Franchising Friday Night Lights

Section I: What is transmedia storytelling?

In November 2006, entertainment industry professionals and media scholars gathered at MIT for a conference ambitiously titled "Futures of Entertainment." At the conference's final panel, discussion revolved around the relatively new concept of transmedia storytelling, and one panelist marveled at the possibilities inherent in the practice:

We're just barely scratching the surface of what's possible to do… You can achieve one emotion with one medium and another emotion with another medium and they overlay really nicely. [We're] starting with "What's the world we're in? What's the story we want to tell?" and then figuring out how the technology feeds that.

Though crowning it as the future of entertainment may be premature, transmedia storytelling is a tantalizing idea. In his 2006 book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins introduces the concept of transmedia storytelling, defining it as a story "that unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole" (95). Using The Matrix as a case study, Jenkins traces various threads of the story through a trilogy of films, a series of comic books, anime shorts, a video game, and an elaborate alternate reality game (ARG). At its core, he says, transmedia storytelling does not revolve around traditional linear narratives but is instead a process of building "complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories." The economic implications for this kind of media convergence are obviously significant; more importantly, this form appears to be ideally suited for the way we consume media in the digital age.

The use of multiple mediums to tell a single story is hardly a new concept. However, only now is it being so aggressively and intentionally applied, especially in the case of network television. Through character blogs, dedicated Second Life areas, corporate websites for fictional institutions, and vast collections of deleted and additional scenes, many popular network television shows are being extended into the digital realm. Television-based transmedia storytelling has found its best successes in two genres: Science fiction (notably Heroes and Lost) and youth-oriented drama (Quarterlife, and, to a lesser extent, Gossip Girl). These shows are particularly effective exercises in world building that lure active readers to follow storylines outside of the borders of their television sets.

The success of television-based transmedia storytelling in such small niches raises a question: If digital extension truly is the future of all television, why does it fail when applied to shows in mainstream genres? More importantly, how can we adjust current models of transmedia storytelling so that they successfully work with these kinds of programs?