This is the fourth installment in the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media.  This week’s contributor, Iain Robert Smith, completed his PhD in the department in 2011.

On Sunday, April 12^th, the fifth season of Game of Thrones will premiere simultaneously in more than 170 countries and territories. [1]  A truly transnational production with filming taking place this season in Northern Ireland, Croatia and Spain, Game of Thrones is both the most watched show in HBO’s history and the world’s most-pirated TV show.  Adapting George R.R. Martin’s series of epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-), showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have managed, on the whole, to satisfy both fans of the books and audiences unfamiliar with Martin’s works.  Yet this season marks a significant shift in the adaptation process, one that has the potential to challenge many traditional notions of fidelity criticism.  Despite starting to write the first volume in 1991, George R.R. Martin is still in the process of writing the book series, and this season looks to be the transitional moment when the show will start to overtake the books.  In this short article, therefore, I would like to consider what happens to fidelity criticism when a show goes beyond the published material and starts to “adapt” material that has been planned but not yet written by the original author.

In the fifteen years since Robert Stam published his influential critique of fidelity criticism, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” the academic study of adaptation has attempted to move away from discourses of fidelity that privilege the “original” source above the adaptation, to embrace instead an alternative intertextual model of “texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation and transmutation, with no clear point of origin.”  While there have been some attempts to reclaim and rehabilitate fidelity criticism (e.g. MacCabe et al, True to the Spirit, 2012), there is still a prevailing assumption that notions of fidelity reinforce a problematic hierarchy between source and adaptation, where the novel is valued above its screen adaptation.  Yet, as Christine Geraghty has noted, while we may wish to move beyond fidelity criticism in our own textual analysis, the question of faithfulness is nevertheless still important in studies of reception, given that “faithfulness matters if it matters to the viewer.”

As we might expect, the fandom surrounding Game of Thrones is heavily invested in issues of faithfulness, although it should be noted that the forums primarily devoted to the TV show, such as Winter is Coming and Watchers on the Wall, tend to be more open to changes than those that predated the show, such as A Forum of Ice and Fire.  One of the difficulties of this particular adaptation was that George R.R. Martin had deliberately conceived of the book series as something that would only be achievable in the literary form.  After having worked for ten years in Hollywood as a writer and producer on shows such as The Twilight Zone (1985-1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1987-1990), Martin made the conscious decision to return to prose fiction to escape the restrictions of a TV budget and shooting schedule.  In this age of media convergence, serialized television may be becoming more novelistic in its form, yet it is nevertheless still the case that there are significant differences in what each medium can achieve.  Certainly, by constructing an epic fantasy world with over a thousand named characters, 31 of whom are given their own point-of-view chapters, Martin’s book series posed a serious challenge for anyone who wished to adapt it to the screen.

Most of the changes made by the showrunners to date have been relatively small, such as amalgamating some minor characters, cutting out much of the historical background, aging up the central protagonists, and adding extra scenes to provide insight into characters — such as Tywin Lannister, Margaery Tyrell and Robb Stark — who were never given a POV chapter in the novels.  The upcoming season, on the other hand, looks to be making substantial changes.  While the showrunners found two seasons’ worth of material to adapt from the plot-heavy third book (A Storm of Swords), they have elected to adapt the slower-paced fourth (A Feast for Crows) and fifth (A Dance with Dragons) books together in a single season, with entire storylines dropped and others moving in a markedly different direction from their book counterparts.  Furthermore, as some characters are progressing more quickly through their book material than others, it is looking likely that this season will introduce elements from the sixth book (The Winds of Winter), even though Martin is still writing it.

This has become a point of concern for many fans, and while there is some debate as to whether the sixth book will be published ahead of season six in 2016, it is clear that the series will conclude well before Martin publishes the planned seventh and final novel, A Dream of Spring.  In 2013, the showrunners held a weeklong meeting in Santa Fe with Martin to discuss in detail his plans for the overall structure of the story, and it is evident that seasons six and seven of the show will be adapting these plans for the books that have not yet been written. [2]

This form of concurrent production has a number of implications for the debates surrounding the faithfulness of the Game of Thrones series to the books.  Most importantly, the distinction between the book series as the “original” source text and the TV show as the “adaptation” becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.  With the show overtaking the book series, television will not only be the first medium through which the majority of fans will discover the events of the final novel, but it will also have been written, shot and screened well before Martin finishes writing the novel.  To a certain extent, this final novel therefore has the potential to be received by some fans more like a novelization that adapts the events of the TV series than as the “original” source.  Of course, Martin’s status as the creator of the book series [3] means that A Dream of Spring will be treated as more than a “mere” novelization, but nevertheless we are confronted here with an increasingly blurred distinction between original and copy.

