1. According to Nielsen ratings, The Agency ranked number 49 out of prime time broadcast programs for the 2001 – 2002 season, with 10.3 million estimated average viewers per episode, while Alias was at number 60 with 9.7 million and 24 was number 76 with 8.6 million; see “How Did Your Favorite Show Rate?,” USA Today, May 28, 2002, http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/2002/2002-05-28-year-end-chart.htm.
2. See David Lambert, “24’s TV-on-DVD Success Leads to New DVD Concepts,” TVShowsOnDVD.com, October 22, 2003, http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/24/764.
3. See Michael Kackman, “Conclusion: Spies Are Back,” in Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 176 – 190, for a fine example of such cultural analysis.
4. See Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown, Investigating “Alias”: Secrets and Spies (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); and Steven Peacock, Reading “24”: TV against the Clock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), for representative ranges of scholarship on these two series.
5. For important earlier explorations of television’s narrative form, see Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974); John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Horace Newcomb, “Magnum, Champagne of Television?,” Channels of Communication, May – June 1985, 23 – 26; Jane Feuer, “Narrative Form in American Network Television,” in High Theory / Low Culture, ed. Colin MacCabe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 101 – 114; Sarah Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 61 – 100; Christopher Anderson, “Reflection on Magnum, P.I.,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112 – 125; Thomas Schatz, “St. Elsewhere and the Evolution of the Ensemble Series,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 85 – 100; Marc Dolan, “The Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What Happened to/on Twin Peaks,” in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to “Twin Peaks,” ed. David Lavery (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 30 – 50; Greg M. Smith, “Plotting a TV Show about Nothing: Patterns of Narration in Seinfeld,” Creative Screenwriting 2, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 82 – 90; Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From “Hill St. Blues” to “ER” (New York: Continuum, 1996); Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Robyn R. Warhol, “Feminine Intensities: Soap Opera Viewing as a Technology of Gender,” Genders, no. 28 (1998), http://www.genders.org/g28/g28_intensities.html.
6. For more recent examples of such work, see Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003); Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI, 2004); Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 93 – 112; Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon, eds., The Contemporary Television Series (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2005); Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005); Michael Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative,” Velvet Light Trap, no. 58 (Fall 2006): 16 – 28; Sean O’Sullivan, “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: Deadwood and Serial Fiction,” in Reading “Deadwood”: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 115 – 130; Greg M. Smith, Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of “Ally McBeal” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Sean O’Sullivan, “Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season,” StoryWorlds 2 (2010): 59 – 77; Shawn Shimpach, Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action Hero (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2010); Paul Booth, “Memories, Temporalities, Fictions: Temporal Displacement in Contemporary Television,” Television & New Media 12, no. 4 (July 2011): 370 – 388; and Anthony Smith, “Putting the Premium into Basic: Slow-Burn Narratives and the Loss-Leader Function of AMC’s Original Drama Series,” Television and New Media 14, no. 2 (March 2013): 150 – 166.
7. I explore this model more fully in Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
8. See David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches (New York: AMS, 1989), 369 – 398; Henry Jenkins, “Historical Poetics and the Popular Cinema,” in Approaches to the Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2007).
9. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002).
10. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
11. See Will Brooker, “Living on Dawson’s Creek: Teen Viewers, Cultural Convergence, and Television Overflow,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (December 1, 2001): 456 – 472; Jonathan Gray, “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 64 – 81; Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010); Matt Hills, “The Dispersible Television Text: Theorising Moments of the New Doctor Who,” Science Fiction Film & Television 1 (April 1, 2008): 25 – 44; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006).
12. This vision of textuality was convincingly argued decades ago by John Fiske, “Moments of Television: Neither the Text nor the Audience,” in Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power, ed. Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth (New York: Routledge, 1989), 56 – 78. See Derek Kompare, “More ‘Moments of Television’: Online Cult Television Authorship,” in Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, and Bryan Sebok (New York: Routledge, 2010), 95 – 113, for an update for the digital era. Frank Kelleter, “Toto, I Think We’re in Oz Again (and Again and Again): Remakes and Popular Seriality,” in Remake/Remodel: Film Remakes, Adaptations, and Fan Productions, ed. Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2012), offers a compelling model of such “sprawling textuality” for the study of serial media.
13. See Lostpedia, “Statistics,” http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Statistics (accessed March 24, 2012).
14. We have no specific metrics on Lostpedia’s readership during the show’s original airing, but Benjamin Mako Hill, “Editor-to-Reader Ratios on Wikipedia,” Copyrighteous (blog), February 6, 2011, http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20110206-00, calculates that an average of 0.025% of Wikipedia readers have made at least five edits. If we were to extrapolate this ratio to the 10,000 Lostpedians with at least five edits, it would place the site’s readership at around 40 million; this figure is undoubtedly high but clearly points to the likelihood that a good percentage of Lost viewers were actively reading Lostpedia or other fan sites without being tabulated.
15. For more on television style, see Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style (New York: Routledge, 2009); and G. Smith, Beautiful TV.
16. For a chronicle of this device and its use across television and other media, see the TV Tropes entry “How We Got Here,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HowWeGotHere (accessed March 24, 2012).
17. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).
1. My use of “narrative complexity” bears some resemblance to Robin Nelson’s term “flexi-narrative,” especially as Glen Creeber employs it. However, my emphasis is less on quick-edited segmentation than Nelson’s, and my analysis was developed independent from his work. See Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI, 2004).
2. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 155.
3. Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
4. For more on conventional episodic and serial norms, see Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 227 – 234.
5. Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 93 – 112.
6. I use the concept of storyworld as developed by David Herman to suggest a viewer’s mental construct of a fictional universe containing the setting, events, people, and rules of any given narrative; see David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
7. Louis C.K. posted this comment on The A.V. Club review for the “God” episode, http://www.avclub.com/articles/god,44549/.
8. Quoted in Matt Webb Mitovitch, “Heroes Creator Solves Finale’s Biggest Mystery,” TV Guide, May 23, 2007, http://www.tvguide.com/news/heroes-creator-solves-16552.aspx.
9. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
10. For more on the role of gaps in serial storytelling, see Sean O’Sullivan, “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: Deadwood and Serial Fiction,” in Reading “Deadwood”: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 115 – 129; Sean O’Sullivan, “Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season,” StoryWorlds 2 (2010): 59 – 77.
11. It is telling that in recent years, network and cable programs that contain advertising breaks are less likely to feature lengthy title sequences, as producers feel squeezed by limited screen time, while the longer and less strictly timed premium-cable series on Showtime and HBO are free to create lengthy and imaginative title sequences that help define the series and shape our expectations.
12. Stephen V. Duncan, A Guide to Screenwriting Success: Writing for Film and Television (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 220.
13. See Paul Booth, Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), for a fuller discussion of temporal play in complex television.
14. See Sean O’Sullivan, “The Sopranos: Episodic Storytelling,” in How to Watch Television, ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 65 – 73; and Dana Polan, The Sopranos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), for more on Chase’s approach to serialization and the program’s episodic and seasonal structure.
15. For a less positive take on this transformation, see Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011).
16. For more on the key industrial and technological transformations of television in the 1990s and 2000s, see Jennifer Gillan, Television and New Media: Must-Click TV (New York: Routledge, 2010); and Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: NYU Press, 2007).
17. See Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, for more on this shift in television’s cultural legitimation.
18. See Warren Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
19. For an overview of television’s production processes, see Mittell, Television and American Culture.
20. This claim was stated by Carlton Cuse in a personal interview with Cuse and Damon Lindelof, March 23, 2010.
21. It is important to note that beyond the first airing on American television, a cable channel’s brand identity matters little to viewers who watch a series on DVD or Netflix or see it through global distribution. As these alternative models become even more prominent, we could see the goal of establishing a cable brand becoming less prominent, although such transformations are hard to predict.
22. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005).
23. See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006), for an influential take on these shifts in participatory culture.
24. Another important technological development in recent years is the rise of HDTV and digital television, allowing for higher-resolution images and more “cinematic” production styles and genres. This shift has less impact on narrative form than do recording technologies such as DVDs; for more on HDTV’s impact on television’s cultural legitimacy, see Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television.
25. See Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
26. I discuss The Wire’s cross-media comparisons in Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic,” in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 429 – 438; see also Frank Kelleter, Serial Agencies: “The Wire” and Its Readers (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).
27. Derek Kompare, “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television,” Television and New Media 7, no. 4 (2006): 335 – 360.
28. For more on Lost’s issues with the perception that there is no master plan, see Ivan Askwith, “ ‘Do You Even Know Where This Is Going?’: Lost’s Viewers and Narrative Premeditation,” and Jason Mittell, “Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies),” both in Reading “Lost”: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 119 – 138, 159 – 180.
29. See Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).
30. O’Sullivan, “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue.”
31. Sconce, “What If?”
32. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
33. See Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995), 87 – 105; and Lisa Trahair, “The Narrative-Machine: Buster Keaton’s Cinematic Comedy, Deleuze’s Recursion Function and the Operational Aesthetic,” Senses of Cinema, no. 33 (October 2004), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/33/keaton_deleuze/, for examples of the operational aesthetic applied to film comedy.
34. See Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
35. Such narrative special effects have a literary analogue in “unnatural narratives,” in which the storytelling mechanics deviate from mimetic realism in a manner to call reader attention to the narrational mechanics. See Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models,” Narrative 18, no. 2 (2010): 113 – 136.
36. Alan Sepinwall, “ ‘Parks and Recreation’ Mike Schur on the Eventful Season Finale,” HitFix, April 24, 2014, http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/parks-and-recreation-mike-schur-on-the-eventful-season-finale.
37. For more on the Baroque influence on complex television, see Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); and Angela Ndalianis, “Television and the Neo-Baroque,” in The Contemporary Television Series, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2005), 83 – 101.
38. For more on the procedural logic of games, see Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
39. See Buckland, Puzzle Films.
40. Quoted in Jace Lacob, “The Good Wife: Robert and Michelle King on Alicia, Kalinda, Renewal Prospects, and More,” The Daily Beast, March 12, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/09/the-good-wife-robert-and-michelle-king-on-alicia-kalinda-renewal-prospects-and-more.html.
1. I discuss pilots more in Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); see pages 46 – 52 for a discussion of the industrial practices of pilot production and pages 258 – 267 for a detailed analysis of Lost’s pilot.
2. Television pilots often forgo opening credits until they are prepared for broadcast, although producer Mark Frost recalls that Twin Peaks’ iconic credit sequence was produced for the original pilot. See my Twitter conversation with Frost, May 27, 2014: https://twitter.com/mfrost11/status/471406258021355520.
3. A copy of the Alias pilot script was posted online, but was removed from the website since I downloaded it.
4. For more on the series, see Rhonda V. Wilcox and Sue Turnbull, eds., Investigating “Veronica Mars”: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).
5. See the Television Without Pity recap for a description of the originally aired pilot, at http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/veronica_mars/pilot_84/.
6. See Rob Thomas’s site, at http://www.slaverats.com/.
7. The permanent status of this version is complicated by the fact that the version available on iTunes and Amazon as of May 2014 is the shorter broadcast edit. Even though DVDs are becoming less central to the television aftermarket, they still do serve more of an archival permanence than do downloadable or streaming files, which can be altered or withdrawn.
8. Rob Thomas, interview on Television Without Pity, March 8, 2005, http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/veronica_mars/the-rob-thomas-interview-part/.
9. The line “that’s where I come in” is distinctly featured in the 1967 relaunch of Dragnet, although it probably appears in episodes of the program’s 1950s radio or television run, which are less widely available now. Interestingly, the line also appears in the 1955 pilot of Gunsmoke, a Western featuring a Dragnet-style introductory voice-over by Marshall Dillon.
10. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
11. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
12. Noël Carroll, “Narrative Closure,” Philosophical Studies 135, no. 1 (2007): 1 – 15.
13. Showrunner Rob Thomas describes these contractual obligations in his interview with Television Without Pity, March 8, 2005, http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/veronica_mars/the-rob-thomas-interview-part/10/.
14. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
1. See Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974); Horace Newcomb and Robert S. Alley, The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with Creators of American TV (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
2. See Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), for more on the pilot production process.
3. This room-based model is less common in other national television systems, where individual episode authors frequently have more independence; see Matt Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating “Doctor Who” in the Twenty-First Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), for a discussion of authorship in the British case of Doctor Who.
4. Quoted in Brett Martin, Difficult Men: From “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” to “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 258.
5. Quoted in Tim Molloy, “Damon Lindelof’s History of Lost (a Show He Longed to Quit),” The Wrap, September 23, 2011, http://www.thewrap.com/tv/print/31281.
6. For more on Lost’s authorship, see Denise Mann, “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2009), 99 – 114.
7. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 29 – 43; Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays against the American Grain (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011).
8. See Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, eds., Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009).
9. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).
10. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
11. See Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011), for a discussion of television’s authorship and cultural legitimation.
12. Newman and Levine frame television authorship’s evaluative function solely as a process of legitimation (ibid.), which is too narrow of an understanding of the various ways authorial identity can brand a program’s aesthetic roles.
13. Emily Nussbaum, “Roux with a View,” New Yorker, October 1, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2012/10/01/121001crte_television_nussbaum.
14. Quoted in Jonathan Kirby, “Not Just a Fluke: How Darin Morgan Saved The X-Files,” PopMatters, October 29, 2007, http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/not-just-a-fluke-how-darin-morgan-saved-the-x-files.
15. For more on these validating discourses around The Wire, see Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic,” in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 429 – 438.
16. These interviews can be extremely popular, as with the showrunner “walkthrough” series on The A.V. Club — according to the site’s former TV editor Todd VandDerWerff (personal email), these multipart interviews received high readership in 2011 for showrunners including Community’s Dan Harmon (over 163,000 hits), Parks and Recreation’s Michael Schur (92,000) and Louie’s Louis C.K. (81,000).
17. See Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with “Babylon 5”: Fan Performance in a Media Universe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
18. See Myles McNutt, “Replying with the Enemy: Showrunners on Twitter II,” Antenna (blog), November 11, 2010, http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2010/11/11/replying-with-the-enemy-showrunners-on-twitter-ii/.
19. See Carlton Cuse, “Lost’s Carlton Cuse Relives Dealing with the Modern Celebrity of the TV Showrunner,” Vulture (blog), New York, October 19, 2012, http://www.vulture.com/2012/10/carlton-cuse-lost-showrunner-celebrity.html.
20. Suzanne Scott, “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 43 – 52. For more on the fan-friendly author, see Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord; and Derek Kompare, “More ‘Moments of Television’: Online Cult Television Authorship,” in Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, and Bryan Sebok (New York: Routledge, 2010), 95 – 113. See Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), for more on authorial paratexts.
21. Kompare, “More ‘Moments of Television.’ ”
22. See the semiannual Hollywood Writers Report released by the Writers Guild of America, West, http://www.wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=922; the last available statistics were that women writers were only 30% of the television writing workforce in 2013.
23. For more on the strike and its public circulation, see Miranda J. Banks, “The Picket Line Online: Creative Labor, Digital Activism, and the 2007 – 2008 Writers Guild of America Strike,” Popular Communication 8, no. 1 (2010): 20 – 33.
24. For more on Dr. Horrible, see Anouk Lang, “ ‘The Status Is Not Quo!’: Pursuing Resolution in Web-Disseminated Serial Narrative,” Narrative 18, no. 3 (2010): 367 – 381.
25. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); for a compelling history and synopsis of the various ways the implied author has been used, see Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006).
26. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 130.
27. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 62.
28. Jan Alber offers a similar model for cinema under the term “hypothetical filmmaker,” although that model seems less derived from reception practices and contextual discourses. See Jan Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism: Cinematic Narration Reconsidered,” in Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, ed. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 163 – 185.
29. Kindt and Müller, Implied Author, 152 – 154.
30. Torben Grodal, “Agency in Film, Filmmaking, and Reception,” in Visual Authorship: Creativity and Intentionality in Media, ed. Torben Grodal, Bente Larsen, and Iben Thorving Laursen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005), 15 – 36.
31. Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
32. Quoted in Nathan Rabin, “Louis C.K. Walks Us through Louie’s Second Season (Part 3 of 4),” The A.V. Club, September 21, 2011, http://www.avclub.com/articles/louis-ck-walks-us-through-louies-second-season-par,62050/.
33. See Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), for a historical account of such serial consumption practices.
34. Dan Harmon, “Mea Culpa for Those Needing One. Onward and Gayward,” Dan Harmon Poops (blog), November 5, 2011, http://danharmon.tumblr.com/post/12377752020/mea-culpa-for-those-needing-one-onward-and-gayward.
35. See Ivan Askwith, “ ‘Do You Even Know Where This Is Going?’: Lost’s Viewers and Narrative Premeditation,” in Reading “Lost”: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 159 – 180.
36. Quoted in Alan Sepinwall, “Interview: Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan Post-mortems Season Three,” HitFix, June 13, 2010, http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/interview-breaking-bad-creator-vince-gilligan-post-mortems-season-three. See also Noel Murray, “Vince Gilligan,” The A.V. Club, June 13, 2010, http://www.avclub.com/articles/vince-gilligan,42064/.
37. Todd VanDerWerff, “Alex Gansa Walks Us through Homeland ’s First Season (Part 1 of 4),” The A.V. Club, January 24, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/alex-gansa-walks-us-through-homelands-first-season,68143/.
38. obsession_inc, “Affirmational Fandom vs. Transformational Fandom,” Dreamwidth (blog), June 1, 2009, http://obsession-inc.dreamwidth.org/82589.html.
