True Detective

It’s HBO.

True Detective has rapidly entered the pantheon of television drama shared by luminaries such as The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and so on. Indeed, the adventures of Marty and Ruste Cohle have kept this commentator on the edge of his seat for eight weeks now. But what I am interested here is the audience of forensic textual foragers that, like the true detectives themselves, followed the scattered bread crumbs that led towards, not the yellow brick road, but the yellow king and the city of Carcosa.

The tail-end of episode 1 had Charlie Lang mention a king, but it is in episode two when the motif is concretised as Rust reads aloud from Dora Lang’s diary: “I closed my eyes and saw the king in yellow moving through the forest. The king’s children are marked, they all become his angels.”

The camera zooms in on the diary and we see fragmented quotations that turn out to be lifted from a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers first published in 1895 titled The King in Yellow. Michael Hughes wrote an interesting and illuminating article for i09 in February which details the connections between True Detective and The King in Yellow. I do not wish to tread the same ground here.

Rather, what interests me is how references to The King in Yellow spawned an online man-hunt for the killer of Dora Lang by participants reading the Chambers collection as a code-breaking device to solve the crime within the show. Indeed, the creativity and dedication of the viewing populace never ceases to astound me no matter how many times I witness it. I am guessing that a great deal more people just watched the show’s mysteries unfold in their living rooms rather than deputising themselves and microscopically examining a 19^th Century text for clues; but for some viewers, True Detective’s enigmatic coding frequencies invited them into the text to play in the sand-box of textuality and allusion. The sudden surge in popularity of the book turned an obscure ‘weird fiction’ text into a bestseller on Amazon almost overnight based solely on references within True Detective. Anna Russell, writing for Speakeasy, states that the book ‘shot up 71% in 24-hours to reach number 7 on Amazon’s bestseller list.’

Of course, the concept of participatory engagement is nothing radically new and has been discussed at length by Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, among other scholars. But laying intertextual ‘Easter eggs’ within a HBO show that invites audience members to partake in the hunt for a serial killer? That strikes me as quite a departure.

Or, at least, it did. For I am making the assumption that the creators of True Detective knew instinctively that this is what would happen; that by threading oblique references within the text, the interactive viewer would not be able to help themselves exclaiming, ‘the game’s afoot,’ as they grasp deerstalker hat and magnifying glass to join the hunt for the yellow king.

On the other hand, perhaps the show’s creators understand the twenty-first century viewer, or at least a portion of it, and the penchant for extra-curricular investigations. The ABC show, Lost, crafted a sprawling online metropolis for dedicated fans to join a quest to solve the island’s mysteries while also laying intertextually furnished motifs in an array of locations that explicitly referenced The Wizard of Oz, for example, and other cultural artefacts.

Clearly, True Detective does not function on the same-level as Lost’s postmodern campaign. But then Lost is not a HBO show. True Detective is.

I wonder if anyone out there mapped audience reactions and theories as the show aired. Of course, in this era of digital communication and web 2.0, the internet is rife with websites and forums that do not simply vanish overnight and this is certainly an area for further study.

I, for one, intend on re-watching True Detective through the prism of Chamber’s collection. The game is afoot, indeed.

The Information Superhighway: Interactive television

A deal that will indelibly alter our media landscape, throw the future of broadcast into question, promise new distribution models, expand interactive and “addressable” advertising… a deal that will fundamentally redefine television.  No, I’m not talking about the Comcast-NBC Universal announcement that made waves last week.  This was the hype surrounding the “information superhighway” of 1993.

I admit, as someone writing a dissertation on web practices in the dot-com bubble, I probably spend way too much time with my head stuck in the 90’s. But noting all of the mentions of the AOL-Time Warner merger as a deathly omen hanging over the Comcast/NBCU agreement—heightened by this week’s official divorce—I couldn’t help but think that a more apt comparison might be the cable-phone mania that swept the country in 1993 in a clamor for interactive television. Or at the very least, it provides a good back-story for today’s media maneuverings.

“Pipe Dreams”

Back then, telecommunication providers were lining up to build the infrastructure that would bring glorious things into our living rooms and onto our television screens:  500 channels!  Videogames!  Video-on-demand!  Home shopping!  24 hr access to a Cover Girl cosmetics center where consumers can learn—on the spot!—which Cover Girl nail polish matches the lipstick she saw in a commercial!  (OK, that last one perhaps less glorious, but promised nonetheless).  True, there would be high hurdles ahead. “Just wait until John Q. Public tries to click his remote control to ‘launch’ ‘Laverne and Shirley’ and he gets an error message saying, ‘insufficient memory,’ one commentator speculated. But these potential snafus hardly dampened the ambitious plans and alliances being forged.

The Information Superhighway, a nationwide high capacity fiber optic network of phone, cable and computer networks, was being pitched as super-interactive television, and it would reinvent home entertainment, changing the way we accessed and thought about media.  But neither cable companies nor phone companies alone were equipped to bring these services into the home.  Cable companies could pump in the content, but couldn’t help viewers interact with it.  Phone companies didn’t have high capacity lines, but they were masters of switching information in all directions over a network.  Hence, “cable-phone mania”: USWest teamed up with Time Warner, Southwestern Bell united with Cox cable, and most spectacularly, regional phone company Bell Atlantic and cable giant TCI announced a $33 billion merger that would lay the lines that would make the information superhighway a reality.  It failed four months later.

The aborted merger, the technological difficulties in actually getting this stuff to work, and the overwhelming response of consumers to interactive tv and on-demand viewing (”who has time for all the interactive mumbo jumbo”?) all worked to shelve the pipe dreams of the information superhighway as interactive TV. And anyway, by this time everyone was waking up to the idea that the information superhighway was already here, accessible via computer screen and modem. When TCI was purchased by AT&T five years later, the driving logic didn’t have anything to do with interactive TV.  Nobody wanted 500 channels; they wanted internet access.

Fast-forward sixteen years: the high tech future is here!  Video on demand (check), home shopping (check), networked gaming (check), 24 hour Cover Girl access (check!)  So what to make of the long journey to get here? Today “redefining television” isn’t about bringing the media universe to our home set; it’s about setting television loose into cyberspace—accessible “anytime, anywhere”—and watching media industries scramble to bottle up some revenue.

Now, like then, distribution is key… just not the only key.  Guarding against a future where cable is a bunch of “dumb pipes,” Comcast wants in on the content game.  But despite technological breakthroughs and changing attitudes about media use, some of those very early questions are still unresolved plot points in an ongoing storyline about the post-TV era. Is broadcast really over?  Can new technologies like authentication systems successfully herd viewers into gated revenue-friendly media zones? Will viewers go down without a fight?  Will the technology actually work?  Will marketers freak out about the future of ad-supported television? How will audiences be measured?  Can a merger of media giants harness the competing logics of cable and the internet?  Will there ever really be a post-TV era?  Or will Comcast-NBCU turn up as roadkill on the TV Everywhere Infobahn?

ABC News, Sep. 30 1993