New media technologies such as mobile phones, iPods and iPads, email, and instant messaging provide new means for television genres to communicate with fans. The conventional type of American television series, however, will need to transform one key element in order to stay alive in such a rapidly changing media environment – its relationship to audience.
In the new media environment, the audience is never static, and very rarely passive. Gone are the days when viewers gather around a television set. Traditional television series will need to transform how they engage with viewers, and the television shows that survive will be the ones that experiment with these new technologies.
Familiar genres such as the family sitcom may go the way of the dinosaur simply because the traditional form of television built itself around a domestic situation wherein its viewers were passive, and their attention was more or less focused exclusively on the screen. The passive viewer model began in the early days of television.
In McMurria’s words, “broadcast television developed within contradictory developments in modern life where new modes of transportation and communication facilitated a more mobile society while the ideal of self-sufficient family home ownership privileged autonomous dwelling” (McMurria 317).
In this model, the television viewer was a spectator only. He or she sat still and watched the sitcom or drama unfold over the half hour or hour format. The time needed for breaks, including food, bathroom, and putting the kids to bed, was most often relegated to the commercials. “Television responded to, and reinforced, this “mobile privatization” of society by providing a virtual window to the world while TV advertising fueled a consumer economy that reinforced the ideals of private home ownership” (McMurria 317).
The captive nature of the viewer at that time in television history affected the style of storytelling. Plot structure evolved around advertisements, and the competition for eyeballs was again more or less relegated to the few minutes when the viewer’s attention was away the show. Producers and writers spent the lion share of their creative energies devising ways to compel their audience back to their stories following the commercial break.
As McMurria writes, “early television’s insertion of the “public” world into “private” living rooms excited anxieties. Postwar television promotion and programming idealized the detached suburban home for the upwardly mobile white middle-class family as well as threatened to disrupt the private sanctity of the gendered patriarchal family by distracting women from their housework” (McMurria 317).
Audiences at that time, although they still had the power to not watch a show, were far more submissive, and most importantly, far less mobile. The idea of home as a static, stationary platform for television content no longer applies, however. Content, specifically in the realm of television genres, must address the issue of audience mobility, as well as the fact that for many content consumers, a hand held device now represents “home.”
Mobility of the audience represents the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity for television genres and for conventional television content providers. In Dawson’s words, “cross-platform repurposing is certainly an important item on the agendas of the media conglomerates involved in programming handheld devices…[and]…thus far, the budding mobile television industry has placed a greater priority on the mobility of viewers than on the mobility of texts” (Dawson 232).
This represents a crucial understanding on Dawson’s part, and something that television content providers can use, if they allow their imagination to soar beyond their fears of losing the mass television audiences upon which their salaries depend. Should the texts of television shows themselves begin to reflect the mobility of their audience, it will transform television narrative as we know it. The key shift involves the television program itself: it must now to follow its viewer:
Technological shifts are allowing programs to become more accessible, their commercial context more easily evaded, while textual shifts are layering programs, sometimes making them less accessible and more requiring of our time and effort, but offering larger, more complex storyworlds to step into.
They also allow greater personalization of the program and of its consumption process. But for all their benefits, such changes in televisuality not only threaten the culturally cohesive qualities of yesterday’s age of broadcasting – they have also occurred unevenly, leaving some audiences behind (Gray 74)
The shifts in the television industry appear to threaten the staying power of the more traditional television genres such as drama. However, before we consider the “death” of television drama, let us consider the importance of story itself. In Rettberg’s words, “one of the ways we find our place in our culture and among our friends and families is by creating and consuming stories and images. These representations of ourselves and of others connect to larger cultural templates, which we adopt, adapt or reject” (Rettberg 453).
Story itself still holds us, as a culture. What has changed are the modes in which story can be delivered. Even within the drama genre, producers and writers who understand the opportunity the new media presents thrive equally well. An example is the dramatic series Lost, which ran for six years on ABC and spearheaded the notion that drama could become “unboxed,” meaning the story itself could be made powerful and compelling enough to transcend the television (Gray 74).