39. For more on authorial practices and affirmational versus transformative fandoms, see Suzanne Scott, “ ‘And They Have a Plan’: Battlestar Galactica, Ancillary Content, and Affirmational Fandom,” in How to Watch Television, ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 320 – 329; Louisa Stein and Kristina Busse, “Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context,” Popular Communication 7, no. 4 (2009): 192 – 207.
1. Quoted in Lorne Manly, “The Laws of the Jungle,” New York Times, September 18, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/arts/television/18manl.html.
2. For the limited scholarship on film and television characters, see Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Murray Smith, “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 217 – 238; Michael Z. Newman, “Characterization as Social Cognition in Welcome to the Dollhouse,” Film Studies: An International Review 8 (Summer 2006): 53 – 67; Greg M. Smith, Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of “Ally McBeal” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Roberta Pearson, “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the Televisual Character,” in Reading “CSI”: Crime TV under the Microscope, ed. Michael Allen (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 39 – 56; Roberta Pearson, “Chain of Events: Regimes of Evaluation and Lost’s Construction of the Televisual Character,” in Reading “Lost,” ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 139 – 158; Jens Eder, “Understanding Characters,” Projections 4, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 16 – 40; Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Rolf Schneider, eds., Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010); Murray Smith, “Just What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?,” in Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 66 – 90; and Robert Blanchet and Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Don, Peggy, and Other Fictional Friends? Engaging with Characters in Television Series,” Projections 6, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 18 – 41.
3. Eder, “Understanding Characters,” 18.
4. TV Tropes, “Real Life Writes the Plot,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealLifeWritesThePlot (accessed March 24, 2012).
5. M. Smith, Engaging Characters, 110 – 118.
6. Quoted in James Hibberd, “HBO Defends Game of Thrones Shocker,” EW.com, June 13, 2011, http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/06/13/game-of-thrones-reaction/.
7. While other programs such as The Wire and Deadwood did kill off main characters in first seasons, these were not figures who might be viewed as central protagonists, as with Ned Stark.
8. “The Lostpedia Interview: Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof,” Lostpedia, April 17, 2009, http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Lostpedia_Interview:Carlton_Cuse_%26_Damon_Lindelof.
9. See Abigail De Kosnik, “One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling,” in How to Watch TV, ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 355 – 363.
10. See Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,” Psychiatry 19 (1956): 215 – 229. For a more recent discussion, see David C. Giles, “Parasocial Relationships,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Rolf Schneider (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 442 – 456; Blanchet and Vaage, “Don, Peggy, and Other Fictional Friends?”
11. M. Smith, Engaging Characters.
12. Ibid.
13. Other examples of restricted first-person series are rare — the British Life on Mars follows such restriction, but its short run of 16 episodes minimizes the production issues. Louie always features the title character in every scene, but given that Louis C.K. directs and writes every episode, production is already centered around his presence.
14. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); see also Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
15. Pearson, “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom,” 55 – 56.
16. See also Scott Meslow, “As TV Evolves, a Glaring Problem: Characters Who Don’t Change,” Atlantic, February 22, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/02/as-tv-evolves-a-glaring-problem-characters-who-dont-change/253454/.
17. Roberta Pearson, “Chain of Events: Regimes of Evaluation and Lost’s Construction of the Televisual Character,” in Pearson, Reading “Lost,” 139 – 158.
18. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
19. See Gaby Allrath, “Life in Doppelgangland: Innovative Character Conception and Alternate Worlds in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel,” in Narrative Strategies in Television Series, ed. Gaby Allrath and Marion Gymnich (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 132 – 150.
20. See M. Smith, “Gangsters,” for relative morality in film.
21. Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Blinded by Familiarity: Partiality, Morality and Engagement with So-Called Quality TV Series,” in Cognitive Media Theory, ed. Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham (New York: Routledge, 2014), 268 – 284, makes the compelling argument that tight alignment can “blind us with familiarity” by making us feel a kinship with Tony despite our moral disgust, even in cases where the character’s actions are relatively immoral.
22. See M. Smith, “Just What Is It”; and Noël Carroll, “Sympathy for the Devil,” in “The Sopranos” and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am, ed. Richard Greene and Peter Vernezze (New York: Open Court, 2012), 121 – 136, for discussions of the program’s antiheroic sympathies.
23. M. Smith, “Gangsters,” 236.
24. Vermeule, Why Do We Care, 86.
25. For more on the series, see Douglas Howard, “Dexter”: Investigating Cutting Edge Television (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).
26. Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Fictional Reliefs and Reality Checks,” Screen 54, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 218 – 237.
27. For more on television’s gender norms concerning antiheroes, see Amanda Lotz, Cable Guys: Television and American Masculinities in the 21st Century (New York: NYU Press, 2014). For an early discussion of the limits of television’s portrayal of unsympathetic women, see Julie D’Acci, Defining Women: Television and the Case of “Cagney & Lacey” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). For more on the comedic figure, see Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
28. Vince Gilligan, from Nerdist Writers Panel podcast, recorded January 20, 2012, http://www.nerdist.com/2012/03/nerdist-writers-panel-28-vince-gilligan-julie-plec-josh-friedman-jeff-greenstein/.
29. Brett Martin, “Bryan Cranston on Becoming Walter White and the Final Season of Breaking Bad,” GQ, August 2013, http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201308/bryan-cranston-walter-white-breaking-bad-season-6.
30. Quoted in Melissa Locker, “Bryan Cranston Talks Malcolm in the Middle, Breaking Bad and the Meaning of Underwear,” IFC.com, October 28, 2011, http://www.ifc.com/fix/2011/10/bryan-cranston-talks-malcolm-in-the-middle-breaking-bad-underwear.
31. Jeremy Egner, “On Character: Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad,” ArtsBeat (blog), New York Times, March 19, 2010, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/on-character-bryan-cranston-in-breaking-bad/.
