Prospect Park’s soap opera strategy tests traditional conceptions of televisual value within an evolving space of digital distribution.
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Author Archive
All My Commodities: Valuing the Online Soap Opera
Framing a Legacy: The Office‘s Diegetic Documentary
While The Office's documentary aesthetic has often led to the assumption the show itself was the final product, the choice to position the diegetic documentary as public television and a successful international export pushes against this assumption in interesting ways.
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Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Moment in a Movement
Why kickstarting Veronica Mars was not simply a procedural act, but rather a social experience awakening, mobilizing and monetizing fan cultures in real time.
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One World, Two Ways In (For Some): Syfy’s Defiance
While Defiance may seek to expand its focus beyond a primarily male audience, as a broader transmedia initiative it highlights the gendered realities of convergent media practices.
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Production Mythology, Release Reality: Syfy’s Defiance
While a complex production mythology makes Syfy's ambitious transmedia series/game Defiance unique, the first of two parts explores how this mythology also breeds uncertainty as the franchise's April debut nears.
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Mediating the Past: Licensing History, One Game At a Time
By licensing—and disciplining—history, the Assassin's Creed series seeks to turn cultural capital into gaming capital.
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The Broadcast Battleground of the 2012 Emmy Awards
While winners and losers may speak most directly to television's hierarchies, the Emmy telecast itself offers a space in which broadcast networks can reshape prevailing discourses of quality within the television industry.
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Save “Their” Show: Public Appeals of Studio Campaigning
As DirecTV, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon emerge as players in content distribution, we are seeing evidence of active campaigning by production studios finding new homes for their canceled shows.
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The Cheese Stands Alone: Downton Abbey’s Emmy Coup
PBS successfully transitions Downton Abbey from Miniseries to Drama Series by continuing to lean on the advantages afforded the former distinction.
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Campaign Contributions: “Mainstreaming” the Emmy Race
While usually confined to niche websites, the Emmy nomination race broke into mainstream outlets as digital pages are turned over to Emmy contenders in exchange for potential advertising revenue.
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Upfronts 2012: “Save our Show (On the Industry’s Margins)”
With no prominent "Save our Show" campaign following this year's cancellations, we should turn our attention to why we’re not talking about a big cancellation in a year where a number of highly-rated shows got canceled.
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Stranded on the TV Battleground: Hulu’s Invisible Original
Despite generic familiarity and a solid first season, Hulu's Battleground has struggled to draw the attention of critics and viewers alike as the site's first original fictional series.
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Imported by Justin Bieber: Carly Rae Jepsen and Transnational Stardom
Carly Rae Jepsen's Justin Bieber-supported breakthrough offers a case study for how difficult it is for stardom to remain transnational when moving into the U.S. market.
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Specter of Legitimation: The Fading of NBC’s Thursday Legacy
While the actual “Must See TV” branding is all but gone, there remains a specter of legitimation surrounding the evening…at least in the eyes of NBC schedulers.
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Promoting an Uncertain Future: Showrunners (on Hiatus) on Twitter IV
With NBC's Community and ABC's Cougar Town on hiatus, their respective showrunners' Twitter accounts become key outlets for implicitly or explicitly encouraging fan involvement and/or activism.
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