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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Tier (in Alphabetical Order):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today starts a mini-conference in Hannover, a city just north of Göttingen, about Cultural Distinctions Remediated. I’m giving the opening keynote today at 6pm, and wanted to share it here (below). It’s an extension of things I’ve written before about evaluation, quality TV, and cultural hierarchies, with a case study examining Breaking Bad and The Wire. It will be adapted for an anthology about television aesthetics, and incorporated into my current book project, so feedback would be quite helpful as I develop it further!

“The Qualities of Complexity: Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television”

During my year in Germany, I’m writing a book called Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Narrative, exploring the transformations in industrial norms, viewing practices, and technologies that have helped give rise to new formal elements of television storytelling. In discussing television form, one issue I touch on is the question of evaluation, considering how we might look at these transformations through the lens of aesthetic judgment. There is no shortage of evaluative practice in the backstage arenas of media scholars, whether on barstools at conferences, in departmental mailrooms, or on online networks like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. But there is little space for a media scholar to make an evaluative argument within the realm of official professional discourse, where evaluative proclamations and arguments are viewed skeptically at best, forbidden at worst. Today I would like to explore why media studies is reluctant to evaluate by considering the two contrasting positions that center around the term “quality television.” In contrasting these two approaches, I hope to move away from the discursive trap of quality, and model a third approach to evaluating television programming that can hopefully open up a space for scholars to engage more productively with aesthetic analysis. While it might not be an end in itself, evaluative criticism can strengthen our understanding of how a television program works, how viewers and fans invest themselves in a text, and what inspires them (and us) to make television a meaningful part of everyday life.^[i]

The first approach to evaluation might be considered unselfconscious quality television discourse, but this is actually quite rare among media scholars. “Quality television” as a term is rarely used without layers of caveats and disclaimers, noting that “quality” is subjective or that it is more interesting as a discourse circulating within the industry or fans, rather than an evaluative label itself.^[ii] Yet for all of these caveats, there still seems to be a general consensus as to what programs are included and excluded among scholars who use the term, suggesting that it has some salience as a critical category. Looking at books that use the term “quality television,” as well as the I.B. Tauris “Reading Contemporary Television Series” that typically embraces the category if not the term, we can see common texts categorized including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ER, The X-Files, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Lost, and Six Feet Under. While we might see a shared corpus identified under the label, there is rarely any analytic clarity as to what precisely counts as quality television, making it hard to justify why CSI, Deadwood, Scrubs, and The Daily Show are all framed within the book Quality TV, aside from all being part of a shared taste culture that appeals to academics and critics.^[iii]

Attempts to define quality television depend on a notion of weak resemblance, contrasting quality with its presumed opposite and used to elevate certain programs over others, with such programs united less by formal or thematic elements than by markers of prestige that reflect well upon the sophisticated viewers who embrace such programming. The American scholar who has touted quality television most directly is Robert Thompson, who fully admits that the label is ultimately relational: “Quality TV is best defined by what it is not. It is not ‘regular’ TV.”^[iv] Under this formulation, quality television refers to shows that stand in opposition to the majority of programming, with an oxymoronic implication to the term—television must be redeemed by its opposite. For some critics, quality is a marker of value, suggesting that these shows are better than others, while for others it serves as a construction of either a class of targeted viewers (“the quality audience”) or a set of textual attributes of high production values and serious themes that might better be thought of as “prestigious television.” However, the slippage between notions of value, prestige, and audience, as well as the need for quality to assert its equally vague opposite, make the concept fairly incoherent and not particularly useful to either understand how television circulates among industry and audience, or as a textual category with analytic or evaluative use.

Most uses of quality television accept an implicit notion of textual value, where evaluative criteria are left unspoken or undeveloped and a program’s critical worth is viewed as inherent to the text itself. In one of the more self-aware and reflective pieces about quality television, Sarah Cardwell outlines a number of features that distinguish quality television more as a genre and less as an evaluative category, noting that, “to notice a programme’s signifiers of quality is not to assert anything about its value.” But her next sentence reinforces the assumption that a text’s value is inherent: “Yet I believe these qualities also make them good.”^[v] I agree fully with Cardwell that we should be upfront and open about discussing programs that we like and engage in evaluative discourse, but I find that the category of quality television does little to help explain this facet of media engagement, frequently complicating an already muddy terrain through a slippage between the established category and the type of engagement that such texts offer.

The second approach to evaluation is explicitly anti-evaluative, arguing that questions of value should not be on the disciplinary agenda. Often this position is constructed by omission, as most scholarship avoids engaging in evaluative work so pervasively that there is not any need to even mark the gap as notable—evaluation is framed as what journalistic critics and fans do, and is only studied by media scholars at a discursive remove when analyzing those cultural practices. When such scholars do raise questions of evaluation, they follow a line of cultural studies analysis that regards issues of taste and aesthetics as social constructions functioning to reinforce power dynamics and hierarchies, inspired primarily by the work of Pierre Bourdieu.^[vi] Under this formulation, evaluation is always about creating distinctions that elevate one social sphere by belittling others, typically mirroring established class and gender norms. Bourdieu and his followers certainly offer a vital rejoinder to the universalizing discourses of aesthetics by highlighting how such practices are always embedded in social relations and cultural contexts, rather than inherent in texts themselves; however, this critique can be taken too far by reductively dismissing all issues of aesthetics and value in the name of political egalitarianism.

A recent book that exemplifies both this approach and its shortcomings is Michael Newman and Elana Levine’s Legitimating Television, which provides a detailed account of how television has become more culturally valued over the past decade, and in turn as reinforced cultural hierarchies. As they write in the book’s thesis statement:

The work of analyzing patterns of taste judgment and classification is thus to unmask misrecognitions of authentic and autonomous value, bringing to light their political and social functions. Such is the project of this book. We argue that it is a mistake to accept naively that television has grown better over the years, even while such a discourse is intensifying within popular, industrial, and scholarly sites. In contrast, we argue that it is primarily cultural elites… who have intensified the legitimation of television by investing the medium with aesthetic and other prized values, nudging it closer to more established arts and cultural forms and preserving their own privileged status in return. ^[vii]

In surveying an array of critical, industrial, and scholarly practices as part of a larger discourse of cultural distinction, they do a fine job mapping this discursive terrain and highlighting the ways that it can reinforce class and gender norms. But they fall prey to a core danger of such discursive analysis: glossing over the varieties of micro-practices falling under any discursive umbrella in the name of mapping a more totalizing and cohesive macro-picture. Thus while they claim to be arguing for more self-awareness and reflection in our analyses, they quickly label everything fitting into these broader trends of legitimation as “naïve” and thus reinforcing class and gender hierarchies, while they themselves often ignore the very self-awareness and reflection that they call for. And thus we’re left with a situation where we cannot escape legitimating discourse and thus all evaluative judgments are rendered suspect or invalid.

A danger in treating Bourdieu’s critique as gospel is that it paralyzes scholars who want to say anything about issues of evaluation, as accusing an academic of “perpetuating class and gender hierarchies” is among the harshest critiques imaginable within contemporary scholarly discourse. But just as “quality television” is too vague of a brush to paint an effective picture of media practices, “legitimating discourse” is a similarly slippery concept, used both to focus closely on specific technological or genre shifts, and more broadly to caricature criticism as politically complicit or naïve. This is not to say that Bourdieu is wrong in highlighting how aesthetic evaluation is a socially situated practice that can perpetuate power relations, or that the legitimating discourse mapped by Newman and Levine is not an important facet of media today. But we need to take the anti-universalist lessons of Bourdieu and reimagine how we can talk about issues of aesthetics and evaluation more contingently and without the broad brushes of quality television.

So today I want to propose a third way to approach the critical evaluation of television, one that avoids the categorical sweep of either quality television or anti-legitimation discourses. I don’t claim that this approach is novel or wholly original, as it tries to synthesize a number of other mostly-British and Australian media scholars who have discussed similar issues.^[viii] The goal of my approach to evaluative criticism is to model a way that scholars can be honest and reflexive about our own taste cultures and commitments, and provide insight into how television texts accomplish or fail at their aesthetic goals, without resorting to notions of universal or essential criteria of value. I distinguish typical notions of valuation, where a text’s worth is seen as intrinsic and needing to be discovered by the critic, from evaluation, which I see as an active process of engaging with aesthetic criteria, textual features, and cultural circulation. Quality television posits a product of valuation, while evaluation foregrounds the process of critical analysis and the ongoing conversation about text, contexts, and aesthetic criteria.

To engage in evaluation as a process, I suggest we need to articulate specific evaluative criteria for particular texts, rather than casting broad nets that seem to measure all programs to the same standards, or attempt to create broad categories like quality television that efface the specificity of individual criteria or texts. These criteria must emerge from the detailed analyses of television texts, rather than imposing them from other media or types of programming, as we must try to evaluate any given program on its own contextualized creative goals. We should justify the worth of any given criterion, allowing for a diversity of potential markers of success, far from any universalized standard of aesthetics. We should explore how a text achieves or falls short of meeting its aesthetic goals using a model of reader-oriented poetics that examines texts through their cultural circulation. We should situate our own taste cultures within this analysis to consider how our analyzes are tied to our social identities and contexts, not to render our judgments invalid but to highlight their contingency. Thus evaluation requires four key components, potentially performed in any order: establish contextualized criteria, justify criteria, analyze contextualized texts in relation to these criteria, and self-situate our own contingent place in these cultural contexts.

Before modeling this process of evaluation, I need to clarify what we’re doing when we evaluate. Contrary to the assumptions apparent within many adherents of Bourdieu’s anti-aesthetic model, making an evaluation does not aspire to the status of fact or proof. By claiming that a given program is good, or that one series is better than another, I am making an argument that I believe to be true, but I do not assert it as a truth claim—in the terms laid out decades ago by Stanley Fish, evaluation is a discursive act of persuasion rather than demonstration.^[ix] Even more than other types of analysis, evaluation is an invitation to a dialog, as debating the merits of cultural works is one of the most enjoyable ways we engage with texts, establish relationships with other cultural consumers, and gain respect for other critics and viewers’ opinions and insights. Of course I do hope to convince you that my evaluation is correct, and I certainly believe it to be true, but we do not make evaluations to make a definitive statement about the importance of any given text; instead they are contingent assertions lodged in their contextual moment that will almost undoubtedly be revised after future viewing and conversation. While my persuasive evaluation emerges from a context of authority, with an imprint of expertise that gives it more discursive weight than a random pseudonym in an internet comment thread, in the end I think that the effectiveness of any given evaluation stems more from successful analysis and argumentation than the backing of institutional power or authority.

To model this approach to evaluation, I want to turn to the criterion of complexity, a concept that is central to my recent writing. I contend that complexity is an appropriate and useful criterion for evaluating fictional television, as it seems both to be a distinct goal featured by many contemporary programs, and fits into broader cultural norms that seem non-controversially valued. To call something complex is to highlight its sophistication and nuance, suggesting that it presents a vision of the world that avoids being reductive or artificially simplistic. It suggests that the consumer of complexity needs to engage fully and attentively, and such engagement will yield an experience distinct from more casual or partial attention. We teach our students to strive for complexity in their analyses, as we believe the world to be multifaceted and intricate enough to require a complex account to accurately gain insight, whether the field is biology or media studies. Contrast “complex” with “complicated,” and the latter seems to suggest both less coherence and more artifice, an attempt to make something appear more nuanced than it really is. Thus it seems like the aesthetic quality of complexity is a worthy goal and one marker among many of creative achievement.

One frequent objection to evaluation is that it inherently creates cultural hierarchies by valorizing one form over another, a mode of distinction that Bourdieu has convincingly shown can work to reinforce social power relations. However, we can think beyond a reductive binary logic that insists that value is a zero-sum game, or that lauding any single criterion is inherently deriding its opposite. I do believe that complexity is potentially a virtue, but that doesn’t mean that simplicity is a sin—there are many contexts where simple would trump complex, whether in constructing an effective rhetorical motto or designing a user interface. There is certainly pleasure and value in some forms of simple television, where a straightforward elegance of purpose and execution is a laudable achievement. Likewise, achieving complexity is no inherent marker of value, as a complex narrative that sacrifices coherence or emotional engagement is likely to fall short in any evaluative analysis. It is only through the specific analysis of a series and its related criteria that we can avoid falling back on such assumed binaries or inherent universalized values.

In thinking through how to apply this model of evaluation around complexity, I turned to the two series that I currently rank atop my shifting list of best all-time television: The Wire and Breaking Bad. The two series bear some interesting parallels and differences that are instructive as to how we might evaluate programs and approach the process of evaluation. In contrasting the two, I’m not interested in ranking the two shows or even validating why I see them as more successful than many other excellent programs, but instead I want to use them to tease out the criteria we use to evaluate and how each manages to succeed in accomplishing its own ambitious aesthetic approach to complexity. Like all evaluative claims, my analysis is an argument that is not offered as fact, but supported belief—I make my case in the hopes of helping other viewers see the shows in a new light, not to convince the world that these two programs are the pinnacle of television. Hopefully this evaluative analysis demonstrates the usefulness of academic critics engaging in such discussions and not abdicating questions of judgment solely to journalistic critics and fans.

In many ways, The Wire and Breaking Bad are strikingly similar. Both were produced for emerging cable channels in the shadow of a critical darling that had immediately established the channel’s brand identity (HBO’s The Sopranos and AMC’s Mad Men respectively), but both pushed the channel toward new aesthetic directions and slowly grew to match the earlier show in critical reputation. Both came from writers who established themselves on landmark network innovators in the 1990s (David Simon on Homicide and Vince Gilligan on The X-Files), but neither producer seemed poised to create programs as innovative and acclaimed as these follow-ups. Both shows feature five-season runs, ending on their own terms in approximately 60 episodes.^[x] And both shows have somewhat similar focus on drug dealers, crime syndicates, and ongoing battles among police and competing criminal groups, while mixing intense drama along with a vibrant vein of dark comedy to explore contemporary struggles of men attempting to find meaning in their relationship to work and labor.

