Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes

A Narrative Ecosystem Framework

Paola Brembilla, Ilaria A. De Pascalis, Paola Brembilla, Ilaria A. De Pascalis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351628358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Fernsehen

Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes provides a new framework—the metaphor of the narrative ecosystem—for the analysis of serial television narratives. Contributors use this metaphor to address the ever-expanding and evolving structure of narratives far beyond their usual spatial and temporal borders, in general and in reference to specific series. Other scholarly approaches consider each narrative as composed of modular elements, which combine to create a bigger picture. The narrative ecosystem approach, on the other hand, argues that each portion of the narrative world contains all of the main elements that characterize the world as a whole, such as narrative tensions, production structures, creative dynamics and functions. The volume details the implications of the narrative ecosystem for narrative theory and the study of seriality, audiences and fandoms, production, and the analysis of the products themselves.

Part I
Theory

1 New Paths in Transmediality as Vast Narratives

The State of the Field

Matthew Freeman

Introduction

This chapter aims to provide a theoretical contribution to contextual understandings of narrative ecosystems. It does so by unravelling some of the industrial practices, conceptions, uses, and cultural understandings of the contemporary transmedia phenomenon. This chapter in fact positions transmediality as in some ways key to understanding the ever-expanding and evolving nature of the various television series examined later in this book, and so I will here detail the overarching similarities and differences between transmediality as an overarching critical approach and the more specific narrative ecosystem perspective. I also explore the strengths and weaknesses of transmediality in the context of analyzing vast serial narratives.

Specifically, this chapter delves into the conceptual nuances that underpin transmediality as a system, highlighting its value in analyzing the production, distribution, and consumption of vast narrative structures. It is here where I shall then establish the specificities of the narrative ecosystem approach, which keeps together a wide range of heterogeneous factors – accounting for evolutions from text to context – that I use to underline the evolutionary potential of vast narrative formats across multiple media platforms. This pronounced link between notions of transmediality and/as models of narrative ecosystems essentially means understanding the deeply intertwined relationships between media texts, industries, technologies, production, audiences, and culture and between evolving practices and concepts such as marketing, branding, storytelling, and intertextuality. But how does such a deeply intertwined relationship actually work in research terms? More importantly, what does it mean to analyze such complex textual-industrial-contextual relationships as ecosystems?

Thinking Transmedially

As argued in the Introduction, thinking of a storyworld as a narrative ecosystem is particularly useful when one addresses media convergence and narrative spreadability. It may account for all the aspects involved by cross-media narrative production without erasing the specificities of each product configuring the ecosystem. Crucially, just as the proposed narrative ecosystem approach considers the narrative as a complex network based on the interactions among various elements, so too does the notion of transmediality, which broadly describes, as Elizabeth Evans defines, “the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single fictional world through a range of textual forms” (2011, 1). More specifically, transmedia storytelling – itself a smaller category of transmediality – concerns the telling of “stories that unfold across multiple platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the [story] world” (Jenkins 2006, 334). In other words, transmediality is become closely tied to conceptions of vast narrative and integrated ecosystems via the construction of a storyworld across multiple media platforms.

Important to this thinking is the way that Dudley Andrew understands storyworlds to be intertextual structures that persist across multiple texts across media and afford many stories to unfold and many characters to roam:

The storyworld of [Charles] Dickens is larger than the particular rendition of it which we call Oliver Twist […] In fact, it is larger than the sum of novels Dickens wrote, existing as a set of paradigms, a global source from which he could draw.

(1984, 55)

In some ways, the ability to somehow build a fictional storyworld across multiple media is arguably the root of the perceived complexity or sophistication that lies at the heart of so much scholarly literature on transmedia storytelling. Jenkins has argued that transmedia storytelling – “the art of world-building” (2006, 166) – immerses audiences in a story’s universe, providing a comprehensive experience of a complex story (2003). Echoing this idea of a complex or vast story structure, Carlos A. Scolari insists that transmedia storytelling’s “textual dispersion is one of the most important sources of complexity in contemporary popular culture” (2009, 587). In essence, and according to Tim Kring, the creator of Heroes, the nature of transmedia storytelling – and thus world-building – is “like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side” (Kushner 2008).

