviews, frustrating because in the end you only get to hire one of the candidates, and exciting due to the end result of hopefully ending up with an amazing new colleague to work with for decades to come. I’ve served on five search committees in my time at Middlebury – and now have the chance to chair one.

This fall, the Film and Media Culture Department is in the enviable position to be hiring a tenure-track position in Comparative Media Studies. Both as the department chair and the faculty most overlapping with the advertised area, I’ll be reading all the applications quite closely, so it’s in my best interest to make sure that we get great applicants that are well aware of the specific facets of the job and institution. To help accomplish this, I decided to use this thread on my blog to discuss the job and publicly answer questions from people interested in the position. (I personally think Middlebury’s a wonderful place to work, and the fact that my Provost was not only supportive but excited about this form of technological transparency is a good example of why.) Please feel free to repost this link and encourage potential candidates to post any relevant questions.

Here’s the official job description – I’ll provide some more information and context beneath the fold:

The Film and Media Culture Department at Middlebury College invites applications for a tenure-track position in Comparative Media Studies beginning in September 2010. Appointment will be made at the rank of Assistant Professor; Ph.D. preferred, A.B.D considered. The successful candidate will teach courses on the cultural impacts and influences of media technologies, new media as aesthetic forms, and additional contributions to the program’s curriculum in film and media criticism, history, and/or production. Expertise in one or more of these areas is particularly desirable: online video, social software, videogames, new media art, digital media pedagogy, transmedia convergence, media and the environment, or global media. We welcome applicants from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, but the successful candidate should be comfortable teaching in a humanities-centered program anchored in film and media studies as part of an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum.

Candidates should provide evidence of commitment to excellent teaching and scholarly potential. Send letter of application with a statement of teaching and research interests, curriculum vitae, and three letters of recommendation, at least two of which must speak to teaching ability, to: Professor Jason Mittell, Film and Media Culture Department, Axinn Center, Middlebury College, Middlebury VT 05753. Applications must be received by November 2 to ensure full consideration. Middlebury College is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to hiring a diverse faculty to complement the increasing diversity of the student body.

The Film and Media Culture Department (FMMC) is a fairly new addition to the college, spinning off from a combined Theater / Dance / Film department in 2002. We have six current faculty members, ranging from brand-new colleagues to faculty who have been at Middlebury for decades, as well as two staff members supporting technological and administrative areas. We cover a wide range of approaches and media, including both scholars and creators, and our curriculum spans film, television, digital media, and other emerging forms – and a number of us are particularly interested in finding ways to teach and create media that bridge the theory/practice divide. We average around 15-20 majors per graduating class, making it a mid-sized major at the college (out of a total student population of around 2,350), and I believe we are growing in popularity and visibility, especially following our impressive new facilities opening in Fall 2008.

Tenure-track faculty at Middlebury have a somewhat complex teaching load – typically we teach two courses a semester, but one course a year has to be a “double” course, either with two parallel sections or a large-enrollment (at least 45) with separate discussion sections. Additionally, Middlebury has a Winter Term over January, in which students do a single intensive course or project – faculty typically teach every other year, which means that every other year there is a two-month period between classroom obligations (grading and syllabus prep, not included, of course!). But as a whole, it’s a very manageable load, conducive both to working hard to succeed in the classroom and as a researcher. (For more on my own perspective on these issues, see this previous post.)

As you might notice, we are asking for a thin application packet: a letter, CV, and reference letters. Since we are anticipating a large number of applications, we want to save the paperwork and hassle of full dossiers except for candidates who seem to best fit our needs, from whom we’ll request further materials at a later date. That being said, if you have materials available online, certainly including a URL in your letter or CV would be a good idea. We will not be doing any conference interviews – we hope to do phone or video interviews before the holiday break in December.

A few general comments that are appropriate to any search, not just this one: remember that your dossier will probably be one of hundreds. While most readers want to find great candidates, it’s up to you to stand out from a crowded field. So be sure to customize the material for the specific job and institution, demonstrate that you’ve done some homework on the department and its curriculum (and how you’d fit into it), and avoid sloppy mistakes. Since writing is part of your job as a teacher and scholar, the cover letter is the first way to demonstrate your writing abilities to potential colleagues, so be sure to be clear, convincing, and engaging in this brief and constrained format. (See this post for more detailed wisdom on writing the job letter.)