Yet in other ways, the two series are diametrically opposed, serving as stark contrasts among the range of options within the realm of serialized primetime dramas. The Wire is stylistically restrained, following visual norms of naturalistic cinema, eschewing the use of non-diegetic music except for notable season-ending montages, and adhering to typical editing conventions of that we read as “realistic” storytelling. Breaking Bad embraces a wide visual palette, ranging from stylized landscape shots evoking Sergio Leone westerns to exaggerated camera tricks and gimmicks situating our vantage point within a chemical vat or on the end of a shovel, as well as editing devices like time-lapse and sped-up montages. The show’s sound design is widely varying with unusual choices of licensed pop songs, ambient electronic score, and even an original composition of a Mexican narcocorrido ballad about the main character. While Breaking Bad embraces atemporal storytelling jumps and subjective sequences much like other examples of complex television that I have discussed elsewhere, The Wire is fully linear and conventional in presenting chronology and objective narrative perspective throughout.^[xi] In short, The Wire embraces a “zero degree style” that strives to render its televisual storytelling techniques invisible, whereas Breaking Bad foregrounds a “maximum degree style” through kinetic visuals, bold sounds, and unpredictable storytelling form—it is hard to imagine two programs within the general norms of crime drama that take such different approaches to narrative, visual and sonic style.

The two series also approach their thematic focuses and storytelling scope in similarly contrasting manners. The Wire is nominally about the drug war, especially in its first season, but eventually reveals itself to be more interested in using crime as a window into the larger urban condition of 21^st century America. As seasons progress, the show’s scope expands to include the shipping docks, City Hall, public schools, and the newsroom, tracing the interplay between these new dramatic sites and the established police precincts and drug corners. The show starts with an already large scope—the pilot episode introduces more than two dozen characters who will serve recurring roles, with more to come in subsequent episodes to reach a mass of sixty significant characters in the first season alone; this narrative scope gradually broadens over the course of its run to create a sense that viewers have experienced a full range of people and places comprising the show’s fictionalized Baltimore. Moreover, the show not only creates a vast world, but presents a guided tour of the city’s political and economic machinery by portraying how each person, place, and institution fits into a broader system of function and dysfunction. No other television series comes close to achieving such a sense of vast breadth as The Wire’s storyworld, and arguably few examples from other narrative media do either.

The Wire’s emphasis on the vastness of Baltimore’s interlocking institutions and inhabitants necessitates that it sacrifice character depth to achieve such breadth. Characters on The Wire are certainly multi-dimensional and quite nuanced human beings, but they are defined primarily by their relationships to larger institutions, whether the police force, the school system, or the drug enterprise—the characters that succeed are usually those that play the rules of their particular games best, while individualistic rebels fail to escape, change themselves, or transform unjust systems. There is little sense of their interior lives, psychological depths, or nuanced relationships with each other, as The Wire creates a world where people are defined more by what they do than what they think or feel, except as those thoughts and emotions become manifest in their actions. Depth accrues from the accumulation of numerous characters and their institutional affiliations, as Baltimore itself is constructed as a living entity with its own complex interiority.^[xii]

Despite its shared focus on drug criminals, Breaking Bad has quite different concerns, shifting away from a vast sociological breadth toward an inward-looking psychological depth. The show has little interest in constructing a working model of Albuquerque, forgoing urban verisimilitude in exchange for a tighter focus on a central character and his immediate associates. It has a comparatively small cast for a serialized program, with an initial core ensemble of six main characters with little expansion over its first four seasons. Every character is defined primarily through his or her relationship to Walter White, and the narrative is focused on how his choices and actions impact each of their relationships. Instead of subsequent seasons spinning outward from the core characters and setting, the show layers itself inward, creating deeper layers of Walt’s psychological makeup. If The Wire presents a world where characters and institutions are immutably locked into a larger system, Breaking Bad is a profile of psychological change as the core character becomes darker and more amoral, pulling everyone around him down on his descent, the journey that creator Gilligan has frequently called the “transformation from Mr. Chips to Scarface.” Even after four seasons, the show’s spatial universe seems fairly small and non-distinct, but the psychological depth and web of interpersonal history is arguably as complex as the political machinery of The Wire’s Baltimore.

These different approaches to style and storytelling highlight distinct modes of realism pursued by each series. The Wire embraces a fairly conventional mode of social realism, where we are asked to judge the storyworld, its characters, and their actions on the metric of plausibility, where success is measured by how much the fiction mirrors the world as we know it. The degree to which the show succeeds on this measure can be seen by how many sociologists, geographers, and other scholars of urban America have used the show as a teaching tool and research reference point to illustrate social conditions, often denying its fictional frame.^[xiii] The show’s realist goals may be conventional, but its techniques for achieving its social realist effects are innovative in their scope and vastness, resulting in a vision of the world with great explanatory and rhetorical power. It is telling that for many fans and critics, The Wire’s final season fell short of its earlier heights primarily because it forsook its full commitment to such realist storytelling in exchange for a more reflexive and satirical tone.

Breaking Bad strives more for psychological rather than social realism. In embracing a goal of character transformation, the show aims for a nearly unprecedented effect in television: chronicling how a character’s core identity and beliefs can drastically change over time in a convincing manner. The Walter White who commits the unfathomable act of poisoning an innocent child at the end of season four is simply a different person than the broken-down school teacher who begins to “break bad” in the show’s pilot, but his gradual transformation has played out onscreen in such a way that his behaviors never feel untrue to who he is at any given point in the story. The program’s flashy visual style signals that the world seen onscreen is less naturalistic than the thoughts and emotions playing out inside characters’ heads, so even something as unreal as the plane crash triggered by Walt’s selfish actions in the second season is grounded as psychologically plausible and consistent with the show’s thematic and tonal approach. Breaking Bad is ultimately less invested in creating a realistic representation of its storyworld than in portraying people who feel true, and through this sense of honest representation the show engages with real questions of morality, identity, and responsibility.

So The Wire and Breaking Bad are both similar and different—a banal observation probably true for any pair of series. But their storytelling differences point to two distinct modes of narrative complexity, and the fact that two such different shows can be so successful with the same critics (including myself) is instructive for how processes of evaluation might work. The two shows approach serialization with distinctly different vectors. The Wire embraces what we might call centrifugal complexity, where the ongoing narrative pushes outward, spreading characters across a expanding storyworld. On a centrifugal program, there is no clear narrative center, as the central action is about what happens between characters and institutions as they spread outward. It is not just that the show expands in quantity of characters and settings, but that its richness is found in the complex web of interconnectivity forged across the social system. For instance, the fourth season’s resolution is predicated on how the fate of kids like Randy and Namond are not determined by their own mettle or talents, but by the conjuncture of almost random actions undertaken by agents of the interconnected institutions of the school system, the police, drug gangs, and city government. Based on conventional narrative logics, Randy’s entrepreneurial spirit and warmth would allow him to rise above his circumstances, while Namond’s bitterness and sense of privilege should doom him to replicating his father’s role on the corners—but on The Wire, character traits and choices are always circumscribed and actions are often determined by complex networks of institutions portrayed through the show’s vast serial expanses. Systemic logic trumps character actions or motivations, as when Snoop (quoting Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven) answers the question of what a potential victim did to deserve his fate—she justifies an unjustifiable murder by saying, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

But on Breaking Bad, deserve’s got everything to do with it. If The Wire is all about broad systemic vastness, Breaking Bad exemplifies a model of dense television, embracing centripetal complexity where the narrative movement pulls the actions and characters inward toward a more cohesive center to establish a thickness of backstory and character depth that drives the action. The effect is to create a storyworld with unmatched depth of characterization, layers of backstory, and psychological complexity building upon viewer experiences and memories over its numerous seasons. All expansions to the storyworld connect back to Walter White or his associate Jesse Pinkman, and typically become part of their ongoing interrelated transformations, with nearly every plot event triggered by Walt’s choices and behaviors, rather than social systems or conditions. Additionally, the show frequently revisits moments from the narrative past to fill-in gaps in character histories or relationships, whether it’s flashbacks to Walt’s hyper-confident persona before becoming a teacher or returning to the narrative consequences of Combo’s murder, an event that at the time felt marginal but reemerged to directly trigger a crucial narrative turn at the end of the third season. On Breaking Bad, there is always the sense that a past event that seems marginal might get sucked back into the narrative center and impact Walt’s fate in unpredictable but justifiable ways; this centripetal force creates a complex storyworld that seems to always hold its main characters accountable for past misdeeds and refuses to let them (or us) escape these transgressions at the level of story consequences or internal psychology.

Through the different modes of complexity embraced and achieved by The Wire and Breaking Bad, I hope we can see the usefulness of evaluative criticism. Even under the same umbrella of complexity, we can see that their approaches are so different that each would fall short of each other’s aesthetic criteria: The Wire provides little psychological depth to its characters, Breaking Bad fails to paint a picture of how people are impacted by interlocking institutions. But their specific modes of complexity function as criteria for their own evaluation, as each demonstrates a relentless commitment to their own storytelling norms and approaches. And it is through these serialized storytelling strategies that each show speaks to its viewers, and we can see their ongoing attachment to each series through their engagement with such aesthetic facets. Thus I would argue that such models of complexity are not simply embedded in the texts to be rooted out by critics, but emerge through viewers’ contextualized engagements with a series—we are the ones who flesh out the models of centripetal and centrifugal complexity by filling in the gaps, making the connections, and investing our emotional energies into these storyworlds.

My goal here is not to prove that these are great shows (although I believe that they are), but to argue that analyzing the ways they each achieve aesthetic success is important to understand how they each work as texts, how they speak to fans, and what they say about the world. We could probably analyze such dual models of complexity without considering evaluation, but it would be untrue to cast me as a detached objective observer of these programs. I find them both tremendously powerful and compelling works of fictional television, and I am moved to write about them because I find them both exceptional aesthetically, and exceptionally interesting—two facets that are certainly related. By acknowledging my own personal investments, it allows me to go beyond asking “how do these programs work?” to consider “how do they work so well?” I think by bracketing off that facet of our engagement with media, we are not only being dishonest, but also missing the chance to participate in larger conversations with critics, fans, and producers about the very cultural hierarchies that many scholars seem fearful of replicating.

And this brings me back to the fourth facet of evaluation: self-situation. I write this, and watch these shows, as who I am: an American, white, educated, heterosexual, middle-aged professional man, one with an academic investment and expertise in long-form television narrative that is far from universal. I fully acknowledge that my identity is similar to the class habitus that has long policed traditional aesthetic judgments, as well as that of the creators of these two specific programs—in other words, these shows are speaking my language, and I have a vocabulary to respond. But I am not responding with a universalized appeal to transcendent aesthetics outside who I am. I am not asking you to join me in praising the complexity of The Wire and Breaking Bad (although I’m happy to do so on one of those aforementioned barstools), but rather I am inviting you to see the shows how I see them. I have faith that my analysis is compelling enough that you would see something interesting if you do, but I also think it’s partial enough that there is much more in each show to be explored and discussed. What I have done here, and what I think evaluation does, is to present an argument in order to open a conversation. Making an evaluative claim is not designed to construct a canon to exclude other possibilities, but rather to posit a contingent perspective on why something matters, both to me and presumably to other viewers who similarly embrace it. It is neither a statement of fact nor a proof, but an invitation to dialogue and debate—which can commence now.

However… it’s the 10% where we disagree that I’ll focus on here. A few contextualizations are important first. The authors are good friends of mine from graduate school, and we remain in-touch online and always enjoy catching up at conferences. Thus knowing them and our relationship, I take the fact that they directly engage with and argue against some of my work in the book as a sign of respect (and hope they view this response in the same spirit, as I’ve invited them to continue the dialog here). Second, I will try to separate out my issues with the way they discuss my work and my take on their broader arguments. I’m sure an ungenerous reader could look at my response and write it off as sour grapes, but again, I highly recommend most of the book. Finally, this response will be part of a larger argument I’ll be making in a presentation next month at a the conference Cultural Distinctions Remediated at University of Hannover, so I will point toward larger arguments still to come, and welcome feedback to help me craft that talk.

Newman & Levine’s book is primarily a discursive analysis of how, over the last 20 years or so, American television has been culturally legitimated above its traditional “lowbrow” status, and a consideration of the cultural impacts of such discourses of legitimation. They do excellent historical work charting transformations in technology, critical discourses, programming strategies, and notions of authorship, mapping a compelling terrain of how we think about television today. I think their portrait of such discourses is quite strong, comprising the bulk of the book that I fully endorse, and they make a strong argument that we need to make such discursive formations visible in order to be aware of and counter underlying assumptions and implications that often remain hidden. My main quibble lies in what we’re supposed to do with this discursive history.

The book links the discourses of legitimation to structures of gender and class, highlighting how television has traditionally been feminized and stigmatized as lowbrow, arguing that recent legitimation practices work to masculinize and “class up” television. While I think this is correct, I do not see it as a self-evident problem to be avoided at all costs like Newman & Levine seem to, as suggested by the book’s final words: “We love television. But legitimizing that love at such a cost? Paying for the legitimation of the medium through a perpetuation of hierarchies of taste and cultural value and inequalities of class and gender? No” (171). Implied in this conclusion and their analysis throughout is a choice: we (as scholars, critics and viewers) can either embrace legitimation and its concomitant reinforcement of cultural hierarchies, or we can reject it, with the latter framed as the more politically progressive choice.