Yet what differentiates a basic storyworld that exists in any story from the process of world-building across multiple texts and media is the way that the spatiotemporality of a given storyworld becomes expanded across media by using those additional media forms to add new aspects of world mythology, or to expand the timeline of the storyworld to include new events, or to explore new fictional settings, etc., in ways that allow the audience to indeed consider the narrative as a complex network based on the interactions among various elements. And this process is nothing new. For The Lord of the Rings, for example, J. R. R. Tolkien penned entire backstories spanning thousands of years of fictional history, even naming the forests and rivers while developing new languages for the inhabitants of Middle Earth. Across this text, its appendices, and its predecessor story The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien expanded the timeline of this storyworld, narrating earlier or parallel events that occurred in the background or tangentially to the primary story. Even earlier than Tolkien, around the turn of the 20th century, authors such as L. Frank Baum were making use of emerging developments in new printing technologies and in modern advertising – such as the related rise of branding and comic-strip characters in newspapers to extend the fictional storyworld of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) across multiple media platforms (Freeman 2016a).

Such transmedial world-building activity worked to carve a vast narrative, with key pieces of this fantastical story and its characters dispersed systematically across the likes of comic strips, theater, and cinema, as well as via maps and other paratextual documents, indicating the point that, as Mark J. P. Wolf states, the act of building storyworlds is “transmedial in nature” (2012, 68). More to the point, the building of transmedia storyworlds is really about the folding in of text with paratext. Jonathan Gray’s concept of the paratext – itself a kind of intertextual form found in the fuzzy threshold that exists between and around the textual storyworld and the inter-textual cultural or promotional spaces around that textual storyworld – lies in between products and by-products, between ownership and cultural formation, and between content and promotional material. Consider the Harry Potter storyworld as a case in point. To promote the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part II (i.e. the text), Warner Bros. created faux Facebook pages for a number of the film’s characters, publishing paratextual snippets about the spells these characters have learned. These paratextual items exist simultaneously as both text and as promotion – at once operating to increase promotional awareness of the film while also working to develop the audience’s understanding of the rules of magic and mythology that govern that particular storyworld.

Thinking, then, about transmediality as vast narratives has led key scholars to stress the importance of seriality in accounting for the role of each part of the larger story. For as Jenkins observes, “transmedia storytelling has taken the notion of breaking up a narrative arc into multiple discrete chunks or instalments within a single medium and instead has spread those disparate ideas or story chunks across multiple media systems” (2009). Serialized media forms such as prequels and sequels are thus adopted in transmedia stories so to build characters across multiple media, guiding the audience from one medium to the next.

However, it is important to nuance the complexity of how seriality underpins cases of transmedia storytelling. Ben Singer defines seriality as that which “extends the experience of the single text by division, with the selling of the media product in chapters” (1990, 90). But in some sense, Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is in direct opposition to seriality: “Each [textual] entry needs to be self-contained so that you do not need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa” (2006, 98). Rather than operating as a process of selling serialized chapters, then, and as I have previously argued elsewhere:

transmedia storytelling is perhaps better theorised as either a strategic or an emergent/contingent form of expansive intertextuality – using things like characters and their components to link stories together, offering audiences new added insights into characters in ways that constitute a sequel or a prequel, and doing so by quite often switching from one character’s point of view to another as one moves from one medium to another.

(Freeman 2016a, 25–26)

Still, how does one actually account for the role of such expansive intertextuality in research terms? And as was questioned at the start of this chapter, how can transmediality work as a theoretical tool for analyzing and understanding storyworlds as textual-industrial-contextual ecosystems? In some ways, answering this question means turning to the concept of brand.

Brand

Indeed, much current research in the field – particular that which comes from a media industry studies standpoint – points to the role of brand as a way of understanding the links between industrial or corporate activity, wider paratextual meaning and that which occurs on the level of text, i.e. in terms of story and character. In that sense, the notion of the media brand – traversing industrial, paratextual, and textual phenomena – has been useful thus far in allowing researchers to account for the role of multiple pieces of text across multiple media.

