Part of this, of course, has to do with the stiffness of Gordon; McKenzie lends a measure of gravitas and almost deadening seriousness to the future police commissioner.  While this allows him to, for the most part, maintain a measure of moral certitude that may appeal to the more conservative members of the audience, it also makes his plotlines somewhat plodding and predictable at times.  And poor Bruce.  While Mazouz invests the future Batman with a certain pristine appeal–slightly nuanced by his recent attempts to wrest control of his company from the obviously-villainous Board–he is overshadowed not only by the major villains, but also by his own child co-star Selina Kyle (Camren Bicondova).

It is also a matter of space. The police station is, unsurprisingly, painted in grim colors, rendering it a stultifying space that lacks a sense of liveliness or energy. Compare this to Fish Mooney’s bar, which is always full of lush, saturated colors and musical performers who, while perhaps not talented, nevertheless provide a bit of local color (and who could ever forget Carol Kane’s atrociously wonderful performance)?  The bar serves as a world of color and barely restrained sensual energy, a welcome relief from the bleak and grimy cityscapes that show us a Gotham crumbling under the weight of urban decay and the organized crime that permeates every corner of the metropolis. Mooney’s bar also sits at the center of almost of all of the major plots that have emerged among the various crime elements of the city.  Whether under the control of Mooney or of Penguin, the bar is the epicenter of the criminal life of this grimy city.

It’s probably no accident, then, that between them, Jada Pinkett Smith and Robin Lord Taylor get the best lines of the series.  The appeal of Fish Mooney, however, goes beyond her quips; it seeps into every aspect of her persona. It might be going too far to suggest that Smith is a scenery-chewer, but there is something decidedly lush about the ways in which she delivers her lines, even when faced with the imprisonment and torture that have characterized her more recent storylines. It’s thus more than just being interesting. Fish Mooney is compelling; we as viewers actually care about what happens to her.

Like the other powerful women of color that have appeared on television in recent years (most notably, Viola Davis as Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder), Jada Pinkett Smith as Fish Mooney has elevated being an understandable and compelling anti-heroine into an art.  Just as importantly, she also contains a great deal of queer potential, the pleasures of her performance gathering just as much significance as the actions that she takes within the drama.

When it comes to queer pleasures, however, no character provides as many as the Penguin.  From his kooky mother (Carol Kane), to whom he remains steadfastly loyal to his own penchant for the theatrically excessive, Penguin has emerged as one the queerest characters currently on television. Largely eschewing the tough-as-nails, hard-boiled male personae of Gordon and the world-weary patriarchal authority of Don Falcone (John Doman), Penguin succeeds precisely because everyone assumes that simply because he does not perform hegemonic masculinity as well as his fellow male characters. He succeeds because, like any queer, ludic trickster, he knows exactly the places where the dominant rules don’t or can’t hold up, and he exploits them to the fullest.

Through its aesthetic choices, Gotham encourages its viewers to confront the uncomfortable thought that evil, chaos, and queerness are infinitely more interesting, compelling, and even believable than the forces of good, law, and the boring straight world.  For a series that started out as a backstory for Batman and Jim Gordon, it seems to have fully embraced the idea that people really want to see, and what they really enjoy, are the villains who steal the show every week.

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

I raised the concern that information was being withheld from us listeners to make for a more engaging narrative, and suggested that such withholding makes for great storytelling, but problematic journalism. After two more episodes, I’ve found that the question of withholding information has receded in my thoughts about Serial, replaced by another more complex (and I think interesting) question: when are we?

Before diving into the “when” of this question and tackling the topic of temporality, let me first ruminate on the “we”—who is being situated in Serial’s complex timeframes? Recent episodes have cemented my sense that Sarah Koenig is our protagonist and first-person narrator, and she is hailing us to join her in this story. Early in episode 4, Koenig makes this address clear: “If you want to figure out this case with me, now is the time to start paying close attention because we have arrived, along with the detectives, at the heart of the thing.” This moment stood out for me, evoking the kind of direct address common to 19^th century literature, the first golden age of seriality—it is Koenig saying “Dear Reader” to us, a phrase that Garrett Stewart frames as “the conscripted audience,” taking us into her confidence and accessing her subjectivity.

So Koenig is a surrogate for “we,” and like with most first-person narrators, we have access to her perspectives and experience, and lack access to anything beyond her knowledge. But she is also the text’s author, possessing a broader knowledge of the case than she is sharing with us—Koenig asks for our trust, assuring us that the details she leaves out (like the late night cell phone timeline) are irrelevant, and that loose threads (like the call to Nisha) will be addressed in due time. And still I cannot stop from wondering what she knows and isn’t sharing with us (yet). This tension is productive in fiction, as we wonder about the knowledge and perspective between narrator and author; in documentary, we are to assume there is none, or at least it is irrelevant.

But Serial relies on the tropes and styles of serialized fiction enough that I did start to think actively about that gap at one moment in episode 5: Koenig is driving and monologuing, deep in the weeds about reconstructing the post-murder timeline, and her fellow producer Dana Chivvis says, “There’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib”; Koenig deadpans in reply, “Sometimes I think that Dana isn’t listening to me.” If this were fiction, I would seize this moment to explore the possibility of an unreliable narrator, where the investigator’s obsessions start overtaking her rationality and sense of perspective on the case, coloring our own attitudes and perceptions, with Chivvis signaling that we maybe shouldn’t listen to her so intently. Maybe that is what is happening, and the narration is clueing us in to Koenig’s growing immersion and personal involvement, but as of yet, her presentation seems to clearly earn our trust and confidence more than our doubts and reservations.

So if “we” are Koenig’s conscripted audience, riding alongside her as she works the case, when are we as the podcast unfurls? Temporality is central to any medium with a fixed presentational timeframe, as filmmakers, radio and television producers, and game designers all work to manage the temporal experience of audiences more than writers can do with the more variable process of reading. But serial structure is wholly defined by its timeframe, constituted by the gaps between installments that generate anticipation and insist on patience, where that time is used to think about, discuss, and participate in the web of textuality that seriality encourages—see for instance the robust Reddit thread about Serial, complete with fan-generated transcripts and timelines evocative of the “forensic fandom” I have studied concerning television serial fiction. So the consumption of a serial always foregrounds its “when” to some degree.

A listener-created timeline shows forensic fandom at work, but in the realm of actual forensics

Serial explicitly foregrounded its “when” this last episode, as Koenig works to walk us through the presumed timeline of Hae’s death and the alleged actions of Jay and Adnan. As she does this, the podcast constantly toggles between multiple timeframes: the possible events of January 13, 1999, the testimonies and interviews recorded throughout 1999 and 2000 as part of the investigation and trial, Koenig’s interviews with Adnan and others over the course of the last year, and the current weekly production of the podcast. This question of temporality is clearly on the mind of many listeners—Chivvis responds to listeners wanting to binge listen to the whole season by noting that they are still producing each week’s episode, thus “when you listen each week, the truth is that you’re actually not all that far behind us.” So we are situated at a similar “when” to the producers in terms of final product, but they are clearly far ahead of us in terms of the process of reporting, researching, and knowledge. (Chivvis’s post also highlights a dangling thread that I may pick up in a future installment, as I believe the rise of binge-watching in television via Netflix-style full-season releases actually removes the seriality from serial television, whereas Serial aggressively foregrounds its seriality. But that’s for another when…)

While I raised the question in my last post about the lack of clear structure, I feel like that structure is now becoming clearer. Each episode, aside from the first which has a more sprawling focus, takes a step forward in the basic timetable of the case: the relationship between Hae and Adnan before the murder, the discovery of Hae’s body, the police arresting Adnan, and now the reconstruction of the alleged events per the police’s case—next week is called “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” suggesting that the prosecution will soon rest. But the storytelling is not limited to this 1999 progression, as Koenig interweaves her own contemporary reporting, interviews, and reconstructions into the recordings and documents from the past. So we are always in multiple timelines, even as the core case unwinds with some structuring chronology. But given that we are left to live in the contemporary serial gaps each week, our anticipation becomes restless, knowing that the producers have more of the past spooled up to reveal, even if we are “actually not all that far behind” them in the present. I, for one, grow impatient to know what is already known about the past, even if we are not too far behind the process of audio reconstruction.**

So as I wait out another week to try in vain to catch up to the producers, one thing I will be ruminating on is the role of characters beyond Koenig. We are invested in learning the events of the murder and trial, but perhaps even more so, in trying to get a sense of who these people are and why they did what they did. Obviously we’ve learned a lot about Adnan, even without a definitive sense of what we know is true or not, but what about Jay? We still don’t know much about who he was before the events (not even his last name), and unlike nearly everyone else we’ve encountered, we know absolutely nothing about what has happened to him after the trial. Why haven’t they revealed that part of the story? Are they trying to protect potential twists in the story still to come, or to protect an innocent person who might be wrongly attacked by an angry listenership? Has Koenig talked to him, or has he not consented to this story? And what do we have the right to know as listeners riding alongside Koenig’s journey?