But that’s a false dichotomy. Rejecting legitimation discourse does not seem to me like a progressive move, as it simply reinforces other cultural hierarchies that still persist—their knock on legitimation seems to be in large part that it fails to counter, and subtly reinforces, pre-existing hierarchies of gender and class. But to me, rejecting legitimation doesn’t seem to challenge those assumptions as much as just leaving them in place; I’m in no way convinced that pre-legitimation was “better” than post-legitimation, so it ends up being a choice between two problems. The book spends its energy convincingly pointing out many of the embedded cultural assumptions present in legitimation discourse, but does not truly offer another option for how to engage with these issues except to point out their constructedness. Instead, we’re left with a can’t win scenario of either embracing a discourse they show to be built on regressive assumptions, or rely on previous cultural norms also built on regressive assumptions.

I think this gap is due a mistaken framing about how discursive formations work: they are not balloons that pop when they are shown to be social constructions, but rather are the only way we make sense of the world. Throughout the book, Newman & Levine examine sites of legitimation discourse and conclude their analyses by highlighting how gender and class hierarchies are embedded in these cultural formations, using this insight as a pin to pop the discursive balloon. But just because a discourse is not “truth” does not mean that it is not “true,” or at least has useful explanatory power—yes, the celebration of single-camera sitcoms marginalizes the tradition of multi-camera comedy via an implicit class distinction, but we can’t simply invalidate such shows or critical appreciations of them because of such discursive framing. For me, there is no place outside of discourse, so analyzing and acknowledging the constructedness of a discourse does not mean we must reject it. Instead, we need to come up with reflexive critical methods that acknowledge such constructions and avoid totalizing claims, while still making arguments within the discursive frames we have to work with.

What I wanted from the book that I did not get was a third way to discuss television’s cultural legitimation, moving beyond either accepting legitimation discourses of quality television and progress, or rejecting them as illegitimate or ungrounded. (In my talk at Hannover, I hope to offer such a third approach, specifically concerning cultural evaluation.) In the book’s final pages, they gesture toward some scholarship that they think does this, but do not detail how such approaches truly differ from the examples they hold up as problematic—I know most of the work they reference, and don’t really see how such works “examine convergence-era television without echoing broader discourses of legitimation” while other work they critique falls prey to such pitfalls (170). I would have appreciated a conclusion that models the type of analysis they are calling for, rather than ending by rejecting a body of scholarship that they see as lacking; arguably the bulk of the book offers such a model, but since it is framed as a meta-analysis it seems to be an unlikely prototype for future work.

This leads to how my own work is addressed in the book, mostly through the book’s final chapter on “Television Scholarship And/As Legitimation.” Again, I take it as a sign of respect that they take time to engage with my ideas and writing (and note that many of their references to my work are supportive and laudatory), and am happy to continue the conversation. However, I was disappointed in some of the choices they made in what they quoted and how they framed some of my points – I don’t want to be defensive in nit-picking their use of my work, but I want to contextualize and counter some of their characterizations, as well as redirecting the discussion toward other works that they do not engage with directly.

I was happy that Newman & Levine discussed my writing about the relationships between primetime and daytime serials, as Levine is an expert on soap operas (and one of my valued informers I’ve consulted with when writing about the genre). While they critiqued the way I distinguish between primetime and daytime serials, suggesting that I am devaluing soaps by “den[ying] an abiding influence or affinity between them” (166), they themselves outline a number of ways that primetime serials differ from soap opera form and content, such as privileging endings or disavowing relationship melodrama. Elsewhere, I have written at length about the gaps between these two formats, based on hopefully analytic claims about formal strategies and generic norms, but rather than arguing with these claims of influence or similarity, Newman & Levine conflate my analytic argument with an evaluative one. Likewise, in a footnote they dismiss my claim that I have not seen any evidence suggesting that primetime producers are directly influenced by soap operas, but they do not offer any evidence to the contrary documenting such influence. I would love to discuss the claims we both make about issues of influence and formal distinctions between daytime and primetime, but was disappointed with the limited way they treated this topic in their final chapter – I’m not insisting that I’m correct in my analysis, but I’d like to engage the questions we both raise in more depth.

In discussing my work on narrative complexity, they write: “[Mittell] states that he is not making an ‘explicitly evaluative’ claim about the worth of narrative complexity over ‘conventional programming.’ Still, one suspects that Mittell wants to assert that ‘the pleasures potentially offered by complex narratives are richer and more multifaceted than conventional programming’ but refrains from doing so overtly in this context” (163). Here’s the full quote they draw from, in my essay on narrative complexity:

Arguably, the pleasures potentially offered by complex narratives are richer and more multifaceted than conventional programming, but value judgments should be tied to individual programs rather than claiming the superiority of an entire narrational mode or genre. Thus while we should not shy away from evaluative dimensions in narrative transformations, the goal of my analysis is not to argue that contemporary television is somehow better than it was in the 1970s but rather to explore how and why narrative strategies have changed and to consider the broader cultural implications of this shift. (30)

I see a crucial distinction here – I am suggesting that we avoid evaluations at the level of genre or mode, yet they suggest that I am arguing for such evaluations under the dubious implicative phrasing of “one suspects.”

In the next paragraph, they quote two more sources to indicate how I’m complicit with legitimation discourses: a parenthetical aside in a piece I wrote for Flow where I admit to teaching television “that I think is great” in part to cultivate and broaden students’ tastes, and a promotional video I did for Middlebury College’s Meet the Faculty series, in which I do use “Golden Age” rhetoric explicitly. I think the latter quote is a bit unfair, as such videos are clearly different from the formal scholarship I have published on the topic, or even the more casual realm of blog posts—in such a short soundbite-y video, I couldn’t really go into the way I view cultural evaluation as discursively constructed and contingent, and the video producer explicitly asked me to respond to the Golden Age question (and I have never published anything where I call contemporary television a “Golden Age”). Thus even though they used words I spoke or wrote, I feel like my work was framed highly selectively to cast me in a role that feels more simplistic than deserved.

Regardless of what quotations they use to paint me as an unselfconscious legitimator, my real disappointment was what they didn’t engage with from my work. Beyond the issues of soap opera form I referenced above, I had hoped they would tackle some of my arguments in defense of evaluative scholarship, which (I assume) would feed into their analysis of legitimation discourses. For instance, in “Lost in a Great Story” (an article in their bibliography, but not specifically discussed in the book), I wrote:

I don’t yearn for a day in which television studies publishes a definitive canonical list delineating the best of television once and for all, but I relish the opportunity to openly debate the value of programs without suggesting that all evaluations are equally justifiable as idiosyncratic personal taste or simple ideological manifestations. Just because aesthetics can be done in a way that disenfranchises some positions does not require the evacuation of evaluative claims altogether in the name of an egalitarian (and I believe ultimately dishonest) poetics of inclusion…. In offering my own evaluative criticism here, I am not trying to convince anyone that Lost is the essence of television, or the pinnacle of the medium’s artistic possibilities. But it is a great show, and I wish to explore why. I hope to model a mode of evaluative criticism that avoids the universalistic and canonistic tendencies that other fields have been fighting over for decades. I imagine an explicit awareness of the practices of evaluation in all spheres of television creation and consumption, including a discussion and defense of our own taste practices. Such a mode of evaluation would not seek to make taste judgments the final words of a debate, but openings of a discussion. What makes shows like Buffy and Lost so appealing to scholars? How do criteria of cultural politics and poetics intersect or conflict? How might we account for our own shifts in taste as tied to changing cultural contexts, textual exposures, formal education, and transformed aesthetics? What might a non-foundational aesthetics of television look like, and how might we use such contingent evaluations in our teaching and scholarship? Just because we want to avoid the flaws of traditional aesthetic criticism doesn’t mean we cannot imagine a more sophisticated, historically-aware—and yes, better—way to place evaluation on the agenda of television studies and proudly acknowledge and examine our own tastes. (129-131)

I’m pretty sure Newman & Levine would disagree with these ideas, but I hope it would be a better argument than quoting from a promotional video to reductively characterize my position—perhaps we can have such a discussion here.

So in the end, I found the book disappointing, not paying off the excellent work of the first seven chapters by resorting to some underwhelming & poorly (or at least only partially) substantiated claims about my and other scholar’s positions. More importantly, their conclusion doesn’t show us how to move forward with these topics, except to always be aware of potential implications of legitimating discourses and reject their totalizing tendencies (which I would claim I and others are already doing). It’s one of my pet peeves that scholars should offer more positive models rather than negative critiques of each others’ work, and thus I felt like the final chapter undermined some of the positive work of most of the book. As mentioned before, I hope to continue this conversation, both in my future work charting out a more productive approach to evaluative scholarship, and in the comment thread here where hopefully the book’s authors and readers can discuss these issues in depth.

My talk, “Serial Orientations: Mapping the Narrative Worlds of Contemporary Complex Television,” is from my book-in-progress, part of a chapter focused on paratexts used to help facilitate viewer understanding of serial television. Below is the text of my talk, which included a lot of visuals. Given that WordPress’s image embedding is high-maintenance, I’ve uploaded the slides to SlideShare, and if you’d like to follow along, you can read through the talk with the visuals in another window.

As always, feedback is welcome!

Serial Orientations: Mapping the Narrative Worlds of Contemporary Complex Television

Throughout its history, we might consider “accessibility” to be the defining feature of commercial American television. Per the medium’s commercial goals, any program’s success would be judged by its ability to attract, retain, and grow its viewership, which could then be converted into the currency of Nielsen ratings and sold to advertisers. The programming strategies that emerged to support this system of popular appeal have been termed “least objectionable content” or more dismissively, “lowest common denominator.” In short, a television producer’s first job is to avoid alienating potential viewers. In terms of cultural meanings, this edict manifests itself with programming that seeks to offer a brand of political consensus rather than divisive partisanship, programs that celebrate and reassure the status quo over challenging it. At the level of textual form, television is designed to look and sound familiar within well-established norms, assuring that viewers will know how to make sense of what they see and hear. And at the base level of narrative comprehension, television must be easy enough to follow in order to make sense to casual viewers.

Of course, the history of the medium is peppered with exceptional programs that violate these comfortable consensus strategies, and many of the medium’s most successful programs challenge television’s political and formal norms: think of I Love Lucy, Dragnet, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Hill Street Blues, Roseanne, The Simpsons, among many others. Yet for all of the ways that such shows challenged viewers politically and strived for formal innovations, they all retained the baseline goal of easy viewer comprehension. I would argue that innovative programming seeking to challenge the ease with which a casual viewer might make sense of a program is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back to the 1990s with innovators like Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files, and typifying an increasingly common model of television storytelling that I have termed “narrative complexity.” Narratively complex programs invite temporary disorientation and confusion, allowing viewers to build up their comprehension skills through long-term viewing and active engagement.

In this presentation, I will not focus on defining narrative complexity or highlighting its storytelling strategies, but instead want to consider how viewers make sense of complex serial forms through practices of orientation and mapping, primarily through the creation of orienting paratexts. Arguably, most orientation practices involve the creation of paratexts, whether in the tangible form of maps and lists, or more ephemeral processes of conversation, as orienting ourselves in relationship to the narrative world places us outside the core text itself. In thinking about the range of orientation practices that television viewers embrace today, we encounter a mass of strategies and paratextual modes that can be rather… disorienting. So today I would like to embrace categorization, one of the chief tactics of orientation, to chart out how television viewers grapple with narrative complexity in a wide range of ways. I make no claims for comprehensiveness or even internal consistency with my categories, as many practices overlap in ways that muddy the best efforts of the taxonomist. But hopefully a tentative list of orientation practices will help us understand the wide range and breadth of what viewers do on a daily basis to consume contemporary serial narratives.

Let’s start with a simple definition of narrative to help orient our orientation: a television serial creates a sustained narrative universe, populated by a consistent set of characters who experience a chain of events over time. Thus a serial narrative presents four basic storytelling facets that might require orientation: time, events, characters, and space. These four landmarks provide a top level set of categories for how viewers make sense of television narratives—to comprehend an ongoing story, we need to be able to follow each of these elements. And thus these categories will provide the roadmap for my presentation.

The first category of time is arguably the most central aspect of serial narrative, as seriality is defined by manipulating time as a storytelling variable—we consume the story in installments defined by the creators and experience mandatory gaps between episodes and seasons to process the narrative. Elsewhere, I have categorized the timeframes of television storytelling into the three layers of story time, plot time, and screen time; each of these potentially requires orientation practices (Mittell, 2010). The last of these seems most obvious, but it points to a central issue in viewer orientation: we need to know when an episode is on, and in what order we are supposed to watch them. Traditionally in American television, the order in which episodes air was a minor concern for primetime programs, as networks might choose to air episodes in unusual times or sequence depending on their competition or other mitigating factors. Syndicated reruns rarely aired a series in its original sequence, meaning that viewers were likely to encounter a program in haphazard order, and thus storytellers adapted to the lack of guaranteed sequence by avoiding story arcs that surpass the length of a given episode, a practice that still lives on in most episodic police procedurals and many sitcoms.

With the profusion of cable channels and other viewing technologies in the 1990s and beyond, the industry developed ways to orient viewers’ sense of screen time, notably through the onscreen Electronic Program Guide. Viewers adapted their own ways of navigating screen time by cataloguing episodes and airdates on websites like epguides.com or show-specific sites, and employed technologies like the Digital Video Recorder to structure their viewing. And the rise of boxed sets or downloadable purchases provide another technology to orient viewers to screen time, as the structure of seasons and episode order are foregrounded. Together, we see the use of schedule as orientation to help viewers master a base chronology of screen time that while seemingly obvious, is essential to being able to comprehend an ongoing complex serial.

