Franchising Friday Night Lights

The transmedia formula

Jenkins' work on transmedia storytelling and convergence culture depends heavily on the theories of philosopher Pierre Lévy. In his semi-utopian tome Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, Lévy defines collective intelligence as the sum of human knowledge: "no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity" (13). The internet, he says, has spurred knowledge communities that fully exploit our collective intelligence, allowing us to solve problems, manage situations and consume media collectively.

Jenkins further details the ways in which we form these knowledge communities around cultural properties so that we can parse increasingly complex narratives: "The most committed consumers track down data spread across multiple media, scanning each and every text for insights into the world… Viewers get even more out of the experience if they compare notes and share resources than if they try to go it alone" (95). Transmedia storytelling naturally caters to this trend, providing audiences with an encyclopedic amount of information spread across a number of media texts – more information that a single viewer can consume. The form extends a narrative beyond a traditional linear structure, building a fictional world that demands reader attention and involvement.

Seeing the economic potential in having involved, dedicated viewers willing to track a story across multiple media, entertainment industry professionals are scrambling to implement successful transmedia storytelling. In his 2007 Masters thesis, Geoffrey Long attempts to identify a series of principles for a successful transmedia franchise. Using films by the Jim Henson Company as a case study, Long first adapts John Keats' concept of negative capability to film and television narratives: "When applied to storytelling, negative capability is the art of building strategic gaps into a narrative.... Simple references to people, places or events external to the current narrative provide hints to the history of the characters and the larger world in which the story takes place" (53). When presented with these gaps, an audience expects the narrative to eventually fill them; in the meantime, we try to imaginatively fill them ourselves, using the hints provided to predict a resolution.

The presence of negative capability allows for another of Long's key concepts (as first defined by Marc Rupple): migratory cues, or road signs existing in one media form that point a reader towards additional content in another media form. Migratory cues play on an audience's desire to fill narrative gaps, driving viewers to other forms of media to find the missing details. For example, in the show Heroes (NBC, 2006), the storyline involves a mysterious organization pretending to be a paper company. A close-up shot of the company's business card with a visible phone number was a migratory cue: viewers who took the hint and called the number were rewarded with additional information that supplemented the narrative.

A viewer's motivation to fill narrative gaps is predicated on suspense, and Roland Barthes' concept of the hermeneutic code is crucial to Long's analysis. In his analysis of the short story "Sarrasine," Barthes identifies five structuralist codes that are woven into any narrative (19). One of these codes, the hermeneutic, functions primarily to create suspense; it encompasses elements in a narrative that are not fully explained, leaving a gap in the reader's understanding of a story and creating anticipation of an answer. Hermeneutic codes are what ultimately drive an audience to follow migratory cues and, in the case of transmedia storytelling, seek engagement across multiple media. In his application of Barthes' concept to Henson's films, Long further divides hermeneutic codes into six classes:

• Cultural: aesthetic details ("costumes, architecture, artwork, and other elements") that refer to cultures not explicitly defined in the narrative
• Character: references to characters that do not appear on screen (or appear only briefly)
• Chronological: references to events that are not depicted in the narrative but occurred in its past or its future.
• Geographic: references to locales do not appear in the narrative (or appear only briefly)
• Environmental: references to "the flora, fauna, or other scientific components of the world" (1)
• Ontological: suggestions that call into question the existential nature of the narrative

Long notes that, like traditional narratives, a successful transmedia narrative provides resolutions to some of the questions raised in its hermeneutic codes, but does so in various kinds of media – if a puzzle is presented in the early scenes of a movie, the answer may be buried on Level 3 of the related videogame.