Few storytelling forms can match serial television for narrative breadth and vastness. A single narrative universe can continue onward for years or even decades in the case of daytime serials, with cumulative plotlines and character backstories accruing far beyond what any dedicated fan could reasonably remember. Even a series that fails to find an audience typically airs for a comparatively long time — for instance, the single-season Terriers is viewed as a commercial failure, but it still offered 13 episodes of serial storytelling, with a combined running time of over nine hours that eclipses the scope of most novels and nearly every feature film. In short, of all the challenges that face the creators of television fiction, the lack of screen time to tell their stories is hardly an issue.
Given serial television’s temporal vastness, it would seem unlikely that producers would want to expand a story into other venues, as managing the single-medium realm of a television series is more than enough work for a creative team. However, the 21st century has seen the rise of innovative narrative extensions grouped under the term transmedia storytelling, significantly expanding the scope of a television series into an array of other media, from books to blogs, videogames to jigsaw puzzles. To understand the phenomenon of transmedia television, we need to examine the strategies used by various series, the motivations behind such narrative extensions, and the tactics employed by viewers to make sense of such expanded serialized vastness.1
Any thoughtful study of contemporary transmedia must acknowledge that transmedia is not a new phenomenon but predates the digital age. Even if the term is new, the strategy of adapting and expanding a narrative into other media is as old as media themselves — think of paintings dramatizing biblical scenes or iconic 19th-century characters such as Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes whose narrative scope transcends any single medium. Early television employed transmedia strategies as well, as one of the medium’s first hits, Dragnet, spanned multiple media: starting as a radio program, the more popular television series spawned a number of novels; a feature film; a hit record for its theme song; tie-in toys such as a board game, a police badge, and a whistle; and even a television reboot of the 1950s original in the late 1960s.
Highlighting the history of transmedia is not to suggest that nothing new is happening in recent years, as the proliferation of digital forms has certainly led to transmedia techniques that are both greater in degree and different in kind. Technological transformations have helped enable such proliferations, as digital platforms such as online video, blogs, computer games, DVD supplements, and new forms such as alternate reality games (ARGs) are widely accessible avenues for expanding a narrative universe. Television producers use social networks and platforms to enable engagement across screens, creating opportunities for narrative expansions through viewer-driven conversations and sharing within so-called second-screen experiences. Additionally, industrial shifts that have shrunk the relative size of any one program’s television audience and expanded competition across numerous cable and broadcast outlets have encouraged producers to experiment with transmedia as a way to get noticed and to build viewers’ loyalty in an increasingly cluttered television schedule. We might characterize this as a shift in norms: in previous decades, it was exceptional for a program to employ a significant transmedia strategy, while today it is more exceptional for a high-profile series not to.
Despite the growing ubiquity of transmedia, we need to avoid confusing general transmedia extensions with the more particular mode of transmedia storytelling. Nearly every media property today offers some transmedia extensions, such as promotional websites, merchandise, or behind-the-scenes materials — these forms can be usefully categorized as paratexts in relation to the core text, whether a feature film, a videogame, or a television series. As Jonathan Gray has argued in his defining work on the topic, we cannot view any text in our media-saturated age in isolation from its paratexts — for instance, films come preframed by trailers, DVD covers, and posters, and once any text enters into cultural circulation, it becomes part of a complex intertextual web.2 However, we can follow Gray’s lead by distinguishing between paratexts that function primarily to hype, promote, introduce, and discuss a text and those that function as ongoing sites of narrative expansion, which I explore here; I would add a third category of orienting paratexts that serve to help viewers make sense of a narrative, as discussed in chapter 8. This chapter focuses on paratexts whose prime goal is to expand the storyworld and to extend narrative engagement with the series and that are not designed primarily to chronicle, reflect on, or promote a program.
Transmedia storytelling thrives in ongoing narrative paratexts, through a strategy best captured by 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.”3 This definition of transmedia storytelling problematizes the hierarchy between text and paratext, for in the most ideally 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 commercial media industry, the financial realities demand that the core medium of any franchise be identified and privileged, typically emphasizing the more traditional television or film form over newer modes of online textuality. It is useful to distinguish between Jenkins’s proposed ideal of balanced transmedia, with no one medium or text serving a primary role over others, with the more commonplace model of unbalanced transmedia, with a clearly identifiable core text and a number of peripheral transmedia extensions that might be more or less integrated into the narrative whole, acknowledging that most examples fall somewhere on a spectrum between balanced and unbalanced. Most prime time television programs serve as the core text of their transmedia franchises, with the unusual example of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a rare exception pointed toward a more balanced approach in which comics and films are seemingly more central to the narrative. In this chapter, I focus on examples in which the originating television series is the core text, with transmedia extensions serving as paratexts in clearer cases of unbalanced transmedia.
This issue of relative emphasis and priority across transmedia is crucial to both the industrial and storytelling logics of serial television. American commercial television’s core business model is predicated on attracting viewers to a television program, aggregating them into measurable audience segments, and selling that viewership to advertisers in the currency of Nielsen ratings. Even as television’s industrial structures shift toward more flexible measures of audience practices and engagement, the emphasis still remains on generating high ratings to generate the majority of revenues used to fund both television and its associated forays into transmedia storytelling. The industrial edict to protect and strengthen the core business of watching commercial television creates a creative imperative as well: any television-based transmedia must protect the “mothership,” Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse’s term for the central television series at the heart of their armada of transmedia extensions. For the industry, some transmedia extensions might provide an additional revenue stream, but their primary function is to drive viewers back to the television series; for creators, transmedia storytelling must always support and strengthen the core television narrative experience. These goals are particularly important within a serial form, as the gaps between episodes and seasons provide time for viewers’ attention to wander — for many people within the industry, transmedia is optimistically regarded as a magnet to sustain viewers’ engagement and attention across these periodic gaps.
