Author: weldont2

By Theo Weldon

Denise Mann’s 2009 essay, “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management TV,” uses Lost, the high-budget serial drama series that dominated pop culture discourse throughout its six year run, as a defining example of the 21st-century “transmedia franchise.” Mann observes that “blockbuster” shows like Lost have grown so large and technically complex that they cannot be centered under the creative control of a single “auteur.” The single showrunner has been replaced by a team of executive producers delegating creative responsibilities to a group of middle managers, who then coordinate teams of specialists. This bureaucratic structure resembles a corporation more than a production team, placing TV programs somewhere between “art” and “brand.” Indeed, Mann notes that writers and producers are often contractually responsible for creating “multimedia content” such as blogs, webisodes, and behind-the-scenes documentaries as accessories to the main television product.

Lost ended when I was 8 years old. I never watched the show, and I don’t remember the discourse surrounding it during its run. The one thing I do remember, however, is my older cousin complaining about the show’s disappointing ending. Apparently, the show’s final season kept introducing new plot points and mysteries without resolving old ones, leaving the audience confused and unsatisfied until the very end. I imagine that the show’s unfocused ending reflects its unfocused production team. With what Mann calls “an army of writers and producers” working on this billion dollar TV franchise, the scale of the project had grown too large to hope for a coherent conclusion. In the absence of a single creative vision, I believe that the writers fell back on what made the Lost “brand” successful in the first place: mystery. Lost probably failed to stick the landing because its noncontiguous production team began to overrely on flexing its brand of mystery without understanding why/how it worked in the first place.

Though I never watched Lost, reading about the show’s pseudo-corporate production and controversial ending reminded me of the final few season of Game of Thrones. GoT’s scale makes Lost look like small fry in comparison, with thousands of extras, massive CGI battles, and dozens of worldwide shooting locations throughout the series. GoT also found itself transformed into a multimedia brand, it had official blogs, podcasts, video games, and accompanying documentaries releasing throughout the show’s run. The sheer size of GoT undoubtedly made production a game of frenetic delegation and compartmentalization, but the show maintained a cohesive direction for most of its time on air due to its status as an adaptation. As the show’s source material, George R.R. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire gave GoT a detailed, streamlined creative vision that original shows of similar scale simply could not reproduce. It was far easier for showrunners D. B. Weiss and Dan Benoiff take on greater responsibility for growing the GoT brand when the bulk of the show’s writing and identity had already been established for them.

Unfortunately, George R.R. Martin never finished his book series, leaving Weiss and Benoiff with no source material for the last few seasons of the show. As is well known, this is where things started to go off the rails, and GoT slowly transformed from a medieval political drama with magical elements to an expensive mess of poorly written dialogue, draconic violence, and unresolved plot threads. I view the ending of GoT the same way I view the ending of Lost; when the writers of a series don’t have a coherent vision for the story, they fall back on the elements of the show that they view as integral to its brand. For GoT, this crutch manifested in a final season overstuffed with dragons, magic, and random character deaths. These were all things GoT was known for, but their gratuitous implementation felt forced and insubstantial. The outrage surrounding the ending of GoT did serious damage to the brand, with the franchise having barely any staying power in pop culture discourse (until House of the Dragon saved the day).

Thinking over the endings of Lost and Game of Thrones, I wonder whether the creative failures of these shows can be attributed to their evolution into “brands.” The goal of a brand is inherently commerical, it seeks to propagate itself across a diverse array of products, mediums, and audiences to ensure its growth and survival. The brand managers of Pepsi and McDonalds don’t think about they’re going to “end” or “wrap things up,” so how can we expect satisfying endings from television that structures itself like these corporations? We see this problem with film franchises too, with the MCU long overstaying its welcome after what would have been a fitting conclusion in Avengers: Endgame. I see this phenomenon of corporate branding among high-budget movies and TV as an unequivocal negative for the creative potential of these mediums, but I don’t know how showrunners could create large-scale, high-budget projects without succumbing to it.

By: Theo Weldon

Among the greatest tragedies to befall me in these past weeks was the fact that I did not get the opportunity to share my analysis of the music video for Rihanna’s We Found Love with the class. I’m going to remedy that tragedy now by examining the discursive clusters that surrounded We Found Love in the broader social context of the year it was released (2011).

We Found Love sounds uplift. At a surface level, it could be read as conveying the message that “love triumphs all.” It should be noted, however, that the Rihanna says “we found love in a hopeless place,” she says nothing about love being a positive force and/or a solution to hopelessness. Just the opposite, she says “I’ve got to let it [her feelings] go.” The music video reflects this skeptical view of (hopeless) love, as Rihanna and her lover’s passionate romance descends into a cycle of drug use, explosive arguments, and reckless adrenaline hunting.

With the music video as context, We Found Love takes on a new meaning. Young love is passionate, but it can also be harmful and self-destructive, causing those who partake to lose their grip on reality. The two-toned message is clear… or is it? There is a good bit of extratextual context that is worth considering here. For one, the artist herself, Rihanna, suffered physical and emotional abuse in a highly publicized relationship 2 years prior to the songs release. Morbid as it sounds, the song “rewards” audiences for understanding the extratextual circumstances of the artist. We can take this further. Jason Mittell encourages us to situate genres and texts within prevailing social power structures and to look for “political implications and effects” in “seemingly nonpolitical case studies” (Mittell 19). We Found Love is a pop song, but it is a product of a specific cultural/political sentiment in the late 2000s/early 2010s. We could think of number of pop songs that carry upbeat tunes and darker messages: Outkast’s Hey Ya!, Foster the People’s Pumped up Kicks, Ke$ha’s Die Young. I imagine this historical genre as a product of rising cynicism in the 21st century. 9/11 and the War on Terror ended the honeymoon period the United States had experienced after the Cold War, and the 2008 financial crisis left a generation of youth fearing for their economic futures. Through this framework, we can view Rihanna’s hit single as emerging both personally and societally from a discursive cluster of disillusionment and loss of innocence, one reflected by hundreds of texts, musical or otherwise, produced since the early 2000s.

By Theo Weldon

A new episode of Survivor goes through months of editing and postproduction before it is broadcast to millions of fans on CBS. When it does hit the airwaves, Jeff Probst has a plan. Jeff knows where to put the commercial breaks. Jeff can draw us in with promises of conspiracy and interpersonal drama before blindsiding us with a bombardment of advertisements for pharmaceuticals, insurance packages, and an endless number of skincare products. Jeff (read: the executives at CBS) has tailored the flow of Survivor to hook viewers on the content of the episode such that they are willing to suffer through seven commercial breaks to see how it all ends. 

Watching S46E6 of Survivor live on CBS revealed to me just how well this strategy had been perfected over the last 24 years. The episode, as I understood it, was split into three “parts”: the introduction, the challenge, and the tribal council. Each part led with 10-12 minutes of uninterrupted content to pique the viewer’s curiosity. The latter half of each part was conversely saturated with 2-3 commercial breaks separated by only a few minutes, relying on the viewer’s established interest in the story to carry them through the wall of advertisements. This strategy is not very subtle; when CBS cuts to commercial moments before Jeff reveals who would be voted off the show, I know exactly what’s going on. 

Still, I can’t deny the effectiveness of Survivor’s commercial flow. I was thoroughly invested in the show’s drama, and I was willing to watch a few ads to see how things played out. Even so, watching CBS’s meticulous plan unfold left me with some burning questions. What happens when networks don’t have months of production time to plan the flow of a program? In the context of live television, how do networks strategize to keep viewers engaged when they themselves might not know what’s coming next?

In hopes of answering these questions, I spent the evening of April 4th watching a nationally televised NBA game between the Denver Nuggets and Los Angeles Clippers. I’m a pretty big basketball fan, so I didn’t need much convincing to sit down and watch 2 1/2 hours of the best teams in the world competing. It seemed to me that TNT, the network broadcasting the game, realized this fact, taking advantage of my love for the game by sneaking advertisements into every pause in the action. Every time a coach called timeout, a commercial break was coming. Every time a player stood at the foul line to take free throws, the game’s commentators would rattle off a 15-second plug for Nationwide Insurance, Chevrolet, or Wendy’s.

This heavy-handed, abrasive commercialization indicated a major difference in broadcasting strategies between TNT and CBS. I imagine TNT execs did not feel the need to hook me on the NBA product the way that CBS did with its opening sequences in Survivor. My guess is that they assumed their audience started watching the game with the intention of seeing who would win and how their favorite players would perform, something they would have been sold on before the even turned on their televisions. In short, while the flow of Survivor is tailored to captivating new audiences, the NBA broadcast seemed inaccessible to non-basketball fans, aiming instead to inundate a commited, pre-existing audience with as many advertisements as possible.

Because NBA games are live television, this maximization of commercilization can create some dramatic tonal swings that strike me, as Raymond Williams would put it, as “irresponsible.” The Nuggets vs. Clippers game I watched ended up being close down the stretch, with the Clippers leading by just 5 points with 90 seconds remaining. The Nuggets had the ball, bringing it up the floor in a hurry as they tried desperately to close the gap. Reggie Jackson passed the ball to Nikola Jokic, who lined up a three point shot and scored, cutting the lead to 2 points. The crowd erupted. I was only able to process what was happening for a few moments, however, because as soon as the Clippers coach called timeout so that his team could plan their next attack, I found myself listening to a corporate jingle as I stared at a Pfizer ad. I was still excited to see how the game would play out, but by immediately taking me out of the arena the broadcast had killed the momentum of the moment somewhat. Still, the tonal whiplash from this moment didn’t even come close to the egregiousness of the following sequence.

The Clippers missed their next shot, giving the Nuggets the ball with the chance to tie. Nikola Jokic dribbled the ball across half court, the announcers enthusiastically commentating his every move:

“The score is 102-100, Clippers lead. Nikola Jokic brings the ball across half-court. Hands it off to Aaron Gordon. Gordon’s got a lane to the basket–he takes it. Gordon drives! Oh! Gordon is down… he slipped on his way to the basket… and Gordon is holding his ankle, writhing in pain next to the stantion… we’ve got a timeout on the floor…”

Aaron Gordon had slipped on a wet spot as he drove to the basket. His knee had buckled, his ankle had rolled, and head had crashed into the hardwood floor. I had just witnessed someone suffer a potentially serious injury on live television, and the image of Aaron Gordon holding his leg with his face twisted in pain faded to black only to be immediately replaced with a Taco Bell ad. It was a comical as it was disturbing. Thankfully, it turned out that Gordon had suffered only a minor ankle sprain, but in the moment I couldn’t help but reflect on how the callous flow of the broadcast was seemingly oblivious to the actual tone of the content it was showing on screen.

The tonal whiplash of these final minutes revealed to me a potentially critical difference in “flow” between live and preproduced television. No commercial break from Survivor felt nearly as forced or out of place as those from TNT’s broadcast because they were meticulously planned out long before the episode was aired. In a sense, the CBS broadcast accomodated the viewer with the predictable and less disruptive pacing of its advertising. The live NBA game was unpredictable, the progression of its “narrative” could not be planned for ahead of time. Thus, the network has to assert itself onto both the game and the audience, taking advantage of stoppages in play, whatever the context might be, to run advertisements. This approach creates a somewhat jarring and emotionally inconsistent viewing experience, and I’m curious as to whether that exprience extends to other areas of live television, such as concerts or news broadcasts.