Moreover, the anxieties surrounding spoilers will shift focus.  Until now, the concern has been about book readers potentially spoiling events for show watchers, but it will now be show watchers who will be first to find out what happens.  In an age of social media, it will be challenging for any readers who wish to avoid the show revelations and remain “unsullied” until the novels’ release.  Indeed, this process has already begun, with any changes made by the showrunners provoking fevered speculation on forums about what this may mean for the future books.  The choice to remove certain storylines and characters from the show is treated as an inadvertent spoiler, alerting viewers that these story arcs will turn out to be relatively insignificant within the future novels.

Of course, the fact that both the novels and show are still in process means that this dynamic may change over time.  Martin’s original outline for the book series was recently revealed, showing that he had initially intended for the series to be a trilogy with a markedly different structure and focus.  Within that letter to his publisher, he admits that, “As you know, I don’t outline my novels.  I find that if I know exactly where a book is going, I lose all interest in writing it.”  We may find therefore that the book series will ultimately diverge from the outlines planned by Martin alongside the showrunners in 2013.  It is telling that in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Martin teased that he has recently come up with a shocking new twist to the novels that they can’t do on the show because they have “made a couple [of] decisions that will preclude it.”  The showrunners may face pressure from the fans to stay relatively faithful to the plans for the novels, but as the storylines start to diverge, Martin seems less concerned with restricting himself to staying faithful to those earlier plans.  We are moving to a situation in which we have two parallel adaptations, both based on but not beholden to those outlines laid out in that weeklong meeting in Santa Fe.  Notions of fidelity may still play a role in the reception of Game of Thrones, yet it is not so clear what the “original” text is to which the showrunners are being asked to be faithful.

To conclude, therefore, I’d like to put forward a few questions that this case study raises: 1) To what extent do notions of faithfulness still matter when the source itself is under development?  2) How will fans respond to differences between the ending of the show and the ending of the novels, especially if they experience the show first?  3) How are our ideas of the “original” and the “copy” challenged in these rare cases of concurrent production?  While this has only been a short mapping out of these issues ahead of the premiere on Sunday, I hope that future scholarship explores the wider implications that this fascinating case study may have for issues of fidelity criticism and adaptation in an age of convergence.

Notes

[1] Although unfortunately not here in the UK, where Sky Atlantic has elected to premiere the episode on Monday evening instead.

[2] This situation is reminiscent of the collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where they collaborated on the screenplay together, then went off to work on their respective novel and film concurrently.  Both deviated from the early drafts of the screenplay, and the resultant works contained many similar elements but were substantially different in tone and content.

[3] Martin’s active involvement with the TV production, having written an episode each for seasons one to four, further complicates this dynamic.

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

… was more than a month ago. Why the delay? Partly it was personal circumstances: a dead hard drive, family commitments, end of the semester craziness. But more it was because I didn’t quite have enough to say to warrant an installment, as many of my thoughts were only partly formed, or contingent on how future Serial developments would play out before I wanted to commit to an analysis. My abiding sense that Serial itself was in flux as a cultural object made it difficult to write an analysis that could avoid its own wavering and uncertainty.

But now we are done, or at least the standard weekly release of the story of Adnan Syed on Serial has ended. His story is far from over, but the storytelling has stopped. And I’m left to reflect on what Serial was, and might have been, had it not been so wedded to its weekly release schedule and need to conclude before the holiday season kicks in. One of the most exciting elements of Serial is how it has seemed to be inventing its own structural conventions throughout its run, distinguishing itself from typical radio with variable episode lengths, and jumping onto the high wire act of simultaneously reporting and presenting astory. From the beginning, Sarah Koenig has said that we’ll be following along with her as she discovers the story, and that they did not know how exactly many episodes the first season would be. But the final month has felt like they were spinning their wheels, looking for material to structure each weekly episode (especially last week’s “Rumors” installment), even given the extra break for Thanksgiving, and finding ways to incorporate the miscellaneous new information that kept pouring in.

Despite its conclusive allusion to Dragnet, which made me smile, today’s final episode felt rather arbitrary, dictated by the desire to have a defined season of regular installments, and seemingly to avoid the counter-programming of Christmas and New Year’s. There is no resolution, with two court motions still in play but otherwise no change in Adnan’s status or compelling alternate suspects—the last minute identification of a serial killer felt underwhelming, making me yearn for an episode exploring that story and teasing out the many problems with that theory. Koenig ends by playing juror and acquitting Adnan, but even as bits of evidence may have swayed her opinions slightly throughout the series, I have no doubt that she has always held sufficient reasonable doubt. The ending of Serial, entitled “What We Know,” establishes that although we know a lot more about the case than when we began, the big picture is the same as established in the pilot: the prosecution’s case was not enough to warrant conviction, but no other explanation for Hae’s murder rises above the level of unsubstantiated speculation inappropriate for factual journalism.

