Science Fiction Audiences

Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who

Henry Jenkins, John Tulloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134926138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Science Fiction Audiences examines the astounding popularity of two television "institutions" - the series Doctor Who and ^Star Trek. Both of these programmes have survived cancellation and acquired an following that continues to grow. The book is based on over ten years of research including interviews with fans and followers of the series. In that period, though the fans may have changed, and ways of studying them as "audiences" may have also changed, the programmes have endured intact, with Star Trek for example now in its fourth television incarnation.
John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins dive into the rich fan culture surrounding the two series, exploring issues such as queer identity, fan meanings, teenage love of science fiction, and genre expectations. They encompass the perspectives of a vast population of fans and followers throughout Britain, Australia and the US, who will continue the debates contained in the book, along with those who will examine the historically changing range of audience theory it presents. and continue to attract a huge community of fans and followers. Doctor Who has appeared in nine different guises and Star Trek is now approaching its fourth television incarnation. Science Fiction Audiences examines the continuing popularity of two television 'institutions' of our time through their fans and followers.
Through dialogue with fans and followers of Star Trek and Dr Who in the US, Britain and Australia, John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins ask what it is about the two series that elicits such strong and active responses from their audiences. Is it their particular intervention into the SF genre? Their expression of peculiarly 'American' and 'British' national cultures. Their ideologies and visions of the future, or their conceptions of science and technology?
Science Fiction Audiences responds to a rich fan culture which encompasses debates about fan aesthetics, teenage attitudes to science fiction, queers and Star Trek, and ideology and pleasure in Doctor Who. It is a book written both for fans of the two series, who will be able to continue their debates in its pages, and for students of media and cultural studies, offering a historical overview of audience theory in a fascinating synthesis of text, context and audience study.

Part I

Chapter 1
Beyond the Star Trek phenomenon
Reconceptualizing the science fiction audience

Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch

Nineteen-ninety-one was a landmark year in the history of what popular journalists call ‘the Star Trek phenomenon’. Twenty-five years after its initial airing on 8 September 1966, Star Trek still commanded the covers of major magazines and was the focus of a two-hour television documentary.¹ The first five feature films had earned a total of $398 million in box office revenues. Thirty-five different Star Trek novels have commanded a spot on the New York Times paperback bestseller list and Pocket Book’s long-standing series had grown to more than a hundred titles. Widely syndicated, the original Star Trek episodes were still being shown 200 times a day in the United States and were all available for rent or purchase on videotape. Star Trek: The Next Generation was America’s highest rated syndicated drama, seen by more than 17 million viewers every week.

Countless writers have struggled to understand Star Trek’s success; one recent bibliography listed more than 1,300 English-language articles examining every conceivable aspect of the programme, its producer and stars, its exploitation and its reception.² Much of this coverage displays curiosity about Star Trek’s hardcore audience. Most often, however, that audience is constructed as exotic, unknowable and irrational. Entertainment Weekly’s cover story, ‘Star Trek at 25’, opens with a typically alien representation of stereotypical fans:

The Enterprise has assumed orbit around a Class M planet inhabited by the oddest race of creatures we’ve ever encountered. They call themselves ‘Trekkies’—some insist on the word ‘Trekkers’—and their entire civilization seems to be based on an ancient TV show about a band of space-age pioneers. They worship in hives called ‘conventions’, where they don silly velour uniforms and plastic pointy ears. Mr. Spock says these strange beings are harmless, but I’m not so sure.³

Elsewhere, the magazine listed ‘a pretty good Trekkie starter kit’, some $2,600 worth of collectors’ items, bumper stickers, buttons, T-shirts, bubble-gum cards, mugs, toys, and of course the ever-present rubber Spock ears and stuffed tribbles. The fan as extraterrestrial; the fan as excessive consumer; the fan as cultist; the fan as dangerous fanatic— these images of the science fiction audience have a long history.⁴

