Franchising Friday Night Lights

Adapting the formula

To be sure, there are issues with backwards-engineering a digital extension of a television property; the makers of Friday Night Lights are not creating the show with digital extension in mind. The strongest, most popular transmedia franchises tend to be ones managed by a single creator. (4) However, even though the show's creators are not consciously leaving migratory cues and gaps suitable for negative capability, these qualities are inherent in serialized television dramas, and our model will exploit them to meaningfully extend the world of the show. A successful extension of Friday Night Lights would revolve around those hermeneutic codes that are very much present in the show: those in the chronological, character and geographic classes.

The show sports a large ensemble cast lauded for its authentic portrayals, but even minor and extra characters on the show are cast with care; Friday Night Lights is filmed on location in central Texas and its production staff often casts local non-actors in minor roles. (5) Accordingly, the body of Friday Night Lights fan fiction shows an avid interest in the show's characters, including those who have only the barest amount of screen time. As in the example of "Dawson's Desktop," the lives of major and minor characters alike can be explored endlessly online with immersive diegetic extensions. By depicting the fictional lives of minor characters and establishing alternative perspectives on events in the narrative, a transmedia extension of Friday Night Lights could even produce alternate readings of the show, allowing fringe details of the shows' metaverse to anchor their own offshoot narratives and giving readers a non-dominant view of the primary characters and events in the television text.

Friday Night Lights also exhibits especially strong codes in the geographic class, as it is entirely set in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas. Locations both within and outside of the town are often referred to in the narrative and could function as valuable sites for expansion. Beyond explicitly mentioned locations, however, the portrayal of Dillon in the show recalls Jenkins' comments about transmedia storytelling as "world-building":

Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. ("Transmedia Storytelling 101")

The show takes pains to ground its story in a realistic, yet entirely fictional, Texas town. By geographically constraining itself, Friday Night Lights creates a world with knowable details that can be closely tied to the show's narrative threads. Exploring and cataloguing those details seems like a natural site for transmedia expansion.

Hermeneutic codes in the chronological class occupy a tricky place in sports dramas. If a show revolves around the fortunes of a particular athlete or (more frequently) a team, games and matches are the primary chronological codes; they become events with highly anticipated outcomes. Friday Night Lights follows this formula, with each season of the show encapsulating a single football season. However, the makers of fictional sports dramas traditionally struggle to find a wide demographic, and hence are wary of making sport too central to the narrative. The longest running sports-themed fictional show is a sitcom – ABC's Coach, on air for nine seasons – which largely followed traditional workplace sitcom conventions (Simmons). ESPN's Playmakers, possibly the only ratings success in the history of sports television drama (averaging 1.9 million households – a respectable draw for a cable drama) nonetheless drew only a small portion of viewers outside the 18-49 male demographic and lasted just eleven episodes. (6)

A show that is perceived to be solely about sports pigeonholes itself. The creative team behind Friday Night Lights has openly acknowledged this struggle, as Executive Producer Jason Katmis has said: "It has been a challenge for women to know that they would like the show because of the football thing" (Grossman). A marketing campaign launched late in the show's first season carried the telling tagline "It's not about football… It's about life." For this reason, events on the fictional playing field are rarely the central source for narrative gaps and viewer anticipation. Instead, most hermeneutic codes in this and other sports dramas fall into the character class, creating tension around relationships between members of a large ensemble cast. That said, a digital extension could exploit chronological codes in a limited way, especially in reference to events that might happen during a show's summer hiatus.

A successful, engaging transmedia franchise for such a program would avoid the pitfalls Askwith details in his "Defaker" analysis, adopt a realistic aesthetic, closely mimic the tone and temper of the narrative, and exploit the hermeneutic codes and migratory cues inherent in the show.