I’ve been interested in how Serial draws upon conventions of serialized TV fiction, and there is no doubt that the podcast’s unprecedented popularity was fueled by those resonances. But in the end, I think those comparisons also highlight Serial’s greatest weaknesses. The producers fail to achieve the structural elegance that marks the best of serial storytelling, where each episode both stands on its own and as piece of a compelling larger whole. They tackled a genre of crime fiction where our expectations are always aimed at a revelation that will be satisfying and conclusive, answering the curiosity question of “what happened in the past?”, which is an unreasonable goal for an ongoing investigation to arrive at. They embraced a serialized form that has encouraged and even demanded forensic fandom to fill in the gaps between episodes, but did not account for how to deal with the ethics of fan investigation into an actual murder, and whether to integrate or ignore such fan practices. And by adopting the model of weekly episodes of a thematically unified season, they were forced to produce episodes without much new to say, and stop producing episodes before the story had finished unfolding.

None of these structural facets are essential aspects of a serialized podcast. Specifically, I wonder how Serial may have played out with a more flexible production and distribution schedule. There is no doubt that the weekly release creates a ritual of engagement that is hard to replicate, but after a few episodes establishing the hook, moving to a more sporadic release as motivated by the story and reporting could sustain that engagement. And why must the series end now, just because further weekly releases are untenable? Imagine that in two months you noticed there was a new episode of Serial waiting in your iTunes playlist, with an update on Adnan’s appeal, or an in-depth investigation into the possible guilt of Ronald Lee Moore. That would set Twitter ablaze, and renew interest in the series (and sustain engagement in anticipation of the next season). Unlike television or radio, there is no need for a podcast to follow regular schedules, as it can be updated and distributed more like software or blogposts. Fiction has long shaped crime stories to fit into the constraints of a book, a film, or serialized television—Serial has adopted those constraints for a new medium, rather than exploring how non-fiction audio might more radically reshape the serial form. Much has been said about how Serial’s success has made podcasting into a more legitimate and popular medium; I hope it can inspire more creative uses of the medium’s structure and serial possibilities.

I conclude here where I began as well—I think Serial is a remarkable achievement, and I found it truly compelling listening. And yet… I am left dismayed by the structural limitations it imposed upon itself, by the ethical considerations that it seemed unable to grapple with effectively, and the genre trouble stemming from marrying non-fiction content to fictional storytelling norms. I don’t find these flaws to be debilitating, or that my critiques are merely “concern trolling” (as I’ve been accused of doing). Instead, such dissatisfaction is the fuel that keeps me engaged—given the ongoing promise of seriality, we always hope for more, for different, and for better. While I doubt we’ll get more of Adnan’s story within Serial proper (although I assume there will be a This American Life episode in a few months following-up on the developing story), we will get another season. Hopefully Koenig and her team won’t try to recreate what worked this season, but rather explore a new story on its own terms, with new storytelling structures and less constrained possibilities for what podcasting may be. Regardless, I’ll be listening.

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

I peered down the rabbit hole of Serial’s Reddit board. Today I want to explore it a little more, raising the question of how people listen to Serial.

For anyone reading this without a media studies background, this might seem like a secondary digression for a critical analysis of the podcast itself. But one of the tenets of media studies is that any text (like a film or podcast) only matters through its consumption and cultural circulation. And I contend that a serialized text’s reception is even more essential, as the timeframe of production, consumption, and circulation is intertwined, and the gaps between episodes generate far more cultural material about the series than typically occurs in a self-contained text. Thus how we listen helps shape what it is.

Right now, how people are listening to Serial is the most interesting facet of Serial to me. This is not to say the last two episodes aren’t interesting—they definitely are, both in laying out the case against Adnan last week, and this week confirming my own sense that the case left “mountains of reasonable doubt” according to the experts in the law clinic. But together they feel like a transitional moment in Serial, moving from the first wave of establishing the facts as presented in trial, to the process of pushing back against that conviction and proposing alternate narratives. After all, we’re given a key clue as to where this might be going in this last episode: “As a legal question, Deirdre says they should only have to prove Adnan isn’t their guy, he’s not the killer. But as a practical matter, she said, their chances are much better if they can go a step further, and say to the state, ‘not only is this not your guy, we can tell you who is your guy.’” I assume Sarah Koenig says this knowing full well that offering a compelling case for an alternative perpetrator plays much better not only as a legal matter, but as a non-fiction narrative too. Whether that will be Jay, as teased for next episode, or someone else is still to be determined.