While screen time follows a fairly rigid set of boundaries and structures, plot time is much more variable and free-flowing, especially in shows with complex chronology. Understanding how nested flashbacks, replays, flash forwards, and other atemporal shifts play out on shows like How I Met Your Mother or FlashForward require dedicated attention to details and chronicling of markers of temporal continuity, often through elaborate plot summaries on official network or fan websites. Certainly a contender for television’s most complex chronology would be Lost, whose varying timeframes led to numerous graphic and textual representations proliferating both on and offline, including both fan-created images and officially sanctioned paratexts on ABC’s website or in DVD releases. Shows do not need to embrace time travel to warrant such use of chronology as orientation, as fans of a series like Battlestar Galactica chart its narrative through diagrams that help guide viewers to understand both the sequence of events and temporal relationship between various onscreen representations.

Plot time refers to the sequence and selection of the narrative material presented to the audience, while story time comprises the actual events taking place in the narrative universe. For shows with tight chronology, reconciling between story and screen time can be a challenge, requiring strategies to orient the show’s timeframe. For instance, Breaking Bad lacks the sci-fi temporal play of Lost, but it is important to keep in mind that the events of the first four seasons only take up one year of story time in order to understand the consequences and stakes of dramatic events that remain fresh in characters’ minds. For the historical realism of Mad Men’s 1960s to resonate, fans use timelines to parallel the fictional events with historical moments that are mentioned in the show or left unsaid in the subtext. Such use of calendaring as orientation helps us follow an unfolding narrative in a way that foregrounds a realist sense of a persistent storyworld with consequences and history, a fairly new development in television narrative.

Even when the storyworld is not realistic in the least, mapping chronology and calendars can be a crucial orientation strategy. Probably the most complicated timeline on television today is the “timey-wimey” playfulness of Doctor Who, especially in the title character’s ongoing relationship to fellow time-traveller River Song. Fans have created numerous visual representations of the bidirectional relationship experienced by River and The Doctor, attempting to match-up their experiences and chart the key moments in their story, a strategy that the characters themselves perform on the show by synching up their journals and memories whenever they meet. Of course this is not the exclusive domain of fans, as the BBC produced their own orientation material in the form of an online video chronicling River Song’s story narrated from her own perspective and timeframe. This video highlights how the process of orientation is an element of both official and unofficial production, and can be presented in a range of media, not just graphic timelines or textual lists.

One of the most interesting ways that fans create orientation tools is through the use of video remixes, recasting the temporality of the original series in innovative ways. Two Lost projects speak to the varied approaches fans take to remixing chronology. In the online video Lost: The Synchronizing, a fan took footage depicting moments of the plane crash from across three seasons and multiple perspectives, editing them together via split screen to synch the chronology and highlight how these moments converge into the show’s most important narrative event. At a larger scale, another fan created ChronologicallyLost.com to distribute his re-edited version of the series in chronological order in 45 minute episodic installments, starting with the origin of Jacob and The Man in Black from “Across the Sea,” and moving forward through the island’s time jumps, character flashbacks, plane crash, escape and return, and finally ending with the final season’s flash sideways as an epilogue. While I doubt that such extensive remix projects work to orient confused viewers like a timeline or map, they do serve as analytic forms of orientation, providing insights via rethinking the show’s narrative timeframe.

So like any complex taxonomy, we need more than one axis to categorize practices of viewer orientation—it’s not just “what” is being oriented (time vs. space), but also “how” the orientation proceeds. One type of orientation practice aims for recapitulation, summarizing narrative material in a straightforward manner like the calendar or chronological list of events. Another practice embraces a mode of analysis, exploring narrative material via a representational mode, typically a visual map or video, that offers an analytic dimension to the representation that goes beyond recapitulation. While analytic orientations aim to better understand what is happening within the text, orientations of expansion look outward extratextually to connect the series with other realms beyond the core program, whether it is another fictional series or aspects of the real world. These three modes, which certainly can blur and blend together, are forms of practice that can be applied to the various objects of narrative comprehension, creating a matrix of orientation practices.

These three modes of orientation practice can be applied to other narrative dimensions beyond time as well. Narrative events are closely linked to time, as they are typically thought about in terms of “what happens when,” and attempting to orient oneself to story events often involves chronology and temporal causation. Plot recapitulations are commonplace orientation tools, whether the now ubiquitous “previously on” segments preceding most episodes, or write-ups on official network websites or fansites aiming to provide a clear summation of an episode’s narrative events. Such textual recaps are abstractions as well, as the conversion of televisual material into prose is just as much of a transformation as visual or video remixes. However, some event analyses detach narrative events from their chronology to create a different perspective on the story, such as lists of character deaths found on various series wikis to more visual depictions, like an infographic poster documenting Dexter’s dozens of murders, charting weapons, motives, and interrelations between victims. Such analytic reinterpretations take a series of narrative events and explore them for greater understanding of causality, significance, or even basic comprehension, and can be pursued within the realm of remix videos. For instance, Breaking Bad’s next-to-last episode of season four, “End Times,” left some ambiguities as to who was responsible for poisoning a child; a fan took to YouTube to offer an interpretation of the narrative events to (correctly) argue that Walter White was responsible, piecing together scenes from the episode providing clues and evidence that proved what would only be revealed in the next episode. Such analytic abstractions and reinterpretations function as sites of forensic fandom, enabling viewers to make greater sense or propose new explanations of the narrative events beyond chronology and recapitulation.

Plot expansions aim to contextualize the events in a series into a larger intertextual web, most typically by connecting what happens in a fictional series to the real world. For instance, Treme depicts life in post-Katrina New Orleans, with many fictionalized versions of real people and events; bloggers and journalists, most notably Dave Walker from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, catalog and analyze the show’s cultural references, working to orient viewers to the factual basis of the fictional events. Sometime such real world connections are less analytical and more playful, like an image of Breaking Bad’s Walter White connecting him to the recent Occupy protest movement. More rare are examples of trying to connect the narrative events from one series to another fictional world—probably no orientation practice is as disorienting as the Tommy Westphall Universe theory. In the legendary conclusion to 1980s series St. Elsewhere, it was revealed that the entirety of the medical drama existed in the imagination of Tommy, an autistic child staring into a snowglobe. Because the series had a number of crossover episodes and intertextual references with other programs like Cheers, Homicide: Life on the Street, and The Bob Newhart Show, fans have posited that all of these other fictions are figments of Tommy’s imagination as well. Fans catalog these crossover events and create elaborate maps of an intertextual multiverse—as of now, the grid lists 282 programs ranging from I Love Lucy to The Wire. While such orientation practices are certainly not designed to help viewers truly make sense of fictional worlds, as the theory is clearly meant to be taken as playfully ludicrous, I would argue that fans do take it seriously—they get immersed in the intertextual web and passionately argue about interpretations concerning the validity of various connections. They know it’s not “real,” even within the fictional worlds of television, but many seriously embrace the practice of creating expansive paratexts as if it were “real,” playfully undertaking hypothetical analysis and conjecture similar to recent forms like alternate reality games.

The third type of narrative orientation seeks to understand a program’s cast of characters. For vast, sprawling series like The Wire, it is hard work keeping track of who’s who amongst the dozens of characters, many only known by nicknames or left unseen for long stretches of episodes. Character guides offer convenient overviews of dramatis personae in a manner common to theater goers, whether found on official websites or even tie-in books, or fan-created wikis or guides; the baseline goal of such guides is to orient us to the cast, placing faces with names and dramatic functions. Character analyses typically visualize narrative aspects via alternate means as a way of mapping relationships, developments, and personalities. For instance, Lost DVDs contained an interactive character guide to chart out the often coincidental connections between characters, and fans made similar maps to highlight inter-character links. Another fan paratext offers a visual rendering of the characters of Battlestar Galactica, charting their interactions and connections over the series, along with a dwindling baseline measuring “My Respect,” as a form of fan critique over the show’s perceived weak conclusion. Such analytic commentary can be mixed with a character guide, as in an interactive online Lost guide that features caricatures of each character, scalable by season, with pop-up boxes offering snarky summaries of the character’s actions and death—for instance, Jin’s recap reads “Total jerk to his wife when they got to the island, but later came around to become an all right dude…. Dead: Opted to stay with his trapped wife on a downed sub instead of raising their child. Very romantic.”

While certainly many fan paratexts aim for character reinterpretation, such as fan fiction and remix vids, I would not call most of those “orientation practices” per se, as they are less focused on making sense of the existing narrative world. A common mode of such fan creativity is intertextual expansion, bringing characters from multiple storyworlds together into a shared universe, a genre called “crossover fic.” It is fairly rare to see such character expansion clearly functioning as an orientation practice, although one example is a fun case of intertextuality: a number of fans have adopted the alignment system from the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which charts a character’s morality on dual axes of good to evil and lawful to chaotic, and mapped them onto the cast of various television series. Examples range from the dysfunctional Bluth family on Arrested Development to the array of 1960s businessmen from Mad Men, but probably no show is more apt for such intertextual orientation than The Wire, given its thematic emphasis on morality and codes of conduct. Mapping out the characters on a game-based alignment chart invites discussion in the blog’s comment thread over the meaning of lawfulness and chaos in the context of The Wire, and whether characters like Avon and Omar can be seen as anything but evil due to their murderous ways. Such intertextual expansion is an invitation to rethink our impressions of the original series, orienting ourselves to a new way of categorizing and grouping the characters.

The final aspect of narrative that requires orientation is the most common to the practice of mapping: a spatial storyworld. While practices of mapping are well-suited to spatial orientation, it would seem that space is the dimension of television narrative that needs the least outside help for viewer comprehension. I would argue that temporality, plotting, and characterizations have all become more complex in contemporary television, but spatial storytelling is still fairly conventional and straightforward. Most programs follow well-established filmic conventions for orienting viewers spatially in any scene, with little sense of purposeful ambiguity and playfulness. If anything, space is the storytelling dimension that television is most willing to cheat on to maximize complexity in other realms; for instance, 24’s dedication to maintaining strict chronology and pseudo-realtime narration frequently led them to create spatial implausibilities, traversing Los Angeles and Washington DC traffic and geography at unrealistic speeds. While many fans will try to make sense of muddled chronology or plot continuity, such geographical incoherence in navigating a story space is typically only recognized by natives of a given city searching for spatial realism, suggesting that in the process of consuming serialized television, temporal consistency trumps spatial coherence.

Nevertheless, both viewers and the industry do invest energy in creating orienting paratexts for television series. For shows that feature a fantasy space, orientation maps are helpful paratexts to ground viewers in the show’s mythology, a common practice found in previous media like Tolkien’s novels of Middle Earth that included maps. Thus the science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica published a poster-size map of its cosmos, outlining the Twelve Colonies of Kobol with detailed mythological information and graphic depiction not covered by the show; the poster was even signed by series writer Jane Espenson as a marker of canonical authenticity. For fantasy series that do not produce their maps, fans typically fill the gaps, as typified by the vast array of Star Trek cartography that spans the franchise’s multiple series, and frequently facilitates fans moving from creating unofficial orientation paratexts into joining official production teams. Such fan mapping is part of a larger facet of affirmative fan productivity that Bob Rehak has labeled “blueprint culture,” as fans work to document the canonical facts established by a fantastic fictional franchise.

For programs based here on Earth, no tool has been more important to spatial orientation practices than Google Maps, as both fans and production teams create custom maps for dozens of series to show both shooting locations and addresses for fictional story sites. An interesting example is Seinfeld, as even though it was filmed primarily in Los Angeles, its New York City locale is a powerful part of the show’s narrative experience. Thus both Sony, the show’s production studio, and fans have created their own Seinfeld-themed Google Maps—while the map on Sony’s site features glossier visuals with embedded videos, not surprisingly the fan version is more comprehensive, including more than twice as many locations. Such maps then can translate into embodied practice, as fans explore the locales of their favorite series as part of the growing realm of media-themed tourism, with popular tours of places like The Sopranos’s New Jersey or the Mad Men “Time Machine” Tour of New York. The Seinfeld case is particularly interesting in terms of the blur between fact and fiction, as Kenny Kramer, Larry David’s old neighbor who was the real inspiration for the Cosmo Kramer character, entrepreneurially created Kramer’s Reality Tour that brings fans around New York to see the real places that inspired Seinfeld’s fictional version of the city, as filmed in Los Angeles. Unlike other media tourism like the New Zealand tours of “Middle Earth” via the Lord of the Rings filming locations, when television tourism focuses on an ongoing serial, it adds another experiential dimension, as fans may explore a space where they anticipate future narrative developments or even hope to see filming on-location. In these cases, maps and tours function less to orient fans to the fictional worlds than to extend those fictions into their real lives and allow them to momentarily inhabit their favorite storyworlds.

An interesting case study of the use of mapping within an ongoing series is Lost, which created a fantasy setting of a fictitious island whose geography is central to the narrative, and also is grounded within the interesting real-world island of its Hawaii shooting locale. Given the show’s huge participatory fanbase, it is not surprising that fans have created a detailed Google Map of Hawaii, with shooting locations catalogued by season, character, and fictional locale – and it’s equally unsurprising that Hawaian travel companies offer Lost tours as well. Google Maps also hosts a collaborative map of every real world locale referenced on Lost and its copious transmedia extensions, highlighting the show’s global reach despite nearly everything being shot in Hawaii. Google Maps is less helpful in orienting us to the fantasy geography of the show’s central location, although a number of fans have used it to chart potential sites for the mysterious island, including the use of the show’s mythological numbers of 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 as geographic coordinates. But Lost’s forensic fandom is most active in its attempts to map the internal geography of the show’s fantastic island, requiring platforms beyond Google Maps.