Hopefully this further information is helpful. I’m happy to answer questions about Middlebury, our department, the position, or the logistics of the search. I cannot answer questions specific to an individual application here on the blog, but I’ll try my best to be as helpful and transparent as possible. I hope to hear from many of you here, or via your dossiers.

I’m in the midst of drafting another long article, both to feed the blog and meet a lingering book chapter deadline, and head off-the-grid next week for some family vacation. But in the meantime, I’d like to crowdsource some brainstorming for my fall syllabus. I’ll be teaching Television & American Culture, a course I’ve taught many times and have working pretty effectively. (And I have I mentioned the brand new textbook I’ll be featuring?!)

The course covers the full range of American TV history, from the 1950s to today, and the screenings are pretty good overall. But I’ve realized with the rise of serialized television and the unique narrative forms it’s created, it seems a shame not to feature seriality in a more significant way than showing a single episode from a series like Buffy or Veronica Mars. My colleague Chris Keathley featured the entire first season of Deadwood in his introductory Aesthetics of the Moving Image course this spring, and it went swimmingly. And I had a wonderful experience (about which I still need to write-up a blog, I know…) teaching the entirety of The Wire. So I believe teaching a serial is quite rewarding.

The question is what to show. I don’t think I have time to squeeze in more than 6-8 episodes. Ideally it would feature significant plot arcs that resolve over that timeframe, even if it’s not a full season. 1/2 hour might be easier to schedule, but I’m open to an hour. American TV doesn’t lend itself to 6-8 episode runs that well, based on the 24 episode season, or 12-13 for cable, but since the course is specifically American, that does seem to be important.

Some options I’ve considered:

- The first season of Breaking Bad. It’s really great and runs only 7 eps, although I think the show didn’t start to really click until season 2. And it’s strengths focus mostly on Bryan Cranston’s performance more than interesting style or narrative form (which emerge more in s2).

- A section of Arrested Development. Certainly would be popular with students, and would highlight many of the interesting reflexive and innovative narrative tricks that I’d want to discuss. It might be so atypical as to make it not that useful, but I’m not sure. What episodes offer a good self-contained arc? It’s all still a blur to me, years later.

- The Pylea episodes of Angel. Fairly self-contained despite being almost 2 seasons into the show. I remember loving them, but might be an odd place to introduce viewers to the storyworld.

- The first season of Slings & Arrows. A nicely self-contained 6 episodes, with good plot and character arcs, backstory, and interesting high/low cultural resonances. Alas, it is Canadian, so its Americanness is borderline.

But I look forward to your ideas, oh wise readership!

One of my most-clicked (if not read) posts concerns how my approach to prime time serial television relates to the traditional daytime soap opera. Last year I was asked to expand on those ideas via an interview to be included in a forthcoming anthology edited by Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik, and C. Lee Harrington, entitled The Survival of the Soap Opera: Strategies for a New Media Era (University of Mississippi Press, 2010).

In the book, my comments will be interspersed with others around particular issues and questions. Sam Ford, who conducted the interview with me via email, gave me permission to reproduce it here in full as a record of the conversation (under the condition that you agree to get the book next year). Hopefully, I’ll still agree with myself in a year when the book is out! As always, your comments are welcome…

Sam’s questions are in bold:

What drove your interest in looking at narrative complexity in fictional television storytelling?

I think just like a lot of soap researchers, my research interest stemmed first from my personal tastes and fannish investments. I remember a number of programs that I was watching around 1999-2001 that seemed distinctive in their narrative strategies, offering new possibilities for primetime programming. Some specific examples include The West Wing (with the season 1 finale standing out as an epiphany moment for pointing to new storytelling innovations), Buffy & Angel, Six Feet Under, Alias, and 24. All of these shows seemed invested in expanding the vocabulary of prime time television, both by incorporating serial form (which had been a growing trend for two decades) and by embracing more overt narrative experimentation: temporal manipulation, moments of “retelling” the same scene from a different perspective, “reboot” scenarios that change the course of the series quite significantly, and an overt acknowledgment of narrative mechanics (like 24’s “real time” structure and title, or Six Feet Under’s “death of the week” norm).