But one place where such questions are already being explored are on Serial’s many paratexts. The Reddit board is thriving, with more than 7,000 subscribers (and rapidly growing) and constant chatter between episodes. Slate started tackling Serial on their “Spoiler Special” podcast after the fifth episode, and they have now created a dedicated “Serial Spoiler Special” podcast that now ranks #7 on iTunes (Serial itself is #1). Serial is a popular topic on Twitter and many culture-centered websites, generating copious conversation and analytical attention. There is even a parody series, a sure sign of cultural importance in this day and age. What most interests me is how these paratextual practices fit with norms that have been well established over the past two decades for fans of fictional television series. I mentioned this briefly last post, with Reddit fans creating timelines, but it deserves more consideration.

As I have analyzed elsewhere, fictional television viewers have embraced forensic fandom for many series to try to parse out what is happening in a program and speculate what is still to come. Often times this involves gathering together evidence from interviews with producers, subtle clues within a series like freeze-frame images or intertextual references, and exploring official paratexts that point to broader contexts. Serial fans are doing all of these things, but with the added dimension that they are researching a non-fiction story, with much of the material in the public record. This creates a very strange differential of knowledge: some listeners want to only know what has been shared in the podcast (but still want to discuss that material and often ache with anticipation for the next episode), while others are looking into other sources of information, creating what we might think of as “reality spoilers” (in Myles McNutt’s phrase, as coined in a Twitter conversation).

As with spoilers of fictional series, the reasons why someone might seek to be spoiled are wide-ranging, including wanting to short-circuit anticipation, focusing more on how a story is told rather than what will happen, and hoping to thwart the producers. In the case of Serial, it seems that the nonfiction nature of the story, with much of the “action” occurring in the past, inspires forensic fans to do their own investigations into the case largely because that story information did not emerge from the creative impulses of producers—knowing that there are trial documents and news reports out there makes them irresistible paratexts for some listeners. In this way, fans become parallel investigators to Koenig, and I’m sure some of them are motivated by the competitive drive to “scoop” or at least equal the journalists. Of course, we have seen many cases in recent years of the dangers of online communities trying to be amateur cops, as with the wrongful accusations in the Boston Marathon bombing case and others; there have been ethical discussions on the Reddit board as to what information is appropriate to share versus withhold, given the potential recriminations that being linked to the murder might bring (as discussed in this Guardian piece on the fan phenomenon). And even parties who know more about the case can be respectful of Koenig’s storytelling imperatives to avoid spoilers, as with the fascinating blog of Rabia Chaudry, the lawyer who first brought the case to Koenig’s attention—she fleshes out lots of details and perspectives, but always in deference to Serial’s sequence of revelations.

Another key element of the forensic fandom involves the operational aesthetic, the focus on how a story is being told. As I’ve argued, this is a key element of contemporary serial television, both in fiction and reality television, and such attention to the mechanics of Serial’s storytelling are a central concern of both Slate’s podcast and the fan discussions. People parse out why Koenig makes the choices she does, what she’s omitting and including (like last names of key figures like Jay vs. Jenn), and the strategies the series seems to be following. The type of analysis I’m offering here on Antenna is widespread, both among the Redditors and journalists covering the series, as there seems to be an intense focus on where Serial is going and how it is being put together.

In thinking through the fan reaction and forensic attention the series has gotten, I’ve come to one conclusion: the ending of Serial will be regarded as a disappointment for a large number of listeners. As brought up by Cynthia Myers and Mike Newman in a Twitter conversation, Serial invites comparison to The Thin Blue Line, but it seems unlikely that the series ends with Adnan’s conviction being overturned. As Koenig has reasserted numerous times, she is still reporting the case (and seemingly the Innocence Project is also still working on it), and she doesn’t know where it will end. If fans are bringing expectations from well-crafted serial fiction, an ending that doesn’t resolve neatly or conclusively would seem to violate its assumed arc. Even the best fictional series rarely nail their endings, as expectations are too high and varied to please most viewers. Given that Serial’s ending is still a moving target, it’s hard to imagine how it will resolve in a manner sufficiently satisfying to match its hype. (This point is made more expansively and eloquently by NPR’s Linda Holmes, in a piece I read after drafting my column.)

And yet, even knowing that a satisfying ending is unlikely, and that elements of the reporting fill me with discomfort for rehashing a girl’s murder to prompt fans to debate the entertainment value of the series, I still listen, read, and write about Serial. What’s the draw of this format, this series, and this story? Next time, on “Downloading Serial”…

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.