Unlike Battlestar Galactica, the producers of Lost did not give us a clear rendering of the show’s fictional geography, even though maps are a central obsession of various characters and do appear onscreen quite frequently. Such brief appearances were copiously catalogued by the forensic fans at Lostpedia and numerous other fan sites dedicated to decoding the world of Lost, but no map is as indicative of how such practices straddle the line between orientation and disorientation as the cultural life of what fans have termed the “blast door map.” In the season two episode “Lockdown,” John Locke found himself trapped in an underground bunker with his leg pinned under a blast door. For a few moments, a black light turns on, revealing a hand-painted map on the back of the door that we see onscreen for no more than six seconds. The information contained within the map, as decoded collectively by fans only hours after the episode aired, pointed to deep mythological clues that resonated both in the show and across the transmedia extensions. John Locke himself attempts to reconstruct the map’s geographical revelations, but fell far short of what fans accomplished, aided by freeze-frame screengrabs and collective discussion forums. The map would reappear in transmedia versions four times with slight alterations and additional information, outlasting its role in the series itself. Through their forensic fandom, viewers got a preview of future hatches to be revealed, references to the backstory of the Hanso family and the Black Rock ship, and other minor clues to forthcoming puzzles.

However, I would contend that the blast door map’s least successful function was concerning spatial orientation, as the map provides little sense of scale or relationship between the outlined stations and the places we had seen on the island. Instead, the map functions more like a roster of places, names, and clues scrawled onto a wall, a to-do list for fans anticipating what might be revealed in future episodes. It provides a window into a number of character subjectivities, visualizing the mentalities of the map’s two authors-to-be-named later, Radinsky and Inman, who chronicle their limited mythological knowledge and island explorations under duress, as well as orienting us to John Locke’s obsessive quest to make sense of the briefly seen images. The map also charts narrative time and events, as we try to place the drawing’s creation into the island’s backstory and our own limited knowledge of the history of the DHARMA Initiative. Thus as fans worked to decode the multiple versions of the map, they arguably were less engaged with questions of spatial orientation than attempting to understanding the embedded representations of a fictional storyworld, refracted by still to-be-discovered characters and events.

This is not to say that Lost fans did not seek to create maps to spatially orient the island. A wide range of fan-created island maps emerged throughout the series, including illustrated schematics, topographic charts, and even 3D simulations. Like the schematics of the Enterprise, these are clearly attempts to render an unreal fantastic story space via the tools and assumptions of scientific realism. While we never saw Lost’s island explicitly change its shape or topography, we did see it move through time and space in a manner that suggests that realistic geography was low among the show’s priorities. The show’s commitments were more to the flexible realm of the fantasy genre than any notion of realism, yet fans strived to map a consistent geography onto the island; such conflicts between the rational realms of science fiction and more spiritual and irrational concerns of fantasy were an echo of one of Lost’s main thematic debates between science and faith, and became a key point of contention that I’ve discussed in the context of the show’s finale.

Lost points toward one final dimension of orientation that transcends time and space: the concept of dimensions themselves. As narrative complexity has opened up possibilities of time and space in serialized storytelling, it has occasionally explored notions of parallel worlds or multiple dimensions, issues that have emerged more commonly in complex films like Lola Rennt, Sliding Doors, and Inception. The final season of Lost was one of the highest profile television examples of such storytelling—abandoning the flashback structure typical of the show’s first three seasons, the fourth season’s flash forwards, and the fifth season’s frequently jumping time traveling, the sixth season introduced what producers and fans called “flash sideways.” In almost every episode, action would toggle between the endgame being played out on the island, and a seemingly parallel dimension where Flight 815 never crashed, most of the characters had drastically different lives, and seemingly the island was sunk at the bottom of the ocean. Not surprisingly, forensic fans were both frustrated with and excited by the challenges of orienting themselves to this dimension, especially since the actual explanation for what the world was and how it related to the main storyworld were not revealed until the final minutes of the series finale. Scanning the edit history and discussions on Lostpedia on the entry for the Flash Sideways Timeline documents dozens of fans working for months, debating issues of chronology, character, and even ontology for this aspect of the story—and finally when all was revealed, arguing over whether to delete the whole article due to the temporal ambiguities that remain in the sideways dimension.

The case of Lost’s sixth season points to one of the particular challenges that emerges at the intersection of narrative complexity and seriality: as storyworlds grow more complicated and challenging, they require greater attention to ensure comprehension. But orientation practices for an ongoing serial are charting out a storyworld that is still evolving as they are being created and consumed, forcing viewers to try to map a moving terrain. We watched hours of flash-sideways stories without knowing how to orient ourselves to this fictional world, relative to the storyworld that many fans had invested a great deal of time and energy mapping and documenting. While few examples are as acute as Lost, a danger of all complex serials is that we won’t realize what is vital for maintaining our orientation until all of a show’s mysteries and outcomes are revealed.

So after taking some time to chart our a wide array of orientation practices, do we feel any more oriented? In other words, so what? What do these categories teach us about contemporary media practices? First, I think it is significant that they are happening at all, as it stands as proof not only that viewers are actively engaging in television viewing (which we have known for decades), but that today’s television outright demands that viewers stretch beyond the time and space of their initial viewing to try to make sense of what they have seen. It’s not just that audiences are active, but that texts are explicitly activating, designed to stimulate viewers, strategically confuse them, and force them to orient. While some of these practices fill in textual gaps designed by creators, most go far beyond that, taking orientation practices into the realm of fan creativity and transformational fandom—such practices highlight the ways that making maps and charts is fun, whether it’s charting a fictional geography onto a real space or positing that the entirety of television is happening inside a boy’s imagination.

Finally, these orientation practices help us understand the ways that television has embraced narrative complexity, and the areas where it might still look to develop. Clearly there is much experimentation with complex plots and time schemes, and character relationships have always been a fertile ground for serial complexity. However, there is comparatively little experimentation in terms of innovative spatial storytelling, so if we were to predict where another wave of narrative innovation might come, I’d look to how serial storytelling plays with space. And for us meta-mappers charting the orientation practices used by serial creators and viewers, we must keep attending to this shifting terrain that is still emerging in the ongoing development of television as a complex storytelling medium.

Works Cited (but not linked)

Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 223-25.

The blog in its infancy

Today, Just TV turns five years old, having launched in November 2006, on Middlebury’s installation of MoveableType. It moved here to WordPress a few months later, the digital equivalent of becoming potty trained -managing spam on MoveableType definitely felt like changing diapers! Since launching, I’ve accumulated 268 posts, 1,365 comments (and exponentially more spam), and over 300,000 page views. I can say with certainty that no professional decision has had more of an impact on my career than starting this blog, aside from the major geographical & personal shifts of choosing a graduate school and accepting a job.

I started as a reluctant blogger. A few faculty at Middlebury who were quite forward-thinking technologically encouraged me to try blogging when I arrived in 2002, but I was skeptical – after all, shouldn’t I spend my time writing something that “counts”? But in retrospect, no writing has counted more than what I’ve posted here, both in the measurable counts of readers and commenters, and harder-to-measure sense of professional impact. I thought I’d celebrate this anniversary by reflecting on what this blog has meant for my career, providing a walkthrough of its changing place in my scholarly life, and perhaps helping to persuade any academic readers who have not made a place to self-publish and collect their work to make the leap. This post serves as a kind of sequel to an earlier piece about how my career came to be what it is, in which I purposely overlooked the role of the blog in anticipation of this forthcoming anniversary.

I launched the blog after years of mulling what I would do with such a site in large part because I had started feeling frustrated by the lag in academic publication. My first book Genre & Television came out in 2004, after having started as my dissertation, which I finished in 2000 and started gestating parts of as early as 1994. In academic terms, four years is fairly short from dissertation to book, but over those four years, I grew sufficiently distanced from the topic that the book’s publication felt anti-climactic – my interest in, and thinking about, the topics explored in the book had shifted enough that the major accomplishment of publishing a book felt more like an (important, no doubt) achievement than an act of communication and argumentation. I didn’t want to recant anything I wrote, but I’d moved on intellectually. So I decided then that I didn’t want my future academic projects to get stuck in that time warp between writing and publication, although I hadn’t quite figured out how to avoid that trap yet.

When starting this blog, I had already started my next major project, officially kicked off by publishing “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television” in Fall 2006 (having started writing it two years earlier), and I was eager to start talking about this work before the book eventually came out – as we see today, that would still be years away (hopefully in 2012…)! Especially since I was working on a contemporary topic, I felt that it would be useful to have a space to post some random thoughts (as the blog’s subtitle still says) on the topic, or anything else related to television that might strike me as timely. And the first year of posting was primarily in that “random thoughts” mode of links, brief commentary, and the like.

As I’ve learned through various life events, progress is often triggered by a mishap, and breakthroughs are often unintended consequences rather than grand plans. In Spring 2007, I came down with appendicitis just before the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference, so I had to cancel my trip. My scheduled presentation did happen, as my co-author Jonathan Gray was able to present our work on Lost spoiler fans, but to combat my sense of absence from the conversation, I posted about the presentation and explored some of the points that didn’t make the presentational cut, which resulted in a more-robust-than-usual conversation in the comments based on what was at the time my longest blog post.

What happened by medical accident became more of a blog norm for me: longer posts, including posting full versions or excerpts from conference presentations. This was soon followed by posting a full draft of a book chapter, my piece on The Wire as a videogame, which yielded much more conversation and readership than anything I’d yet written. While I’d not planned for the blog to function as a pre-publication site for my more conventional scholarship, the pleasures and usefulness of posting works-in-progress for feedback and conversation soon became clear. And notably, it seems to be what is most compelling to readers as well: of my 11 most read posts, 7 are full-length essays that eventually would be published conventionally (or not, in two cases!). (And it goes without saying that being able to have such metrics about what bits of writing are most read, discussed & linked to is another huge benefit of the blog versus conventional publishing.)

Having this blog as a venue to workshop and share my scholarship has undoubtedly raised my profile and led to professional opportunities much more than any conventional publications. I doubt I would be on a fellowship in Europe without having used my blog to share my work on television narrative, as most of the official publications of that scholarship has been in a couple of journals with limited readership and assorted book chapters. The odds that anyone would discover most of those venues and piece together a profile of somebody as an “expert” on television narrative is quite slim, while this page assembles all the work into a easy-to-navigate menu of writing that is far more accessible in today’s information environment than even a book.

While I’m not ready to say that publishing a piece on a blog is “worth” more than a conventional journal article or book chapter (at least if you’re invested in being a conventional tenure-track academic – if you’re not, blogging is definitely much more worthwhile!), I do think that I’ve gotten more tangible value from my blog in terms of invitations to give talks and other academic accomplishments than from my standard publications alone. And this “alone” is key – for me, the blog serves as a means to make my scholarly work more timely, more accessible, and more conversational, but it has not stopped me from publishing in books and journals. In talking to academics who do not have blogs, I often get the sense that they view blogging and publishing in an “either/or” relationship, as if anything posted to their blog then becomes tainted for publication. Some publishers may think that, but many do not – after all, NYU Press is letting me self-publish an entire draft of my forthcoming book online. And those presses who are not supportive of open access like this will discover that they will not be able to publish my work, and that of many other scholars who sign onto the open access movement.

For me, the excitement of any new piece of scholarship comes from the writing process and the close-to-immediate reaction I get from posting it here. When there is work that I cannot post immediately (for a range of reasons), I get frustrated. (For instance, I wrote an article about Phineas & Ferb a couple of months ago that I’m itching to release to the world! Soon…) The physical publication of a piece in a book or journal is less exciting, as the ideas are more distanced and I’ve already (hopefully) had a conversation about it here, or at least known that people have discovered it. I’ve published six book chapters in the past three years, and have no idea whatsoever how much they’ve sold or been read in print, but I know precisely which essays resonate more here based on blog traffic and comments. Blogging more closely resembles the immediacy of the classroom or conference presentation, but with the greater precision and control of the written word coupled with the flexibility of when & how the ideas are consumed that comes from reading.

I will say that I do miss the proliferation of “random thoughts” that the blog offered in its earlier years. Much of that energy has been taken over by Twitter, where conversation flows quickly and thoughts are very random, but its more ephemeral form lacks the sense of “saying something” that a blog post offers. These days my writing has been so focused on book projects that briefer asides for the blog have become much less common. But one of the wonderful things I’ve come to realize about having a blog is that it can serve whatever function you need it to at that moment in your writing life – if my time and energy shifts to allow for more frequent brief posting, I can do that without creating a new venue (or even redesigning the look here, which has been static for years).

So even though my posting frequency has lagged, the importance of this site to my intellectual and professional life has not. Happy birthday, Just TV, and many thanks to all the readers – dedicated, sporadic, and even the spambots for often amusing me with nonsensical comments – for spending time here for the last five years. Much more still to come…

My presentation, which is posted below, is a pivot from my current research, my book Complex TV, into a project that I’m looking toward down the road about the role of play and ludic engagement with television. The paper will be included in the conference proceedings, and I have room to add to the essay – any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Playing for Plot in the Lost and Portal Franchises

As an outsider to the game studies field, I am intrigued by how the topic of narrative exists in an almost quantum duality, both as the catalyzing question that galvanized the emerging field a decade ago, and as a marginal topic within ongoing research. This seminal “debate that never took place” seems to have unified game studies by isolating a major topic that is now deemed off the field’s research agenda.¹ While I’m probably overstating the absence of recent work, when it comes to scholarship on games and narrative, it seems to me more likely to come from scholars outside of game studies (like myself) than established game scholars, further entrenching the split (real or perceived) between ludologists and narratologists. And thus we are left with the scenario where a scholar from a related field, in my case television studies, comes to a game studies conference to talk about narrative.