This imperative creates challenges to mesh Jenkins’s definitional ideal of balanced, distributed transmedia as a “unified and coordinated entertainment experience” with the reality that television storytellers must privilege the mothership by designing experiences that viewers can consume in a wide range of ways without sacrificing coherence or engagement, regardless of how aware they may be of the paratextual extensions. This challenge of differential engagement plays a crucial role in one of this chapter’s case studies, as Lost embraced a wide range of transmedia strategies that tried both to protect the mothership for television-only viewers and to reward participation for transmedia-savvy fans. The chapter’s other case study, Breaking Bad, considers an alternative approach to paratexts that treats canonicity and narrative continuity quite differently, suggesting varying ways that transmedia storytelling might work within extended storyworlds. But before turning to these detailed examples, it is important to chart out some of television’s earlier transmedia experiments to clarify precisely what is meant by “storytelling” when discussing transmedia.
Storytelling typically suggests the centrality of narrative events, where a story consists of “what happens.” Certainly events are crucial ingredients of any story, but as discussed in the introduction, narratives are also composed of characters and settings, two additional components that are crucial to transmedia storytelling. Complex television treats these facets as cumulative and consistent within the storyworld, with everything that happens and everyone we see as part of this persistent narrative universe. As discussed throughout this book, such cumulative persistence is one of the chief ways that serial storytelling is defined against episodic television — an episodic drama or sitcom may have the same characters and storyworld, but such characters rarely remember previous events and there is little sense of continuity between episodes, enabling viewers to watch intermittently and out of chronology.
For fans of serial television, charting the canonical events, characters, and settings featured in a storyworld is a central mode of engagement, with viewers striving for both narrative comprehension and deeper understanding of a fictional universe, often through the orientation practices discussed in chapter 8. The rising prevalence of transmedia television alongside the increase in complex seriality has complicated this question of cumulative canon, forcing producers to make difficult choices about how transmedia serial storytelling situates its paratexts in relation to the core television canonical mothership. We can see the important precedents for these issues playing out through older examples of transmedia television in the forms of tie-in books and videogames.
Books have a long history as paratexts to moving-image media, both in conventional prose and comic-based graphic forms, but their role is typically derided as nonessential add-ons rather than integrated transmedia. For many film properties, the most common books are novelizations, direct retellings of the story events, characters, and settings previously seen on-screen and typified by uninspired mass-market paperback novelizations and their comic-book counterparts. Although such novelizations are far from the model of coordinated, dispersed transmedia storytelling as envisioned by Jenkins, they frequently do add material to the storyworld by filling in gaps in the story, whether it be events not seen on-screen or internal character thoughts or backstories that are far easier to convey by the written word — I remember first watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and wondering how Indiana Jones survived the submarine going underwater, only to have a friend point me to the novelization for the answer. Strict novelizations that retell on-screen stories are much rarer for series television, with most examples found in the realm of cult television classics such as the original 1960s-era Doctor Who and Star Trek, both of which saw many of their episodes adapted to the novelized format. In these television franchises and others in film, such as Star Wars, the novels can become part of the canonical storyworld, with details and characters that have been expanded in the novels sometimes appearing in future on-screen installments.
The narrative form of series television encourages another, more common form of tie-in novel, with a book functioning like a new episode of an ongoing series. This approach makes sense for highly episodic programs, as established characters and settings can easily host a new set of narrative events without much need to police canonical boundaries — we see this type of tie-in novel frequently in series that connect to popular fiction genres, such as police procedurals from Dragnet to Columbo to CSI. In such episodic narratives, the books function mainly to stay true to the characters, tone, and norms of the narrative universe — the actual plots are frequently irrelevant to larger continuity, and thus questions of canonicity rarely matter. For the cult realm of science fiction, tie-in novels are quite common, but the questions of canon are more fraught. The original Star Trek featured dozens of tie-in new-episode novels in addition to novelized retellings; while most were regarded as noncanonical by the franchise’s creative team, many fans embraced them, especially in the decades between the original series leaving the air and the emergence of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the late 1980s. Doctor Who similarly used novels to fill the era between 1989 and 2005 when there was no television series in production, with novels sometimes serving to inspire story elements in the rebooted television series.
Novelistic extensions from more contemporary serials often fall in the awkward realm of semicanon: endorsed by the program’s creative team but not fully integrated into its complex serial arcs. Examples of this include 24, whose novels typically predate the program’s continuity by telling tales from characters’ backstories, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which features both novelized retellings and new-episode novels (in both prose and comic forms) exploring a broad chronology in the franchise’s mythology. Such tie-ins are usually written independently from the program’s core writers but based on story outlines that are approved by showrunners and production studios — except for notable instances when a program’s producer pens his or her own canonical tie-in, as with Buffy creator Joss Whedon writing an arc of comic books that came to be known as “Season 8,” continuing the series continuity after it left the air. Such print extensions of beloved series can be quite popular among fans, who often have a love/hate relationship with the books, as they try to police boundaries of canon, seek tonal consistencies, and otherwise explore the borders of their favored fictional storyworlds.
While fans typically judge print extensions on how well they capture the tone, setting, and characters of the mothership, the type of integrated transmedia that Jenkins explores in the example of The Matrix franchise places more emphasis on narrative events, so that the plot is distributed across media.4 Few television series have attempted to create transmedia extensions that offer such canonic integration, with interwoven story events that must be consumed across media for full comprehension. This is surely in large part due to the industrial demands of a commercial television system that depends on revenue from selling eyeballs to advertisers, which mandatory transmedia might seem to undermine. Additionally, the broad (if erroneous) cultural assumption that television is a low-commitment, passive, “lean back” medium would argue against experiments that demand more from viewers beyond just sitting and watching an episode. As complex narratives have demonstrated, viewers will actively engage with challenging television, and thus producers have been willing to try more overtly canonically integrated transmedia storytelling, albeit with very mixed results.