In the Lost model, the show’s producers and writers trusted the elasticity of the Lost myth, and cultivated multiple platforms, outside of traditional television, to purvey the narrative far beyond the confines of the small screen (Gray 76). Lost’s producers and writers used the web effectively to mine and develop multiple readings of the Lost story, including creating fictitious websites for the airline that brought the castaways to the island, as well as the shadowy Hanso Corporation (Gray 76).
Essentially, Lost’s producers and writers understood the mobility of their audience, and understood that many would not be settling around the television set to passively watch the show at the appointed hour, as in earlier manifestations of television audiences. Thus, Lost’s producers and writers found a way to follow their audience, and bring the content to them. The Lost model represents one way that the traditional drama genre may survive in the new media landscape.
The reality genre, to a much greater degree than established television genres, blossoms in the emerging digital environment of social media and personalized media technologies for the simple reason that it is cheap. Reality television developed more or less as an answer to the skyrocketing costs of television production in traditional genres.
In McMurria’s words, “ABC’s more recent incorporation of Good Samaritan reality television into its primetime schedule reflects dynamic changes in the television industry. The broadcast networks began producing reality TV in the 1980s and early 1990s to cut program costs as audiences fragmented across proliferating cable channels and scripted programming became increasingly expensive as powerful Hollywood agencies packaged their star actor, writer, and producer clients” (McMurria 315).
Reality television offers content providers the opportunity to take more financial risks; however, reality television supports a certain style of television, namely, minimal narrative development. As Keane and Moran articulate, in regards to the “evolutionary struggle for ascendancy in the new media era, the television industry has developed new engines.
New formats have allowed a convergence of formerly discreet genres—sporting challenges, celebrity revelations, lifestyle improvement, and drama and detection into new forms. Even the documentary is made-over; genres such as wildlife and animal shows that were predominantly “female” have crossed into reality, injecting adventure, novelty and the element of surprise” (Keane & Moran 58).
Another reason reality television is perfectly suited to the emerging television landscape remains its applicability to user generated content. Reality television is far more democratic, and there are nearly no gatekeepers. It equates to accessibility. Reality television also understands the participatory nature of new media.
As Burgess et al demonstrate, “those who upload, view, comment on, or create content for YouTube, whether they are businesses, organizations, or private individuals, [are] participants. …content is…valued and engaged with in specific ways according to its genre and its uses…as well as its relevance to the everyday lives of other users, rather than according to whether or not it was uploaded by a Hollywood studio, a web TV company, or an amateur video blogger” (Burgess et al 57).
User generated content captured on a Blackberry or iPhone can be as brilliant and compelling as the most expensive episode of a television with a four million dollar per episode budget, and you don’t need to an agent to produce it. All you need is YouTube or Twitter. Case in point: Sh*t My Dad Says.
In the new media environment, not only does the audience never remain in one place, the audience generates its own content. Gone are the days when viewers gathered passively around a television set to await content. Traditional television series that engage directly with viewers, and follow them through their personal media devices, will compose the new model of television, one that is fluid, dynamic and responsive.
Works Cited
Burgess, Jean, Joshua Green, Henry Jenkins, and John Hartley. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Print.
Dawson, Max. “Little Players, Big Shows: Format, Narration, and Style on Television’s New Smaller Screens.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 2007; 13; 231. Web.
Gray, Jonathan. “Television Unboxed: Expansion, Overflow, Synergy.” Television Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Keane, Michael and Albert Moran. “Television’s New Engines.” Television New Media 2008; 9; 155-169. Web.
McMurria, John. “Desperate Citizens and Good Samaritans: Neoliberalism and Makeover Reality TV.” Television New Media 2008; 9; 305-332. Web.
Rettberg, Jill Walker. ‘Freshly Generated for You, and Barack Obama’: How Social Media Represent Your Life.” European Journal of Communication 2009; 24; 451-466. Web.