As I began thinking more about what united these programs, I started tracing back this mode of narrative experimentation to earlier programs of the 1990s, such as Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, The X-Files, Malcolm in the Middle, and Seinfeld. Meanwhile, more programs started coming out that seemed to suggest that this was an overt trend, not just a coincidence – shows like Scrubs, Arrested Development, Lost, Boomtown, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Veronica Mars, and My Name Is Earl all began to accumulate as evidence of a new mode of television storytelling that would have been virtually unthinkable in the 1990s or earlier.

I had just published my book on television genres, in which I argue that we need to see genre categories as they are culturally used by industries and audiences, not artificially created by scholars and critics. So it was probably an act of self-rebellion that I set out on a new project to create this scholar-defined category of “narrative complexity”! But I was careful not to call it a “genre,” as I believe it crosses most primetime genres and operates at the more macro-level of narrational mode, following a model laid out by David Bordwell. And I’m gratified that since I published my first essay on the topic in 2006, many more shows that fit the mode have aired – although per the logic of television, most have failed to last beyond a single season.

Where do you feel the daytime serial drama fits into the history of the complex television narrative?  In particular, how do you feel soap operas have influenced complex television narratives in primetime?

This is a big question for my work, and I think my answer won’t be popular. But it’s not arrived at casually or dismissively.

Certainly the soap opera plays an important role in the history of serialized TV, as it has been the centerpiece of serial form for decades. If we look at the history of primetime serialized programming, soap operas are a common reference point. In the 1960s, Peyton Place had much in common with soaps, with focus on a web of relationships within a community, an assumed female audience, multiple airings each week (2 or 3 episodes a week) running year-round, and even some production norms common to soaps (although it was shot on film, not live). The producers of the show refused the soap label, highlighting its novelistic source material over the lowbrow assumptions tied to the daytime genre (with this link between the televised novel and soaps became more prevalent later through the Latin American telenovela form). Despite the show’s success, other primetime serials failed throughout the 1960s.

The next wave of primetime serials makes explicit ties to soaps, but through genre parody: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Soap both created highly successful serials that acknowledged the soap opera roots but explicitly mocked the genre. MHMH is one of the most interesting shows in TV history, as it violates all sorts of norms in terms of genre, scheduling, fanbase, taboo content, and sheer off-the-wall ideas. Although it was nominally created by Norman Lear as part of his wave of relevant sitcoms of the 1970s, it was written by Ann Marcus and a number of other former soap writers who were freed to undercut but still embrace the genre via this deeply strange program. I find it fascinating to watch today, especially with the context of knowing that it was the darling of the New Yorker set for a brief shining moment in the mid-1970s – a great highbrow/lowbrow crossover moment!

Soap is more conventionally a sitcom, but really pushes serial form into a primetime network hit. I wrote about the show in my Genre & Television book, and got a chance to interview the creators Susan Harris and Paul Junger Witt – interestingly, they claim that they did not set out parody soaps (which they said they’d never watched), but rather simply wanted to push the boundaries of sitcom narrative by creating a serial form. Soap was used as a working title during development, as a shorthand for the narrative form, and they never came up with anything better. Whether we can read this oral history as an accurate memory of authorial intent or not is besides the point – the more interesting insight is that in the mid-’70s, the form of serial narrative was culturally synonymous with the soap opera.

Soap’s success helped change a lot of network assumptions: audiences won’t be able to follow a weekly serial, viewers are too inconsistent for serials in primetime, they’ll drop out over the summer, serials are only for the traditional daytime audience, men won’t watch. So this sets the stage for the 1980s serial boom of the primetime melodramas (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Knot’s Landing) and the “quality” serial hybrids (Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Cheers, L.A. Law, thirtysomething). This coincides, of course, with the boom in both viewership and legitimacy of daytime soaps in the 1980s, so serialization starts to lose many of its lowbrow assumptions – by the 1990s, I’d argue that serial form existed as an independent concept from the soap opera genre. Thus even a show that I believe explicitly references and comments on soap norms, Twin Peaks, is not framed within the context of soaps by most critics; if Twin Peaks had aired in the 1970s, I think it would have been viewed primarily through the lens of soap operas, much like Mary Hartman.

