Franchising Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights

With its realistic, classically plotted narrative and a devoted (if small) fan base, Friday Night Lights could prove an especially useful model for the application of transmedia storytelling to shows with a similar level of complex realism. In its first season, the show averaged only 6.1 million viewers (2.3 million in the 18-49 demographic) but garnered significant critical praise and accolades, including a Peabody Award for Broadcast Excellence. In its second season, it suffered a somewhat less evangelical critical reception, having introduced a sensationalistic storyline. Ratings subsequently dipped further, and the most recent original episode to air garnered only 1.7 million viewers in the 18-49 category.

However, a March 2007 survey by MediaLife Magazine claims that the show ranks in the top 15 among affluent viewers, with an audience median income of $65,000 (Downey). NBC reports that the show is the second most “upscale” series on television, citing high viewership in households that fit the 18-49 demographic and report an income of at least $100,000 (Stelter). Interestingly, the show is also among the top time-shifted programs, with DVR viewers lifting the ratings 16.4 percent at the end of its first season (Nielsen Media Research). Though overall ratings pale in comparison to digitally franchised shows such as Heroes and Lost, the demographics of the Friday Night Lights viewership hint at a technologically savvy audience.

Yet Friday Night Lights currently has a very limited digital presence. The show's official website features full episodes in streaming video, brief video recaps of previous episodes, extensive interviews with the cast, and two very basic football-themed Flash games. However, with the exception of the occasional narrative extension in the form of a deleted scene, the site barely rises above the level of an electronic press kit. This would hardly be surprising three years ago, before television networks started to aggressively pursue digital extensions of their shows, but it is especially curious to see this lack of interactivity on a website for a current NBC property. Of all the official websites for fictional shows hosted by the network, the site for Friday Night Lights is one of only a few that contains no original creative material.

Nor have viewers of the show stepped in and given the show a significant transmedia footprint. The few fan websites dedicated to the show focus largely on recounting plotlines and cataloging information about the cast; until the recent announcement that a third season was in the works, the majority of fan-created sites were devoting their energies to saving the show from cancellation. It has inspired only a small body of publicly available fan fiction: one popular site, FanFiction.net, reports that 158 pieces of fiction have been submitted on the topic of Friday Night Lights, a fraction of what is available for other current broadcast television dramas. (3) Several LiveJournal communities dedicated to fan fiction also exist, but, again, the output pales in comparison to other shows. Despite their dedication to Friday Night Lights and their level of engagement with it, fans show a relatively low level of interest in extending the show's narrative beyond what they see on the screen.

However, this reluctance on the parts of the show's creators and fans does not mean that the show entirely resists extension – merely that it has no use for the current transmedia storytelling formula. Heffernan notes, somewhat dismissively, that Friday Night Lights "generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, [or] action figures.... There will be no 'Friday Night Lights: Origins,' and no 'FNL Touchdown' for PlayStation." While she makes the mistake of collapsing the boundary between pure merchandising and genuine narrative extensions, she is correct in her assumption that today’s television-based transmedia storytelling is falling into a recognizable pattern. By examining the goals of transmedia storytelling more broadly, we can adapt the model to successfully "franchise" Friday Night Lights and other shows in the complex realist category.