Next time, on “Downloading Serial”…

** And in a clear case of dueling authorial “whens,” after I finished the first draft of this post, I read Hanna Rosin’s excellent post about the latest episode, which raises many points similar to mine concerning Koenig’s role as narrator and journalist, as well as her timeframe in relation to the reporting process. But I assure you, Dear Reader, I wrote the above before reading Rosin, even as I write this addendum after.

 
Matthew J. Smith, Wittenberg University:

Curatorial. It’s a curious word that I must admit I don’t recall having used myself to describe anything that I do as a teacher of media, but it’s one a number of the presenters involved in the Faculty Seminar used to describe their roles in selecting and presenting materials for and about television. I had never thought of the work of television producers as likened to the informed discretion of museum and art gallery directors, but the usage makes perfect sense now. Each selection in terms of what goes into a finished television production is borne of that curatorial sensibility, as producers make paradigmatic choices among a host of alternatives and exercise their insight to achieve a product that—when at its best—proves to help storytelling reach its ideal impact.

As I thought more about our week, curatorial also seems to be a perfect term to describe the avocations of many elements of the experience. When we arrived at the Academy headquarters at the start of the seminar, our first stop was the “Hall of Fame Plaza” where statues, busts, and reliefs of some of the most potent figures in television history were thoughtfully laid out over an acre of North Hollywood real estate. We also met employees of the Academy whose job it was to preserve the history of the medium. Karen Herman heads the Archive of American Television, a phenomenal oral history project whose fruits are online and available at the click of a mouse. There was John Leverence, Vice President of Awards, who has coordinated the primetime Emmys since the early 1980s. He introduced us to the history of the statuette and the awards program. And then there was our trip to Warner Bros. Studios, where our guide, production designer John Shaffner, gave us a tour of the historic studio. Outside each sound stage hangs a plaque commemorating the individual television series produced therein, including one where Shaffner had designed the sets for Friends.

Although much of our week was focused on how television is produced and where it might go next, I was gratified to encounter a good deal of the history of how we got to this point. I’m happy to curate such experiences into my own teaching of the medium and its history henceforth.

Todd Sodano, St. John Fisher College:

Over the last decade, storytellers have flocked to HBO, Showtime, Starz, and Cinemax, not merely because of premium cable networks’ inherent freedom to use strong language, sexual content, and brutal violence. Rather, their freedom to tell a compelling story on those platforms is paramount. Jenni Sherwood, senior vice president of development and production at HBO, said on a panel focusing on HBO’s Game Change that decisions at her network are made based on a script: “Where is the intelligence in this? [Where is] the creativity? How is it going to be received?” Neither she nor anybody else who works in cable and who spoke at the Faculty Seminar yearns to offer nudity, language, or violence simply because they can. Greg Yaitanes, showrunner of the forthcoming Cinemax series Banshee, said these elements “come from a place of character or story.” HBO painfully learned more than a decade ago (see The Mind of the Married Men – actually, don’t see it) that having four men speak candidly about sex and relationships wasn’t a recipe for instant success just because it mirrored the spirit of Sex and the City.

Variety’s Brian Lowry, who moderated the showrunner panel discussion with Yaitanes, Cynthia Cidre (TNT’s Dallas) and DeAnn Heline (ABC’s The Middle), acknowledged that writers boast how the best part of working in pay cable is not having act breaks. In advertiser-supported television, the tail (commercials) wags the dog (programming); conforming to this traditional structure can challenge and frustrate the writer. Yaitanes, who used to run Fox’s House, said that, as a writer, eventually “you start thinking you’re there to fill in the spaces between the ad breaks.” The ability to pursue narratives that avoid the six-act structure is strong incentive for storytellers. Starz CEO Chris Albrecht (formerly of HBO) told Lowry that the absence of the ad breaks was the most important freedom on his old network. Perhaps one of the most important lessons to pass along to our students who are pursuing careers in film and television is to understand storytelling and structures. Cidre declared, “Structure is key. Who wants what, and who’s keeping them from getting it? This is the basic structure of everything.”

