Franchising Friday Night Lights

Lost

The conditions for transmedia storytelling appear to be inherent to contemporary television: the multithreaded plots, complex social webs and cliffhangers in today's shows form a natural habitat for negative capability, hermeneutic codes and migratory cues. However, much of the academic work in transmedia storytelling has focused on niche genres: largely fantasy and sci-fi, and (to a lesser extent) primetime teen-oriented drama. As television networks increasingly pursue transmedia possibilities for their properties, the most popular and successful attempts at narrative extension have fallen into these genres as well.

One of the most richly detailed digital extensions of a television show, The Lost Experience was an ARG that ran during the summer hiatus between seasons 2 and 3 of ABC's hit drama Lost. Though primarily web-based, The Lost Experience played out across various other media, including voice mail and newspaper ads, and promised to offer information about a mysterious organization that lurked on the edges of the show's narrative. Participants in the ARG were directed to websites that included the "official site" of the organization and a blog purporting to be written by a former employee. By visiting these sites, fans of the show hoped to gain information that would help them unlock Lost's famously complicated narrative.

The show sits squarely at the top of Johnson's Sleeper Curve, introducing levels of complexity rarely seen in television: It maintains parallel timelines, with a portion of each episode dedicated to flashbacks and flash-forwards to past and future events in the narrative, stocking the story with chronological questions. To manage all this complexity, followers of the show have built active knowledge communities in the form of a dedicated wiki and various bulletin boards. These online communities are tailor-made to collectively participate in an ARG like The Lost Experience, and most fans jumped at the chance to engage with the narrative (even as the television show itself was on summer hiatus).

Though Lost is a serialized drama that embraces a number of different genre conventions, several of the core mysteries introduced on the show – an unseen monster that stalks the island, a paralyzed character who regains the power to walk – push the story away from mainstream realism and towards the fantasy or sci-fi genre. Much like in Heroes, another successful transmedia franchise, it is the mystery and fantasy elements (rather than character relationships, what Ivan Askwith calls the "more accessible human aspects of the narrative" [Television 2.0, 118]) that drive the transmedia extensions of the text.