Transmedia Television

Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life

Elizabeth Evans

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136740817
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Television

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television industry. The development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for content directly linked to television programming has offered a challenge to the television set's status as the sole domestic access point to audio-visual dramatic content. Viewers can engage with 'television' without ever turning a television set on.

Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of 'the television audience'? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industry's development of emerging new media technologies, and what 'television' now means for its audiences.

1 Understanding Transmediality

1 Transmedia Texts

Defining Transmedia Storytelling

DOI: 10.4324/9780203819104-2

Transmedia storytelling is the most well-known component of transmediality and has gained significant academic currency during the opening years of the twenty-first century. Most explicitly theorised by Henry Jenkins (2003, 2006), transmedia storytelling expands on the contemporary traditions of television narrative described by Jeffrey Sconce as the ‘crafting and maintaining [of] ever more complex narrative universes’ (2004: 95) to place those narrative universes on more than one media platform. As a concept, it has become central to the understanding of how emerging new media technologies are leading to the creation of new forms of narrative content and audience engagement. However, despite the usefulness and pervasiveness of the term, there remains scope for further refinement. To a certain extent the phrase ‘transmedia storytelling’ is a misnomer. All of the practices that could be considered ‘transmedia’ involve the telling of stories over multiple platforms. As Jonathan Gray argues, calling on the work of Gerard Genette (1997), narrative is shaped and constructed as much through the texts that appear around a film, television or book as through those core texts themselves. For Grey, such paratexts ‘create texts, they manage them, and they fill them with many of the meanings that we associate with them’ (2010: 6). Marketing material, sequels, merchandising and branding can all help shape the viewer’s experience of a single ‘text’. Defining what specifically constitutes moments of transmedia storytelling, and their relationship to other theoretical or industrial processes, is vital.

At the same time, the historical precedence of these developments must also be recognised. Whereas the narrative patterns and forms of engagement that emerged from the television industry from 2004 onwards may offer a significant departure from those that had come before them, they were not radical to the point of revolution. Roberta Pearson has raised these crucial questions concerning the boundaries and history of transmedia storytelling by suggesting that biblical stories can be understood in these terms (2009b; see also Bordwell, 2010: online). By representing these stories, Pearson argues, through written word, drama and visual art, the narrative of Jesus Christ is multi-platform, with audiences experiencing it through various forms of engagement. Following this argument, the history of storytelling, including the development of myths such as King Arthur and Robin Hood, is littered with examples of transmedia storytelling. Arthur’s story is told via a history of literary sources such as Welsh and Breton poetry, Monmoth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Malory’s La Morte Darthur, oral storytelling, pictures, drama, poems, real-world locations such as Tintagel and more recently film (The Sword in the Stone, dir. Wolfgang Reitherman, 1963; Monty Python and the Holy Grail, dir. Terry Gilliam, 1975; King Arthur, Antoine Fuqua, 2004 to name a few) and television (Merlin, BBC One 2008–). This echoes work that examines how individual media characters such as James Bond (Bennett and Wollacott, 1987) or Batman (Pearson and Uricchio, 1991; Brooker, 2000) are constructed across a range of media (novels and films or comic books, television series and films, respectively), merchandising and within wider cultural discourses. J. Dennis Bounds uses the terms ‘transmedia poetics’ to explore consistency in the construction of Perry Mason across books and television (1996).

However, as Geoffrey Long indicates, the term ‘transmedia storytelling’ has taken on a specific meaning relating to the creation of a wider, coherent fictional world that is delivered to the audience in multiple formats (2007: 48). It is essential to map out the differences between contemporary and historical uses of the term. This makes it possible to determine how current developments within the television and film industries are offering new forms of engagement for their audiences whilst refraining from positioning these developments as unique and radical. This chapter will examine the development of transmedia storytelling and its relationship to other narrative and industrial processes in order to offer a model that delineates and identifies what makes the incorporation of new media platforms into the traditional media industries a different experience for audiences. This can specifically be identified through three key components: narrative, authorship and temporality. Whereas not appearing equally in every case of transmedia storytelling, these characteristics offer a way of both recognising the history that this mode of storytelling has developed from, and how it has taken cross-platform narrative a step further. This model will be examined through the case study of the BBC series Doctor Who (1963–) which, having been in production on and off for nearly fifty years, spans a significant portion of British television history and has adapted to the changing media landscape around it. At various points in the programme’s production, its ability to function as ‘transmedia’ has had particular significance and these moments, along with its current incarnation, indicate how the term has evolved into its current form. As Doctor Who demonstrates, transmedia texts have become less about promoting a central television programme or film, and more about creating a coherent, deliberately cross-platform narrative experience.

TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING: ADAPTATIONS, SPIN-OFFS, MARKETING AND MERCHANDISING

The first use of the term ‘transmedia’ was as a primarily promotional practice involving merchandising, adaptations, sequels and franchising, and can be found in the arguments of Marsha Kinder and Mary Celeste Kearney. Both writers specifically use the term to describe processes of cross-platform adaptation and marketing, and subsequently couch it in discourses of commercialism. Kinder uses the term to describe the relationship between films, television, games and toys within the children’s media market. She associates ‘transmedia’ with the creation of ‘supersystems’, described as ‘a network of intertextuality constructed around a figure or group of figures from pop culture who are either fictional … or “real”’ (1991: 122). She goes on to specify that one of the criteria of a ‘supersystem’ is that ‘the network must cut across several modes of image production’ (123). Kinder recognises the construction of a single cultural object (be that a text, character or set of characters) across multiple media formats; however, the motivation behind this is connected with the economic systems of Hollywood. Throughout Kinder’s argument, these transmedia supersystems are associated with the process by which children are taught to become consumers and in turn attempt to ensure the commercial success of the product. In order for transmedia content to become a supersystem, it ‘must undergo a sudden increase in commodification, the success of which reflexively becomes a “media event” that dramatically accelerates the growth curve of the system’s commercial success’ (123). Toys, for example, are produced that allow viewers to imaginatively explore the fictional world of a televisual or cinematic supersystem, but at the same time they teach children how to be consumers, to desire material objects. Transmedia storytelling, for Kinder, becomes about merchandising and marketing.

A similar approach is evident in Kearney’s use of the term to describe the expansion of US radio plays A Date with Judy (1941) and Meet Corliss Archer (1943–1956) into short stories, films, television programmes and comic books. Kearney goes on to link industrial upheaval within Hollywood to the transmedia developments of these stories and suggests a possible historical origin for the practice that would evolve into the transmedia text. She writes,

In light of the difficult working conditions and poor pay of screenwriters in the early1940s, it is not surprising that writers working for the film studios would seek out work in other industries, particularly those that produced serialized properties and therefore steady income. (Kearney, 2004: 280–281)

As writers moved into different media industries, they took the narratives they had created with them, expanding these fictional worlds away from their original source. Kearney goes onto articulate this cross-platform development as ‘transmedia exploitation’, consisting of ‘the repeated adaptation of an established entertainment text into different media forms’ and ‘the promotion of a text’s reputation as a successful entertainment property when marketing later versions produced in different formats’ (2004: 281, original emphasis). For Kearney the origins of ‘transmedia’ production are in practices of adaptation and marketing. It is subsequently made to seem less than artistically honourable, the term ‘transmedia exploitation’ conjuring associations of commercialism over integrity, and equated to a set of industrial processes motivated both by the movement of manpower and the desire for a low-risk entertainment product. Whereas Kearney’s model is still evident in the entertainment industry’s ongoing desire to produce content based on already successful properties through literary adaptations, sequels, spin offs and franchises, modern multi-platform practices have taken on a different edge with the emergence of digital technologies and the various modes of engagement they allow for.

Even examinations that explore the relationship between television and new media platforms maintain this association between the creation of transmedia texts and marketing and commercialism. Both Will Brooker’s model of ‘overflow’ (2004) and John T. Caldwell’s theory of ‘second-shift aesthetics’ (2003) examine the role television websites have in relation to audience behaviour and, although they do not use the term ‘transmedia’, they echo the transmedia model. Brooker’s argument, one of the few studies to be based on empirical audience research, maintains the commercial outlook of Kearney’s, with the development of new media technologies being tied to the marketing of texts on more established media platforms such as the television: ‘[T]he Dawson’s Creek fan may still find her key pleasures in the developing television narrative, but the tv show is clearly being marketed within a far wider multimedia context’ (2004: 572). For Brooker, the television episodes become the jumping-off point that initiate a collection of additional moments of engagement, primarily through a connected website. After watching the source programme, the audience is then encouraged to move onto these additional platforms where they can not only learn more about the show but also purchase Dawson’s Creek related merchandise (572). This kind of movement is identified by Caldwell as part of his model of ‘second-shift aesthetics’, an argument that is based on appropriating models from television studies in order to understand new media. Caldwell writes,

Instead of the linear textual compositing model inherent in supertext/flow theory, TV/dot-com synergies now must learn to master textual dispersals and user navigations that can and will inevitably migrate across brand boundaries. In essence, programming strategies have shifted from notions of network program ‘flows’ to tactics of audience/user ‘flows’. (2003: 136)

Again the emphasis in Caldwell’s theory is on how audiences move across different media outlets whilst still engaging with the same core text. As with Brooker’s model, viewers are enticed to ‘flow’ from the television episodes to the website, and then from the website to merchandising sites.