What was interesting about the coverage of Star Trek’s twenty-fifth anniversary, however, was not that the press continually evoked these same stereotypes but rather that many of the reports offered a different and somewhat more sympathetic representation of the science fiction audience. Journalists began to adopt the fans’ own preferred term, ‘Trekkers’, over the derogatory ‘Trekkies’.⁵ Many reporters cautiously confessed their own long-standing interest in the series and its characters. The reporters were not alone. One survey, cited on a television documentary about the programme’s anniversary, showed that 53 per cent of the American public classified themselves as ‘Star Trek fans’. New Scientist ran a story discussing how important the series had been in the recruitment and development of a new generation of American researchers and technicians: ‘MIT students, NASA engineers and other technical people find the programme compelling. Star Trek is confirmation that what they are doing is worthwhile, that science is not an unnatural, sinister art that will lead to our destruction, but something that will allow us to become richer, fuller humans.’⁶ Such stories constitute a reconceptualization of the science fiction fan within popular discourse: the writers’ acceptance of the fan as Self rather than Other, as ‘NASA scientists, MIT students’ and ‘liberal humanists’ rather than ‘overweight women’ in velour uniforms and pimple-faced geeks with toy phasers.

There are limits to this new conceptualization: textual meaning still holds privilege over readers’ meanings; fan activities are still defined primarily through relations of consumption and spectatorship rather than production or participation. The twenty-fifth anniversary documentary, for example, showed fans waiting in autograph lines or browsing through dealers’ rooms, examining commercially produced merchandise; it did not offer interviews with fan writers, publishers, artists, composers, performers or videomakers.

These images model an ideal audience—an audience that buys what the producers have to offer and respects the studio’s creative control over the series development. As one male Trek fan explains on the programme, ‘I think anything with Star Trek on it will draw me to it like a magnet!’ These images stand in stark contrast to the resistant and creative audience that has emerged in several recent academic accounts of this same subculture.⁷ Academic writers have turned to fans as emblematic examples of audience resistance, of the appropriation and rearticulation of programme materials, of ‘poaching’. Journalists, on the other hand, now turn to fans as a justification of their own interest in the media, as symbols of the responsiveness of the marketplace to popular demand, as advocates for the merits and meaningfulness of network programming during a period of increased challenge from cable competition.

As they focus attention on the science fiction audience, academic writers do not venture into a space ‘where no one has gone before’. Rather, scholars move into a space already heavily colonized by other discursive constructs, mapped by popular journalism and preconceived by the reading public. This chapter offers a brief history of the different ways that producers, journalists, critics and audience-members have conceptualized the Star Trek audience(s). The focus on Star Trek, here, will allow consistency and clarity; it is worth recognizing, however, that many of these same images and debates have surfaced in response to the audiences for Doctor Who and many other science fiction series.⁸

THE MAKING OF STAR TREK

We suspected there was an intelligent life form on the other side of the tube. We planned to use our show to signal some thoughts to them. Never in our wildest imaginings did we expect the volume and intensity of the replies that we received.

(Gene Roddenberry)⁹

Stephen E.Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry’s The Making of Star Trek, published in September 1968 as the NBC television series entered its third and final season, remains a central document within the Star Trek fan culture—a myth about origins and the creative process, an ur-text for information about the characters and their universe. For early fans of the series, this book provided a common background for discussions and speculations, during a time when the episodes themselves could not be re-read, except through the fans’ homemade audiotapes. Early fans recall quizzing each other on its contents to demonstrate their mastery over the programme material. Apart from backgrounding the fictional universe of Star Trek, the book reproduces sections from the original series proposal, inhouse memos, letters, documenting the laborious process by which the aired programme materialized from Roddenberry’s initial concepts. The book presents its history of ‘The Making of Star Trek’ as the story of a creative producer’s heroic struggle against network mediocrity:

The television writer-producer faces an almost impossible task when he attempts to create and produce a quality TV series. Assuming he conceived a program of such meaning and importance that it could ultimately change the face of America, he probably could not get it on the air or keep it there! ¹⁰

