Franchising Friday Night Lights

Complex realism in television narratives

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The question remains: Can the concept of transmedia storytelling be more broadly applied? If audiences are increasingly wired to enjoy this kind of encyclopedic entertainment, can this form be made to work with traditional, classically plotted, realist television shows? Or will fictional shows in mainstream genres be forever unable to meaningfully transcend the boundaries of the television screen? Critic Virginia Heffernan paints a dour picture of the latter scenario. In a piece in The New York Times Magazine, Heffernan considers the NBC drama Friday Night Lights and attempts to uncover a reason for the critically acclaimed show's low ratings. "The fault of Friday Night Lights," she claims, "is extrinsic: The program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise." Heffernan predicts that this resistance to transmedia extensions is no longer tenable in a digital age:

An author's work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists' beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise….

[Friday Night Lights] ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity. It shuts fans out.

It may be that the narrative structure of Friday Night Lights is uniquely unsuitable for the current model of transmedia extension, as Heffernan suggests. However, due to the lack of rich transmedia franchises for any television shows outside the fantasy, sci-fi and teen drama genres, I would argue that this is not a condition of Friday Night Lights, but of all similarly non-niche-genre television – a form that could loosely be defined as the contemporary mainstream realistic primetime hour-long drama. Shows in this category, which we can refer to as complex realism, share some particular qualities that resist adaptation to the current model of transmedia storytelling.

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Many cable dramas fall under the umbrella of complex realism, such as The Wire (HBO, 2002), The Sopranos (HBO, 1999), Brotherhood (Showtime, 2006), Big Love, Rescue Me (FX, 2004), and The Shield (FX, 2002); examples of network shows in the category include NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993), ER (NBC, 1994), The West Wing (NBC, 1999), and The Black Donnellys (NBC, 2006). While these shows fall into a variety of subject-oriented genres (such as medical dramas or crime dramas), they make use of two particular techniques that set them apart: