I’m eyeball-deep in writing at the moment, but I just had to briefly weigh in (along with everyone else) on what’s going on over at NBC. Long story short: they’re bleeding money and viewers, and have announced both hundreds of layoffs and the eye-popping plans to strip an hour of Jay Leno five nights a week at 10, starting next fall.

Oh, and Ben Silverman and Jeff Zucker still keep their jobs.

Everyone (and I mean everyone) is restructuring in these lean, mean times. Big media companies (and their employees) are particularly taking it on the chin, as the perennial dilemma of dwindling ratings is now compounded by disappearing ad revenue, as cost-cutting advertisers pull back. All of NBC’s competitors are having to do similar sorts of moves, in varying ways.

But NBC, that venerable old TV network, is arguably hurting the most. They’ve been mired in fourth place in the ratings for the entire post-Friends era (the last four years), and have lost both their edge in terms of affluence and 18-49 viewers. While ABC, Fox, and, especially, CBS, have found at least a few nights of stability on their schedules, NBC has holes on virtually every night. Sure, they’ve cornered the market on us effete aging hipsters with the likes of 30 Rock and The Office on Thursdays, but both shows get regularly and soundly trounced by CSI and Grey’s Anatomy. Effete aging hipsters might write a lot of great reviews and vote for the Emmys, but they do not a network make (just ask Judd Apatow or Bryan Fuller or Mitchell Hurwitz).

Even their other lone spot of moderate scripted success, Monday, hasn’t fared well of late. Heroes is creatively failing, and its bandwagon is shrinking. Hoping the Olympics would launch their fall schedule, NBC tried more action-heavy, expensive shows, like My Own Worst Enemy and a revamped Knight Rider, in an attempt to bring back the magic of Heroes circa 2006-07. That strategy utterly failed, as both shows have been cancelled.

So, faced with the very real possibility of losing one of their remaining assets, Jay Leno, to a competitor (most likely ABC), NBC has opted to give him an entire quarter of their prime-time schedule. That’s five nights of Jay, mostly doing the same stuff he’s done on The Tonight Show for the last 16+ years, only now 90 minutes earlier. Creatively speaking, this is an absolute disaster for the industry, as five hours that had been given over to scripted series are now filled with Jay, a desk, and a couch. Producers and writers are already livid with this decision, and they’re right.

Fiscally speaking, however, this will likely be a win for NBC. It’s already widely reported how much money this will save them; Jay’s show will cost less than a third as much as five new scripted series. I’m more interested in what the move offers them in terms of stability. Assuming Jay’s able to bring his late-night audience with him, and grow it a bit, they could easily lock down around 6-8 million viewers a night most nights (they’ll likely get killed on Mondays vs. CSI Miami, however). That’s a much better proposition than the anemic, up-and-down numbers they’ve been getting in that slot for years.

Critics have also complained that the Leno audience is too old, averaging well above the 18-49s ostensibly coveted by advertisers. Here, again, I think NBC made a move towards stability. The 18-49 demo is increasingly fickle, and entirely unreliable at its young end (unless you’re American Idol). The older audience is much more likely to stick around. And given the economy, the older audience may actually be more desirable to advertisers, as they’ll be more likely to have any money to spend. This could portend a big shift in the kinds of products advertised in prime time, with less Apple gizmos, movies, and cars, and more big retailers, household products, and drugs (Big Pharma’s likely going to chip in for a big chunk of NBC’s bailout).

If successful, it’ll at least keep NBC afloat as a business, even though they’ll potentially be a pale shadow of their earlier creative swagger. If it fails, this may finally be what does the seemingly indestructible Zucker in. Either way, it’s sure to be an intriguing chapter in broadcast network history, and may portend similar shifts at the other networks.

Last weekend I attended the Console-ing Passions conference at UC Santa Barbara. The event, focusing on feminist media studies, has been held roughly every two years since 1992. While it is still primarily concerned with television (as it started as a counter to the predominance of film studies in the 1980s), it has always welcomed papers and presentations on a wide array of media. However, and despite occasional calls to broaden its official purview, it still importantly maintains its central focus on feminist analysis and politics. This focus has helped it maintain a particular sensibility and community over the years, and this year’s event was no exception. Indeed, it was easily one of the best conferences I’ve attended in recent years.