Randy Caspersen, Northern Illinois University:

Each of my visits to Los Angeles becomes more bittersweet than the last. I lived there for nine years where I worked in television production. My best friends still live there. While I was making new friends and learning a ton about television biz at the Academy of Television Art & Sciences Foundations Faculty Seminar by day, I moonlit with friends at night. One, a big producer on the biggest new competition show on television, launched me into the audience of a live taping. Another friend, a make-up artist for the highest-rated show in syndication, recounted her recent staph infection from breast expanders after her double mastectomy. My oldest friend, a beloved roommate from college undergraduate days, told me about how he has been unemployed on and off and just borrowed $300 from his parents while standing in front of his bookcase which uses two of his three Emmys as bookends.

When I returned to Northern Illinois University, I prepared my lecture for my Introduction to Studio Production students with two slides. The first is a “Greetings from Los Angeles” postcard circa 1940’s which shows the city name in block letters with the city’s famous buildings illustrated inside each letter. The second slide, a modern re-imagining of the same, filled the letters in with cartoony portraits of a drug bust, police chase, an overdone plastic surgery victim, an overcrowded freeway and a prostitute on Hollywood Boulevard. I launched into my lecture about the great things I saw during the Academy’s seminar—the showrunners, the above- and below-the-line job panels, the tours of studios and special effects houses, the fever surrounding emerging technologies—along with the caveat that there is a dark side to this land of dreams.

We got a lot of advice to bring home to our students from the very talented industry professionals. Internships are a great start. You must start at the bottom, work your way up through the ranks and hold out for a decent job for at least a ten-year period. The key thread to everything—whether you are the production designer for The Big Bang Theory or the showrunner for Dallas or the DP for American Horror Story—was that everyone is storyteller at heart and that television is no longer cinema’s simpler, uglier sister.

My students still wonder: what is that “dark side of LA” and “how am I going to make it?” I wonder that question, too. I left the city because I never saw myself “making it” even though I was a producer on a hit show. Maybe the greatest lesson of the seminar came from Nashville executive producer R.J. Cutler who said, crude paraphrasing here, that the people who make it aren’t the geniuses but those who are willing to stick it out over time and work the connections they made when they first came to town. He said genuine curiosity into how human beings behave continues to drive him toward creating non-fiction and narrative media. Oh, yeah, and if you make it, there is big money in that creation. I guess the dark truth of LA is that it will always be looking for how it can monetize all creative media pursuits. And so it is nice to visit Los Angeles and also nice to leave.

Jerry "The King" Lawler

During the September 27, 2007 episode of WWE’s Smackdown, the show’s general manger Teddy Long suffered a heart attack during his planned in-ring wedding. This was part of a storyline. Five years later, on the September 10, 2012 edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw, ringside and television commentator Jerry Lawler collapsed off-camera and would later be reported as having suffered a heart attack. This, unfortunately, was not a storyline. While both of these events ‘happened,’ only the latter was real – as real as anything could possibly get.

The real heart attack that took place on September 10 of this year left the WWE in a position no other television broadcaster ever has to face. This media production had to not only tell its audience on live broadcast television that a man just had a heart attack, but also convince their audience that a man actually had a heart attack. Before we get into what this all means, let’s take a look at what happened that night.

Jerry Lawler had been at the announce table with fellow commentator Michael Cole as he is almost every episode. These two men ‘call the action’ in the ring, narrating the events to give context and background information to the viewer. During a match, Lawler collapsed at ringside (off-camera) and the announcers went silent. All the home audience could hear was the ambient noise from the arena. After several minutes, Cole began calling the match on his own with no acknowledgement for Lawler’s absence. It was not until two segments later that Cole addressed the audience about the incident:

Professional wrestling has always had a unique relationship with reality, as the fictionalized nature of the performance is tacitly understood by the audience, leading to the assumption that whatever is seen is planned or ‘part of the act.’ How, then, is the audience supposed to react to this news, given the WWE’s constant reification of the idea that everything one sees is a story? The live broadcast gives them little time and resources to not only acknowledge the event, but to clarify its legitimacy. So they state (via Cole): “This is not part of tonight’s entertainment. This has happened… This is a real life situation.” This mantra was restated throughout the remaining 3-hour broadcast, with new details on the situation given each time.