I should preface this column by saying that I felt particularly hailed by Serial, the new hit podcast from the producers of This American Life. I have been an avid listener of TAL for more than a decade, shifting from weekly appointment radio to can’t-miss podcasts. I even remember the very first time I heard the program, as I was visiting a friend in Chicago in November 1998 and she suggested we tune in this fairly-new local public radio show on my car radio as we drove across the city—fortunately, the first story we heard was the unforgettable “Squirrel Cop,” so I was instantly hooked. Podcasts are my favorite thing to listen to while driving, mowing the lawn, or walking the dog, so it’s easy to fit a new one into my daily rhythms. And given that I have spent the last ten years focusing my academic research on understanding contemporary serial storytelling, this new podcast felt like it was made particularly for me.

And now that three episodes have “aired” (or whatever verb we use for a downloadable audio file), I think it’s great—each episode adds a new installment in the true crime tale of a high school murder in 1999 and the convicted killer who might very well be innocent. The structure maximizes intrigue as to what happened 15 years ago, and what might happen to potentially clear Adnan Syed from the murder charge. The production is as tight and smooth as TAL, making it sound like an established project that hits the ground running, rather than the typical startup choppiness of most new podcasts trying to establish a voice. So it’s definitely worth all the attention it’s been getting and you should certainly become a regular listener.

And yet…

I have some reservations that stem from its formal innovations. Serial’s titular use of seriality raises some interesting narrative wrinkles, as it applies the serial form to journalistic nonfiction in seemingly unique ways. There have certainly been journalistic series before, where a reporter stretches a story over multiple days or even weeks, but in such cases that I know of, it feels like the reporting is ongoing rather than segmenting a single story to maximize suspense and engagement. Likewise, documentaries like the 7 Up series or Paradise Lost’s sequels return to the story after new information or revelations develop during the serial gaps. And of course reality TV serializes nonfiction stories, but typically such narratives are contrived by design, rather than the high-stakes matters of murder and a life sentence. Serial producers report most of the story ahead of time, and serial their presentation of the material. (According to interviews, they are still producing episodes and doing more reporting as the podcast rolls out, but the bulk of the reporting was completed before launch.) And this creates some genre trouble.

Serial’s storytelling owes to other genres besides journalism, with an embedded murder mystery at its core. In exploring this murder, the program functions as a crime procedural, detailing investigations by both the police and the lead reporter, Sarah Koenig. In television, we tend to equate “procedural” with “episodic,” as the bulk of crime programs that highlight investigations focus on stand-alone cases each week in a tradition dating back to Dragnet. But the serialized procedural has emerged recently as a hybrid, tracing the investigative process over time on police dramas The Killing and Broadchurch (innovated importantly by Twin Peaks, which I recently conversed about on this very site). I’ve studied the use of the serial procedural model on The Wire, which dramatizes and serializes procedures not only for police, but also for drug dealers, unions, politicians, teachers, and reporters. This last one is the vital link to Serial, as The Wire creates an interesting intertext: Koenig, like Wire creator David Simon, was a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun before moving into electronic media, and this crime story takes place in Baltimore County. When I am visualizing the scenes described on Serial, I reference the visuals of The Wire to help set the milieu.

Koenig’s role is crucial here, as I would argue that she is the main character of Serial, and this is where my reservations emerge. Obviously there is the highly dramatic material around the murder case, but the podcast’s narrative arc is Koenig’s own process of discovery in investigating the case. The first episode highlights how she learned about the murder, why she began investigating, and her growing reservations about the conviction. I figured that we would trace her investigative process as it unfolds, providing the vector which the series would follow. However, the episodes are structured more topically, with each exploring a particular aspect of the case in depth—thus far we have delved into Adnan’s alibi, Hae and Adnan’s relationship, and the discovery of her body. This last episode raised my concerns about the podcast’s structure: the whole episode centers on “Mr. S” and his unusual stumbling across Hae’s body in Leakin Park (which is visited and referenced on The Wire as “where West Baltimore brings out its dead”). It’s an engaging episode with great twists—he’s a streaker?!—but I’m left wondering how it fits into the larger narrative arc. Is this just a red herring? Does it help us learn more about the core case of Adnan’s conviction, or is it just a colorful digression to flesh out the whole story? And most importantly, what does Koenig know when she’s presenting this facet of the story?