I should say upfront that much of this was due to the setting. Santa Barbara is one of those supernaturally beautiful places, with mountains, the Pacific Ocean, lush vegetation, and near-perfect weather. The UCSB campus, like every other UC campus I’ve ever been to, makes the best of use of this environment, with open spaces, winding walkways, low-slung buildings, and sunlit rooms. The event organizers, UCSB Film and Media Studies professors Anna Everett and Lisa Parks, shrewdly planned the schedule to make the most of this setting, with extended breaks between some sessions, over an hour for lunch each day, and two outdoor receptions (including one on Goleta Beach, adjacent to UCSB).

I bring all this up because it makes a qualitative difference in the conference experience. The best conferences are about what happens in the spaces between the panels: in hallways, restaurants, hotel bars, and (yes) beaches. I’m not as up on my Richard Florida as I should be in this regard, but there’s clearly something about the effective organization of time and space that foster greater intellectual and creative energies. It’s a lesson I hope the leaders of SCMS heed as that conference continues to expand.

The theme for this year’s CP, broadly speaking, was gender and production. Most panels took this issue head-on, presenting work ranging from the theorization of “production” per se, to representations of media production on television, to the conditions and practices of actual media production. This focus indicates the growing expansion of media studies’ objects and methods of study. The days when entire conferences would consist of dozens of individual “readings” of particular films or TV series are thankfully long gone. Instead, effective media scholarship-i.e., “doing” media studies-requires interaction with (if not mastery of) a wide array of theories, methods, media forms, texts, producers, and users. Despite the increased expectations this places on media scholars, students, and practitioners, this is how it should be. Media is too chaotic and important to be carved only into arbitrary approaches or areas of focus. There is so much to learn-about methodologies, about industrial practices, about different formal paradigms, about reception communities-that can benefit us all in ways, I think, that our present moment, with its cultural, economic, technological, political and even biological uncertainties, demands.

That said, CP’s feminist ethos still provides an effective, and critically important, banner under which the new media studies can productively work. At CP, feminism is not so much a discrete approach (as it still tends to be taught) as an overarching principle: i.e., advancing work that broadens our understanding of gendered categories, and contributes to the improvement of the lives of real women and men. Here as well the organization of the event contributed to this goal, as not only media scholars but media producers and media fans interacted in this space; I saw presentations and/or chit-chatted with women television writers, studio executives, porn producers, and media acafen throughout the weekend. As someone who otherwise occupies several central social positions of contemporary American heteronormative patriarchy (white, middle-aged, straight, married, and parenting), I feel it’s important to listen to and engage in these discussions as much as possible.

(That said, I don’t mean to suggest that this makes it all or only “work”; I had a blast all weekend.)

Coming up in the next two installments: CP-presented work on gender in television programming, and work on gender in television production.

It’s been a mighty long time, but I’m back. Blogging time should (he says tentatively) open up a bit more in the coming weeks, with the end of the semester. Welcome in particular to those of you who stumbled upon my name in the Film Comment piece on David Bordwell’s blog; sorry for the lack of fresh product. I’m going to do bit more remodeling on the interface in the coming weeks as well, so stay tuned.

What concerns me these days are new seasons of three of my current favorite series (note: no hedging over the word “favorite”). Lost’s fourth season started back in February (and they’re currently on strike-affected hiatus till April 24); both Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who began their respective fourth seasons this past weekend. I had intended to blog about anticipation as a mode of media engagement, but instead (since the seasons have started) I’d like to talk about serial narrative.

I’ve blogged before about the problems of long television seasons, i.e., what Jason Mittell has beautifully dubbed the “infinity model.” Each of these shows has been able to delimit “infinity” in a variety of ways. Last spring, the executive producers of Lost negotiated an end to their series: spring 2010. This means that (counting the 2008 episodes already aired) there are forty more Lost episodes to come over the next two and a half seasons. Similarly, Battlestar Galactica will wrap up this season; the first ten episodes will run this spring, but the strike likely delayed the release of the last ten episodes till the fall (this has yet to be confirmed). As for Doctor Who, only three bumper-length “specials” will run scattered throughout 2009, followed by a full season of thirteen episodes in 2010. While some fans have panicked at this news, it is intended to become the usual pattern of production from that point forward, in order to keep the demanding series and its personnel fresh.

I bring all this up because most fans are going into these new seasons knowing that “the end” (or, in DW’s case, an “end”) is nigh. That is, each series will end at a known point in the near future. Unlike virtually every other scripted television series in history (with some important exceptions, most occurring within the last decade or so), these series are embarking on an unknown narrative trajectory with a known terminus. Again, in DW’s case, it’s more complicated: the series isn’t ending, but the way it has been produced to date is. And it’s more complicated than that as well, but I’ll get into that in a moment.