All of this history simply presages a point that I imagine some readers of this book will find controversial: I don’t think the contemporary primetime narrative complexity that I write about has much in common with or influence from soap operas, except through their common connections to 1970s and 1980s primetime serials. They are distinctly different in production method, scheduling, acting style, pacing, and formal structure. In reading interviews with, and talking to, primetime creators, I’ve never seen any reference to soap operas as a point of inspiration or influence. Likewise, there is almost no crossover between creative personnel between daytime and primetime drama.

So what are the shared features? Seriality, of course, and often an investment in melodrama. But the way daytime and primetime handle serial form and melodramatic writing and performance are so different that I don’t see this as a particularly compelling link. This is not to say that there aren’t primetime shows that are soapy – I think Friday Night Lights, The O.C., and Dirty Sexy Money are all examples of recent shows with a tie to soap opera’s mode of melodrama (and all of which I find quite enjoyable). But these shows aren’t particularly invested in the form of narrative complexity that I’m studying – they lack the self-aware storytelling mechanics, the play with temporality and subjectivity, and the commitment to a longterm accural of plot clues and mechanistic interconnectivity that I believe is central to the mode of “narrative complexity.”

You have said before that you hesitate to speak too much about the soap opera because of your lack of familiarity with the narratives?  Do you think the sheer volume of soap opera texts pose major problems for incorporating the soap opera into these discussions?  How can the media studies community overcome this barrier?

My own history with soap operas is similar to a lot of people of my age – as a tween in the early-’80s, I got hooked with my mother on General Hospital at the height of the Luke & Laura fad. I think I watched for about a year or so, but then my interest shifted to other serial forms like comic books. I haven’t turned back to any daytime drama aside from occasional forays to harvest examples for class, so I feel quite detached from the world of daytime as a viewer.

As a scholar, I was quite influenced by Robert Allen’s book Speaking of Soap Operas, which is still one of the best studies of a television genre ever written. Allen makes a compelling argument that one of the prime reasons that soaps have been so denigrated is that they do not lend themselves to the “drop-in” viewer – scholars who condemn the programs (especially before the cultural studies shift in the field of communication) typically have only watched a few episodes, and thus cannot appreciate the deeper pleasures and structures of interconnection, long-term memory, and paradigmatic relationships. Even though I’ve never watched a soap long enough to appreciate this level of engagement and sophistication, I buy his account of the genre’s potential rewards.

So in part there’s a problem given the sheer number of episodes involved in any soap, frustrating the scholarly instinct to “master” an object of study. Most soap scholars I know got hooked on their shows as adolescents and as part of an intergenerational community with parents or grandparents. If you’ve had that experience, it’s become a significant part of your life that will undoubtedly impact your scholarship. But if you haven’t, there’s no way to reclaim those decades of research. Thus the only ways I can envision scholars without a soap history integrating the genre into their scholarship is to befriend and collaborate with scholars with that background. I do have some “native informants” whom I go to with questions about soaps, and I think that may be the best we can do – although I’m certainly open to other ideas!

Some, such as Sharon Ross, have posited that the emotional and communal focus of soap operas, along with their cheaper production values, have led to their continued marginalization.  Do you think this helps to explain the gap between gaps between soap opera and primetime scholarship, fan bases, and industries?

No doubt, the cultural distinctions between daytime and primetime dramas are in part tied to production values and formal norms, where the speed and factory style of soap production makes them look “worse” based on most aesthetic criteria. But I still think the genre is laden with the assumption that it’s targeted for a marginal and degraded audience niche: older, lower-class, less-educated women. Whether that’s an accurate reflection of actual viewers or not, that’s certainly the perception that my students still have. So I don’t think that it’s actually the “emotional and communal focus” that triggers marginalization, except for how that idea serves as code for “housewives,” or at least in perception among many outsiders.