Gene Roddenberry, we are told, came to American television with a diverse background: retired airline pilot, retired cop, longtime reader of pulp science fiction. He moved swiftly from a writer for programmes like The Naked City, Have Gun Will Travel and Dr Kildare to produce a short-lived serviceman drama, The Lieutenant. Roddenberry was asked by MGM to submit a proposal for a new series, and in 1963 he pitched Star Trek to the network executives as a ‘Wagon Train to the Stars’. His proposed programme would be a weekly science fiction series with recurring characters ‘who travel to other worlds and meet jeopardy and adventure’.¹¹ Star Trek was rejected by MGM, only to be embraced by Desilu studios, eager to expand its productions beyond its familiar sitcoms. The series was pitched to CBS and rejected; NBC commissioned first one and then a second pilot before finally committing to the programme, after rejecting most of the initial characters, adopting a new cast and protesting loudly against the inclusion of Spock. Despite network indecision, poor time slots and mediocre ratings, Star Trek remained on the air for a three-year run and was then cancelled. The Making of Star Trek is preoccupied with the production process. Empirical audiences play only a limited role here, yet the book often frames its account in terms of two very different conceptions of the television audience: the network’s insistence on appealing to the lowest common denominator and the producer’s faith in the existence of an intelligent and discriminating audience. Consider, for example, this passage:

A number of people [network executives] expressed concern that the viewer might reject the concept of different races, particularly Negro and white, working side by side…. Gene stood his ground, gambling on his belief in the television audience, determined to carry out his plan of presenting subject matter and situations on Star Trek that would challenge and stimulate the thinking of the viewer.¹²

Network constraints are consistently ascribed to a low estimation of the viewership (the first pilot was described as ‘too cerebral’ for television; the plan for a female second-in-command was rejected as too controversial), while Roddenberry’s creative vision is vindicated by appeals to the programme’s audience support:

a devoted fan-following of topflight scientists, engineers, and educators who recognized the ingenuity and foresight behind the fictional facade; science-fiction buffs who for the first time could see in concrete form much that they had been reading about for years; and of course a whole new generation of young people to whom possible futures were a reality rather than a dream.¹³

Roddenberry’s statements at the time the programme was being produced offer a more complex and contradictory picture of the series’ perceived audience. On the one hand, Roddenberry clearly operated with a perception of the mass audience as essentially passive and distracted:

We will be competing with other television series for a mass audience on an adventure-drama-action basis. That audience will sit out there as ever, with a hand poised over the control knob, beer, potato chips and a dozen other distractions around them.

He therefore stressed the need for the series to follow established television conventions wherever possible, rather than moving into less familiar generic territory:

Perhaps the fact that we are ‘science fiction’ and therefore somewhat suspect, we may need even more than average attention to a story which starts fast, poses growing peril to highly identifiable people, with identifiable problems, and with more than the average number of ‘hooks’ at act breaks.

As his discussion continued, however, Roddenberry evoked an image of a heterogeneous audience which might be captured through manipulation of diverse generic traditions within science fiction:

This need not invite bad writing since science fiction (as all sf classics indicate) permits an enormous range of audiences—the child, the housewife, and the truck driver can enjoy the colorful peril of Amazons wielding swords (or even muscled romance) while, at the same time, the underlying comment on man and society can be equally interesting and entertaining to a college professor.¹⁴

Here, Roddenberry evokes notions of socially situated viewers and polysemic texts. Roddenberry was apparently torn between his suspicions of the intellectual rigour of the mass audience and his recognition of the particular cultural competencies that different segments of his potential viewership might bring to bear upon the programme.

The distinctions between elite and mass viewers in The Making of Star Trek are familiar ones to students of 1960s American television and the shift from the 1950s ‘Golden Age’ of live television to the 1960s ‘Vast Wasteland’. Roddenberry evoked ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ABOUT THE COVER
• SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• NOTES