32. Quoted in Matthew Belloni, “Why the Dad from Malcolm in the Middle Knows So Much about Meth,” Esquire, March 4, 2009, http://www.esquire.com/features/television/breaking-bad-0409.
33. Daniel Fienberg, “HitFix Interview: Bryan Cranston Discusses the Breaking Bad Season,” The Fien Print (blog), HitFix, June 13, 2010, http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/the-fien-print/posts/hitfix-interview-bryan-cranston-discusses-the-breaking-bad-season.
34. See Anthony N. Smith, “Putting the Premium into Basic: Slow-Burn Narratives and the Loss-Leader Function of AMC’s Original Drama Series,” Television & New Media 14, no. 2 (March 2013): 150 – 166.
35. Vermeule, Why Do We Care, 93.
36. See Lotz, Cable Guys, for a compelling discussion of Walter in the context of contemporary masculinity within television drama.
1. Quoted in Brett Martin, “The Men behind the Curtain: A GQ TV Roundtable,” GQ, June 2012, http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201206/roundtable-discussion-matthew-weiner-vince-gilligan-david-milch.
2. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); David Bordwell, “Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred Pierce,” in Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 135 – 150.
3. Beyond Bordwell, see David Herman, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003); Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003); Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002).
4. For a rare example of cognitive poetic television studies, see Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Blinded by Familiarity: Partiality, Morality and Engagement with So-Called Quality TV Series,” in Cognitive Media Theory, ed. Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham (New York: Routledge, 2014), 268 – 284.
5. Bordwell, Narration, 30.
6. Ibid., 37.
7. Ibid.; Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
8. See Noël Carroll, “Toward a Theory of Film Suspense,” in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94 – 124.
9. Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, “Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption, and Rethinking Textuality,” Particip@tions 4, no. 1 (2007), http://www.participations.org/Volume%204/Issue%201/4_01_graymittell.htm. Thanks to Jonathan for allowing some of that work to be repurposed here; see also Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
10. For more on multiple passes through a narrative, see Matei Calinescu, Rereading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005).
11. David Bordwell, “This Is Your Brain on Movies, Maybe,” in Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking, by Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 96 – 102.
12. Quoted in Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 60.
13. Bordwell, Narration, 57 – 61.
14. See Bordwell, “Cognition and Comprehension.”
15. For seminal work on television’s glance aesthetic, see John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
16. For an overview of cognitive theories of memory, see Henry L. Roediger, Yadin Dudai, and Susan M. Fitzpatrick, eds., Science of Memory: Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
17. See Ethan Thompson, “Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom,” Velvet Light Trap 60 (Fall 2007): 63 – 72.
18. Matt Hills, “Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variation on a Narrative Theme: Doctor Who (2005 – 2008) as Cult/Mainstream Television,” in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 333 – 342.
19. See Virginia Heffernan, “Gotta Minute? So, There’s This Guy Tony . . . ,” New York Times, April 6, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/arts/television/06sopr.html.
20. Bordwell, Narration, 40 – 47.
21. For more on the role of awkwardness in Curb, see Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness (Hants, UK: O Books, 2010).
1. See Jason Mittell, “Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies),” in Reading “Lost”: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 119 – 138. For other discussions of evaluative television criticism, see Charlotte Brunsdon, Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London: Routledge, 1997); Sarah Cardwell, “Is Quality Television Any Good? Generic Distinctions, Evaluations and the Troubling Matter of Critical Judgement,” in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 19 – 34; Christine Geraghty, “Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 25 – 45; Jason Jacobs, “Issues of Judgment and Value in Television Studies,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2001): 427 – 447; Jason Jacobs, “Television Aesthetics: An Infantile Disorder,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 3, no. 1 (May 2006): 19 – 33; Greg M. Smith, Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of “Ally McBeal” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock, eds., Television Aesthetics and Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
2. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 365 – 368.
3. See Daniel Chamberlain and Scott Ruston, “24 and Twenty-First Century Quality Television,” and Steven Peacock, “24: Status and Style,” both in Reading “24”: TV against the Clock, ed. Steven Peacock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 13 – 34, for more sympathetic takes on the program’s style and aesthetics.
4. See Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi, MTM: “Quality Television” (London: BFI, 1984); Philip W. Sewell, “From Discourse to Discord: Quality and Dramedy at the End of the Classic Network System,” Television & New Media 11, no. 4 (July 2010): 235 – 259; and Dorothy Collins Swanson, The Story of Viewers for Quality Television: From Grassroots to Prime Time (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
5. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). See also Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (London: British Film Institute, 2003); and Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From “Hill St. Blues” to “ER” (New York: Continuum, 1996), for other corpus-defining efforts.
6. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age, 13.
7. Cardwell, “Is Quality Television Any Good?,” 29 – 30.
8. See Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), for an account of the field’s push away from questions of aesthetics.
9. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), for the landmark work on the topic; John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), offers an influential application of Bourdieu to television and other popular media. Arguably, Bourdieu’s own theory is more complex and multifaceted than how it has been adopted within American media studies, with his notion of fields complicating the interplay between production and consumption. However, his work’s influence on television scholars has primarily been through the lens of Fiske, who reads him as a rebuke to aesthetics and as a warning to ward off evaluative criticism.
10. See Antoine Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, ed. Mark Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 131 – 144, for an elaboration of this critique of Bourdieu.
11. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011), 7.
12. See Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste.” See also Sudeep Dasgupta, “Policing the People: Television Studies and the Problem of ‘Quality,’ ” NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 2012), http://www.necsus-ejms.org/policing-the-people-television-studies-and-the-problem-of-quality-by-sudeep-dasgupta/, for a strong critique of Newman and Levine and such celebration of the “popular” within television studies.
13. Gray and Lotz, Television Studies, 54.
14. Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128 – 140.