One of the first examples of a canonically integrated tie-in book came from the complex television pioneer Twin Peaks, with the publication of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer in 1990 between the broadcast of the first and second seasons. Secret Diary, written by series cocreator David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer, functions as a distinctive form of transmedia: a diegetic extension, in which an object from the storyworld gets released in the real world. Most diegetic extensions are objects that do not bear much storytelling weight, such as Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap or items bearing the logo of an in-story brand, such as a Dunder Mifflin mug from The Office. Secret Diary was a reproduction of Laura’s diary as featured on the series, with pages ripped out to obscure crucial narrative revelations still to come, making it both an object from the series and an early experiment in integrated transmedia storytelling. The diary, which sold quite well at the peak of Twin Peaks’ cultural relevance, provided numerous clues about Laura’s murder and her hidden dark past. While a viewer need not read the diary to comprehend the program’s plotlines — although with Twin Peaks, comprehension is always an elusive goal — the diary provided relevant canonical story information about both events and characters, material that was later explored in the prequel feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The series followed up the diary with two other diegetic tie-in books, an autobiography of Agent Dale Cooper, transcribed from his iconic dictated tape-recorded notes to “Diane,” and a travel guide to the town of Twin Peaks, but neither were particularly popular given the program’s deflated ratings and second-season cancellation.
Diegetic extensions are no guarantee of integrated transmedia, as they can also be noncanonic. For instance, the hit 1980s mystery Murder, She Wrote released numerous novels — the 42nd book in the series was released in 2014, almost two decades after the television series concluded in 1996 — attributed as cowritten by main character Jessica Fletcher (along with actual writer Donald Bain), mirroring Jessica’s career as a mystery novelist on the series. However, unlike the diegetic novels that are framed as fully fictional on the television series, the real-world novels star Jessica Fletcher as a mystery writer who solves murders, making them function like new episodes of the television series. Yet with the authorial label of Fletcher attached to the books, they also function as diegetic extensions, albeit with somewhat muddled consistency as to exactly where the boundaries between characters on the TV series, novels, and authorial branding may lie. But presumably, given the huge success of both the television and book series, Murder, She Wrote fans did not care about canonical coherence but rather embraced the series across media because they offered consistent tone and familiar characters within the well-established norms of the mystery genre. While few people would point to Murder, She Wrote as a pioneering innovator of transmedia, it offers a good reminder that success can be measured in a number of different ways, not just in achieving Jenkins’s integrated definition.
Although tie-in videogames do not have as long of a history as television-based novels, they offer another window into the strategies and challenges of transmedia television. Again, these are not new phenomena of the 21st century, as Star Trek games date back to 1970s text-only adventure games and 1980s flight simulators, and Doctor Who similarly had tie-in games from early on (not to mention even earlier precomputerized board games). However, we can see a set of strategies emerging in games tied into recent contemporary television serials in terms of how they negotiate the elements of characters, events, and storyworld and tackle the question of canon. While most of these games are not part of larger transmedia narrative campaigns, they do highlight the challenges of extending an ongoing serial across media.
Nearly every tie-in game foregrounds the storyworld of its original television franchise, allowing players to explore the universe as previously only seen on television. With settings as diverse as the mean streets of The Shield ’s Los Angeles, the suburban cul-de-sac of Desperate Housewives, or the deep-space exploration of Battlestar Galactica, television tie-in games fulfill Henry Jenkins’s suggestion that game narratives function primarily as spatial storytelling — we explore the virtual representations of the storyworlds created in serial television as a way to extend the narrative experience and participate in the fictional universe.5 The tie-in games that seem most popular are those that re-create their television universes with vivid and immersive storyworlds, such as the virtual Springfield found in a number of Simpsons games, with game worlds often surpassing the televisual versions in their level of detail and breadth. While such games need not relay vital narrative information through their spatial reconstructions, one key criterion that fans use to judge the merits of such games is the accuracy with which they re-create the storyworld and the degree to which they feel consistent with the fictional spaces viewers have come to know over the years of a television series; in this manner, such games can function as interactive maps, as suggested in chapter 8.
The treatment of characters within tie-in games has proven to be trickier to navigate. While the digital animation of games enables developers to re-create television settings with depth and fidelity, the creation of robust and engaging people is still a technical challenge and an area where games clearly lag behind television production. Adding to the challenge is the frequent problem of games not featuring the original actors voicing their parts, widening the gap between a television character and its game avatar for viewers. Arguably the most intense bond that fans of a television serial has with the program is their affection for and connection with the characters; thus a game that fails to re-create a beloved, well-known character often alienates fans. Even when original actors are used, players often bristle at how limited game versions of beloved characters become, often reducing complex character depth into a set of quirks or a limited menu of actions. For instance, the game Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds allows you to play many different characters from the series (some with original voices and others with sound-alikes) but limits what you can do as each character to navigating virtual Sunnydale, fighting monsters, and spouting wisecracks — for Buffy fans, this is an oversimplification of beloved figures whom viewers feel they know personally. The desire to try on the skin of a favorite television character is certainly a core appeal for licensed games, but seemingly no television tie-in game has been able to re-create the core pleasure of spending time with fully realized characters in a television serial, an issue discussed more later in the chapter.6
One common strategy to overcome this gap between television and game characterizations is to focus a tie-in game on a new protagonist placed within an already established storyworld. For example, in The Sopranos game Road to Respect, you play as Joey LaRocca, the never-before-mentioned son of the late gangster Big Pussy, exploring fictionalized New Jersey locales from the television series, such as the Bada Bing and Satriale’s, and interacting with core characters including Tony, Christopher, and Paulie Walnuts. Even though Joey is a new character unburdened by the need to accurately re-create a television version, the action of the game reduces the storytelling scope to focus solely on the violent life of a mobster, thus eliminating the interplay between Tony’s dual “families” that helped define the series as a television landmark. Similar examples of tie-in games using new characters include The X-Files Game, Prison Break: The Conspiracy, and Lost: Via Domus, which use new characters as a way to navigate an existing storyworld and interact with established television characters. Thus whether tie-in games are exploring established or new characters, they are marked by a narrowing and simplification of characters, contrasting with how they frequently expand on the original in creating an immersive and expanded storyworld.