I say that in part because a large number of primetime series offer tremendous emotional and communal rewards, whether it’s the online fan communities surrounding shows like Lost or BSG, or the emotional attachments that many viewers have to characters on The Wire and Buffy. So I think the continued marginalization of soaps has less to do with actual ways that fans engage with them, or even the texts themselves (although certainly I do think their production values and some textual conventions turn off a number of potential viewers), as much with the historical associations linked to the genre’s status as bad object. Add to that the sheer commitment it takes to get into a soap, needing both a community of viewers to share it with and a lot of time to dedicate to its consumption – the barriers to entry are quite high.

You’ve mentioned in prior writing that one thing that sets primetime complexity apart from daytime is a difference in how redundancy and repetition is handled.  How would you describe the difference?

One thing we need to remember is that an average primetime serial produces around 22 hours each year, or even less for cable series (without subtracting out commercial time). A soap opera produces over ten times that amount each year, a stark difference in the sheer amount of storytelling volume. How is that volume filled? This is a great project for an ambitious quantitative-minded researcher, charting out the specific ways that stories are told across different shows. I’m not that person, and I haven’t done the research to “prove” these differences, but here are my working hypotheses:

- Soaps spend much more time talking about events that have happened rather than showing them, while primetime serials show events more frequently than talking about them.
- Soap dialogue includes the names and relationships of characters more frequently than on primetime.
- The amount of narrative change that happens over one week of a soap opera is less than one episode of a primetime serial.
- The amount of narrative change that happens over one year of a soap opera is less than a season of a primetime serial.
- Soaps involve more interwoven characters than primetime, where separate storylines have less interactions.
- Individual episodes of primetime have much more defined boundaries and distinctive features than on daytime.
- Individual storylines on primetime serials are introduced and concluded far more quickly than on daytime, with the exception of major plot arcs & mythologies (as on Lost).
- Narrative events have far more emotional and character repercussions, both for an individual character and the community at large, on daytime versus primetime.
- Missing a week of a soap opera would cause less confusion than missing a week of a primetime serial (assuming the viewer does not watch the “previously on” recaps on primetime), because daytime incorporates far more recapping into the dialogue than on primetime.
- A published “recap” of an episode on a fansite is far more likely to focus on character reactions to information and events on daytime, versus the actual events themselves on primetime recaps.

To be clear, I’m not trying to suggest that these differences should be measured in terms of quality – there are different appeals, pleasures, and aesthetics at work here. We also have to account for the differences in viewing strategies – I believe that soap viewers are less likely to watch an episode straight through with their full attention aimed at the screen than for primetime viewers. Soap viewers use recording devices to timeshift and fast forward through plotlines or characters they don’t care about, frequently multitask while watching, and rely on recaps from their community of viewers or paratexts like Soap Opera Digest or fansites. Certainly primetime viewers do all of these things, but I would guess with less frequency. I think these viewing tendencies reinforce textual norms that encourage daytime repetition and slow pacing, versus primetime speed and moving forward.

The primetime shows I’m most interested in explicitly discourage such viewing strategies & textual redundancies – their plots and enigmas are constructed to reward viewers who watch every episode carefully, and they refuse redundancy and repetition for dramatic effect. For instance, The Wire plants some seeds of narrative backstory in the first season, such as Clay Davis’s bribery or Cedric Daniels’ history of corruption, that do not blossom until later seasons, even 5 years later in some instances. The moment of recognition that accompanies the connection to this deep backstory depends on that lack of redundancy, rewarding your careful attention over years rather than having foreshadowed and gestured toward a turn of events explicitly. I would guess that such moments in soaps are more about backstory relationships, rather than dangling loose ends of plot – but since for many soaps, the fans know more about the backstory than the producers, such moments might be more frustration than revelation!

You’ve also written about “strategic forgetting and remembering” in primetime shows.  How does this relate to daytime dramas?

