Franchising Friday Night Lights

Conclusion

When he introduced the concept of transmedia storytelling in 2006, Jenkins himself predicted:

"Soon, we may be seeing these same hypertextual or transmedia principles applied to the quality dramas that appeal to more mature consumers -- shows such as The West Wing (1999) or The Sopranos (1999), for example, would seem to lend themselves readily to such expectations" (129).

However, these are precisely the kind of television programs that have so far resisted attempts to expand their narratives to other mediums. The difference between these shows and the niche-genre shows that have used transmedia storytelling so successfully lies in the limits of realism.

Will Brooker (qtd. in Perryman: 31) questions whether or not transmedia franchising has a negative effect, laying out a breadcrumb trail of dictated readings that discourages any resistant engagement with the text: “the relationship [between creators and viewers] is entirely shaped from ‘above’.” However, Perryman goes on to discuss how fans of the cult sci-fi series Doctor Who have overcome this challenge by building their own metatextual websites around details and storylines the official BBC sites have yet to exploit. Doctor Who’s story world, unbounded even by time, offers myriad opportunities for this kind of expansion. Jenkins agrees, noting that that a never-ending story world is fodder for transmedia storytelling, providing infinite space for details, characters, and narrative twists and turns: "The encyclopedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story: that is, they introduce potential plots which can not be fully told or extra details which hint at more than can be revealed" ("Transmedia Storytelling 101"). In other words, if a show exploits narrative gaps with storylines in other mediums, it often opens multiple other gaps along the way.

In complex realist shows, however, there is an additional barrier to creativity – the fact that these shows use the real world as their setting. It goes against the spirit and appeal of these shows to, for example, suddenly situate Austin next to New York or land a spaceship in an Iowa cornfield. The fan’s avenue for imaginative engagement is already limited by this condition of realism; if the story’s creators create elaborate exploitations of the narrative gaps, they leave even less room for fan creativity. Indeed, Brooker's warnings are reminiscent of Heffernan’s observation that the narrative of Friday Night Lights "shuts fans out."

The key, then, is not to create franchises with self-contained storylines, which only serve to shut down opportunities for imaginative engagement. The primary goal for this mode of transmedia storytelling is building a bridge between the fictional and the real. Because these shows are often geographically bounded and grounded in actual, verifiable locations, it is impossible to expand the story world endlessly and keep the same level of verisimilitude that is key to these shows' appeal. The viewer's immersive experience, then, is found in living in the real world in which these characters also appear to live.

For a transmedia franchise to succeed, the readers or viewers must be motivated to seek pieces of the story across multiple media. In television texts that fall under the definitions of cult, science fiction and fantasy, the element of mystery is often what drives viewers to other screens. In a complex realist television show, it is the dedicated and intense focus on characterization and detail that inspires the encyclopedic impulse and the desire for more information. Instead of filling in narrative gaps and providing character information in self-contained storylines, such as those in comics and webisodes, transmedia franchises for complex realist shows can best accomplish these aims by creating immersive digital extensions, perpetuating the fiction that these characters and this story exist in the same world as the viewer.