Franchising Friday Night Lights

Big Love and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Transmedia storytelling has been successfully employed in these niche genres, but digital extensions of shows in other genres have met with far more limited success. For example, HBO's Big Love (2006), a drama that details the lives of a polygamist and his family, offers a blog written in the voice of the family's youngest wife, Margene. Penned by a writer's assistant (Boche), the blog occasionally reveals details about past and future plot events but primarily focuses on the retelling of events through the character's eyes. Fans of the show have embraced the blog to some extent, with each post averaging 30-35 comments.

With the exception of Margene's blog, however, Big Love's web presence is heavily promotional. Beyond the show's official website on HBO.com, the network briefly hosted "The Henrickson Wedding," a wedding-themed website which made small nods to realism, offering a photo album of the characters' wedding ceremony and creating a fictional gift registry. However, the site made no attempt to hide its promotional purpose, posting prominent links back to the show's official website and advertising an HBO-sponsored sweepstakes. This destroyed any illusion of engagement with the characters, and did little to enhance or extend the narrative. "The Henrickson Wedding" is no longer active, and Margene's blog appears to have dipped in readership during the show's hiatus (now averaging 12-13 comments per post).

Askwith details a particularly disastrous attempt at a diegetic digital extension of a primetime drama: the "Defaker" blog created to promote Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (NBC, 2007). Modeled after a well-known Hollywood gossip site, "Defaker" was positioned as a gossip blog that offered inside information on the cast and crew of the fictional show that Studio 60 revolved around. Studio 60 featured a large ensemble cast and interwoven narratives; Askwith points out that a blog offering inside information that might untangle or enhance plot lines had enormous potential.

However, the blog's first entry "was nothing more than a mediocre recap of events that took place on the show, and a series of HD screen captures presented as 'behind-the-scenes photos'" (Askwith, "Online Content Experiments"). Fans of the show were infuriated by the apparent lack of effort to create new content, or even to make any nods to realism that would elevate the site above the level of clumsy viral marketing. Vitriolic comments from the site's readers and an equally acidic response from the writer of the blog led to the site being shut down within weeks of its launch.

The "Defaker" debacle shows that repackaging a television show in a shiny new medium does not necessarily constitute a meaningful narrative extension; "Online content extensions," Askwith says, "should help transform a show from passive viewing to an immersive experience." Genre television has found success in this formula. To date, other kinds of television dramas have yet to hit the mark.