Issues with tie-in characters often stem from lack of fidelity to the original, but the third facet of story events suffers more from issues of confounded coordination with the serialized source material. Tie-in games typically follow the two options outlined for novels for what narrative events will be told. The first is to retell events from the source material, allowing players to participate in the original core narrative — this strategy is common for film tie-ins, as most games from franchises such as The Lord of the Rings and Toy Story vary little from the original films’ narrative events, although I have yet to find a television-based game using a retelling strategy comparable to novelizations. More common to television tie-ins is treating the game as a new episode in the series, depicting events that could feasibly function as an episode from the series but have not. Thus the 24 and Alias tie-in games both place our heroes in situations very similar to an arc from the original series, interacting with core characters in familiar locales, but the plots are essentially stand-alone stories amid highly serialized narratives. At their worst, such “new episode” tie-in games are merely conventional, formulaic games in a typical genre such as espionage or action, with a thin veneer of another diegetic world and cast of characters ported from a television series, not fully realized games that capture the tone or spirit of the original narrative. At their best, in games such as The Walking Dead, television tie-ins offer new stories from an established world that allow players to navigate storyworlds and interact with established characters, but such successes are comparatively rare.
Even when television tie-ins are enjoyable gaming experiences, most fail to provide a transmedia storytelling resonance. Sometimes such games are peppered with mythological information allowing a die-hard fan to recognize a reference to the program’s backstory or ongoing mystery, but I have yet to find a television tie-in game that delivers an integrated narrative payoff that feels tied to a serial canon in a significant rather than superficial way, aside from creating a navigable storyworld. I do not attribute this to any lack in the videogame medium, as many stand-alone games create compelling narrative experiences, deep and nuanced characters, and engaging plotlines. And Jenkins’s example of The Matrix franchise demonstrates how a videogame can offer canonical integration into a series narrative, even though Enter the Matrix itself was seen by most players as a less-than-satisfying game-play experience. This lack of an effective television-based integrated game speaks to a creative challenge that plagues the entire transmedia enterprise: how do you create narrative extensions from an ongoing core franchise that reward fans seeking out canon but do not become essential consumption for single-medium fans, especially when the core narrative experience is serialized over time and requires a sustained investment in time and attention? In other words, the constraints of the television industry and norms of television consumption insist that transmedia extensions from a serial franchise must reward those who partake in them but cannot punish those who do not. This delicate balance comes to the foreground in the case of Lost, arguably complex television’s most ambitious transmedia storytelling franchise.
While individual transmedia extensions such as novels or videogames can exemplify some general strategies that storytellers use to expand their narrative horizons, it is useful to look at how a particular series mounts an extensive transmedia campaign to get a sense of the scope that a television serial might embrace. There are significant research challenges to exploring transmedia storytelling, as many paratexts are hard to access after their initial release, whether they are websites that are taken offline, ephemeral objects that disappear from circulation, or emergent practices that change over time. In many cases such as ARGs, the paratext itself is experiential more than textual, making it impossible to re-create the narrative moment of participation. Thus as researchers, we must rely on either our own experiences or secondhand accounts of transmedia consumption rather than being able to revisit a story for analytical purposes.
There are a number of expansive transmedia television landmarks that might prove effective as a primary case study, including Heroes, 24, and The Office, but I have chosen to focus on Lost for two main reasons. First, it is undoubtedly one of the most extensive and expansive examples of both complex television narrative and transmedia storytelling, with extensions sprawled across nearly every medium throughout the program’s six-season run.7 Second, I study Lost’s transmedia as a participant-observer, having been highly involved in following and documenting the first ARG and consumed most of the other paratexts in real time as they were released, as discussed in chapter 8. Many of these transmedia texts no longer exist in accessible form, so I hope to use my personal consumption as a source for critical reflection on how the series used transmedia storytelling within the context of an ongoing serial narrative.8
Lost’s approach to transmedia storytelling is expansionist, not only working to extend the narrative universe across media but introducing many new characters, settings, plotlines, time periods, and mythological elements. While few viewers would accuse Lost’s television mothership of being too simplistic in its narrative scope, the series used transmedia to extend itself into tales that surpassed the wide scope of the series itself. This expansionism led Lost to augment its six television seasons with five alternate reality games, four novels, a console/PC videogame, multiple tie-in websites, two series of online videos, DVD extras, and an array of collectible merchandise. Due to both its fantasy genre and its storytelling commitments to a create rich mythological universe, Lost is well suited to this expansionist approach to transmedia, using paratexts to extend the narrative outward into new locales and arenas through an approach we might term centrifugal storytelling, as discussed more in chapter 6.
Lost was ripe for transmedia extensions in large part due to its unique locale in a mysterious place with a rich history. The unnamed island had been inhabited for centuries by various factions of people, dating back at least to ancient Egyptian times, and offers a deep well of backstory to be drilled into. Showrunners Lindelof and Cuse have used the metaphor of an iceberg to represent the storyworld — the material appearing on the series is what is visible above the waterline, but there are underwater depths and layers beneath the surface that are never seen on television. Like other deep mythologies, such as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe, Lost’s producers tapped into a wide range of styles, characters, and eras to extend the narrative universe to other media, following a trend that Jenkins notes in transmedia franchises of focusing on world building more than event-driven storytelling.9 And such transmedia extensions helped encourage viewers to engage with the series and its paratexts as forensic fans, drilling into paratexts to crack their hidden meanings and discover secrets, and to collaborate to create extensive databases and orienting paratexts of story information.