Since Koenig is both Serial’s lead character and the lead authorial figure (or more accurately, functions as the inferred author), her knowledge is crucial to our narrative comprehension. If we were following her process of discovery chronologically, we would share her amount of knowledge about the case—even though there would obviously be a delay in the production process so that the real person Koenig would know more than her radio character would in a given week, we would at least share a linear process of discovery with her. Instead, each episode compresses the discovery over the past year of reporting into a presentation of that aspect of the case. This is much easier to follow than the messy procedures of reporting, where she was certainly investigating multiple facets all at once and only could make sense of certain bits of evidence in retrospect. But by structuring it for both clarity and engagement, I feel like there is a bit of betrayal to the journalistic enterprise, as Koenig and her production team are seemingly presenting information that they know is not crucial to the case, or that later revelations will problematize.

What is their responsibility in telling us what they know upfront? As storytellers, withholding information about a story to maximize dramatic engagement is essential. As journalists, withholding crucial information about a story seems problematic at best, unethical at worst. This conundrum of narrative journalism is compounded by the serial form, as the structural need to withhold and defer story seems to run counter to the journalistic responsibility to inform listeners. While I do not think Serial aims to deceive or mislead us, it does strategically refuse to give us the full story—thus far, we have not been presented with any other viable suspects in the case, any exploration of the crucial witness Jay and his potential role in the crime, or considerations of alternative motives, all of which have been teased as still to come. And yet I assume that Koenig knew of such information and possibilities long before she investigated the burial scene and dived into Mr. S’s odd history. Such deferments make for truly compelling storytelling that I am enjoying, but they make me uncomfortable with the ethics of this format. I get frustrated that Koenig is keeping something from me, feeling like she’s not playing fair—even though I often feel similar frustration about a compelling serial fiction, that’s part of the game for fiction while it violates the rules of journalism. How will this strategy play out over the course of Serial’s many weeks? Will my feeling that information is being withheld get in the way of connecting with the shared experiences and conversations that makes TAL and other long-form audio journalism so powerful? Can I resist researching the case to discover yet-to-be-revealed details certainly lurking online as spoilers (a.k.a. real life)?

These issues are still to be resolved—and that is my motivating question for this series of commentaries on Serial. I’ll post to Antenna on a semi-regular basis (e.g. when I have something more to say), and analyze this new form of serialized audio journalism in terms of narrative, medium, and other issues as they arrive. I also hope to land an interview with Serial’s producers to get a sense of their own procedures and goals in crafting this experiment. Just as Serial represents a new form of serialized journalism, I’m going to try to serialize an essay about the series here, publicly drafting and revising arguments as the source material rolls out. Both are experiments with unpredictable ends. Stay tuned and join the conversation to discover where they might lead.

The Walking Dead is certainly not the first video game to borrow from television, particularly in terms of aesthetics and style. Alan Wake, published by Microsoft for the XBox 360 in 2010, is a full-length psychological thriller that is internally structured like a television series. ‘Levels’ of the game are presented as ‘episodes,’ each with their own arcs and cliffhanger endings. The most overt element is a “Previously On Alan Wake” cinematic that plays before each ‘episode,’ quickly recapping the events of the game so far. The function here is less practical (as it is used on actual television shows to remind viewers of possibly long-forgotten plot points) as it is much more stylistic, meant to imitate the particularly televisual device, perhaps even parodying it.

While Alan Wake certainly captures the aesthetics and presentational aspects of television, it is still a primarily singular experience. Yes, the game features episodes and levels, but games have always had levels since their very inception. Whenever Mario (well, Jumpman) would reach the Princess in Donkey Kong, he would quickly whisk her away, prompting the next ‘episode’ of conflict and adventure for our hero. But Alan Wake shows the inherent structural similarities between these two media. Both television and many video games utilize a particularly fragmented organizational style, wherein smaller yet distinct parts come together to form a whole that allows starting and stopping, as opposed to film which is meant to be experienced in a single sitting. Games often take several hours to complete, and television seasons and entire seasons certainly tie to this mode. With all of these connections, as well as the obvious fact that games are primarily played on televisions, the real question is why episodic gaming is the exception and not the rule?

An 'Episode' of Donkey Kong

The first episode of The Walking Dead game was released in April of 2012. Subsequent episodes (2-5) were released roughly every two months, meaning the entire ‘season’ of the game took about seven months to be fully released. While a disc-based, physical release containing the entire season will be released in December, over 1.2 million unique players have downloaded and experienced the game so far (and these sales numbers only take into account the first three episodes) and was the highest-selling game in August 2012. What is most fascinating about the game’s success, from an economic standpoint, is the growth in downloads from Episode 1 into later installments. Like a television show gaining viewers from season to season, The Walking Dead gained players as word spread in the months between releases. The episodic television model was not some gimmick as it played aesthetically in Alan Wake, but a financially successful distribution model for a gaming product.