Even though there are differences in the technologies employed in Brooker’s and Caldwell’s models compared to the earlier examples discussed by Kearney and Kinder, each theory creates the same kind of relationship between the different media forms. The television programme, or film, is consistently the primary point of engagement, with non-television-based texts, be they digital or not, functioning superfluously to it, merely promoting the primary series or opening up new revenue streams via merchandise.

This situation is apparent when looking at the change that the transmedia text of Doctor Who has undergone. Since the series was launched in 1963 a range of additional material has been made available in connection to the television episodes (see Perryman, 2008). Novelisations of storylines from the programme (see Chapman, 2006: 26) offered an adaptation of the source material in a different medium. Spin-off texts, including films (Doctor Who and the Daleks (dir. Gordon Flemyng, 1965) and Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (dir Gordon Flemyng, 1966)), numerous original novels and a series of BBC radio plays offered new stories from the universe of Doctor Who, sharing characters and generic traits, through different media. Merchandise such as board games and action figures offered a form of engagement with the universe of the series in non-audio-visual formats as they allowed viewers to create their own stories through play.

These earlier adaptations, spin-offs and merchandise function as transmedia to a certain extent by expanding the world of Doctor Who into non-televisual forms. However, as the following comparison with the more contemporary Doctor Who demonstrates, there has been a shift in transmedia practice. In addition, the primary role of many of these texts was as a promotional network for the television series. As James Chapman describes, the BBC used such transmedia elements to sustain interest in the series when it was initially cancelled in 1989:

Undeterred by the relative failure of the 1996 TV movie, BBC Worldwide pushed ahead with an expanding range of Doctor Who spin-offs including more continuation novels, computer games, and a series of licensed audio dramas … The spin-offs ensured that the ‘brand’ was kept alive in the public’s imagination whilst allowing cultural producers to gauge the response of fans towards the prospect of new films or television series. (2006: 186)

Non-television-based elements are seen by Chapman as serving a primary function of promoting the brand, of ensuring that the audience remembers that Doctor Who exists even though it was not appearing on television screens. Similarly, in the four years preceding the re-launch of the series in 2005 the BBC broadcast animated ‘webcasts’ (Chapman, 2006: 186) to generate interest in the series within the increasingly popular online environment. Although these radio plays, novels and animations may offer an expansion of the fictional world that was first presented in the television series, they remain not only separate but also ancillary and secondary to it; there is no integration between the television programme and the other elements of the transmedia text. As Alan McKee argues in his study of Doctor Who fans in the late 1990s, ‘[T]here was a lack of agreement on what constitutes a canonical—real, authentic—part of Doctor Who’ (2004: 179). They serve as a way to keep interest amongst an already interested community alive, whilst the show is off-air. They act as a substitute for the missing source text. However, by the time the television series began broadcasting again, its relationship to new media platforms had changed, and with that the application of the term ‘transmedia’.

THE REGENERATED TRANSMEDIA DOCTOR WHO

When the new series of Doctor Who, overseen during its initial five years by Russell T. Davies, began in April 2005 the television series appeared within a far more coherent matrix of texts distributed on a range of media technologies, which functioned collectively to provide an intentionally multi-platform experience for the audience. In addition to new novels and toys, the BBC also produced games, mobile content and narrative-rich websites, expanding the universe of Doctor Who away from the television set more coherently than in its earlier incarnation. As will be demonstrated, these non-television narrative components tied closely to the BBC’s development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for audio-visual entertainment more generally and so fit into the Corporation’s broader, multi-platform intentions. Whilst not denying the promotional potential of these transmedia components, they offer a more complex picture of transmediality and the use of new media platforms by the television industry.

The first element of the transmedia Doctor Who was the use of the internet in one of its most basic functions, as a platform for text, images and short videos. Websites have long been a part of the broader marketing strategies for television programming (see, for example, Deery, 2003) and Doctor Who was no exception. As Neil Perryman discusses, the programme was a part of the BBC’s online ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Understanding Transmediality
• PART II Audiences for Emergent Transmedia Drama
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index