Throughout Lost’s run, the television series created openings to invite viewers to explore the storyworld in more depth. Such invitations, sometimes called “Easter eggs” if they are bonus features or moments that lead no further or “trailheads” if they open up to larger narrative pathways, rarely were central to Lost’s core narrative but typically provided a bit of backstory, cultural references, or deep history of the island. Lindelof and Cuse have discussed in interviews and podcasts that they had a specific litmus test for what mythology to reveal and explore on television versus in the transmedia extensions: if the main characters care about it, it will appear on television; if the characters do not care, it will not. While we might quibble as to how precisely Lindelof and Cuse followed their own edict, it is instructive in establishing the program’s orientation toward character-centered drama rather than mythological fantasy. The blast door map discussed in chapter 8 is a telling case of both the opportunities and the pitfalls of using transmedia to expand the program’s mythological universe. In the aftermath of its first appearance in “Lockdown,” the character Locke cared deeply about the map, attempting to re-create the image and discover its secret, until the bunker is destroyed and the map’s origins are revealed in a flashback during the second-season finale; the blast door map was not directly referenced on the television series again. However, the map reappeared within a number of paratexts, including in the videogame Lost: Via Domus, as a hidden, glow-in-the-dark image on the back of the official Lost jigsaw puzzles, as a pull-out poster in the official Lost magazine, and hidden within the final complete series collectible DVD box set, with each version 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 fun puzzle to play with deriving from Lost’s story but offering little integrated storytelling payoff. Yet the continued transmedia circulation of the map, even after the series ended, helped create the expectation of narrative rewards on the mothership, feeding a hungry fan base eager for additional mythological revelations where there were none to be found.
Lost, in large part due to its centrifugal use of transmedia, offered a wide range of genres, styles, and appeals simultaneously within the core television text: a puzzling science-fiction mystery, a dimension-spanning romance, a rip-roaring outdoors adventure, and a religious parable about letting go of the past and finding fellowship. As discussed in chapter 10, the television finale downplayed the puzzle-box trailheads it had left throughout its journey and, in doing so, betrayed the expectations of many of its most hardcore fans. Lost always struggled to manage the rabid fan base’s divergent expectations: viewers were invested in a wide range of the program’s narrative facets, from the complex mythology to romantic relationships, heady time-traveling science fiction to adventure-driven action sequences. While at times fans split on the relative merits of particular plotlines, episodes, or characters, as a whole the series did an admirable and arguably unprecedented job of servicing such a broad array of appeals and fan bases. A key strategy for accomplishing this storytelling breadth was to center the core television series around characters, their adventures and dramas, and how they encounter the mythology and to allow the more in-depth mythological explorations and explanations to flower in transmedia properties.
The majority of Lost’s transmedia extensions prioritize storyworld expansion and exploration instead of building on the program’s emotional arcs and character relationships, with some narrative events posited in an awkward relationship to the narrative canon. Two high-profile paratexts, the videogame Lost: Via Domus and the novel Bad Twin, which was posited as a diegetic extension authored by the deceased Oceanic 815 passenger Gary Troup, were initially framed as canonical extensions but later were partially recanted by the showrunners as not fully connected to the core story. In both cases, Lindelof and Cuse highlighted that the outsourced creators of these extensions took the plotlines they outlined in new directions that contradicted the core canon from the television program; instead, both fell into familiar traditions of “new episode” storytelling that is outside the core canonical arc but troublesome for a highly serialized program in which episodes always add to larger arcs. One of the chief challenges for creating canonically integrated transmedia for an ongoing serial is that the demands of running a complex series already tax the energies of producer-managers, as discussed in chapter 3, leaving paratexts in the hands of hired-gun writers who frequently fail to meet the expectations of producers — creating coherent complex transmedia narratives requires a degree of storytelling control that the current system of television production seems unable to fully meet, and given reduced production budgets in recent years, it is hard to imagine that future programs will have the personnel to successfully manage such integrated narratives.
Aside from the video minisodes that appeared online and on DVDs (which were produced by the standard television production personnel), the transmedia paratext that was most controlled by the core writers’ room was arguably its most innovative: the first ARG, The Lost Experience. Running in the summer of 2006, The Lost Experience (TLE) was the first extensive ARG to emerge during an ongoing, mainstream, hit television series, filling the hiatus between the program’s second and third seasons. Lasting four months and spanning an array of media across the world, including websites, podcasts, television appearances, voicemail, live events, and merchandise, it is also arguably the most ambitious and extensive ARG yet attempted for a television series and thus established many of the industry’s assumptions about the form, its possibilities, and its limitations. TLE was conceived by Lost showrunners Lindelof and Cuse, with leadership from staff writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, making the ARG an integrated aspect of the program’s narrative canon and core production team.
Lost’s producers have suggested that TLE had three main goals: to offer narrative revelations for hardcore fans that would not be addressed in the series itself, to experiment with innovative forms of storytelling, and to keep the program active in press coverage and the public consciousness during its summer hiatus.10 The last of these was clearly a success — the experiments of TLE generated a good deal of press coverage, including a June Entertainment Weekly story teased on the magazine’s cover, effectively avoiding a summer slump of waning enthusiasm and placing ARGs in the mainstream consciousness like never before. As an innovative form of narrative, TLE provided lessons from storytelling mistakes and problems, outweighing any compelling formal innovations. TLE consistently had to balance the desires of ARG players to be challenged with innovative puzzles and the clamoring of television fans for more direct narrative payoffs. The in-game story of Rachel Blake investigating the Hanso Foundation rarely resonated as much more than a skeleton on which to hang clues, and the game did not stand apart from the storyworld established on the television series as a compelling narrative experience. The game play and immersive engagement was too erratic in quality and sophistication for hardcore ARGers, driving many of them away after the first few weeks and leaving less experienced players to try to work through subsequent puzzles. Additionally, the integrated marketing with sponsors such as Jeep, Verizon, and Sprite struck many players as crass and intrusive, violating the playful spirit that ARGs aim to capture.11
As to the goal of revealing narrative mythology for the ongoing television series, the ARG 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 third season. TLE’s biggest revelations were in the so-called Sri Lanka Video, which included an “orientation film” featuring Alvar Hanso, explaining the origins and mission of the DHARMA Initiative, the meaning of the “numbers” (which had been a central mystery from the program’s first two seasons) as being part of an equation predicting the end of the world that was being researched by the DHARMA Initiative, and numerous other clues that connected directly with the television canon. However, these revelations never appeared in the series itself, and the numbers were given a different (but not contradictory) explanation in the program’s final season. For fans who participated in the ARG, the mystery of the numbers was already solved, and the new explanation felt like a slap in the face undermining fans’ engagement by placing the narrative events uncovered in the ARG into an ambiguous paracanonical status. In contrast, some of TLE ’s revelations were considered “unanswered questions” by television fans who were left unsatisfied with Lost’s lingering mythological ambiguity — for such fans, knowing that the numbers and DHARMA were further explained in the ARG increased frustration over the television program’s narrative, as they wanted to be able to comprehend the series fully without requiring “online research.” Even for TLE players who learned the secrets of the Sri Lanka Video (which has received over one million views on YouTube, still a small fraction of the program’s global television audience), the fact that the television series never addressed, and subsequently contradicted or displaced, its revelations made the game play more frustrating in retrospect, feeling more like a waste of time than a storytelling bonus.
