Claims about “creativity” anchor LEGO marketing strategies and the meanings ascribed to LEGO products.  The company pledges parent- and educator-friendly engagement “in the development of children’s creativity through play and learning.”  Countless press releases tout this support of creativity; even the embrace of media licenses like Star Wars was framed as a boon to (rather than limit upon) creative imagination.  The ideological frame of creativity also underpinned LEGO’s most recent gender-differentiated appeals to girl builders.  While the 2012 LEGO Friends theme commendably corrected the exclusive focus on boys, would-be inclusiveness manifested predictably as market segregation.  Girls and boys were not imagined as playing together, but instead as two classes of builders with different creative desires and needs.  Girls, according to LEGO, needed more role-playing and even different kinds of human representations (“minidolls” instead of minifigures).  Notions of inherent creative difference legitimated narrowly gendered marketing appeals.

Defenders of Friends nevertheless pitched the modular creativity of LEGO as a get-out-of-gender-free card.  Kids “don’t have to follow” the included instructions, this thinking went.  Gender normative bakeries and beauty salons could become pink and purple starfighters.  Though packaging and instructions offer what Ellen van Oost and Mary Kearney term “gender scripts,” the reconfigurable nature of LEGO product promised such scripts could also be “backdoors,” enticing already gendered subjects to creative experimentation.  The ideological utility of creativity for LEGO came in both demanding gender conformity and offering ways out of it.

The LEGO Movie ruminates endlessly on this idea of following instructions.  “Masterbuilders” like Vetruvius and Wyldstyle initially devalue Emmet’s interest in building and living by the instructions of mass culture.  And yet, the film does not completely disarticulate creativity from such instructions.  As Emmet takes on leadership, he explains the virtues of instructions as a platform for creative teamwork.  And while the film culminates (spoiler alert) in a live-action meta-conflict over proper use of LEGO toys between an instruction-minded father and free-building son, the compromise reached suggests the father will continue building by instructions, just with newfound support for his son’s reconfiguration of them.  The climactic action sequence in the animated world too turns on the idea of LEGO people rebuilding a prefabricated world, turning ice cream trucks into winged attack vehicles.  In line with LEGO’s marketing of instruction-based building sets as “creative,” the film locates creativity somewhere beyond the instructions, but still figures those scripts as a key first step toward creativity.  Meanwhile, the Ice Cream Machine can be sold in stores with instructions for building both on-screen configurations.

And despite the mélange of LEGO product in the film, including a visit to Cloud Cuckoo Palace that offers far more queer combinations of bricks than ever offered in prior instruction-based sets, the gender-specified creativity of LEGO Friends remains absent.  The minidoll does not exist in this world.  In the film’s concluding joke, meanwhile, the live-action father insists that a toddler sister join in the family play—a moment some take to task for suggesting that girls would disrupt the masculine creativity being celebrated.  But that critique may give LEGO too much credit.  As imagined by LEGO marketing, this toddler would be a user of larger DUPLO bricks, a product LEGO is still willing to market (in part) via gender-neutral appeals, in significant contrast to gendered segregation for older markets. The LEGO Movie does not acknowledge the possibility of girls aged four-and-up (or mothers) sharing in this creative LEGO play, more easily recognizing the creative commonality of privileged male consumers with DUPLO toddlers than with feminized Friends builders.  Rather than entertaining disruption of LEGO’s creative ideologies, this narrative extension of LEGO play to a less fully gendered toddler market affirms their boundaries.

Ultimately, this film helps positions creativity as something that unfolds in relation, but not strict opposition, to clearly defined scripts (gendered or otherwise).  Obviously, that serves the instruction-based product LEGO markets, but it also has implications for how we understand the “creativity” of those who make use of it.

Looking back at Kid Nation, most observers probably find the industrial controversy preceding the 2007 reality series to be its most significant legacy.  Purporting to put children in a frontier town to fend for themselves, the CBS series drew fire prior to its premiere for both the supposed reality of the genre and the artifice of its construction.  Detractors who feared the endangerment of children stranded in the wilderness did not recognize omnipresent producer supervision and direction, while those who criticized CBS for violating child labor laws saw kids participating in the calculated fabrication of a television commodity.  Most viewers didn’t seem to care one way or another, and the low-rated show entered obscurity well before CBS declined a second season.

