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 The single showrunner has been replaced by a team of executive producers delegating creative responsibilities to a group of middle managers, who then coordinate teams of specialists.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.