15. See Brunsdon, Screen Tastes; Jacobs, “Issues of Judgment”; Geraghty, “Aesthetics and Quality”; Michael Bérubé, The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Jacobs, “Television Aesthetics”; Alan McKee, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006); G. Smith, Beautiful TV; John Corner, “Television Studies and the Idea of Criticism,” Screen 48, no. 3 (September 21, 2007): 363 – 369; Matt Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating “Doctor Who” in the Twenty-First Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010); and Matt Hills, “Television Aesthetics: A Pre-structuralist Danger?,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 8, no. 1 (April 2011): 99 – 117.
16. See Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Greatest TV Drama of the Past 25 Years, the Finals: The Wire vs. The Sopranos,” Vulture (blog), New York, March 26, 2012, http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/drama-derby-finals-the-wire-vs-the-sopranos.html.
17. For more on The Wire’s visual style, see Erlend Lavik, Style in “The Wire,” video essay, Vimeo, 2012, http://vimeo.com/39768998.
18. See Jeremy G. Butler, Television Style (New York: Routledge, 2009), for a discussion of zero-degree style. I offer the term maximum-degree style as its opposite, bearing some similarity to John Caldwell’s historically grounded notion of “televisuality,” which emphasizes visual excess that can (like Breaking Bad) evoke cinematic traditions or embrace a video-centered aesthetic. See John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
19. I discuss The Wire’s approach to simulating urban systems more in Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic,” in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 429 – 438. See also Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall, “The Wire”: Urban Decay and American Television (New York: Continuum, 2009); and Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, eds., “The Wire”: Race, Class, and Genre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
20. For an influential take on television’s realism, see John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987).
21. See Linda Williams, On “The Wire” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
22. See Anmol Chaddha, William Julius Wilson, and Sudhir Venkatesh, “In Defense of The Wire,” Dissent, Summer 2008, http://dissentmagazine.org/article/in-defense-of-the-wire, in which the authors write, “Quite simply, The Wire — even with its too-modest viewership — has done more to enhance both the popular and the scholarly understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other program in the media or academic publication we can think of.” See also Frank Kelleter, Serial Agencies: “The Wire” and Its Readers (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), for an analysis of this realist reading strategy.
23. Jason Mittell, “On Disliking Mad Men,” Just TV (blog), July 29, 2010, http://justtv.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/on-disliking-mad-men/; as of September 2014, the post has been viewed over 16,000 times and has received more than 100 comments. The anthology it was slated to appear in is Lauren Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A Rushing, eds., “Mad Men,” Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
24. Carl Wilson, “Let’s Talk about Love”: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York: Continuum, 2007), 156.
25. Mark Grief, “You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel,” London Review of Books, October 23, 2008, 15.
26. Todd VanDerWerff, “ ‘Look! They’re Doing Math!’: Mad Men,” South Dakota Dark (blog), October 12, 2007, http://southdakotadark.blogspot.com/2007/10/look-theyre-doing-math-mad-men.html.
1. See Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).
2. For influential takes on film melodrama, see Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987); Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42 – 88; Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
3. Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003).
4. See Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
5. See Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922 – 1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), for a detailed discussion of this and other radio serials.
6. Frank Kelleter, “Trust and Sprawl: Seriality, Radio, and the First Fireside Chat,” in Media Economies: Perspectives on American Cultural Practices, ed. Marcel Hartwig, Evelyne Keitel, and Gunter Suess (Trier, Germany: WVT, 2014), 46 – 65.
7. See Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011), 83, for an account of this early history.
8. Such formats could span these categories, as with The Jackie Gleason Show, which offered a variety-style set of new sketches each week, alongside the embedded series of “The Honeymooners,” whose consistent setting and characters eventually spun off into a more typical “episodic” sitcom.
9. Jane Feuer has been one of the more high-profile advocates of this position, but more in brief asides than in a fully fleshed-out argument. For instance, in her account of Six Feet Under, she mentions that HBO “quality drama was always . . . a peculiar elevation of soap opera narrative structure,” with no further elaboration. Jane Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 155.
10. For a telling instance, Jane Feuer recounts a female-centered television conference where someone critiques male scholars who claim that “narrative complexity did not occur in television until Lost” : “There was a big laugh from the audience when we gals all agreed that these men do not realize the shows they are fetishizing are soap operas.” Jane Feuer, “Conference Report: Television for Women: An International Conference,” Television & New Media 15, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 83.
11. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas.
12. See Laura Stempel Mumford, Love and Ideology in the Afternoon: Soap Opera, Women, and Television Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 33 – 35. Even though daily viewing is essential for soap fans, they do have techniques for filling narrative gaps that might arise from missed episodes, including elaborate communities of home taping and trading, the intergenerational sharing of narrative knowledge, and the use of paratextual publishing with magazines such as Soap Opera Digest and detailed fan sites.
13. Caryn Murphy, “Selling the Continuing Story of Peyton Place: Negotiating the Content of the Primetime Serial,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 33, no. 1 (2013): 115 – 128.
14. See Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 82 – 84, for more on primetime serials in the 1960s and 1970s.
15. For more on Mary Hartman, see Elana Levine, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 202 – 207.
16. I discuss Soap’s genre mixing and Harris’s own claims of the program’s connection to soap operas in Mittell, Genre and Television, chap. 6.
17. Linda Williams, “Mega-Melodrama! Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the ‘Classical,’ ” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (2012): 526.
18. Williams uses “suspense” to describe the narrative impulse of melodrama, following a broader notion of the term that is closer to what I call “anticipation” in chapter 5.
19. Williams, “Mega-Melodrama!,” 529.
20. See Williams, “Mega-Melodrama!”; Linda Williams, On “The Wire” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). For another take on The Wire’s use of melodrama, see Amanda Ann Klein, “ ‘The Dickensian Aspect’: Melodrama, Viewer Engagement, and the Socially Conscious Text,” in “The Wire”: Urban Decay and American Television, ed. Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2009), 177 – 189.
21. For one of many examples of such distinctions, see Jane Feuer, “The Lack of Influence of thirtysomething,” in The Contemporary Television Series, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2005), 27 – 36.
22. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 82.
23. Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003). See also Kristyn Gorton, Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
24. Note that Warhol uses the term “antieffeminate,” as she argues that there is no real antonym to “effeminate”; however, I prefer the not-quite-parallel term “masculinist” because it has less of an oppositional connotation than “antieffeminate,” as I am trying to explore how the dual modes can coexist.
25. See Sue Turnbull, “ ‘Nice Dress, Take It Off’: Crime, Romance and the Pleasure of the Text,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2002): 67 – 82, for a revealing account of female fans of crime fiction.
26. See Williams, On “The Wire.”
27. Such genres have always had an active female fan base, and many viewers of both genders frequently worked to highlight sentimental and affective subtexts that were often buried within more overtly masculinist programs, such as Star Trek or Man from U.N.C.L.E., but are more overtly central today.
28. Michael Kackman, “Quality Television, Melodrama, and Cultural Complexity,” Flow, March 5, 2010. http://flowtv.org/2010/03/flow-favorites-quality-television-melodrama-and-cultural-complexity-michael-kackman-university-of-texas-austin/.
29. Warhol, Having a Good Cry, 41 – 50.
30. Ibid., 43.
31. Ibid., 47.
32. Ibid.
33. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 98.
34. Ryan McGee, “Lost, ‘The Constant,’ ” The A.V. Club, December 24, 2011, http://www.avclub.com/articles/lost-the-constant,66980/.
35. John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987).
36. Many scholars have explored such recent paradigms of television gender representation — see Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010); Amanda D. Lotz, Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Amanda D. Lotz, Cable Guys: Television and American Masculinities in the 21st Century (New York: NYU Press, 2014).
37. Lotz, Cable Guys, 57.
38. Breaking Bad, “Más,” season 3, episode 5, originally aired April 18, 2010.
39. Todd VanDerWerff, “The Good Wife Has Proven Itself a Worthy Successor to The Wire,” The A.V. Club, May 17, 2011, http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-good-wife-has-proven-itself-a-worthy-successor,56168/.
1. See Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), for a comprehensive analysis of media paratexts.
2. Emily Nussbaum, “Pugnacious D: The Wire Creator David Simon on His New HBO Series, Treme,” New York, April 4, 2010, http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/65235/.
3. This video aired on the BBC program Doctor Who Confidential in the United Kingdom on October 1, 2011, and is described in Charlie Jane Anders, “River Song’s Chronology on Doctor Who, from River’s Own Point of View,” io9, October 3, 2011, http://io9.com/5845981/river-songs-chronology-on-doctor-who-from-rivers-own-point-of-view.
4. See pyram1dhead, “Lost: Flight 815 Crash in Real Time,” YouTube, September 12, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKcKtjrL5bc.
5. See Dave Itzkoff, “In a Twist on the Remix, Fans Recut TV Series,” New York Times, June 9, 2013, C1, for a discussion of such analytic remixes, including remixes of Lost and Arrested Development.
6. See Mark Andrejevic, “Watching Television without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans,” Television & New Media 9, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 24 – 46.
7. Shahed Syed, “Dexter’s Victims,” last updated September 27, 2013, http://www.shah3d.com/dexters-victims-season-8-update/.
8. jcham979, “Breaking Bad Finale Theory: A Case for Walt Poisoning Brock,” YouTube, October 5, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BROfhjCycY.
9. See Dave Walker’s “Treme Explained,” posts at NOLA.com, May – June 2011, http://topics.nola.com/tag/treme-explained/index.html.
10. See The Tommy Westphall Universe, “The Master List,” http://thetommywestphall.wordpress.com/the-master-list/ (accessed June 15, 2014).
11. See Paul Booth, Digital Fandom (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), for a discussion of the ARG style of fan engagement.
12. Steve Murray, “Loved & Lost,” National Post, May 21, 2010, http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/lost/index.html.
13. See MGK, “Alignment Chart Week! The Wire,” MightyGodKing.com, December 9, 2010, http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2010/12/09/alignment-chart-week-the-wire/.
14. Tim Appelo, “Secrets behind Game of Thrones Opening Credits,” Hollywood Reporter, April 9, 2011, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/secrets-game-thrones-opening-credits-179656.
15. See Bob Rehak’s Graphic Engine blog for his in-process writing on the topic: http://graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu/?tag=blueprint-culture.
16. Neither of these online maps is available any longer, but both were online in 2012 when I was researching this chapter.
17. For more on media tourism, see Nick Couldry, “On the Set of The Sopranos: ‘Inside’ a Fan’s Construction of Nearness,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 139 – 148; David Crouch, Rhona Jackson, and Felix Thompson, The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2005); Leshu Torchin, “Location, Location, Location,” Tourist Studies 2, no. 3 (December 1, 2002): 247 – 266.
18. “Timeline: Flash-Sideways Timeline,” Lostpedia, http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline:Flash-sideways_timeline (accessed March 24, 2012).
19. For more on wikis as participatory culture, see Jason Mittell, “Wikis and Participatory Fandom,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 35 – 42; and Booth, Digital Fandom.
20. See Jason Mittell, “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia,” Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (Fall 2009), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/118/117, for a more detailed analysis of Lostpedia. All Lostpedia content referred to can be found on http://lostpedia.wikia.com.
21. Henry Jenkins, “ ‘Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?’: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery,” in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to “Twin Peaks,” ed. David Lavery (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 51 – 69.
22. Because of the fluid nature of wikis, quotes from Lostpedia might change over time. Whenever appropriate, I cite a date on which the page did include the material; if not otherwise noted, the quotes were part of Lostpedia on March 20, 2009.
23. For more on collective online fan engagement, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006); Booth, Digital Fandom.
24. “The Lostpedia Interview: Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof,” Lostpedia, April 17, 2009, http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Lostpedia_Interview%3ACarlton_Cuse_%26_Damon_Lindelof.
25. See Christy Dena, Jeremy Douglass, and Mark Marino, “Benchmark Fiction: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies,” Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, December 2005, 89 – 98; and Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas, “A Million Penguins” Research Report (Leicester, UK: Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, April 24, 2008), for examples of more creative uses of wikis.