This ties into these moments of recognition – serial narratives can play with how much a viewer knows and forgets to create narrative pleasures. For instance, in the third season of Lost, it is revealed who Claire’s father is (and I won’t spoil it in case readers want to experience the series without that information). This relationship is not referred to again until a year later, when he shows up on the island suddenly and Claire says, “Dad?!” I think the average viewer who follows the show consistently (but not repeatedly) would have been able to tell you who Claire’s father is if you asked, but until she said “Dad,” they wouldn’t be thinking about that relationship. Because this hypothetical viewer (which mirrors my own experience, at least) is aware of this relationship but has forgotten it from working memory, the show allows for a moment of narrative pleasure unique to the serial form: the sense of being surprised by what you already know.

Can soaps offer this pleasure? Sure, but I’d be curious to hear from fans whether it’s common. The assumed distracted viewership, the lack of reruns/DVDs to ensure completism, and the constitutive pleasures of repetition and redundancy all seem to work to avoid the pleasures of forgetting and remembering. But again, I don’t have the experience to know whether these moments do occur like this in soaps.

In light of increased serialization, character-based storytelling, and dialogue-driven shows in primetime, is the daytime soap opera becoming an historical genre?  Does it have a future, in your opinion?

All cultural forms emerge at the conjuncture between creative innovations and historically specific circumstances that allow a form to flourish. For television, this is tied to technology, industrial norms and goals, and viewer behaviors. The contexts that allowed soaps to emerge on radio and flourish on television are mostly gone: television is no longer centrally a live synchronous form, defined by scarcity of channels, regimented schedules, and limited viewing choices. The single-sponsorship model is gone, making a genre where sponsors might own a production quite rare. Schedules are no longer defined by genre homogeneity, so daytime has many more options for viewers. Technologies have given viewers more control of viewing contexts and access, which can facilitate increased viewership via time-shifting (although this doesn’t translate into Nielsen viability), but also encourages more competition among programming options. And finally, peoples’ lives have shifted such that far fewer people are home and looking to watch TV in the afternoon.

Take this thought experiment: imagine that soap operas never existed. What would a network say to a producer pitching a series like All My Children today? I don’t see any reason why a network would want to innovative toward daytime soaps today, so I think that the programs persist primarily due to precedent and long-term viewership. However, history is a powerful force, and there are clearly many viewers and producers invested in the continued health in the genre. So just because it doesn’t make sense as a new business model, I do think there is enough of a commitment to the form that it will persist, at least into the near future.

I think that serial storytelling taps into a widely-shared and even primal set of narrative pleasures: investment in an ongoing storyworld, relationships with characters, long-term interest in what will happen next. But I think back to my own brief soap opera viewership – I got hooked in because of the “what next?” question. But the obstacles for regular viewership were too high, so I abandoned it for the more convenient (although costly!) serial form of comic books. I gave up comics around the same time that I got invested in primetime serials (Dynasty and St. Elsewhere were two of my favorite 1980s shows), and I’ve continued to be an ardent primetime serial viewer for 20 years. And all the changes I just mentioned privilege this mode of seriality: more flexible technologies of viewing, lower commitment threshhold, and more choice allowing for the flourishing of serials across genres and channels. So when my kids get interested in seriality, why would they turn to soap operas? I don’t think that there’s enough of an appeal there without the intergenerational community to nurture soap fandom. So as viewership dwindles, so does the next generation’s exposure and investment – a recipe for making soap fans endangered, if not extinct.

What about the daytime soap opera model still remains unique and unable to be replicated in other genres?

I’d say it’s the daily ritual and amount of textual material. For many, this is a core pleasure that a primetime serial cannot replace, even with paratextual exploration online via fanfic, wikis, blogs, vidding, etc. Is it enough to sustain the genre? Hard to say – I could imagine a mode of online storytelling that could effectively match that ritual, but I haven’t seen an example that’s worked yet. But we’re still in the primitive era of online video, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone comes up with a smash hit online serial in the next few years.

Given your work on the nature of television genres, what do you see as challenging in referring to soap operas as a genre?  Is it instead a format?