Here one can begin to see the type of situation WWE found itself in. This is a company that operates on the assumption that whatever is seen on their broadcasts is part of a larger performance, a fictitious storyline. However, this unique convention has led to problems in the past. Take, for instance, when real life chairman of WWE Vince McMahon appeared as his ‘character’ Vince McMahon (think Stephen Colbert and ‘Stephen Colbert’) on a Raw broadcast and ‘died’ in a fiery limousine explosion.

While this was meant to be a ‘kayfabe’ event (meaning existing within the fiction of the program), there were possible real life consequences. As a publically traded company, WWE answers not only to their paying customers and fans, but to their stockholders as well. During the ‘McMahon death’ angle, CNBC reporter Darren Rovell questioned if purporting the head of your company has ‘died’ on your company’s official press release and website could be grounds for misleading stockholders. The company’s response:

“It is well known to our shareholders and our viewers that “Mr. McMahon” is a character portrayed by Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the founder and Chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.”

Here we see a fascinating example of the WWE acknowledging the artifice of their promotion, citing ‘character’ and ‘story’ as reasons why such an event should not have real world consequences. Examples like this show that for WWE, the scripted segment is the norm, and reality is the exception to the rule, not the other way around. WWE expects viewers to know the fictive nature of the events on-screen, despite constant attempts to undermine their own artifice. Instead of just showing the limo explode on-screen, the storyline crept into all other forms of their media empire: website, press releases, WWE Magazine, and recap shows. Vince McMahon did not make public appearances for weeks during the angle. This is like if an Emmy-nominated actor whose character was killed off the show couldn’t go to the ceremony because the writers wanted to ‘keep the fiction alive.’

Teddy Long's "Storyline" Heart Attack

Returning to Jerry Lawler’s heart attack, what makes this event so fascinating is how no other television broadcast has to deal with such issues of reality/fiction. Part of this is due to the live nature of the performance, but Saturday Night Live, as an example of another live performance show, would rarely face this problem because they follow certain conventions in terms of content and portrayal. SNL rarely challenges standard expectations and so their audience is trained to easily tell what is a written sketch and what is not. However, WWE’s long history of bucking convention makes this negotiation more difficult, as can be seen with its past use of a heart attack in a storyline mentioned in this article’s opening. When little is off-limits in terms of storytelling fodder and anything can be expected, how can the audience tell when something truly unexpected happens?

Overall, the live fiction program is a rare part of the contemporary television landscape, and this special nature raises particular challenges and negotiations, particularly when it comes to the nature of fiction and reality, the planned and the spontaneous. Professional wrestling not only lives in this tenuous environment, it thrives upon it. However, existing within such a state of tension brings unique challenges with unique solutions.

Ian Harding, the actor who plays Ezra Fitz, the young teacher and love interest of main (teen) character Aria in Pretty Little Liars, shared some apropos commentary about the show’s demographics in a New York Post interview:

Ian Harding: [laughs] At first I thought,…(Pretty Little Liars would be)… just be for teenage girls. But I was in Europe, where it’s not airing yet, and in every city… someone came up to me and said, “I love the show.”…In one occasion this guy, early 30’s, said “I really like the show man.”… He was the man to come up to me strongly and comfortably saying he loves the show… At first, I thought it’s the girl’s show, so their storylines will be really heavy and everyone else’s will be almost scenery. But that’s been so far from the case. I know that “Lost” and “PLL” are two totally different shows, but like that, we kind of answer one question and throw another mystery out. I think what keeps bringing people back into the show is that every storylines is constantly spinning and moving.

I’m struck by how Harding’s comments links Pretty Little Liars’ gender and generational context with its narrative complexity. Harding’s comments highlight the way in which the series’ approach to narrative modifies expectations one might have about the generation and gender of its audience.