Lost made this shift in last year’s season finale, when the familiar flashbacks were replaced with flash-forwards, i.e., glimpses at the lives of some of the characters after their departure from the island. This move neatly cleaved the entire series run in half, and signalled movement to a new narrative problematic. The question of “who were these people?” has become “what happened to them?” The foregrounding of the Oceanic Six (i.e., the only six characters who “survived” Oceanic 815 and returned to civilization and became celebrities), coupled with the addition of several new characters (brought on board the freighter that made contact with the regulars at the end of last season) has provided the fuel for this problematic. Interestingly, each episode thus far (there are still five to go this season) has prompted even more questions. For every answer that’s given (e.g., what happened to Michael) loads of questions are asked (e.g., what’s the deal with the polar bear skeleton in Tunisia?).

Thus, the knowledge that viewers must bring to bear on the material increases, but moves on at the same time. That is, answered questions or cut-off plotlines (e.g,. goodbye Danielle and Karl…probably) can be filed away, opening up conceptual space for the new questions. Lost has done this all throughout, of course. However, it’s new, denser narrative structure (16 straight episodes, rather than 25 scattered across 40 weeks), plus eight-month hiatuses, means that the experience of watching each season unfold will be even more “intense” than usual. That is, more narrative significance packed into fewer episodes, engaged with in a shorter amount of time.

(Side note: yes, DVD box set viewers have been able to do this for years. What’s interesting now is that this mode of focused intense engagement is occurring more and more in scheduled runs of series on their networks)

For Battlestar Galactica fans, the stakes are even higher: these episodes are it. Twenty and out. Moreover, there’s no flashforwards (at least straightforwardly). There’s no way to effectively predict where this story is going. The series has excelled at jaw-dropping season finales all the way through, episodes that both culminate their season arcs and explode into a completely different narrative direction. Arguably, the Season 3 finale was the most explosive of them all, revealing four of the “final five” cylons, acquitting Gaius Baltar, bringing back Kara Thrace from the dead, revealing that Earth does indeed exist, and working in Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower.”

The first episode back (after almost a year) picked up exactly where events left off and didn’t disappoint, moving each of these plot points along (including the Dylan song) and raising the stakes accordingly. What’s most extraordinary is how this is working without resorting to genre cliche, and without drawing up an explicit puzzle (like in Lost). Instead, we’re left with bits and pieces of meaning to chew on, with very little stable ground. I like to think this is how both the surviving humans and the cylons are perceiving their worlds as well: that all attempts thus far to move on have either failed (e.g., New Caprica) or have gone unpredictably awry (Tigh’s a cylon!).

This pushes the series out of the literal realm and into something more challenging, more disturbing, and more uncertain. The various strains of hybridity presented (all twelve cylon models, Baltar’s vision of Six, undead Kara, Hera (and maybe Aaron), the cylon/human hybrids, the animal consciousness of the centurions and raiders, the failing Colonial state, etc.) make any notion of a core or foundation untenable, and increasingly so. This material would be compelling in any medium, but on television-that seemingly reliable technology of modernity and civilization-its fissures and wounds are felt all the more. You can’t put it down. You can’t walk out of the theater. You can watch something afterwards, or turn off the screen. But you know it’ll be back. And yet it will still end as well, within the next eight months.

Finally, Doctor Who continues to offer kind of “annual saga” mode of narrative, in that each season has a central thematic, as well as a growing narrative problematic, that nibbles away at the corners of early episodes before building up to increasingly explosive finales. In practice, this means that while the entire series run is interconnected, individual seasons are meant to be experienced as one thirteen-episode saga (I’m leaving out the Christmas episodes in this calculus, glorious though they are, as they’ve functioned thus far as variously “interstitial” between the main action in the seasons).

Twenty-nine episodes into the David Tennant era, and we’re starting to see the emotional cracks in this particular Doctor blossom. He was put through the wringer last season well enough, but not as much as his companion Martha Jones. This season looks to compound these emotions and relationships several-fold, as not only Martha, but, incredibly, Rose Tyler (marooned in a parallel universe way back in Series Two’s finale “Doomsday”) are somehow returning this year, in addition to the now-regular companion Donna Noble (seen previously as one-off team-up in “The Runaway Bride” in 2006). Unlike Lost, which literally screams the questions and answers at us, and BSG, which plunges us into uncharted conceptual waters, DW’s real “big questions” are actually quite intimate. For despite all the copious (and extremely well-conveyed) action and epic scale, this is basically a series about a very, very lonely person, and the emotional (as well as physical) damage he leaves in his wake. And, based on the last few minutes of the Series Four opener, “Partners In Crime,” his life is about to get very, very complicated indeed.