The scaled-down efforts to use ARGs in the Lost franchise in subsequent years suggest that many of these lessons were in fact learned, as the producers moved to create transmedia experiences that were less ambitious and complex but ultimately less disappointing to their target audiences. Lindelof and Cuse found the challenges of running a narratively integrated ARG within the already complicated television production process far too daunting to try again, and thus they scaled back the subsequent ARGs to be less integral to the program’s canon. 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 a mythological universe as has ever been 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 series 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 series 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 found Lost’s emotional payoffs and sweeping character arcs sufficiently engaging and entertaining; however, its use of transmedia and cultivation of a forensic fandom encouraged us to expect more, leading many fans to revolt against the series in its final hours for not delivering its answers in a clearly marked package, a tension I discuss more in chapter 10.
This dichotomy between forensic fans watching (and playing) for coherence and emotional viewers getting swept up in the adventure and romance, as discussed in chapter 7, mirrors one of the program’s main thematic structures: the contrast between rational and supernatural outlooks, embodied by the battle between Jack Shepard’s “man of science” and John Locke’s “man of faith.” Even though neither survives the narrative, it is clear by the program’s conclusion that faith trumps science, with Jack sacrificing himself to the island’s mystical forces and endorsing John’s vision of fate and spiritual meaning. In choosing faith over science, and in turn privileging the genre of fantasy adventure over science fiction, Lost was willing to let many dangling mysteries go unexplained within the context of the television series, offering instead a spiritual celebration of Jack’s (and, by extension, our) “letting go” of the need for rational understanding in the program’s closing moments. And yet the program’s transmedia strategy still sided with the rational exploration of island mythology, despite its frequently frustrating incoherence — the final DVD release contained a bonus 12-minute “epilogue” video that provided a flood of answers to dangling questions about the island, DHARMA, Walt, and various other mythological mysteries. The playful video winks at viewers, with a DHARMA worker chastising Ben by saying, “Wait. You can’t just walk out of here. We deserve answers!” tweaking fans’ dissatisfaction with the finale, as discussed in chapter 10. And even though the answers resolve some ambiguity, it becomes clear that this additional content is canonical but nonessential, relegated to a paratext simply to appease those hardcore forensic fans who would not follow the finale’s advice, to let go.
Thus Lost’s transmedia tries to follow some clear parameters: use paratexts to expand access to the storyworld and island mythology but keep character arcs and core events centered on the television mothership. While this might reward hardcore fans willing to expand their narrative consumption across media, it does create frustrations for both transmedia consumers underwhelmed by the payoffs and television fans who do not want to have to do “homework” to understand their favorite series. Although most Lost fans who were left frustrated by the finale probably had not been transmedia consumers, the program’s reliance on transmedia to parcel out answers did set up expectations that answers would be found via forensic rationality rather than the spiritual acceptance that the finale offered. Lost’s commercial and creative successes have established the series as a model for transmedia television, inspiring numerous clones in both television and transmedia formats, including Heroes, FlashForward, and Revolution. But another case study suggests a more modest approach to television transmedia that might ultimately be more successful.
If Lost uses transmedia to expand its narrative universe outward to the breaking point, Breaking Bad demonstrates the alternate vector, creating transmedia to fold in on itself via centripetal storytelling. As discussed in chapter 6, Breaking Bad is an intense character study of a chemistry teacher gradually turning into a drug kingpin, mixing riveting suspense and pitch-black comedy to most closely resemble a television serial as made by the Coen brothers. Most television series that have embraced transmedia aggressively are in fantastic or comedic genres, such as Heroes and The Office. Fantasy and science-fiction programs can use transmedia to create more expansive and detailed versions of their storyworlds, which typically are a core appeal within the genre — the emphasis on world building through paratexts is a time-honored strategy for narratives set in universes with their own scientific or magical properties that beg further investigation and exploration. For comedies, transmedia can be a site to develop additional gags or to highlight throwaway plotlines for secondary characters without disrupting the plot and character arcs of the television mothership.
While Breaking Bad was modest in its use of transmedia compared to programs in these other genres, its strategies offer an interesting contrast. If Lost’s expansive transmedia offered new narrative events and broadened the storyworld, Breaking Bad ’s focus was primarily on character. This use of character-based transmedia makes sense given Breaking Bad ’s genre and narrative strategies: there is no underlying mythology or complex mystery to parse, so the transmedia extensions offer virtually no narrative events that seem particularly relevant to the story as a whole. As discussed more in chapters 4 and 6, Breaking Bad ’s focus is firmly on characters and their transformations, so its transmedia strategy is well matched to the program’s core narrative tone and scope. Breaking Bad ’s storyworld is a fairly realistic version of Albuquerque, New Mexico, so its transmedia give almost no attention to the setting itself. This deemphasis on setting and plot arcs within its transmedia is partly tied to the program’s genre of serious drama, but even a similarly dramatic series such as Mad Men grounds its small excursions into transmedia within its periodized world, such as its online Cocktail Guide and Fashion Show sites.