There are many factors required for this system to be successful. First and foremost, digital distribution is needed by publishers like Telltale Games in order to keep costs down. The idea of packaged episodic content would raise prices exponentially, particularly considering that each episode only contains roughly 2-3 hours of content (as opposed to full-retail games ranging from 20-50 hours). Players are even able to buy a ‘Season Pass,’ getting all five episodes cheaper than buying them individually, encouraging early adoption.

Beyond the digital technology, the game had to be good, which allowed for both popular and critical acclaim to spread, increasing interest in the product while it was still on the market, so to speak. Instead of possibly buying a game most people had already purchased and played to completion, new players could ‘catch up,’ and join the conversation. Herein lies the rub; while episodic gaming is a new frontier for how developers make games, helping avoid the huge risk market of long development cycles and increased budgets, it is perhaps an even larger divergence in terms of how we play games.

Fan Art for "The Walking Dead" Game

One of the more lauded aspects of The Walking Dead is the element of player choice. The game frequently confronts players with moral and practical choices that change the plot throughout the rest of the game, with decisions as major as killing or saving certain characters. This entire system gains more worth for the player when it is shared socially, with players discussing stories and divergences in various play-throughs, leading to a variety of unique narratives. Communities like The Walking Dead Confessions (SPOILERS!) have sprung up around the game, and the episodic nature was crucial to these discussions, as posts before the final episode frequently featured theories and hopes for how the rest of the game would play out. Players were socially-constructing their play experience because of the episodic nature, rather than individualizing the experience and sharing after-the-fact.

As television continues into its (arguably) new “golden age,” the shift in video games towards the televisual model of both aesthetics and distribution may be a sign of quality to come. Despite the entrenched history of AAA-games and off-the-shelf distribution, the rise of digital and more small-scale games portends a seismic shift in the industry, for players, developers, but perhaps most importantly, for the games themselves.

It wasn’t the first time a comic book character’s death had been announced by mainstream (rather than specialized or pop culture-centric) news sources. When DC Comics killed off Superman in 1992, the issue, which was vacuum-sealed in an opaque plastic bag for secrecy (and collectability), made waves in the news media. Likewise, when Marvel killed off Captain America in 2007, the news spread across the internet like wildfire the morning the comic was published. And deaths aren’t the only comic book events that receive media coverage. In the past few years alone, headlines have sprung up in mainstream news venues about Archie marrying Veronica, Captain America carrying a gun, and Wonder Woman wearing pants. In each example, the news hit the wire before the issue in question was available for purchase – in the case of Johnny’s death, more than 24 hours before comics’ usual Wednesday release date, and hours before any stores would open for the early, unofficial Tuesday release of Fantastic Four #587.

The comic book industry is a small one with a tiny core audience, and it’s not shocking that companies like Marvel, DC, and Archie would harness the power of the mainstream press to try to get new bodies into the specialty shops where comics are near-exclusively sold. Fantastic Four #587, like the Death of Superman, was placed in a vacuum-sealed “polybag,” a practice reserved in the past for so-called “collectible” issues that largely went out of favor after the burst of the speculation bubble in the 1990s. The companies assume (correctly) that non-readers will hear the news and buy the issue out of an (erroneous) assumption that its “special event” quality will make it valuable years down the line, thus briefly spiking the company’s profits. And if even a handful of those potential collectors spots something on the comic book shelf that makes them come back the next week and the week after that, the corporate logic goes, so much the better.

What is more surprising, though, is the mainstream media’s treatment of these stories as legitimate, reportable news events, rather than as spoilers for serial narratives. I can’t imagine a scenario in which the Associated Press would report spoilers for a death on LOST before the episode aired, or the death of a Harry Potter character before the release of the sixth or seventh book. While rumors, advance reviews, and other easily-accessible sites for spoilers on the internet are commonplace, the mainstream news generally avoids directly reporting such information, at least until the general public has gotten the opportunity to consume the piece of media in question. But news organizations possess no such qualms about spoiling comic books.

This raises questions about the strange place that comic books occupy in the cultural landscape. The most popular comic book superheroes are some of the oldest, most iconic fictional characters in modern America, cultural strongholds from the 1930s through the present. Yet circulation of comic books themselves in the 21st century is pitifully low – a comic that sells 100,000 copies in 2011 is a blockbuster, and the average American is more familiar with the heroes through movies, cartoons, and merchandise. As a result, the news reports play to the lowest common denominator, revealing the key events in the comics without providing any context and sending the curious to comic shops to pick up an issue that will make absolutely no sense to anyone who has not been following the serialized story. A non-reader would never know that Archie’s marriage to Veronica was simply a fantasy of one possible future, that the gun-slinging Captain America was not Steve Rogers but his sidekick, former brainwashed assassin Bucky Barnes, or that Johnny Storm died at the culmination of a long storyline involving alien invaders from another dimension. The only people who wouldn’t be confused by these things are the regular comic book readers – the very people who find the pervasiveness of the spoilery news stories so frustrating.