Yet it’s worth looking back at the text overshadowed by this industrial controversy.  Though not the most popular or influential entry in the genre, Kid Nation appropriately offers an elementary school primer both on the conventions of reality competitions and their negotiation of social structures taken for granted in the “real” world (enough so that I continue to rely on it in my TV courses today).

In the first thirty minutes of the series, the cast of forty 8-to-14-year-olds meet their “council” of appointed leaders, trek with provisions to the abandoned ghost town “Bonanza City,” and start trying to meet their basic food and shelter needs.  This opening suggests alternative social structures could emerge as children self-organize without the imposition of traditional parental order.  Like clockwork around the thirty-minute mark, however, host Jonathan Karsh appears to impose adult order on this fledgling kid nation, providing specific game-show rules by which their society must operate.  He divides them  into four “districts” that compete in challenges for class status to determine their unequal prestige and income as laborers, cooks, merchants, and the upper class.  Laborers on one end of the spectrum do the most work and get paid least, while the upper class on the other enjoys least responsibility and most pay.

Of course, some 2007 reviewers challenged this bald imposition of capitalism upon children. Systemic competitive social rules are not unique to Kid Nation–many other reality competitions in the Mark Burnett-model, from Survivor to Apprentice, allow a period of social experimentation before competitive structures are imposed by someone like Jeff Probst or The Donald.  By rendering reality television’s generic embrace of social capitalism as a child’s game, however, Kid Nation opens it to strangeness and play.  Seeing industrious child “laborers” unable to afford  candy sold by “merchants” in the general store calls class inequality at least partially into question (even if one child’s entrepreneurial response is to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as a panhandling street performer).   Just as the absurdity of domestic norms come into view when children play house, so too does this mimicry of adult class distinction open it to critique.

Class structures were not the only thing mimicked–these kids also “played”  as reality contestants.  Take Taylor, the 10-year-old girl who performed adult reality celebrity culture through catch phrases (“Deal with it!” being her version of  “You’re Fired!”), emphasis on beauty ideals (“I”m a beauty queen, I don’t do dishes”), and gravitation toward the outrageous (“the ugly animals should die and the pretty ones should stay”).  As Taylor explained a year later, producers fed her many of these outlandish lines.  So unlike, say, Toddlers and Tiaras, where we reel at what parents impose upon children, Kid Nation begs to be read in terms of what conventions reality producers ask kids–and all reality viewers–to take for granted and perform.   Kids are not just endangered and employed by the reality industry here, but also encultured.  What continues to resonate years later, however, is that “kidness” prevents these participants from unproblematically adopting the same positions adults do as reality contestants or social subjects.  Their imperfect mimicry instead makes reality strange.

This is why I was shocked to receive a reminder about this Antenna post I’d promised about the mid-season return of Caprica and then to have asked myself, “oh, is that tonight?”  Sure, I’ve been busy.  But I’ve been busy before, and Battlestar viewing was always something I met with great anticipation.  Whether separated by hours or days, viewed “live” or in DVD marathons, the space between episodes was consistently filled with excitement and build up, causing my internal clock to keep a constant countdown until my next Battlestar appointment.  That clock, apparently, has ceased to run for Caprica.

I don’t think it’s because Caprica is a bad show, necessarily.  Sure, this mid-season premiere could have been better.  The previous cliffhanger left the fates of Amanda and Zoe in the air, and this episode teased at their deaths without directly confronting them: an obvious fake-out confirmed by the last minute reveal of their survival.  Joseph Adama’s seemingly complete embrace of  a criminal lifestyle (rather than tenuously negotiating it as a lawyer) makes him a far less interesting character in my eyes.  And the Gemenese clergy costumes looked too much borrowed from a Vulcan monastery to match Caprica’s more grounded textural palette.  But there was a lot of great stuff going on too.  The virtual representation of a terror attack at a Caprica Buccaneers game was not only chilling, but also gave needed meaning to Clarice’s long-promised “apotheosis,” granting her character new purpose and heft.  Seeing that Tomas Vergis had taken over Daniel Greystone’s company between episodes to put the Cylons into production advanced the well-played personal and corporate conflict between the two tycoons, all while generating a sense of inevitable dread.  It’s not clear how this conflict will resolve, but Battlestar fans know the stakes involve an army of robots destined to wipe out both sides.  The whole premise of the series, and its greatest strength, is anticipation of certain societal ruin.

But I can’t have an internal, step-by-step countdown to robotic apocalypse if I have no idea when the next appointment in the countdown will be.  At the unresolved moments between episodes and seasons when I should be feeling the most tension and anticipation, I actually feel the least, because I have no idea when or if that resolution might be coming.  Despite the series having premiered in January, SyFy only aired the first half of the season and then waited several months until the summer to announce a return date.  That return date was then slated for January 2011, and only last month bumped up to this week.  I can’t help but feel my anticipation of this return would have been stronger if I’d seen the previous cliffhanger with some sense of how long I’d be waiting, so that I could invest in its dramatic tension on those terms with a target for resolution in mind.  I can look forward to next week’s episode a little bit more, perhaps, and the week after that, but since SyFy hasn’t committed to a second season yet (and likely won’t by the end of the season), I fear I’ll reach another impasses when I’m asked to sustain anticipation and excitement indefinitely.  Yes, this kind of scheduling did occur on occasion with Battlestar too—but it seems that SyFy has institutionalized the temporal uncertainty once necessitated by the writer’s strike.

That institutionalized uncertainty has stopped my ticking clock.  Despite having a real fondness for the series and being part of the built-in, loyal audience it needs to survive on SyFy, I find this uncertain wait makes Caprica increasingly difficult for me to anticipate.

Suddenly, 24 had its groove back.  First, Jack failed to stop the Russian assassination of “Islamic Republic of Kamistan” President Hassan.  In the next episode, Jack gets his first real-time sex scene–only to see love interest Renee immediately killed by a sniper.  Simultaneously, President Taylor seeks dubious advice from disgraced ex-President Logan (returning from season 5), hiding Russia’s involvement in the murders to protect an international peace accord.  As a result, Jack goes over the edge, delivering as “judge, jury, and executioner” the justice Taylor will not: he  eviscerates the sniper, impales the Russian ambassador with a fire poker, attacks Logan’s secret service convoy, and in the finale, almost kills the Russian president.  Kidnappings, graphic politicized murders, sudden attacks on woefully inept US security forces–this was vintage 24!

But with a twist.

I’ve always considered my reading of 24 to be negotiated, in that I do not interpret the series as reactionary and pro-torture as some “fans” like Rush Limbaugh and Antonin Scalia famously have.  To me, Jack Bauer is one of the most deep, fascinating characters on television because he represents the emotional and social folly of “extreme” interrogation and security policies.  Granted, 24 has always problematically suggested that torture can deliver actionable intelligence–but Jack shows us the costs of such delivery.  Jack may repeatedly stop terrorist attacks, but at the expense of his loved ones, the health of the American political institution, and ultimately, his own humanity.  Jack’s character arc is a gradual loss of character, with him becoming a more pitiable, pathetic killing machine each season.  Maybe that’s not how most viewers saw this show, but the way I read it, Jack is a cultural argument against extralegal security measures.

These final episodes, then, actually bolster my reading by reversing Jack’s position in these stock 24 plots.  Jack is no longer the protagonist, or even an anti-hero, but an antagonist who must be stopped by cooler minds like his former sidekick Chloe.  Jack effectively becomes the unstable terrorist, his actions described not as “interrogations” or “operations”, but with terms like “murderer” and “slaughterhouse.”  Though Jack had “gone rogue” before, he had never been portrayed as unhinged in taking liberties with the law; Jack loses it, however, after using a blow torch to torture the Russian sniper, exasperated that “This isn’t working!”  In the penultimate hour, Chloe confronts Jack; there’s a palpable danger that crazy Jack may actually kill her rather than calling off his attack.  Though Chloe brings him back to reason, he’s taken prisoner  and almost entirely removed from the canvas for the final hour of the series.  His only major scene is a shared admission of guilt with the President.  It’s up to Chloe’s non-violent methods and a penitent political establishment to bring the story to resolution and rescue Jack from an execution squad. Jack, ultimately, is irrelevant, expelled from the nation as an outlaw.  Of course, that’s not entirely new to 24, echoing Jack’s previous exiles after seasons 4 and 6.  But that only strengthens my reading, in that the finale reaffirms the recurring rejection of men like Jack from the social order.

I know many viewers celebrate Jack for his lack of humanity, gleefully tallying the Bauer kill count.  Maybe my read is even a little naive in that light.  But even so, I think we need to recognize the end of 24 for what it brought to the “cultural forum” of television as a lens through which viewers could imagine a decade of war, institutional ineptitude, and narrowing civil rights in multiple and rarely  cohesive ways.  It wasn’t a poetic reflection on fate and free will, to be sure, but something more contradictory and urgent.

Losing 24 at the same time as Lost, I’m struck by how different the swan songs of these two long-running, heavily serialized shows are.  (At this point, I imagine Antenna‘s die-hard Lost contingent saying, “yeah, the difference is that 24 sucks!”–but bear with me).  We’ve been anticipating  Lost s finale literally for years, since the producers announced an “end date” in 2007.  For 24, the official cancellation decision  (more for growing production costs than abysmal ratings) comes only about six weeks before the final airdate.  With only two hours reportedly left to produce, there’s scant time for producers to bring any closure or unity to the series beyond this single season.   I’m not arguing that 24 needed more–the writing on the wall certainly permitted producers to plan for this possibility, and I’d argue that the series slid into a gravity well of mediocrity from which there could be no wholly satisfying escape years ago.  Instead, I’d say this sudden finish tells us a lot about what kind of serialized show 24 was, and points to an alternative serialized aesthetic beside that which is privileged by Lost.

If the eighth season of 24 had been planned as its last, what would the producers have done differently?  Uncover the German threat hinted at in seasons one and two?  Bring back fallen Bauer BFF Tony Almeida for a shot at redemption?  Wrap up the fates of characters like Behrooz, Wayne Palmer, or Lynn Kresge who abruptly disappeared from the screen?  Hardly.  The producers of 24 repeatedly claimed to resist long term outlooks, rarely planning beyond the next four episode arc and leaving the story open for organic development.  Characters and narrative threads that didn’t pan out were dropped and retconned along the way as the producers explored other possibilities.  I’m not saying the Lost producers don’t do that too, but in their promotional discourse, the Lost producers have also promised that their complex tale will cohere in the end.  For ten years, 24 has implicitly promised the opposite.  Very little will cohere as a unified tale; instead you’ll get a bunch of wild, sudden twists that won’t stand long-term scrutiny, but stand to pack a punch in the moment of delivery.  My current criticism of 24‘s storytelling style is less that things don’t make sense, and more that the writers have deployed the same outlandish in-the-moment surprises so often that a friend-killed-resurrected-turned-enemy-then-friend-then-enemy (see Season 7) IS coherent in the context of the show’s history, and thus lacks any thrill.  Had the writers more time to plan a series finale, I’m confident they’d provide no more sense of unity–perhaps only a few more good surprises to further thwart unity.

24 will be justly remembered for serving as a forum for deliberating and reimagining citizenship, governmentality, and national policy in an age of convergence fantasy and real world terror.  But I think 24 also embodies the rise to primetime of another kind of viewing pleasure–one, perhaps more soaplike, obscured by the privilege accorded classical notions of unified closure.  Gary Morson argues that serial narratives are best considered not in terms of poetics, but “tempics”–an in-the-moment aesthetic of contingency and possibility.  By offering an ending on-the-fly, I expect that the producers will not provide unified, coherent closure, but a new set of contingent possibilities that hopefully have impact in the moment–even if they don’t make a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, I’d rather argue that the game fails both in making the Star Trek universe an inhabitable virtual space and engendering community and participation within it.  In panning STO, I’m a little late to the party.  Many reviewers have already declared it “bland and shallow“, “simplistic and brainless“, and “boldly going nowhere.”  However, the game further exemplifies Trevor Elkington’s notion of “self-defeating co-productions,” where licensed games fail because of irreconcilable goals to please both fans of cross-media licenses and fans of a specific game genre.  Frankly, the problem here is less that developer Cryptic Entertainment served two masters, and more that the game proves ill-suited to serve either.

One major appeal of the MMO is its potential to offer expansive, continuous experiences of the Trek world.  Yet I can visit more Trek locales just as immediately on television than I can in STO.  I can orbit Earth in game, but can’t beam down to the familiar Starfleet Academy grounds .  I can traverse the galaxy, but I can’t visit our closest neighbor, Mars.  Instead, the universe is represented by a small number of confined spaces–like television soundstages–and countless loading screen separate them–like elliptical video edits.  Granted, traversing all that space would make for undramatic television, but in an MMO, this inability to ontologically render the universe prohibits the pleasures offered by World of Warcraft, where one can experience every step of the journey in that world.  While Jonathan Gray argues that many otherwise poor licensed games offer the pleasure of newly navigating continuous spaces between recognizable television set-pieces, STO provides neither a full complement of sets nor explorable empty space between them.

License aside, STO‘s design also disincentivizes the collaborative social relations TL Taylor places at the center of MMO gameplay.  In STO, “instanced” gameplay generates multiple, parallel versions of the gamespace, negating the sense of singular, shared, co-populated social space.  Automatic team assignment within instances additionally prevents relationship building and shared pre-mission strategizing.  Players divided into small, server-determined groups usually proceed to shoot randomly at things without speaking to one another.  AI crewmembers further make cooperation unnecessary, and players rarely even acknowledge one another’s co-presence.  The best and worst mission is the Crystalline Entity fight; it is perhaps the only quest that requires massive cooperation between several players, but because players are not socialized to cooperate, and usually work at cross-purposes, it became almost impossible to beat.  The social logic of MMOs–and heck, Star Trek–is betrayed by my self-reliant attainment of the final rank of Rear Admiral having made only two, fleeting social connections.

Both those friends quit the game in frustration.  While self-defeating co-production might explain why they quit, it doesn’t quite explain why suckers like me persevere.  Despite the game’s failures, I feel my specific interests in the property and the achievement possibilities laid before me by the game proved a powerful combination; as a longtime fan, I coveted the Defiant-class starship available only to higher ranking players, and that sufficed to motivate me through mediocrity (but also to deflate my interest once finally attained).  But I’m still unsatisfied with this answer, and I’d like to think there’s another critical/cultural dynamic in play beyond my particular fan/achiever personality.

Spider-Man 3 arguably demonstrated director Sam Raimi’s inability to freshen his take on Spider-Man; amid rehashes of Peter’s conflict with Harry, rocky relationship with Mary Jane, and guilt over the death of Uncle Ben, the elements that were actually new  felt wildly out of place (song and dance number, anyone?).  Hollywood reboots, however, aren’t necessarily responses to declines in quality.  Sure, Batman & Robin, Die Another Day, and Star Trek: Nemesis were all pretty horrific films, but it’s naive to suggest that studio developers embraced change out of some sudden commitment to good filmmaking.  Neither, however, would it be accurate to say reboots necessarily follow in the wake of economic failure.  With the exception of Nemesis, the films that predated the aforementioned reboots, including Spider-Man 3, were all money makers.

What this Spider-Man 4 debacle demonstrates instead is that the reboot can be just as much about intervening in an unruly development process asreigning in unruly, unmanageable story continuities.  To extend the “ALT+CTRL+DEL” metaphor of the reboot perhaps a bit too cutely, the alternate versions and narrative deletions underscoring this kind of franchise management are often about maintaining control over the property.  Reboots not only reorganize storytelling resources, but also the hierarchies and labor structures making use of them.  With Sony, Raimi, and star Tobey Maguire all interested in but at potential odds over the ongoing development of the franchise, a reboot is Sony’s most viable means of seizing back the creative reigns.  Sure, Sony could make a Spider-Man 4 without Raimi or Maguire, but they’ll be in a better position to fill that creative labor void by offering new talent a clean slate in which to work.  In the similar case of Universal’s The Incredible Hulk, a reboot that followed only five years after 2003’s Hulk, director Louis LaTerrier claims in the DVD special features that he only pursued the project once promised freedom to break from the first film and redevelop the property.  So while Sony might seem hasty in similarly abandoning Raimi’s existing foundation for Spider-Man, it is likely a prerequisite for reorganizing creative labor.

Moreover, as Variety points out, Sony does not have the luxury of time.  It must proceed ahead, lest its licensed right to the character revert back to owner Marvel Studios, for whom Spider-Man would prove an invaluable resource in its current attempts to  build a shared Marvel Universe across its self-produced Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America films.  Sony clearly isn’t sure how to make a Spider-Man 4, and it doesn’t have time to keep trying to figure it out with Raimi.  It does, however, know how to make a Spider-Man 1, and a reboot therefore offers the best chance of holding on to and successfully leveraging the property as a tenant without losing it to Marvel the landlord.

So while we might first think of reboots in terms of their rather extreme impact on ongoing narrative series, that effect may only be a secondary consequence of the labor and licensing relationships that Hollywood studios, property owners, and for-hire creators need to negotiate in development.