I definitely see soap opera as a genre, while “serial drama” is a format. My concept of genre is as a cultural category bearing assumptions and associations – and probably no television genre is as laden with assumptions as the soap opera! Some of those associations are tied to textual form, such as production style, performance, and narrative mode, but others are more operative within the industry and audiences, such as assumed viewer base, low cultural value, and norms of consumption. Thus I don’t think that primetime serials are still considered soap operas, or at most they bear the adjective “soapy” while acknowledging that they’re not the same as daytime. This is a change since the 1970s, when the producers of Soap couldn’t imagine serial television apart from the soap opera.

I think its important to detach seriality and melodrama from the specific genre of daytime soaps – obviously soap operas have been prime sites for both serial form and melodramatic television for decades, but today there’s a wider range of these formal and tonal elements across genres, including nearly every primetime fictional genre, reality TV, sports, and even news, where both melodrama and serial form seemed to bubble up quite a bit in the 2008 election. But this doesn’t make these texts “soap operas,” any more than when a soap opera incorporates a crime plot does it become a cop show. Even though I’ve heard that General Hospital has recently focused on a mafia storyline, I don’t think that plot makes us regard it as a gangster show. Genres matter as they’re culturally used, and the framework for understanding daytime dramas continues to be exclusively “soap opera,” even as the shows mix in other genres.

I know other scholars who disagree with me on this point concerning the influence of soaps on primetime. They argue that the presence of serial melodrama in primetime suggests the expansion of soap opera outside of daytime, and assert that this influence suggests that soaps should be seen as more legitimate and central  to the cultural values of television. But I just don’t see that argument applying today, as the majority of both producers and viewers of primetime serials have never watched soaps, and probably wouldn’t particularly like them if they did. Soap operas did not invent serial form or melodrama – they just happened to be the dominant locale for both throughout the bulk of television history. But I see today’s primetime serials as much more influenced by other serial formats, like comic books and 19th century novels, than by soap operas. Thus today’s primetime serial is cousins with the soap opera, sharing common ancestry from the 19th century novel, but very few primetime shows seem to be directly influenced by daytime traditions.

There is a strategic cultural politics to asserting the importance of soap opera to the more legitimate cultural realm of primetime serials, but I see a dangerous side-effect to this claim. If you argue that shows like Lost, The Sopranos, and The Wire are indebted to the soap opera genre, it’s pretty easy to rebut that these programs are “more evolved” than daytime – the aesthetic criteria that celebrate primetime serials will judge soap operas as cro magnon relatives at best, and thus worthy of evolutionary extinction! If you’re a soap fan, it’s a dangerous game to suggest that the primetime serial can be regarded as a mutated soap opera, because soaps are going to lose this aesthetic evaluative comparison for the vast majority of critics and viewers. I see it as both more accurate and politically useful to maintain that soaps possess their own unique values, aesthetics, and rewards distinct from primetime serials, forcing us to evaluate daytime on its own terms. And based on soap’s own assumptions and aesthetic terms, most primetime serials fail to measure up.

Do you have any hypotheses about where the soap opera will be in 10 years?  What would be lost if the soap opera “genre” ceased to exist?  In particular, what would be lost if the eight current shows were to go off the air?

It’s hard to say – think back 10 years ago, and who would have predicted the rebirth of the primetime game show, reality TV, YouTube, DVRs, TV-on-DVD, and the like? And whenever I’m asked to predict the future of TV, I always think of the “death of the sitcom” proclamation that was rampant in the early-’80s, just before The Cosby Show came on. So any predictions bear the caveat that nobody really can predict these things, and that uncertainty suffuses media industries.

With those caveats in mind, one advantage of soap operas is that they’re fairly cheap to produce, so they could linger on TV even as their ratings dwindle. I could imagine some series migrating from network to cable channels, where lower ratings are more acceptable to be profitable. And perhaps more aggressive product integration might help fund the shows even as timeshifting becomes more prevalent. But many of the trends of TV today don’t seem to mesh with the traditions of the genre. Migrating online would make it harder to reach the older audience that still values these longterm narratives and would disrupt much of the genre’s ritualistic appeal. Likewise the transmedia strategies that I know some soaps have explored might not resonate with a good deal of viewers.