John Caldwell argues that media branding, much like transmediality, has “emerged as a central concern of the media industry in the age of digital convergence” (2004, 305). As Catherine Johnson continues, “programmes are now being constructed as brands designed to encourage audience loyalty and engagement with the text beyond the act of television viewing” (2012, 1). Considerations of branding in this context work to evoke what Jenkins also calls brand extension, “the idea that successful brands are built by exploiting multiple contacts between the brand and the consumer” (2006, 69). For Jenkins, this too

should not be contained within a single media platform, but should instead extend across as many media as possible. Brand extension builds on audience interest in particular content to bring them into contact again and again with an associated brand.

(ibid.)

Following this logic, there is a distinct slippage between the concept of brand extension and that of transmedia storytelling. In fact, the precise industrial means through which transmedia storytelling occurs has considerable overlap with the concept of branding, for to maintain brand recognition across a range of media texts and products itself requires a sense of textual or visual coherence across these products so as to ensure that each indeed feels like it fits with the others. In other words, both transmediality and branding are conceptualized in terms of extensions of branded content across as many media as possible – working together via textual and paratextual factors to “produce a discourse, give it meaning, and communicate it to audiences” (Scolari 2009, 599).

So how can branding be used as a theoretical lens through which to trace a storyworld as a narrative ecosystem, one that may account for all the aspects involved in the transmedia narrative production? Let’s consider the Star Wars storyworld for a moment, and in particular the way that branding can be seen to account for the links between the branding of Disney’s Star Wars adventures, their narrative trajectories, and the meanings of the larger Disney brand image. For despite the enormous shift in Star Wars’ ownership patterns in recent years – the property was bought from Lucasfilm by Disney in 2012 – there are now deep synergistic overlaps between the brand identities of Star Wars as a world and Disney as a corporation that allows us to make sense of this storyworld and its ownership as a brand ecosystem.

In the broadest sense, for instance, Disney – which for Betsy Francoeur (2004, 1) is “one of the most visible and successful examples of corporate and brand image building” – has created and sustained a global brand identity built on a few core ingredients. And for Bruce Jones, Director at Disney Institute, “the overriding theme of Disney is magic” (2010). Indeed, when a focus group was asked to list the words that came to mind when thinking of Disney, by far the most frequently mentioned words were ‘fun,’ ‘magic’ or ‘magical,’ and ‘family’ (Winsor 2015, 24). Each of these three descriptions equally apply to Star Wars, with its brand identity built from the fun of the matinee film serials of the 1930s, the magic of the storyworld’s mythological and mysterious Force, and the narrative emphasis on family relationships and conflicts derived from its soap opera heritage. Disney’s stories have also characteristically focused on heroic journeys, overlapping with the Star Wars film saga by foregrounding hope, courage, and friendship as key to lost, isolated people who all must gradually find their place in the world – be it Cinderella, Aladdin, or Luke Skywalker.

Looking even closer, there is a clear emphasis on nostalgia at the heart of the Disney brand identity. Tom Boyles, Vice President at Disney Parks, for example, says that “Disney’s core promise, the simple idea on which it was launched, has not changed since Walt Disney made clear that it was to create happiness through magical experiences” (quoted in Adamson 2014). Nostalgia – defined by Grainge (2003) as a kind of mood interested in conveying a knowing relationship with the past and manifesting as a yearning for an irretrievable and previously cherished past – is crucial to Disney’s brand, a fact that has manifested itself in the wider Disney-owned Star Wars texts across multiple media as a focus on what Star Wars once was, not what it could be. In effect, both the Disneyland theme park and Disney’s Star Wars comic books – the latter described by reviewer Tracy Brown (2015) as “a series very much for fans of the original trilogy by reuniting Luke, Han, Leia, R2-D2, C3-PO and Chewbacca” – are places where “age relives fond memories of the past” (Jones 2010).

Indeed, there is the sense that Disney has effectively tied the future of their own Star Wars world with nostalgic ideals of its past, infusing its own brand messages of nostalgia and mystery into the textual narrative fabric of Star Wars: The Force Awakens itself. Nostalgia, first, plays out in both the textual and paratextual material of The Force Awakens – specifically in terms of the film’s approach to world-building. Principally, the film features the return of the original trilogy’s main characters – Han Solo, Leia Organa, Chewbacca, C-3PO, Luke Skywalker, etc. Moreover, much of The Fo...