So I apologize in advance for making such a predicable move. However, I think that sometimes games themselves demand that we talk about narrative. Additionally, it becomes increasingly limited to analyze a game solely as a bounded textual object, as transmedia techniques have led to interesting overlaps in cultural norms, textual design, and fan engagement across normally distinct media, highlighting the need to think across ludic and narrative modes. Specifically, television has used transmedia extensions to embrace a playful mode of engagement drawn from (and often directly through) videogames, while games have employed transmedia to extend their storyworlds by expanding character depth, backstory, and world-building. Yet scholars typically treat such media as separate realms, with game studies and television studies isolated in distinct academic silos, despite the increasing blur between the media themselves. In this presentation, I attempt to traverse this scholarly divide, examining how gameplay and storytelling co-mingle in two very different franchises with both cult and mainstream appeal: the television series Lost and the game series Portal. In analyzing these two disparate transmedia franchises, I believe we can see a number of ways where issues of both play and narrative are foregrounded both textually and experientially, and that taken together we can begin to chart out a mode of ludic storytelling that transcends the false dichotomy between game and narrative.

Transmedia storytelling is a broad and debated realm of media practice, and time does not permit me to delve too deeply into those definitional nuances. In short, it is a realm of interrelated paratexts working together to create a narrative universe. In Henry Jenkins’s comprehensive and influential definition of the form:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.²

This definition of transmedia storytelling problematizes the hierarchy between text and paratext for our dual case studies: in a more balanced example, all texts would be equally weighted rather than one being privileged as “text” while others serve as supporting “paratexts.” However in the high stakes industries of commercial television and game design, financial realities demand that a franchise’s core medium be identified and privileged, typically emphasizing more established industries like television studios or game developers over newer modes of online textuality. Thus in understanding transmedia extensions based on a so-called “mothership” franchise from an established medium, we can identify the originating television or videogame series as the core text, with transmedia extensions serving as paratexts.³

We can see the centrality of the mothership in my first case study. Lost, originally airing on ABC from 2004-2010, is one of television’s most groundbreaking serials, pioneering a mode of narrative complexity and innovative storytelling that has rarely been matched in any medium.⁴ The core premise, focused on a group of airplane passengers stranded on a remote island with hostile inhabitants and a mystical and conspiracy-laden backstory, lent itself to a wide-ranging storyworld with character backstories illuminated through flashbacks. Lost’s approach to transmedia storytelling is expansionist, extending the narrative universe not only across media, but introducing many new characters, settings, plotlines, time periods and mythological elements. While few viewers would accuse the television incarnation of Lost of being too simplistic in its narrative scope, the show used transmedia to extend itself into tales that surpassed the wide scope of the series itself. This expansionism led Lost to add to its six seasons of television with four alternate reality games, four novels, a console videogame, multiple tie-in websites and online videos, DVD extras, live events, and an array of collectable merchandise. Both due to its fantasy genre and its storytelling commitments to a create rich mythological universe, Lost is suited to this expansionist approach to transmedia, using paratexts to extend the narrative outward into new locales and arenas.

One of Lost’s chief strategies in crafting its transmedia narrative is positioning its fans as players instead of viewers. Games are a central theme and underlying story structure that runs throughout the show, ranging from the long con games played by Sawyer, Ben, and numerous others (and Others), to the ongoing game revealed in the final season between the island’s mythological entities Jacob and The Man in Back, embodied by a senet board but comprised of centuries of elaborate role-playing and strategizing with other people as pawns. The show created puzzles and games for its viewers to play within its diegesis, asking us to parse out meanings and decode narrative information from images like a hidden map on the back of a blast door in an underground bunker, or identify names written in chalk within a mysterious cave; such puzzling moments were embraced by what I have termed “forensic fans” who collectively worked to parse out answers. Throughout all of these ludic moments within the show, there was an implied narrative payoff: the puzzles would uncover information that would heighten our narrative comprehension and reveal hidden truths about the storyworld. Thus while the show offered ludic engagement, it was framed within the narrative drive for mastery of the story.⁵

Showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have discussed in interviews and podcasts that they had a specific litmus test for what mythology to reveal and explore on the show itself versus in the transmedia extensions: if the main characters care about it, it will appear on the show; if the characters don’t care, it will not. While we can quibble as to how precisely they followed their own edict, it is instructive in establishing the show’s orientation toward character-centered drama rather than mythological fantasy. The map is a telling case: in the aftermath of the episode where it appeared, the character John Locke cared deeply about the map, attempting to recreate the image and discover its secret. But by the end of the second season, Locke had seemingly moved on, we saw the origins of the map in a flashback, and the underground hatch was destroyed; the blast door map would not be directly referenced on the television series again. However, it would reappear in four subsequent paratexts, including the Lost jigsaw puzzles, the videogame Lost: Via Domus, a hidden poster in a DVD set, and in the official Lost magazine, each offering slightly different details and encouraging further forensic fan decoding. But to what ends? The transmedia versions of the map detach it from Locke’s character motivations and the core island narrative events, making it a potentially fun puzzle to play with, but offering little storytelling payoff despite the promise of hidden mysteries and revelations.

The majority of Lost’s transmedia extensions prioritize storyworld expansion and exploration instead of building on the show’s emotional arcs and character relationships, and in doing so, the franchise fails to create effective tie-in media properties designed to stand independently from the core series itself. This approach to transmedia is what I would call “playing for the plot”: creating ludic moments of engagement that are primarily motivated by the promise of narrative information, but lacking the intrinsic pleasures of the tie-in medium. Thus console/PC game Lost: Via Domus works to offer fans an opportunity to explore the island and play in the margins of core plot points from the series, but doesn’t create its own compelling ludic experience – it’s hard to imagine anyone who didn’t actively watch Lost playing more than an hour of the dull gameplay. Likewise the show’s four ARGs all promised some revelations or rewards to hardcore Lost fans, but all fell short of what ARG fans expect from the genre, lacking clever design, effective pacing, or engaging roleplay.⁶

As to the goal of revealing narrative mythology for the ongoing television series, the show’s first and most extensive ARG, The Lost Experience, proved to be more frustrating than rewarding – the canonical narrative content was not sufficiently integrated into the television series as a whole, making some players feel like they had wasted their time on “trivia,” rather than getting a head-start on what was to come during Lost’s next seasons. No matter how enjoyable such games and extensions were to fans, they often fell short in rewarding the core edict of adding to the franchise’s storytelling without taking away from the main television experience. One of the great contradictions of Lost is that the series built as robust of a mythological universe ever devised for television, but then undermined the importance of its own mythology by relegating many of its mysteries to transmedia extensions that it deemed as “bonus content” rather than core storytelling. The show was unmatched in its ability to posit mysteries and encourage fans to immerse themselves expansively into clunky alternate reality games and poorly paced videogames and novels with the hope of uncovering answers. Yet by the final season, the show offered emotional character resolutions and thrilling adventure storytelling, but left many mythological questions unaddressed within the television series itself or ambiguously vague in its answers. On its own, I think the emotional payoffs and sweeping character arcs suffice in the show’s mission to engage and entertain a mass audience; however its use of transmedia and cultivation of a forensic fanbase encouraged us to expect more, leading many fans to revolt against the show in its final hours for not delivering its answers in a clearly marked package. Lost’s transmedia extensions foregrounded a mode of ludic engagement that celebrates puzzle solving, storyworld exploration, and vicarious participation, while the show’s narrative resolution on television ran counter to these impulses by focusing the finale on its more typical storytelling realms of resolving character and relationship arcs. Such divergent appeals and modes of engagement point to a danger of transmedia franchises in establishing wide-ranging appeals for fans with endings that fall short of meeting all of their expectations.

What can game scholars learn from the transmedia experiments of the Lost franchise? While I don’t think any of the show’s ludic extensions can be seen as truly successful from either a gameplay or storytelling perspective, they do highlight the potential for coupling play and plot as a motivating factor to justify the inevitable tie-in games that most successful entertainment franchises are likely to generate, and potentially maximizing viewer engagement across media by creating ludic opportunities for fans. Although Lost is an exceptionally broad and complex example of transmedia storytelling, it is typical in its structure of building ludic extensions off of a narrative core. But my second example reverses that hierarchy, with narrative branches coming from a game franchise.

Portal did not debut like a typical game franchise, as it was first released by Valve as a bundled extra in their Half-Life package The Orange Box. The game itself seems to avoid franchise logic, as it first appears to be an example of one of the least franchise-able genres, the puzzle game, with little narrative material—early gameplay is focused on the unique mechanic of the dual portal guns that allow the first-person avatar to navigate the generic lab space to accomplish clearly demarcated tasks. In the scholarly arguments over narrative and games, the puzzle genre is frequently hailed as the proof that gameplay trumps story via examples like Tetris, as the compelling mechanics of such games need no narrative frame to engage players. Evoking sports, another frequently cited genre of non-narrative games, Markku Eskelinen famously and provocatively staked out the extreme anti-narratological position by writing, “If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.”⁷But I would argue that this dismissively pithy phrase captures much of what makes Portal such a compelling experience on both ludological and narrative terms: midway through this puzzle game, the ball starts telling a story.

This unexpected shift in Portal is what elevates the game beyond just an engaging puzzler into a landmark of the medium: you slowly begin to realize that the game has been telling you a story, even while you were primarily focused on the mechanics and puzzles. Even the most hardcore ludologist would (hopefully) admit that Portal’s storyworld, characterization, and plot is more than just set dressing on a set of physics puzzles, but that the surprising integration of ludic and narrative experiences is the game’s true genius and why it grew beyond its first release as a bonus extra into a top-flight transmedia franchise. And yet as Valve looked to extend Portal into the inevitable realm of sequels, it faced the challenge that its best twist was impossible to replicate, especially in the face of heightened player expectations—Portal 2 was not about to take anyone by surprise.

For the sequel, Valve doubled down on the game’s narrative elements, creating parallel narrative media experiences. The game of Portal 2 itself is far more narrative-driven, with three characters monologuing to silent Chell instead of the first game’s singular GLaDOS, a far more expansive exploration of Aperture Science’s facilities and beyond, and many more plot twists and revelations in both past and present tense. Most interestingly for me, the game establishes character relationships where the first game had almost none—there was little explanation why GLaDOS wanted Chell dead aside from some faulty programming, so Chell herself was effectively a blank slate avatar with little motivation beyond escaping. In Portal 2, GLaDOS remembers Chell’s previous crimes against Aperture, and far more is revealed and hinted at to suggest that Chell is not just a random test subject but someone with deep ties to characters from Aperture’s past. However, these relationships and backstories are not the ludic point of the game, as gameplay is still dominated by elaborate physics puzzles humorously undercut by mocking voiceovers.

Portal’s second narrative thread as a transmedia franchise focuses directly on this backstory, filling out the history of Aperture and the assorted characters who appear in the games. This is most directly explored in the web comic Portal: Lab Rat, which introduces the character of Doug Rattmann, a mentally-unstable Aperture scientist who is revealed to be the author of the first game’s graffiti informing us that the cake is a lie. Lab Rat fills in narrative gaps between the two games by explaining how Chell got pulled back into Aperture and put in deep stasis, and foreshadows some of Portal 2’s later narrative by introducing the morality core and highlighting elements of Aperture’s history that are explored in the game. There is nothing essential about this narrative material, as the games can be fully enjoyed as stand-alone experiences without delving into this backstory, and as such, Lab Rat functions as a typical transmedia paratext that offers interesting but ultimately secondary storyworld depth.⁸

Even more interesting to me is how fans have taken to Portal’s narrative universe to explore its gaps and mythology, creating a rich site of alternative gameplay. Portal 2 and Lab Rat contain hints toward a backstory where Chell was the daughter of an Aperture employee, imprisoned at the lab after a disastrous Bring Your Daughter To Work Day, but the details are left vague and unspecified. A number of players, embracing the forensic fan approach common to Lost viewers, have analyzed and parsed the game and its transmedia to theorize about the storyworld’s mythology, positing elaborate theories. For instance, reddit.com user Ryuker920 posted a lengthy illustrated theory that aimed to prove the following claim: “I believe that Chell was abandoned by her biological parents, Cave Johnson and Caroline, and adopted by the Ratman (Doug Hopper). Oh, and Doug’s on the moon.”⁹ This post was followed by dozens of commenters engaging with these ideas and attempting to resolve the mysteries and ambiguities of the game’s storyworld, and reconcile the numerous other theories circulating online.

Tellingly, the first comment after this lengthy post raises a key issue: “Interesting theories… I missed most of the significance of this in my playthrough.” This question of significance to gameplay is crucial. The Portal games do not demand that we master the narrative universe, but rather ask us to master the micro-spaces of each test chamber using our portal gun. Aperture’s mythology is often enjoyable but inessential window dressing on the gameplay, emerging at times to motivate powerful shifts in Chell’s mission but not part of the ludic puzzle logic, as the games provide their own essential narrative drive without requiring forensic fandom to parse out buried mysteries and ambiguities. Portal’s gameplay offers a type of puzzle logic that is bounded and tight, always requiring completion before advancing to the next level with singular, non-ambiguous answers. The mythological puzzles that Valve may have created in the game’s storyworld are fully optional, highly ambiguous, and ultimately not significant to the core ludic experience of the franchise. They are fun playgrounds for fan speculation, but enact a very different ludic experience from the games themselves; such playful excavation of the franchise’s storyworld can feed back into the core game for some players who play (or replay) the game for plot, discovering clues to the narrative puzzle more than solving the level’s physics puzzles and thus adding a layer of participatory engagement to the franchise. But they also potentially create frustrations for fans who want the definitive elegance of the game’s puzzle logic to carry over to its transmedia storytelling, instead of offering ambiguous mysteries with no clear payoff within the core game franchise.