Instead, Breaking Bad ’s transmedia extensions focus on character over setting or plot, providing additional depth to a series that already features highly elaborated characters. Most of this transmedia character development focuses on secondary figures rather than the main protagonist, Walter White, and highlights the program’s comedic rather than dramatic tone, with additional videos and websites illuminating the amusing backgrounds of Hank, Marie, Badger, and Saul, some of the least serious characters in the series — one enjoyable example is the diegetic extension promotional website for Saul Goodman’s law firm, bettercallsaul.com, serving as a dual parody of both ambulance-chasing lawyers and cheesy website design, and more recently as a promotion for the 2015 spin-off series Better Call Saul. Even when the program’s dark main character, Walter, is featured in a minisode, it paints him in a more comedic light, with short videos that show him listening to his future brother-in-law Hank’s prewedding sexual hijinks or carrying out a bungled breaking-and-entering with a drugged-out Badger. These minisodes do not contradict the program’s plot arcs but offer a different but compatible comedic tone that tends to be secondary on the darker mothership.
Although Breaking Bad lacks the mythological expanses that encourage tie-in games to explore the storyworlds, the series has spawned two online minigames that point to another direction for game-based transmedia. Both were created for AMC’s website with direct coordination from the program’s producers, featuring motion-comic-style graphics with an interactive narrative design; the first, The Interrogation, was launched during the third season in spring 2010, while the follow-up, The Cost of Doing Business, was released for both the web and mobile devices prior to season 4 in summer 2011. The Interrogation places us in the shoes of DEA agent Hank as he interrogates a suspect member of a drug-smuggling organization; in The Cost of Doing Business, we play as Jesse, trying to get paid what he is owed from a drug customer. Neither plotline is canonical to the series, but both feel like plausible moments for the characters in the new-episode model common to tie-in games; Gordon Smith, the series writer’s assistant who scripted the games, suggests about each game, “Hopefully [it] is true to the characters as they are on the show, but it’s not stories that literally take place in the timetable of the series. We feel like they’re part of the show that somebody could have experienced at some point, [with events that] had the same feel of something on the show.”12 This emphasis on creating extensions that coordinate character identities and consistent tone with the series points to a strength of Breaking Bad ’s transmedia: by downplaying plot, the extensions work by allowing viewers to spend time with the characters without encouraging the forensic attention to story as with most canonic extensions.
The minisodes featuring Jesse are indicative of this approach: his storylines on the series can frequently be quite dark and serious, but his minisodes focus comedically on his fledgling band and artistic creations, rather than his struggles with addiction, quest for self-discovery as Walt’s surrogate son, or search for moral clarity in the face of his criminal acts. Most interestingly, one video previews a hypothetical animated series, Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E., featuring superhero versions of the characters as created by Jesse and transformed into a crime-fighting team rather than a burgeoning criminal enterprise.13 Not only does this video offer an amusing take on the program’s characters for die-hard fans, but it also provides a compelling look into Jesse’s psychology via how he narrativizes and rationalizes his own experiences and positions his impressive artistic skills in relation to his criminal actions. Nothing that happens in this video is canonical, as it is clearly outside the storyworld — perhaps it could be read as a diegetic extension of something Jesse would make if he had the time, expertise, and dedication, but more likely it is a hypothetical game of speculation, playing with genre, tone, and production mode while retaining a consistency of character. Like most of Breaking Bad ’s transmedia, such videos draw you into the core television series and offer some additional depth rather than expanding the storyworld’s scope and breadth. All of the program’s extensions seem like they could easily be canonical, if only due to their modest scope that rarely intersects with the main thrust of the television story, but they do not invite the type of intense dissection of plotlines typical of Lost’s transmedia.
None of Breaking Bad ’s transmedia extensions reward viewers with trailheads into deeper narrative experiences, flesh out the fictional universe, or relay any seemingly vital story events. Instead, they allow us to spend more time with characters whom we have grown close to over the course of the television serial, extending the parasocial relationships I discuss more in chapter 4. While these paratexts may not seem as innovative or immersive as Lost’s, they might even work better as extensions to the core narrative by playing to the strengths of serial television: establishing connections to characters. Nobody exploring Breaking Bad ’s transmedia would have his or her expectations of the series transformed or misdirected, as they are clearly positioned as supporting, nonessential “extras” rather than vital transmedia plotting. But in their modest success, I think they more successfully accomplish the goal of rewarding viewers who consume them but not punishing those who do not. And as we see further experimentation and innovation with transmedia storytelling, Breaking Bad and Lost both offer valuable lessons to how to balance viewers’ expectations, canonical concerns, and the relative importance of events, storyworld, and characters.
In the contrast between Lost’s and Breaking Bad ’s paratextual strategies, we can see two larger tendencies that typify the practices of transmedia storytelling, dueling approaches that we might label “What Is” versus “What If?” The former is embodied on television by Lost and fits with Jenkins’s definition of the form as exemplified by The Matrix. “What Is” transmedia seeks to extend the fiction canonically, explaining the universe with coordinated precision and hopefully expanding viewers’ understanding and appreciation of the storyworld. This narrative model encourages forensic fandom with the promise of eventual revelations once all the pieces are put together — the emblematic example of a “What Is” paratext might be Lost’s jigsaw puzzles, which literally require the assembly of all the pieces of four separate puzzles to reveal extra narrative information hidden within its glow-in-the-dark image of the blast door map. If one goal of consuming a story is mastery of its fictional universe, then “What Is” transmedia scatters narrative understanding across a variety of extensions to be collectively reassembled by a team of die-hard fans to piece together the elaborate puzzle.