As for what would be lost if soaps died out – there’s certainly a sense of sadness that would accompany the extinction of storyworlds that have persisted for so long. But I’d be curious to know whether soap fans today are truly invested in the shows as they are now, or more nostalgically holding onto a series as it once was – how many viewers are watching out of habit and hope for a potential return to a golden age, versus how many still find the shows rewarding? American television is so invested in the notion that cancellation equals failure, that people mourn the loss of long-running primetime series even after they’ve lost their lustre. I think the cultural place of shows like ER and The Simpsons might be even higher if they’d ended in their prime, rather than going on for years after their core fans had moved on. This “infinity model” of TV is certainly most prevalent for soaps, where cancellation is quite rare and lamented. But the idea that a story can go on forever just doesn’t make much sense if you think about it, and really has few precedents in other narrative traditions.

How can soap operas learn from trends in primetime?  Do you feel there are aspects of primetime storytelling that would port well back to daytime?

I’m not sure how well primetime innovations can fit into the constraints and expectations of soap operas – building elaborate puzzle narratives like Lost or complex games with narrative form as on Buffy doesn’t seem feasible in the daily production grind of daytime. Plus these storytelling strategies are really dependent on viewers paying careful attention to every episode – would enough daytime viewers consume their series that way? I don’t know enough about the viewing patterns of soaps, but I do think there is a big disconnect with the style of viewing between daytime and primetime serials, enough that we need to think about their strategies more separately rather than as part of the same trend.

Again, I see the downside of soap fans & critics claiming major influence and connections to primetime serials is that it denies the uniqueness of daytime, and ends up highlighting the ways that daytime fails to match some aspects of primetime. I can’t imagine a soap version of The Sopranos that doesn’t seem subpar to the original, because we’d carry over the aesthetic values of primetime, which can never be met given the constraints of daytime. So if you’re looking for advice on how to reinvigorate soap operas, I’d say producers should focus on what the genre does best: immersive, slow-paced, dialogue-driven melodramatic storytelling that rewards long-term accrual of character knowledge. If there’s no longer a market for this, then the genre will disappear – and perhaps there does need to be some contraction to concentrate the audience who still want these pleasures to choose from only a few shows. But I’d argue that the problems daytime is facing can be solved best by trying to be more like soap operas, not more like primetime.

One of the pleasures of working with Middlebury College students is advising independent work on their senior projects. While I don’t have the opportunity to work with graduate students on their dissertations, every once in awhile I have undergraduate students who do exemplary work that feels quite similar to a condensed version of the graduate thesis project. Typically they do great work, but the end result remains dormant, at best being read by a random browser in the Middlebury library.

One of my top students this past year, Aaron Smith, wrote a project that warrants broader dissemination, given its timely topic and more “prescriptive” tone. Aaron wrote about transmedia storytelling in contemporary television (a topic of great personal interest for me), specifically exploring what lessons can be learned from experiments from the last decade and how future storytellers might devise more successful examples.

Per my encouragement, Aaron has posted his thesis online, inviting comments through the CommentPress system – you can comment on individual paragraphs, sections, or the entire project. I know that Aaron would appreciate feedback, and I think anyone interested in contemporary television narrative and transmedia issues will find interesting material to chew on here. Below is the thesis abstract to whet your appetite – please comment, reblog, or otherwise engage with his work:

“Transmedia Storytelling in Television 2.0” by Aaron Smith
In the era of convergence, television producers are developing transmedia narratives to cater to consumers who are willing to follow their favorite shows across multiple media channels. At the same time, there still remains a need to preserve an internally coherent television show for more traditional viewers. This thesis offers a model for how transmedia storytelling can coexist with and enhance a television narrative, using Lost as a case study. By building a world to be discovered, creating a hierarchy of strategic gaps, focusing on the unique capabilities of each extension, and using the “validation effect” to reward fans for their cross-media traversals, television/transmedia producers can provide a satisfying experience for hard-core and casual fans alike.