Pretty Little Liars manages to skillfully enact one of the strategies of millennial marketing; as I’ve argued elsewhere, the very category of millennials seeks to compound and coalesce a potential audience of teens and young adults, of pre-teens who can identify aspirationally, and of not-so-young-adults that can engage nostalgically. It’s an elusive, expansive category, and Ian Harding’s Mr. Fitz offers older viewers one way in. And not only Mr. Fitz, but many of the adult characters of Pretty Little Liars are positioned as millennials themselves, or borderline (or perhaps honorary) millennials. Indeed, many of the adults struggle with the same millennial themes of ambiguous morality, negotiating identity in a networked town, and doing the right thing by family and friends. As such, their struggles and storylines can hardly even be called B or C plots; rather they tie rapidly into the central mystery.

I don’t want to oversimplify this trajectory, but let me throw out an observation. It would seem to me that past teen-focused series like The OC, Roswell, Veronica Mars, Smallville, and Kyle XY (and even currently running series like Gossip Girl) for the most part either relegate parental characters to the background (if they’re not entirely absent or dead), keep adult and teen storylines separate, or posit adults as foils or antagonists. Pretty Little Liars in contrast appears to model a different approach. Rather than pitting teens against adults, the series offers a more expansive notion of young adult culture through its representation of the millennial generation. Pretty Little Liars positions the adults and teens both as part of the millennial generation, to greater or lesser degrees, and as a result their stories are deeply interwoven, rather than radically separated.

Yet I do not mean to suggest that she show flattens generational differences and conflicts, or recognizes all characters as millennial without acknowledging particular age specific differences. Rather, the series mines the multifaceted spectrum of millennial identity for narrative conflict. In fact, where in the past teen series would feature two teen star-crossed lovers, Pretty Little Liars has as its central romance a cross generational affair between a teacher and a student. Taking the place of Buffy and Angel, Max and Liz, or Marissa and Ryan (vampire slayer/vampire, alien/human, rich girl/poor boy), we have teacher/student Aria and Ezra, who meet in a pub, fall in love talking poetry, only to discover the next morning that Ezra is Aria’s new English teacher. Mr. Fitz is only twenty four, (making his birth year 1987), and thus fits squarely in industry definitions of “millennial.” His age, as an older millennial, becomes the romantic obstacle in their love affair—but certainly not an obstacle to the romance narrative in itself. Rather, the age difference fuels the narrative, just as the species and class differences fueled the narratives of Buffy, Roswell, and The OC. (It’s also worth noting here that two other concurrently airing shows—Gossip Girl and Life Unexpected—now also feature teacher/student relationships, and that Gossip Girl actually went out of its way to retrofit a teacher/student relationship into its primary season one mythos.)

Indeed, Pretty Little Liars seems to have found a millennial approach to narrative construction, where all characters’ narratives weave into the greater social fabric and unfolding mystery. And it’s this narrative weaving that perhaps gives Pretty Little Liars the potential to be compelling television with reach beyond its assumed demographic. However, despite Ian Harding’s anecdotal reports of the series’ success breaking gendered and generational expectations, it remains to be seen whether the series’ buzz can overcome assumptions rooting from its home on ABC Family and its Gossip Girl-like marketing.

Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse

Summer is always a great time to catch up on TV you missed, and both of us have recently binged on the first two seasons of HBO’s True Blood, catching up to current airings of season three. True Blood, despite all of its campiness, has been hailed as “quality television” and become a major force in summer television schedules. Yet, many of the critics who praise it – including Todd Van der Werf  at the L.A. Times – freely admit that they have never read the books it is based on, and don’t intend to do so. Their loss. Summer is a great time for reading, too, and we’ve found Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries (aka the Sookie Stackhouse stories) to be fun, sexy, suspenseful, and a totally different experience than True Blood.

The Southern Vampire Mysteries currently include nine serial novels and several interstitial short stories following Sookie, Bill, Eric, Alcide and more. They are usually categorized as “paranormal romance” or “urban fantasy,” both messy genres that mix up romance (or even erotica), supernatural elements, and often some kind of mystery or action plots. These genres are directly aimed at women, offering female protagonists through whose experiences and perceptions the story unfolds. Sookie is just such a protagonist in the books, describing her “disability” of telepathy, musing over her relationships, and agonizing over decisions about how to survive yet another supernatural conflict. In fact, some of critics’ dissatisfaction with Sookie in True Blood may come in part from the way that television has erased a lot of internal character moments in order to show us the action. Sookie’s internal musings about relationships and her deepening involvement in vampire politics just don’t come across as well without her first-person narration.