The majority of official storytelling extensions seem designed to fulfill the goals of “What Is” transmedia, and the measuring stick that critics and fans use to assess those paratexts typically defines success through canonical coordination and narrative integration. However, an opposite mode of transmedia points to different narrative goals and markers of success: the “What If?” extension as suggested by Breaking Bad ’s Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E. This approach to transmedia poses hypothetical possibilities rather than canonical certainties, inviting viewers to imagine alternative stories and approaches to storytelling that are distinctly not to be treated as potential canon. The goal for “What If?” transmedia is to launch off the mothership into parallel dimensions, foregrounding tone, mood, character, or style more than continuity with canonical plots and storyworlds. We are never meant to believe that Jesse really created a comic and animated series fictionalizing his friends as a superhero team, but we are presented with the possibility that he could have and invited to imagine “What if he did?” This style of hypothetical narrative paratext highlights the fictionality of all narrative, as there is nothing more “real” in the characterization of Walter White as accidental drug dealer than Jesse’s reinterpretation of him as Doctor Chemistry, fighting off zombies “for the right to be awesome,” as both are equally artificial works of fiction, albeit with one clearly marked as subsidiary to the other. Just as we embrace serial narrative for its creation of compelling storyworlds in which we can immerse ourselves, “What If?” transmedia multiplies the possibilities of those fictions into the realm of hypothetical variations and transmutations.14
Both “What Is” and “What If?” transmedia can best be seen as vectors or tendencies rather than distinct categories, with fluidity and blur between the dual approaches — for instance, we might think of the Lost tie-in novel Bad Twin as conceived as a “What Is” diegetic extension that transformed through its troubled production process into a “What If?” hypothetical paratext. Many tie-in novels and games function as noncanonical “What If?” paratexts but lack the playful variation and imagination of Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E.; instead, they often appear as failed “What Is” extensions, setting up viewers to futilely search for narrative continuities and canon only to come up empty. Both transmedia tendencies embrace a ludic narrative quality but draw on different styles of play, as influentially categorized by Roger Caillois as a contrast between rule-driven ludus and free-play paidia.15 “What Is” transmedia extensions work more like ludus puzzles with proper solutions and final revelations, while “What If?” paratexts feature more of a sense of paidia dress-up or performative role-play, spinning off scenarios with no “real” outcome or canonical narrative function.
We can see important precedents for both of these transmedia modes in the realm of fan productions and consumption practices. Some fan cultures produce paratexts clearly in the “What Is” realm, typified by the detailed schematics of the technology in the Star Trek universe, analyzed by Bob Rehak as “blueprint culture.”16 Such orienting paratexts provide definitive guides to both canonical motherships and various transmedia extensions, all driven by the goal to arrive at the singular, correct account of complex narrative material. This strategy of mapping and cataloguing fictions has seen a boom with the rise of wikis, as fans can collaborate in creating encyclopedic documentation of a storyworld, as with Lostpedia or Star Trek’s Memory Alpha, as discussed in chapter 8. Such modes of affirmational fan engagement prioritize canonical authenticity, seek narrative mastery, authorize the role of controlling showrunner, and search for connections and theories to fill narrative gaps — all facets prioritized by “What Is” transmedia and discussed more in chapter 3.
The best-known models of fan productivity follow the “What If?” paradigm, with fan fiction, remix videos, and other forms of fan creativity that make few claims to canonical authenticity but playfully posit a range of hypothetical narrative possibilities. Such paratexts are valued for their transformational expansiveness, thinking beyond the terrain of canon by positing possibilities that clearly could not be “real” within the fictional universe — whether building on subtexts that could never be explicitly represented, offering intertextual crossovers to other franchises or real life, or creating parodies that playfully revise a program’s genre, style, or tone. Some “What If?” fan creations tell stories that strive to seamlessly fit within the canonical mothership or offer alternative interpretations that fans may view as in keeping with the spirit of their vision of a series — sometimes even more faithfully than the canonical ongoing narrative does. However, such fan creativity nearly always positions itself as outside the core canon and embraces its hypothetical possibilities, even when it might be regarded as more satisfying than the official narrative canon.
An interesting case of fan-produced transmedia that plays with both of these vectors is an unofficial alternate reality game for Alias, produced in 2005 and generally referred to as the Omnifam ARG. Launching during the program’s third season and after ABC had produced official ARGs during the first two seasons, the Omnifam game did not announce itself as an unofficial paratext but, in keeping with ARG style, presented itself as part of the “real world” without reference to the television series as fiction — it only became clear over the course of game play that it was not licensed by ABC and was instead created and run by fans. Interestingly, the unofficial ARG was much more faithful to Alias’s spirit of conspiratorial complexity than were the official ARGs, which featured more stand-alone, web-based minigames using the program’s iconography and storyworld. The Omnifam game appeared to offer “What Is” integrated story information about the overarching Rambaldi mythology — except it was distinctly unofficial and unsanctioned by the program’s creative team, making its pseudocanon decidedly “What If?”17 This tension speaks to both the desire of some fans to have transmedia experiences that pay off with significant narrative integration and the urge of other fans to create their own stories that mimic the canonical, regardless of authorial endorsement or in-series confirmation.
If fans step in to create pseudocanonical “What Is” transmedia as in the Omnifam case, there is potentially tension in the opposite direction as well. As the terrain of “What If?” has been occupied primarily by fans, there is legitimate concern that the industry producing such extensions could work to co-opt fannish creativity and close down the realm of the hypothetical to fan producers. For instance, Sci-Fi Network offered an online video site for Battlestar Galactica fans to create their own remixes, but only within the channel’s chosen clips and usage policies, effectively constraining the free play of “What If?” creativity.18 But I would contend that the official production of a video such as Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E. celebrates the fannish “What If?” impulse without closing down possibilities and validates it by using the official talent of the program’s cast members to make the hypothetical feel more fully realized. While fans cannot get Aaron Paul to record voice-over for their creative work, the video opens up new raw materials and hypothetical directions for future fan transmedia without enforcing a hierarchy between licensed and unlicensed material around the question of canon.
Jenkins’s model of “What Is” balanced transmedia in which plot coherence is distributed across media is an exciting possibility for storytellers and deserves the attention it has gotten. But for transmedia properties with a clear mothership in serialized television, it may be an untenable model, as the commercial system cannot effectively sustain a franchise that risks eroding television ratings points for viewers who are uninterested in straying beyond a single medium, not to mention the storytelling challenges of crafting complex plots that can function both over time and across media. I would point to the comparatively unexplored (at least via official paratexts) realm of “What If?” transmedia storytelling as a potentially more productive avenue for serial television to develop, building on the medium’s strengths of character and mood over plotting and mythology and tapping into the clear fan interest in imagining noncanonical possibilities. The proliferation of hypothetical transmedia narratives offers its own “What If?” scenario of another dimension of complexity that has yet to be discovered.