So what do these dual case studies teach us about the intersection between storytelling and gameplay? This charts out an area of future research for me, but I’ve identified a few key points to develop further out of these case studies. They highlight a mode of ludic storytelling where playfulness is an important facet of narrative comprehension. They both demonstrate the lengths that fans will go to in the name of exploring the transmedia storyworlds of a beloved franchise, extending the time spent engaging with texts with forensic detail and ludic imagination. They also show the limits of attempting to play for plot, as the competing logics of gameplay and storytelling can fail to coalesce, especially when one mode is clearly privileged in the franchise’s mothership. Interestingly, either ambiguity or clarity can tied to each mode—for Lost, the television storytelling is more definitive and canonical than the transmedia play, while Portal’s puzzle logic seems more certain than the narrative ambiguities parsed out by transmedia fans. But despite each franchises’s limited success in merging the two modes, both highlight the intersection of storytelling and play as mutually reinforcing and potentially coordinated aspects of a transmedia franchise, often working in tandem to encourage fan engagement in a way that suggests the importance of thinking about narrative and gameplay as intertwined rather than competing impulses in media texts.

Assistant Professor of Media Production, Middlebury College

The Film and Media Culture Department invites applications for a tenure track position in Media Production beginning September 2012.  Appointment at the Assistant Professor level; completed M.F.A. or Ph.D. at time of appointment required.  The successful candidate will primarily teach introductory and advanced courses in video and digital media production, spanning the range of narrative, documentary, and experimental work, as well as specialized production courses in topics such as animation, documentary, or digital media.  Candidates should be versed and invested in the field of film and media studies as well as hands-on production, and thus would be able to teach additional critical studies courses per their interest and expertise.  It is expected that this candidate will be an active media creator and producer, and ongoing creative output will be considered his/her primary professional development focus.  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 dedicated to bridging the gap between theory and practice.  Details of the department’s mission, production facilities, and curriculum can be found on its homepage.

Applicants should provide evidence of creative potential and teaching excellence.  All application materials must be received by November 15, 2011.  Middlebury College uses Interfolio to collect all faculty job applications electronically.  Email and paper applications will not be accepted. Through Interfolio, submit the following: a letter of application, addressed to search committee chair Christian Keathley, that outlines teaching and creative experiences and interests; a curriculum vitae; a sample of scholarly writing (max. 25 pages); sample(s) of production work (max. 15 mins.); three letters of recommendation, at least two of which should speak to the candidate’s teaching ability.  Interfolio enables uploading of video to its own portfolio system, or embedding of links to existing website that presents your work (e.g., vimeo, youtube). Middlebury College is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to hiring a diverse faculty to complement the increasing diversity of the student body.

Please spread the word to any media producers/scholars who might be a good match for the position.

Just to be clear: I’m no longer the chair of my department, and I’ll be participating in a detached role in this search from my current perch in Germany. So I won’t be doing online Q&As and outreach as I did during our last search, but if you’re interested in the job, reviewing the posts and comments from the search I ran two years ago could be useful, as would be reviewing my various Middlebury-centered posts about how things work at my home institution & department.

Good luck on the job market!

There’s a history to me discussing television genre categories with college friends – I open my book Genre and Television with an anecdote about debating whether Northern Exposure was a comedy or a drama. And some of the points I brought up there apply to Louie - just as Northern Exposure fit the industrial criteria of a drama for its era (ensemble cast, hour-long format, serialized storylines, single-camera production without a laugh-track), Louie‘s basic attributes point to it clearly being a contemporary television comedy. It’s a half-hour show, produced much like many “quality” comedies today (single-camera without a laugh track), focuses on a titular stand-up comic in a long-standing television comedy tradition – and it’s often the funniest show on TV, with a distinctive comedic sensibility growing out of the commonplace gutter of jokes about farts and blowjobs.

Of course it’s much more than that – take the finale’s opening stand-up bit about the pleasures of sleep as a father. It starts with the familiar topic of parents griping about their kids waking them up early, and then gets more twisted as he vamps on the exquisite pleasures of “deep African sleep” with sleep as a “goddess whore sucking me off” with “a gold helmet and forty tongues… speaking in a dead language” (and it’s worth saying that the words alone cannot convey how hysterical this sequence is – Louis C.K.’s physicality and performance is essential to his comedy). This is the odd juxtaposition of conventional parenting and ribald blowjob forms of humor, filtered through a singularly warped creative vision. It’s clearly comedy, but its unconventional approach and rawness makes it push at the genre’s boundaries.

Note: I wanted to post this clip, but YouTube doesn’t care about fair use. So instead, watch a scene Louis C.K. posted himself from the first season that similarly plays with offensive humor, conventions and serious issues:

I’ve read critics comparing Louie to short films, collections of short stories, or art cinema, and while I think those are all apt, I’ve come to think that the cross-media comparison that best fits what Louis C.K. is doing on his show is making jazz albums for television. The show uses jazz music as its score, which invites this connection, but I think it’s more than the sonic tone – jazz is lodged in the show’s approach and genre. I’ve not seen anyone else make this comparison except this nice account of C.K.’s standup by jazz musician George Colligan:

Watching Louis C.K. is like watching an older jazz musician play; he’s totally comfortable on stage, he’s has total control over his material, and the audience is left in awe of his mastery. His material is highly observational, and it covers things we can all relate to, but he can examine the simplest ideas with such angry, twisted detail, that you are left breathless at the virtuosity of his explanations. C.K. draws much of his humor from his complete honesty, his shamelessness, his willingness to leave no stone unturned in his self-deprecation and criticism of society.

I’m not jazz expert or even much of a fan, but what I take away from reading about jazz is that much of the genre’s pleasure is found in taking the conventional and making it new, in the virtuosity of the performance, in exploring innovation within limits, and in the sense of passion coming through the expression. Louie is far from improvised – the visuals and performances are tightly controlled and calibrated (although perhaps some of the dialog scenes are more improvised, especially when Louie chats with other comics). But I think jazz is unfortunately equated with improvisation too often – much of what happens in jazz music is about control, precision, and working within established limits and patterns.

The film work that Louie most reminds me of is peak Woody Allen (late-1970s) – films like Manhattan and Annie Hall have a similar jazz influence, juxtaposing conventions and influences, taking the norms in new directions, and finding heart and passion underneath a more flippant surface (plus the similar use of jazz for soundtrack material). C.K. and Allen have drastically different tones and styles, but both work as singular creators, as writer/director/star (and in the case of Louie, editor). Such singular vision is unheard of on television, fairly uncommon in mainstream American film, but quite common in the musical world of bandleaders and solo artists.

What C.K. has done with Louie is create a piece of television that is instantly recognized as the work of one creative vision, and arguably that’s never truly happened in American television before (maybe Ernie Kovacs?). It’s working in the vein of comedy, but wanders freely across genres and tones, embracing influences from all over the cultural map. Its refusal of overt serialization, such as abandoning the “plot development” at the end of “Niece,” runs directly counter to most of today’s best television, prompting Louie‘s comparison to short films and short stories more than the long-form novelistic mode of other great television. But I’d say that seriality is besides the point with Louie because the show is ultimately not that interested in plot or even storytelling per se – instead, it focuses on tone, style, mood, and sensibility, like a compelling piece of instrumental jazz that refuses simple categorization. And rather than trying to classify and understand it, we’re left just to enjoy its unique vision.

The jazz parallel also helps locate the show in terms of cultural hierarchies. Today, the commonplace perception is that jazz is part of elite, highbrow culture, catering to aficionados at swanky bars, but of course jazz’s origins are within lower-class, folk and street milieus, and in some places, that’s where it still thrives. Another jazz-influenced television show, Treme, mines this territory by contrasting the elite New York jazz culture where trumpeter Delmond Lambreaux resides with the street events and seedy bars in New Orleans where Antoine Baptiste plays. And jazz gains vibrancy when it crosses and transcends such cultural divides, making it more complicated than an elite form.

Louie is “art television” in many ways, with stylistic cinematic flourishes and measured pacing, layered with serious ideas and “depressingly realistic” themes, as my friend wrote. But it also employs lewd, lowbrow humor – as with the season 2 opener “Pregnant” that spent a tense 20 minutes building to an exaggeratedly long fart – that makes it a not-entirely-inappropriate companion to FX’s most popular program: reruns of Two and a Half Men. Such cultural contradictions are integrated into the show’s stories, most notably in the brilliant hour-long “Duckling.” Louie takes his act to Afganistan to entertain troops alongside a pair of cheerleaders and hyper-earnest country singer Keni Thomas. But while the show acknowledges that (character) Louie’s sense of self places him at a higher cultural plane (but lower self-esteem) than his fellow USO entertainers, he connects with the military audience through clever gutter humor, just as (show creator) Louis treats the singer and his song with respect – and ends by making Louie the show’s biggest buffoon through a perfect use of lowbrow physical comedy.

So in the end (of season 2, thankfully not the series!), Louie offers a virtuosic and singular approach to television that defies comparison within its own medium. I don’t know enough about jazz to be able to argue direct comparisons – maybe season 1 is “Kind of Blue” and season 2 is “A Love Supreme”? – but I find the cross-medium link useful to better understand the scope and power of C.K.’s innovations. And the next time a friend asks “is Louie a comedy?”, I’ll respond with, “no, it’s jazz.”

I do have some publishing news to share soon, with a really exciting edited collection I’m working on, but it’s not ready to go public yet. But I do have another publishing anecdote to relay in the name of professional transparency that’s neither exciting nor news, but speaks to some interesting facets of the state of academic publishing today, and raises some good questions about why we do things the way we do them.

Backstory: in March 2010, I was invited by a trio of scholars (whom I did not know) to contribute to an anthology about Mad Men, with the clear angle that I would be writing as a television scholar who did not particularly like the show. In corresponding with them, they were supportive of me writing about my dislike and my attempt to watch season 1 to understand and hopefully appreciate the show’s appeal. I delivered a draft of the essay in early July, and got a lot of editorial feedback that pushed the revision toward a more formally academic, less personal “bloggy” style to suit their volume. I sent in the revision at the end of the month, and also posted the piece here on my blog.

The resulting post, “On Disliking Mad Men,” has since become the most read item I’ve ever posted, with 8,400 views and counting (which is nothing special for the internet, but certainly a much larger readership than most academic essays get in a year), and 10x the number of comments I ever get here. It has been linked to by many other blogs, and inspired a lengthy and probably even more widely-read discussion at Ian Bogost’s blog. Throughout the excitement of getting a piece so widely discussed, I felt some ambivalence – the essay is far from my best work, as I found myself contorting to find an appropriate balance between bloggy snark and formal academic prose, and seek out the way to criticize something I truly dislike without judging the many people I respect (and otherwise share a taste culture with) who love the show. In working with the volume’s editors, I always maintained that it was an experimental piece rather than polished fully-realized work, but as a blog post, I remain disappointed that there are many people who have only read that single essay of mine here, rather than exploring writing that I feel is more representative (and higher quality) work. In fact, I’ve told a friend that sometimes I wish I could unpublish the piece!

Fast forward to the present, and I sort-of got my wish: this week, I received an email from one of the book’s editors, informing me that my essay would need to be cut from the volume as it goes forward to press. The reasons given were interesting - motivated first by length issues, the press demanded that some essays be removed from the volume. (This is fairly typical for an academic book as the print medium’s physical form can create increased costs, but ideally such matters are stipulated in the contractual stage so that the press and editors share a target length upfront.) [UPDATE: I got a clarifying email from an editor saying that the length issue was not coming from the press to cut costs, but rather because the reviewers felt the volume was too long for readers. I've left my original comments in strikethrough just so the comments below make sense.]  In trying to select which essays should be eliminated, the anonymous reviewers felt that “the volume as a whole was too critical and not enough ‘fun,’” and thus my piece (among others) was cut in the hope of making a more uniform “pro-Mad Men” book that the press believed would sell read better, despite the editors’ advocacy to retain all of the pieces. (In my experience, if a press wants to shorten a book or eliminate a piece, no amount of authorial advocacy will work if there’s a reviewer who endorses the move.) [UPDATE: Again, I misread the editor's original comment - the goal was not sales as much as uniformity of address. The reviewers wanted the book to be less negative for tone issues, not to build sales.]

I find this news more interesting than disappointing. As I mentioned, I’m not bubbling with pride about this essay, so having it absent from a book is no great loss. There’s no real professional downside for me, as it’s not like getting another book chapter published will make a significant difference in my future promotion or salary decisions. (For those who don’t know the economics of academic publishing, the only compensation I would have gotten for having my essay included is a free copy of the book, so there’s no real financial loss.) And the piece has already been read and discussed much more broadly than it would have had it solely been published in an academic print volume which will certainly not generate 8,000+ readers in a year. (And yes, there is some strange irony in the press striving to make the book more popular by cutting a chapter that already had proven to be quite well-known, and based on a number of questions I’ve fielded, is how many people know about the forthcoming volume!)