26. See Sarah Toton, “Cataloging Knowledge: Gender, Generative Fandom, and the Battlestar Wiki,” Flow 7 (January 2008), http://flowtv.org/?p=1060.
27. See Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2012).
28. See Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington, Fandom, for an array of fan practices across historical eras and media.
29. See http://en.battlestarwiki.org/.
30. As of this writing, the clip is still available on YouTube: jkh9005, “Incredible Commercial/Product Placement,” March 19, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDjAFi7oJ4.
1. See Paul Booth, Digital Fandom (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); M. J. Clarke, Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production (New York: Continuum, 2012); and Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 2011), for in-depth accounts of transmedia television.
2. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
3. Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan (blog), August 1, 2011, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html, emphasis in original.
4. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006).
5. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 118 – 130.
6. Note that I do not believe that this gap of characterization is inherent to the videogame medium, as numerous games such as Red Dead Redemption and the Final Fantasy series have created vivid and compelling characters. This issue arises more when attempting to port established characters from television to games, as the latter medium typically fails to re-create the depth and breadth of an ongoing television character.
7. See Ivan Askwith, “TV 2.0: Turning Television into an Engagement Medium” (master’s thesis, MIT, 2007), http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses/IvanAskwith2007.pdf; Aaron Smith, “Transmedia Storytelling in Television 2.0” (honors thesis, Middlebury College, 2009), http://sites.middlebury.edu/mediacp; and Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories (New York: Norton, 2011), for other accounts of Lost’s transmedia strategies.
8. See Jason Mittell, “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia,” Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (Fall 2009), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/118/117, for more on my role within Lost fandom.
9. Jenkins, Convergence Culture.
10. Personal interview with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, March 23, 2010.
11. See Jason Mittell, “Lost in an Alternate Reality,” Flow, June 16, 2006, http://flowtv.org/2006/06/lost-in-an-alternate-reality/, for a discussion of playing The Lost Experience.
12. From the Breaking Bad “Insider Podcast” for episode 409, September 13, 2011, http://www.amctv.com/shows/breaking-bad/insider-podcast-season-4.
13. AMC, “Team S.C.I.E.N.C.E.: Breaking Bad Animated Webisode,” http://www.amctv.com/breaking-bad/videos/team-s-c-i-e-n-c-e (accessed March 2010).
14. See Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 93 – 112, for a discussion of the “What If?” impulse within television serials.
15. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (1961; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
16. Bob Rehak, “Franz Joseph and Star Trek’s Blueprint Culture,” Graphic Engine (blog), March 11, 2012, http://graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu/?p=1602.
17. See Henrik Örnebring, “Alternate Reality Gaming and Convergence Culture,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 4 (December 1, 2007): 445−462, for a detailed discussion of the Alias ARGs.
18. See Julie Levin Russo, “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Videos in the Age of Convergence,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 125 – 130.
1. From New Oxford American Dictionary, on Apple Macintosh computers.
2. See “Reunion,” TV Series Finale, http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/reunion/ (accessed March 24, 2012), for details.
3. Greg M. Smith, “Caught between Cliffhanger and Closure: Potential Cancellation and the TV Season Ending” (paper presented at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2011).
4. Personal interview with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, March 23, 2010.
5. See also Steven E. Jones, The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (New York: Routledge, 2008).
6. Emily Nussbaum, “A Disappointed Fan Is Still a Fan: How the Creators of Lost Seduced and Betrayed Their Viewers,” New York, May 28, 2010, http://nymag.com/arts/tv/reviews/66293/.
7. See Linda Williams, On “The Wire” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), for a compelling discussion of The Wire’s journalistic functions.
8. See Bill Carter, “Fans Online Sift for Clues in the Sopranos Finale,” New York Times, June 16, 2007, for reference to Chase’s desire to extend the blackness.
9. For one of many places where Chase denies showing contempt for viewers, see Alan Sepinwall, “David Chase Speaks!,” NJ.com, June 11, 2007, http://blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/06/david_chase_speaks.html.
10. Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Episode 21, ‘Made in America,’ ” The House Next Door (blog), Slant, June 11, 2007, http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2007/06/the-sopranos-mondays-season-6-ep-21-made-in-america/.
11. See Master of Sopranos, The Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of “The END” (blog), last updated June 19, 2013, http://masterofsopranos.wordpress.com/the-sopranos-definitive-explanation-of-the-end/.
12. Todd VanDerWerff, “The Sopranos — ‘Made in America,’ ” The A.V. Club, December 19, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/made-in-america,89671/.
13. Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Sopranos,” Sight & Sound 23, no. 9 (September 2013): 112.
14. Tara McKelvey, “Media Coverage of the Drone Program” (discussion paper, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, February 2013), http://shorensteincenter.org/2013/02/media-coverage-of-the-drone-program/.
15. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
16. For more on the role of serial narrative and ideological closure, see Laura Stempel Mumford, Love and Ideology in the Afternoon: Soap Opera, Women, and Television Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
17. Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 45 – 60.
18. Quoted in Lane Brown, “In Conversation: Vince Gilligan on the End of Breaking Bad,” Vulture (blog), New York, May 12, 2013, http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/vince-gilligan-on-breaking-bad.html.
19. Anna Gunn, “I Have a Character Issue,” New York Times, August 23, 2013.
20. To be fair, not all Skyler hating is misogynist; see Kelli Marshall, “I Don’t Like Skyler White, but Probably Not for the Reasons You Think,” MediAcademia (blog), August 7, 2012, http://www.kellimarshall.net/television/skyler-white/, for an example of feminist anti-Skyler sentiments.
21. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: NYU Press, 2011).
22. Emily Nussbaum, “Tune in Next Week,” New Yorker, July 30, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2012/07/30/120730crte_television_nussbaum?currentPage=all.
23. Paul Booth, Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).