Franchising Friday Night Lights

Dawson's Creek and Gossip Girl

Transmedia storytelling has also found limited success in what may seem like an unlikely site for cutting-edge media experimentation: teen drama. Shows in this genre often are similar in structure to soap operas – multithreaded plots, geographical bounding, complex relationship webs – and therefore a feasible launching pad for transmedia franchising. Jenkins briefly outlines the history of "Dawson's Desktop," a digital extension of the teen drama Dawson's Creek (WB, 1998). A marketing team at Sony coordinated with the series' writers and created an interactive website that simulated the computer desktop of the show's title character. Visitors to the site had the opportunity to read the character's e-mails, investigate his computer files, and navigate to websites ostensibly maintained by his friends; the site's makers stocked these texts with details relating to past and future narrative threads of the show. The makers of "Dawson's Desktop" regularly broke the proverbial fourth wall and interacted with the show's fans, a curious move that prevented the website audience from ever being entirely immersed in the virtual world. Despite this, the website "allowed the producers to take viewers deeper inside the heads of the characters, to see other dimensions of their social interactions" (117).

While "Dawson's Desktop" was an early experiment in digitally extending a television show, the series Gossip Girl (CW, 2007) is an example of a current show that has widely extended its narrative across multiple media. The show's storyline originated in a series of youth-oriented novels by Cecily von Ziegesar, which effectively serve as texts in the show's canon. In addition, since the development of the television show, the network has aggressively pursued digital extensions that feature the show's narrator (whose blog is a central conceit) and the communications of the story's affluent, wired characters who send text messages and digital photos as a matter of course. Gossip Girl is also one of a few shows to extend into virtual worlds, setting up a dedicated presence in Second Life called "The Virtual Upper East Side" and allowing fans to create avatars and inhabit virtual spaces modeled after locations in the show.

The digital extensions of Gossip Girl do not exist solely for the purpose of expanding and advancing a storyline; Critics and fans alike have taken note of the heavy presence of product placement in the show, both on the television and computer screens. The show's website prominently features the clothes that characters wear, and the music that they listen to, complete with links to purchase; a holiday-themed episode offered a storyline revolving around Victoria's Secret, and the show's digital extensions helpfully provided detailed information about the products shown. However, the fact that these various pieces of the Gossip Girl franchise are primarily motivated by marketing does not necessarily exlude them from being authentic story extensions.

Immersion is the best way to deliver a marketing message, and in their attempt to engage the audience the various properties in the Gossip Girl empire do manage to serve a narrative purpose. Gossip Girl's web-based digital extensions provide information and fill in minor narrative gaps; its Second Life presence allows the audience to inhabit the world of the story and imaginatively fill in the gaps themselves. The show's young audience – in Jenkins' words, a generation of "kids who grew up in [a] media-mix culture" (129) – has responded positively to Gossip Girl's digital presence.