Dead Until Dark, the first novel in the Southern Vampire Series

It’s also important that Harris calls these her Southern Vampire Mysteries – these books could also be described as “cozy mysteries”, which is certainly  the genre of Harris’ other series (Lily Bard (Shakespeare), Aurora Teagarden, and Harper Connelly). Cozy mysteries feature non-professional women solving crimes – they “just happen” to be there, they are resourceful and charming, and their relationships with neighbors, friends, family and romantic partners are highlighted. These novels – everything from Agatha Christie’s “Miss Marple” books to Diane Mott Davidson’s catering mysteries – focus on character development and fast paced plots, with little explicit sex or violence. Sookie novels do the same (with a little more sex, and a lot more blood). And Sookie novels, like other cozies, are serialized books, allowing readers to follow a likeable character through any number of unlikely adventures, solved cases, and boyfriends. Ending with a cliffhanger – or a preview of the next book – is common, and this structure is replicated well in True Blood. Serialized narrative in novels also activates a bit of a collecting urge, pushing one to read the next and the next, to binge on the novels and enjoy the sense of completeness it brings to see books on a shelf, or to know the whole story. Obviously, this kind of binge is common to serialized television, as well, possibly making serialized novels a uniquely well-suited medium for television adaptation (see also: Dexter, The Vampire Diaries, Rizzoli & Isles, etc.). Television offers the time to visit subplots, character moments, and nuances that film adaptations of books must often gloss over, often turning a single novel into an entire season.

Finally, for those of us from small towns and/or the South, the Sookie Stackhouse novels portray a rural Southern experience that is funny, relatable, and affectionate. Despite the problems and limitations of life in Bon Temps, the portrayal of this world is not condemnatory. As a native of the Mississippi Delta, Harris creates a vision of life in the South that’s neither overly romanticized nor too simplified. No “urban fantasy,” the Sookie novels move to a nearly nostalgic rural Southern environment and challenge it with the supernatural. True Blood may attempt to do the same, but the sense of a small community fades into a collection of high-profile characters, and the accents are terrible (we’re looking at you, Stephen Moyer).

While True Blood at times does cliffhangers well and makes some good additions (extending Lafayette’s presence and introducing Jessica), Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries offer a much different serial experience in a wryly lighthearted and suspenseful story world that’s sure to add some fun to your summer.

First up was a morning workshop featuring a set of comic book, TV, and film writers and producers, including Rebecca Dessertine, Scott Peterson, Howard Chaykin, Marc Guggenheim, and Jeff Katz. The session was filled with spirited discussion focusing primarily on the comparative techniques and conditions of writing for film, television, and comics, and the economics and aesthetics of film and TV industry adaptations of comic books. The panelists offered nuggets of knowledge I likely never would have obtained otherwise (such as the tantalizing notion that a comic book adaptation of Mad Men’s first season was proposed but deemed too expensive to pursue); great examples to raise in my classes (such as Katz discussing how during the production of Wolverine, Iron Man became a hit, prompting a flood of studio memos encouraging them to make Wolverine more like Iron Man, then The Dark Night became a hit, prompting another flood of studio memos encouraging them to instead make Wolverine more like The Dark Knight); behind-the-scenes affirmation that film and television have grown more risk-averse and licensing-dependent than ever before (there is a Jolly Green Giant movie in the works – yes, you read that right); and plenty of darn good quotes to file away for future use (Chaykin especially delivered, offering up gems like “TV is a medium that congratulates you for being too hip for TV”).

Midday brought the showrunner-studded transmedia studies and future of TV workshop with Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, Tim Kring, Kim Moses, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, and Mark Warshaw. Co-moderator Henry Jenkins set an appropriate tone from the start by telling the SRO crowd that this would be a substantive academic discussion, not a Comic-Con fan fest, and the panel was indeed a highly edifying look from the creator perspective at the value and challenge of fostering transmedia properties. There was too much information from really smart and articulate people for me to do it justice in this short space, so we’re lucky that the session was recorded. What you can look forward to seeing once that is posted online is a discussion of, among other things, the tensions inherent to serving contrasting audiences, from the mass to the cult; the economic and reception contexts of transmedia properties and the uncertain future of monetizing them; the industrial implications of fragmented audiences, serial storytelling techniques, and piracy; and the impact of fan demands on the creative process. Most striking to me in regard to the latter was the panel’s evident agreement that while it is a positive that fans are empowered by the internet to communicate their opinions about story direction to showrunners willing to listen, those fans have to ultimately trust in the professional storytellers to do their jobs. Grillo-Marxuach remarked, “We cannot abdicate the right to give the audience what they need instead of what they want.”

A few hours after the showrunners and aca-fans cleared out, it was thrilling to see the room fill right back up to SRO capacity for a workshop (also recorded) featuring members of the legendary Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Barbara McCullough, Cauleen Smith, and Billy Woodberry. Discussing their participation in one of the most important independent film movements in American cinema history, the panelists captivated me with stories about how they leaned heavily on one another for support while at UCLA film school and passed down that community spirit to subsequent generations of filmmakers, as well as how they drew from influences like Italian Neorealism but were driven to create African-American-centered stories that had yet to grace the screen. I’ll be teaching the LA School to my Film History class in a few weeks, and I look forward to passing on to my students the details of the communal spirit that drove these pioneering filmmakers, though I will also have to relate their disheartening stories about the current state of independent filmmaking, as each spoke of struggles to find funding and fair treatment in today’s media landscape.

Overall, I was especially struck by the big crowds attending each of these panels. Just prior to the transmedia workshop, I chatted with Andrew Douglas of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, who recalled an SCMS conference of a decade or so ago where virtually nobody showed up to hear Arthur Hiller speak on a panel. Perhaps today’s events are a sign that SCMS members are recognizing more than ever before the vital value of being able to connect with industry figures and artists. Or as Douglas speculated, perhaps this has also been facilitated by an explosion in communications technology that has brought the media industries and academia in closer contact. If so, hopefully this means that even future conferences set far away from the film and TV capital can still drew on these burgeoning connections. After all, as Henry Jenkins invoked before introducing the transmedia panel and all of today’s workshops affirmed, in the end we’re all just geeks who share common passions and intellectual curiosity.

I am, however, referring to the chain of ongoing narrative events taking place on Buffy: Season 8 in comic book form. Debuting in March 2007 and currently 33 issues in, the Season 8 moniker is, on the one hand, a gimmick intended to convey to readers that as overseen by Joss Whedon, the comic book is officially in continuity with the TV series, picking up where season 7 ended. On the other hand, labeling this series as somehow “televisual” is also perfectly in tune with the ongoing cross-fertilization between the comic book and TV worlds, with talent like Whedon, Mark Millar, and Damon Lindelof moving between both media, adaptations and spin-offs on both sides of the pond, from Smallville to Battlestar Galactica, and genre/style comparisons abounding, whether we’re talking short-lived praise for Heroes or references to Alan Moore’s Top Ten as the Hill Street Blues of superhero procedurals.

Amongst all of this blurring and borrowing, however, the one television concept that simply does not work for comic books is “the season”. Seasons imply definite temporal boundaries. There is always an end in sight and part of the pleasure as well as the pain of viewing a season’s worth of TV is knowing that it will wrap itself up, well or poorly, within a finite number of episodes. Yes, serialized TV may leave viewers sweating through a season-ending cliffhanger or eight, but viewers still know that at a certain point the season will end, whether things are resolved or not, and that anticipatory foreknowledge is essential to the TV viewing experience.

And herein lies the problem with Buffy: Season 8. As a comic book, it does not follow the same narrative rhythm as prime time network television. There is no end in sight, just an infinite succession of story arcs, whose relation to the overall series is designed to be expansive, opening up future storytelling possibilities. This is perfectly in line with the economics of comic book retail sales that increasingly rely on trade compilations available at chains like Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart to hook new readers by offering self-contained mini-book-length stories that form part of an on-going franchise.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I like reading the Buffy comic. It is well written, capturing the clever dialogue and pathos that made the television series so appealing. The artwork is compelling, with snippets of manga-esque imagery interspersed with some near dead-on recreations of the original actors’ likenesses. The opportunities it provides for exploring parts of the Buffy universe impossible to capture on TV without radically blowing up the budget, like Dawn’s years-long transformation first into a giant and then into a Centaur, add texture and spectacle that enrich the franchise. But as a television season told in comic book form, it has really sucked precisely because it insists on adopting the organizational schema of “the season,” leading to expectations that all of this is somehow driving toward a climactic confrontation between Buffy and Angel rather than exploring multiple facts of the Buffyverse that chart its expanding boundaries.