The “end,” here, ominously foreshadowed in the already released title of this year’s final episode (“Journey’s End”), refers to the seeming end of this year’s particular theme, and I suspect, the buildup to the end of Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, probably in the last 2009 special, which then would usher in an Eleventh Doctor in a full series in 2010. But that’s all speculation. The primary advantage of Doctor Who’s narrative structure is that it allows a relatively wide range of storytelling styles (everything from comedy to horror to SF to domestic drama) which collectively, and subtly, build upon an overarching story. A story that then actually comes to a conclusion as episode thirteen ends, while still leaving plenty of bruises and mysteries to propel the next series.

Just back from Cambridge, where I attended Unboxing TV, one of the most satisfying “conference experiences” I’ve ever had. So, right off the top, yay Jonathan Gray and Joshua Green for putting this together. Let’s do it again.

In the wake of MIT5, Jon and Josh cooked up the idea for a small, one-stream conference of TV Studies scholars where the focus would not be on the conference paper as the kind of finished idea polished for presentation, but on the much more engaging process of interactive thought and discussion. They were also inspired by the design of last year’s Flow conference in Austin, which similarly put the “discussions in the corridor” front-and-center. The difference was in scale. Flow was not large, but certainly not small. There were 30 invited participants to Unboxing TV, present at every panel, in the same space, for a day and a half. This produced the effect of an undistracted collective experience, an ongoing evolution of discussion throughout the weekend.

The larger conferences in our field (e.g., SCMS, at around 800 participants) can be exciting but exhausting in all their numerous, too-brief meet-ups and scurrying between panels. By contrast, as one person put it, Unboxing TV felt like the best grad seminar ever, where everyone has done the reading, and everyone has something interesting to say.

You can do the reading as well, here, where you’ll find PDFs of the “provocations” – the short thought pieces that each participant contributed. Collectively, they indicate how we’re working to understand and contextualize both the rapid changes happening in and around television (and media and culture more broadly) and the continuities of so much unfinished lines of inquiry. Rather than break down each panel, as I did for MIT5, and will ideally do for similar conferences, I thought I’d do a synthesis here instead, giving a general sense of what our collective intelligence generated.

Indeterminacy

All throughout the weekend, and embedded in the design of the event, were questions of definition. What is “television”? What is “television studies”? What is “public service”? What is “fandom”? What is “newness”? What is “creative labor”? What is “community”? What emerged from these discussions was not only the sense that none of these categories (and several others) can be pinned down precisely, but that none of them should be pinned down. Instead, in the best post-structuralist tradition, we collectively (if often not consciously, and not with some contention) argued for the value of indeterminacy. That is, the strategic mobility of concepts, terms, and discourses.

This applied most radically to the questions of television and Television Studies itself. After more than thirty years of scratching at the doors of various fields (mostly the one marked “Film Studies”) for legitimacy, the field is arguably better off pursuing an open disciplinarity. By this I don’t mean “interdisciplinarity” (which many critiqued) or even post-disciplinarity, but rather a kind of not-disciplinarity, whereby the usual parameters of an academic field (theories, methods, objects of study, etc.) could never quite be fixed. Indeed, aside from a general lack of quantitative approaches (and even there, there were exceptions), the breadth of scholarship produced by the participants is staggering. A PowerPoint slide of all the participants’ book covers reminded us of that from the very beginning.

The benefits and risks of cohering into “a field” were openly discussed, and my wheels are still turning over the possibilities, which are especially intriguing given our steady ascendancy into SCMS over the past several years, and the impending job security of most of the people in the room.

Inquiry

In a similar manner, the weekend revealed plenty of gaps in methods, concepts, terms, “languages” (I’m guilty of that metaphor, I suppose), technologies, objects of study, texts, and (arguably most importantly) histories of every kind. If Television Studies is indeterminate, than “inquiry” is what keeps it afloat, always moving forward, always questioning established categories and practices.

Yes, the academic life is about inquiry at a very basic level. But this field never stops inquiring, never rests on assumptions, never takes much for granted. It might be a sign of a seminal moment in Television Studies, or maybe only a seminal moment in my academic life, that the energy and intensity of discussions in conference rooms and grad seminars of long ago (2005, 2003, 1999, 1994, 1991,…) was matched and superceded by our collective wisdom in Cambridge.