But for the news media, confusion about the narrative is not a concern, because the news media does not treat comics as narrative. Comics are periodicals, both in form (floppy, stapled pages of content and ads) and release structure (monthly or weekly), and the treatment of comic books by the media can be compared much more readily to its treatment of magazine periodicals than its treatment of television shows or book sequels. In the current digital climate, news of a celebrity having a baby or coming out of the closet hits the wire long before the physical issue of People hits the stands, no matter how allegedly exclusive the content. Comics, as conceptualized by the media, are no different – they are merely magazines reporting news from another universe, a universe full of players as beloved and well-known as Gwyneth Paltrow or Lance Bass. One needn’t be a diehard *NSync fan to be curious about Lance Bass’s sexuality, and, likewise, one needn’t be a comic book reader to care about what happens to the Human Torch.

The difference, however, is that despite the iconic status of their characters, the periodical status of their form, and the small size of their audience, comics are narratives, narratives lovingly constructed by hard-working writers and artists. In a spoilery media culture that ignores story for the sake of shallow reporting on the status of fictional people, that’s the fact that threatens to gets lost in the shuffle. Superhero comic books have long struggled for cultural legitimacy, fighting the derisive “Wham! Biff! Pow!” headlines, and as long as the American media landscape (not to mention corporate marketing departments) treats them as news delivery mechanisms rather than stories, that struggle will continue.

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.

I can’t remember what made us decide to start in on Season 3 of Damages this past year. I watched the first and second episodes with divided attention, my phone raised and twitter list loaded to catch up on the conversations on Big Love, Lost, or Supernatural. But that state of distracted viewing didn’t last long; soon I was drawn in to this tightly woven serial mystery masquerading as a legal show. I was dually captivated by the masterful storytelling and by Glen Close’s performance of the indomitable high-stakes litigator, Patty Hewes. I was also intrigued by Martin Short and Tate Donovan, both of whom gave performances with much more subtle force than I expected. Still I found myself resistant for a few episodes to the character of the young law associate Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) who finds herself seemingly in above her head. There was a period of several episodes where I would actually decry out loud that I did not understand the point of her character, or see what she added to the series.

But I’d venture to say now (as I move back in time to race through the first season on Netflix) that my initial resistance to Ellen stemmed from my too low expectations of what a show like Damages might do with two female characters, one older and powerful and another slight, young, and pretty. I expected Ellen to be a weak, powerless character—or an overly idealized, character there for eye candy—because surely the series only had room to depict the journey of one strong, complex, flawed woman. And in that, I am happy to say I was very wrong. The core of Damages, to me is its depiction of the struggles of two strong, complicated professional women. (I’ll write another post on how the focus on female characters coincides with the series’ compelling and unorthodox aesthetic and narrative structure.)

Over the course of its serial, mystery narrative, Damages paints a portrait of a lifetime of edges and compromises, successes, ambivalences, and sacrifices faced by two different generations of women fighting to be powerful in the world on a daily basis. A rare moment where Patty actually talks with Ellen about her personal life highlights the show’s complexity on this front. In a single exchange—held over whiskey in the workplace—Patty warns Ellen that most men can’t handle ambitious women, and that Ellen must search to find a significant other who won’t reject her ambition; and yet this advice immediately follows Patty’s suggestion that Ellen give her fiancé the false sense that he’s in the driver’s seat.

I find this unexpected instance of relationship advice from Patty to Ellen especially notable—an overt moment in which we see the characters directly address how traditional gender roles do or don’t fit into their lives as professional women. This type of negotiation of the contradictions of lived gender politics isn’t something we see very much on television; though I’m drawn to shows that hint at it, or give it to us in incoherent moments; (Gossip Girl, NYC Prep, The Gilmore Girls, and Veronica Mars come to mind…)

But with Damages, Ellen’s and Patty’s experiences are our center. I’d even argue that Damages is more about the high stakes of relationships between women and the navigation of the public and the personal as women than it is about the larger legal proceedings and narrative mystery (as intriguing and satisfying as that may be). When all is said and done and the mystery is revealed, core questions remains: what do Ellen and Patty see in each other? Why do they need each other and/or repudiate each other? What does Damages have to say about the possibilities and limitations of female power, as different generations of powerful women collide, align, and recognize their likeness in each other?

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.