The interesting part is what it tells us about the state of academic publishing. The thing that “counts” as a line on a CV is slow-moving and comparatively hard to access, while that which clearly is getting broadly read and cited is viewed as an optional hobby. Formal publications do systematize peer review and thus that is supposed to make a publication “count,” but while the editors gave me some excellent feedback, it seems like the official reviewers were judging the book on merits of “fun” and celebratory analysis more than typical standards of rigor. (I’ll grant that perhaps the reviewers blasted my essay’s rhetorical incoherence and tortured self-reflection, as it probably deserves, and the editors were just sparing me by focusing on the less personal pragmatic issues in their explanation.) And clearly presses make publication decisions based on marketability and cost, not just scholarly merit. But peer review is not only available via formal publication, as I think the dozens of comments on my post can be viewed as a form of review – many are quite critical, but do more than complain that I’m not fun enough!

So what is this essay now? Unlike my piece on the Veronica Mars pilot, which I pulled from a book due to the press’s open-access restrictions and will be reborn as part of my book on television narrative, my piece on Mad Men is an orphan who was bred for a very specific purpose – it’s kind-of like a custom-made monogrammed outfit that got returned because it was no longer fashionable, and thus will not sell in the outlet mall. The essay would never had been written had I not been asked to contribute – and I likely would have just kept my dislike of Mad Men simmering to myself, so that might have been preferable! While it may inform my book’s chapter on evaluation and narrative complexity, I have no desire to revisit the topic to make it part of the larger project, nor does it make any sense to submit it to a journal, as it’s clearly designed to be read in dialog with other essays on Mad Men.

I guess it will live on as a blog post, rather than blogged-draft of a forthcoming essay. But it’s also not a blog post, as I wrote (and rewrote) it in a non-bloggy voice aimed for a more exclusively academic audience, so its awkwardly contorted – or as one of my commenters wrote in all-caps, CONSTIPATED – style is left to linger in a neither here-nor-there state. And unlike nearly everything else on this blog, it’s been edited by other people, with feedback incorporated into the process rather than just my thoughts and voice – perhaps those edits are for the better, but they clearly took it in a direction away from this blog rather than toward its final resting place. But I’ve chosen to not unpublish it, if only to allow the interesting discussion to remain accessible. And hopefully, a few of the dozens of readers who still click on it each week stick around to read some of my less constipated writing.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m on sabbatical from Middlebury for the 2011-12 academic year, and I’ll be moving my family to Germany to be on fellowship for a year. I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people about this, both online and face-to-face, so I figured I’d post the answers I’ve been giving for anyone interested in where I’m going & what I’ll be doing.

So where are you going?

I’m moving to Göttingen, Germany, which is in the center of the country, about halfway between Frankfurt and Berlin. It’s a small city (around 120,000) best known for its very old and well-regarded University of Göttingen. The American city it seems to most resemble in character and size is Ann Arbor – except that it’s got a Medieval wall around the city center, and it’s a typically European walking/biking city rather than car-centered (and yes, we’re going car-free for the year).

Why are you going there?

Because I was invited. Two years ago, I presented at a conference in Zurich about serial narrative, and was approached by a member of Göttingen’s American Studies department who was also presenting. He told me about a project that his department was proposing to the German Research Foundation (essentially the equivalent of our NEH and NSF rolled into one) for a research team on “Popular Seriality,” and asked if I would be interested in participating as a visitor. The funding came through and we worked out an arrangement for me to be a visiting fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg Institute for Advanced Study for the 2011-12 year.

So will you be teaching?

Thankfully no! (I love teaching, but I need a break from the day-to-day pressures of the classroom, and that’s what sabbaticals are for.) It’s a research fellowship, so my responsibilities are primarily to work on my own research – primarily, writing my book Complex TV. The Institute is modelled after Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where gathering a group of international researchers together serves to extend the university’s academic community – besides giving one or two public lectures at the University, my primary responsibility is to work in my office (in the beautiful historical observatory that used to be the residence and office of Carl Friedrich Gauss) and to participate in three community meals each week. Additionally, I’ll participate in events and conversations with the Popular Seriality team. (I know – a tough job!)

Does this mean you’ll be studying German media?

Not really. My book & other research are still focused on American television. Since I’ll primarily be working with the American Studies department, this will be a welcome focus. But I’m interested in how American television is consumed in Europe, so this will certainly be a point of some investigation and probably some blog commentary here.

Why does a German university have an American Studies department?

Why does an American university have a German department?

Do you speak German?

Alas, no. I started taking intro German in the fall, but dropped after 6 weeks when the daily grind of teaching, chairing, parenting, and life overwhelmed me. (I did learn the great German word überwältigt, meaning overwhelmed.) So I’ll study a bit of German while there, but my work is solely in English, so I’ll muddle through as a mostly illiterate ex-pat.

What is your family doing?

My wife will be continuing to work for Middlebury College’s budget office, through the wonders of VPN and Skype. (It’s worth noting that most dual career couples find it incredibly hard to manage a year abroad during a sabbatical due to spousal career concerns, so we’re quite fortunate that it works for her job to telecommute.) She thrived in German class for the whole year, so she’ll be the family’s designated communicator. My kids, aged 10, 7 and 5, will go to German public school, getting the full language immersion. I fully expect that they’ll all be highlighting my linguistic ineptitude by winter. And we’ll all hopefully be blogging about our experiences in our family travel blog, Fünf in Deutschland.

Will you be going to other cities in Europe?

Definitely. For the fall, I’ve already lined up talks at German universities in Mannheim, Weimar, Bochum, and Hannover, and will be attending conferences in Vienna and Innsbruck. I hope to hit other European countries and cities while I’m in easy train or plane distance – so if you’re in a position to invite me, please send me an email! And of course, the family will take advantage of the German penchant for vacations to travel around the continent.

What are your goals for the year?

I think setting realistic and diverse goals is key to a successful sabbatical. I certainly want to finish writing my book, and publishing the chapters to the book’s website. I have a couple of other writing and editing projects in the works that I’ll reveal when the time is right. But sabbaticals are not just for writing, as they also help provide new perspectives and experiences to refresh and revitalize your thinking. So I want to feel some productive disorientation – being in another country speaking a foreign language forces you out of your comfort zone, and I do generally feel quite comfortable in my regular life. I want a jolt out of my regular routine to help me rethink how I compartmentalize and separate the personal and professional. And I want to teach myself to play the mandolin.

Shouldn’t you be packing instead of blogging?

Yes.

I’m also taking advantage of being in Germany for a brief time to test out possible ways to plan for being a media scholar abroad. One of the challenges in packing for a year abroad is figuring out what type media I need to pack and what I can access online. So in the next few days I’ll be test driving my new Slingbox to see how well it plays with my TiVo as one way to maintain a connection to American TV while abroad. And I’ll also see how my VPN connection or connecting to a remote desktop server might help me get to Netflix, Hulu, etc. (Any advice is welcome!)

One of the odd side effects of technological innovation is that it creates stress through what it makes possible. A decade ago, the idea of streaming media libraries or a remote connections to my new TiVo was simply unthinkable, so I would have just accepted that a year abroad meant a year of being disconnected to American media. Now that I know what I could possibly access, I’m motivated to come up with strategies to maintain the connection. Two decades ago, the last time I lived abroad during a semester in London, I remember bringing dozens of CDs and a portable stereo so I wouldn’t have to grapple with months without music. Now I can fit thousands of songs on the various devices that we’re already bringing, but I’ve been furtively ripping my CD collection, planning for what various members of my family might want to listen to.

Not that I’m complaining – everything is amazing, I’ll try to be happy:

And then the season finale happened.

To be fair, I still like the show more than many critics – I have little of Maureen Ryan’s vitriol (although it amuses me), Matt Zoller Seitz‘s disdain, nor Alan Sepinwall‘s fury that ends with a very public break-up with the show. My thoughts are most along the lines of Cory Barker‘s, as we both treat our dislike at a safe intellectual distance. But having thought about the finale and overall season for a few hours now, I do have some (hopefully new) things to say about how The Killing failed to create an effective serialized narrative – and take the opportunity to compare it to another one of this blog’s favorite targets, 24.

(Spoilers to follow if you haven’t caught up with the show yet, and still want to…)

Scholars of narrative have categorized a number of ways storytellers create reactions to new narrative information in viewers/readers with three main types: curiosity, suspense and surprise. I’d boil down the show’s core problem to be overemphasizing surprise instead of curiosity and suspense, but some clarifying detail is useful.

Curiosity is the primary driving force of narrative momentum, propelling viewer interest forward into future installments. The basic function of curiosity is to get viewers to think “I want to learn more about X”, with the unknown being bidirectionally aimed toward both past and future events. (I’d call this temporal tendency “bi-curious,” but that term is already taken.) On The Killing, curiosity focuses around the past-centric tagline of “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” with the forward-looking question of “how will Linden and Holder solve Rosie’s murder?” There are other forward-looking points of curiosity – Will the Larsens’ marriage be saved? Will Linden ever get to Sonoma? Will Belko overcome his mommy issues? – but for the most part, the main stakes of future curiosity have been wagered on Rosie’s case. Likewise, there are intriguing narrative gaps in the past – What was Linden’s previous case that messed up her life? What’s Holder hiding? Did Richmond have something to do with his wife’s death? – but the show has failed to create real interest in such matters.

So The Killing‘s first problem is that it over-invested the dramatic stakes in one main question, both through its storytelling strategies (mostly by leaving the characters insufficiently fully realized to make us care about their curiosities) and its paratextual promotion centered around the core mystery. When you invest so much narrative energy in one point of curiosity, you better deliver on that question. Mo Ryan’s (and many others’) frustrations over not getting closure on Rosie’s murder is not because the show absolutely needed to resolve the mystery to satisfy viewers, but because there was nothing else driving the narrative forward. Compare this to Twin Peaks, where the lack of closure to Laura Palmer’s murder at the end of season 1 was sustained because there were so many other interesting things to care about. (Although those of us watching live back in 1990 were plenty pissed.)

Suspense is another narrative motor, arising when we anticipate an outcome to a situation that we really don’t want to see happen, but feel like it’s likely, usually tied to the protagonist in peril. The Killing features very little suspense for a mystery – the only really effective moments of suspense I can think of are Stan driving Bennet off to his potential doom, and Linden discovering the Orpheus emails dinging away in the other room. Suspense requires emotional investment in the outcome to override our understanding that the peril that is likely in the storyworld is actually quite unlikely in the realm of fictional conventions – our protagonist will almost certainly not perish midway through the season, but we should care enough about her to be concerned nonetheless. The email scene suggests that the show can pull off suspense, but both its lack of investment in characters’ fates and its preference for surprise undermines this part of its narrative toolbox.

Surprise is the weakest of these three storytelling tools, as its exhilarating effect is fleeting, it’s easy to abuse, and the impact diminishes every time it’s used – in other words, it’s the crystal meth of narrative. Surprise is the moment of thwarted expectations, when what you expected to happened didn’t. The Killing loves its surprises, and in this way is similar to 24 at its worst. And on both shows, the surprises are mostly hollow, without sufficient motivation within the storyworld except just to keep us guessing and chatting at the watercooler (or on the Twitter). 24 was good at making its surprises seem less hollow by combining them with suspense and cranking the tension and adrenaline up to eleven so we wouldn’t feel the let down after thinking about the ludicrousness of any given plotline. The Killing doesn’t do adrenaline, as the mood and style are all about low-key simmer, so the surprises stand-out as key moments of narrative momentum – and thus ask to be scrutinized. And more often than not, they don’t stand up to the scrutiny.

Last night’s finale seemed to offer two major surprises and one attempt at suspense, all of which fail to pass the sniff test. The first surprise was that Holder is corrupt, planting fake evidence to arrest Richmond. This twist is designed to make us all say “I can’t believe he did that!”, but it reeks more of “I can’t believe it.” There’s little in the plot to suggest that Holder was corrupt (a few odd meetings & phone calls early in the season, but nothing for a few weeks spent making both us and Linden care about him), and if he was really trying to nail Richmond all along, why did he pursue Bennett so doggedly? It doesn’t make sense given what we know – and the best surprises should make sense in retrospect, following the twist with a “I should have seen that coming!” And for most fans, Holder was the most compelling character on the show, so to make him corrupt seems like a betrayal of viewers’ investments. (And perhaps we’re to think that another twist will show that he’s not really corrupt, but that makes my Holder affections feel used & abused rather than redeemed.)

The second surprise is a meta move: “Can you believe that they didn’t reveal Rosie’s killer in the finale?” (Although Ginia Bellafante, in her baffling New York Times review, seems to have missed the final few minutes and thinks that the case is closed!) But such a twist only works if there’s something else pulling us forward to season 2, and as I suggested above, I don’t think there is. Instead, we’re left with the frustration that the case is dragging on, and we lose faith in showrunner Veena Sud’s abilities to manage her mystery and viewer engagement. Instead, the finale plays like the end of nearly every other episode, with a big surprising twist that will likely prove to be just another red herring, insufficiently motivating my interest throughout the gap between seasons.

Finally, the moment of final suspense is “Did Belko just kill Richmond?”, but I’m not sure what we as invested viewers are supposed to want to see happen. Since both Belko and Richmond are characters we’ve been asked to care about, murder seems like the less desirable outcome. But as a viewer, I’d like to see Richmond die just so we can move beyond the plodding political plotline and put away another red herring. In the end, do I really care what happens? Nope. Suspense test failed.

What I’m left with most of all after the episode – which I actually enjoyed for the most part until the final minutes – is a loss of faith both in the ability of Sud to craft a compelling serialized narrative, and the fictional Seattle police to investigate a murder case. Looking at both the first season of The Killing and the case file of Rosie Larsen yields numerous moments of bafflement as to why they did what they did, why certain leads were dropped, why others were pursued, and why the people we trusted to proceed in our best interest seemed to violate our faith in them. My faith would only be redeemed if they brought in a higher authority to oversee things – paging Dale Cooper and Mark Frost!