I now find myself wanting to listen in on Julie D’Acci’s feminism seminar in 1991, or John Fiske’s Media Theory seminar in 1993, or my dissertation writing group in 1996, or the birth of the SCMS TV Studies group in 1999, or the collective intellectual geek-out over reality TV at MIT3 in 2003. To see how the act of “inquiry” propelled discussions towards where we are now, and to see those past moments under the (often harsh) glare of the present.

Inquiry is what we do; it’s what we’ve always done and always will do.

Community

The last major category to emerge from Unboxing TV was community. I understand community, coming out of this, as operating in three distinct ways (again, indeterminacy, remember?).

First, there was a lot of talk about building communities across not only other academic disciplines, but other key publics (regulators, activists, fans, creative workers, “the industry,” etc.). Lines of inquiry often led in this direction, which in turn led “out” of a sense of a cohesive field, and toward a more diffuse array of interests and politics. Every panel tied back into the concept of community in this regard, whether of Asian Americans, program buyers, journalists, striking TV writers, or Mexican factory workers (to name a few).

Second, there was great support (especially from Jon and Josh, as event organizers) for maintaining and expanding online and offline communities within our “field” (as such). The ongoing “good fight” at places like Flow, MediaCommons, LiveJournal, Henry’s AcaFan Debate, and the blogosphere more broadly were discussed as examples of how we need to effectively utilize new interfaces and technologies to support the idea of “academic community.” Oddly, the TV Studies group at SCMS didn’t come up once, despite the fact that five past or present steering committee members were there, and that one invitee (Michele Hilmes, who unfortunately couldn’t make the trip) now serves on the SCMS Executive Committee.

And a final, important note about community. At the first panel, Jon made the observation that the participants were going to be colleagues and collaborators in our “field,” or whatever it is we do, for the next thirty-odd years. I thought at that moment not only of those in the room, but of the many others, some in “adjacent” fields like Film Studies, Popular Music Studies, and Communication Studies more broadly, in my generational cohort. We’re the “class of the millennium,” I suppose, all gaining PhDs in the last ten years and many now scampering over the hedge to tenure (Amanda Lotz counted seven colleagues in the field going up this year alone). So community also means this particular community. These people, gathered in this room.

In this regard, there’s not only a shared politics and purpose; there’s love. I’ve known many of the people at Unboxing TV for several years, and a few of them for many years, dating back to my early grad school days (I first met Henry Jenkins at the first Console-ing Passions, at Iowa City in 1992). Even those I’ve only met recently, I feel a close affinity with. We’ve shared knowledge, gossip, baby pictures, book chapters, hopes, fears, drink recipes, job tips, political rants, hugs, works-in-progress, fannish crushes, mentor stories, laughter, restaurant reviews, conference panels, YouTube videos, paper calls, tears, and complaints about department meetings for years. We all feel isolated at our home institutions. We all feel like “home” in distant hotel meeting rooms and bars, and blogs and e-mail discussions. We all do, otherwise we wouldn’t have come to Cambridge.

I don’t want to critique or theorize this community, but hold onto it. Aside from family and friends, these are the most important long-term relationships we’ll ever have. These people, and the many others they’ve led me to, are ultimately the fuel that keeps my inquiry moving, and my indeterminacy undaunted.

May we never stop unboxing television.

In case you haven’t heard (and honestly, if you’re not reading about it online, you probably haven’t heard much), the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA), the guild that represents several thousand film and television writers, went on strike this week. The key issue prompting this strike has to with residuals, the royalties paid to writers, and other creative talent, for subsequent runs of their material. Their current residual system is flawed in two ways: DVDs only count at the same lousy rate they’ve had for VHS tapes for twenty years, and internet-distributed content isn’t eligible at all for residual payments.

This WGA video explains this all in just under four minutes:

The strike is a critical rupture (or at least could be; it’s too early to tell) in the ongoing story of TPTB (i.e., the corporations that run the networks and studios; you know, “Hollywood”) extracting more and more value out of the content they own while sharing less and less and none with the people who actually create it. In Rerun Nation, I described how the TV rerun moved from the margins of industrial logic to its very center over the space of a few years in the 1950s. At the time, as the video above points out, writers (and actors, for that matter) received no residuals on these reruns, which were often successfully, and extraordinarily profitably, syndicated for years and decades in the US and across the world. I closed that book with a chapter on the DVD box set, which has had a similar industrial impact in the 2000s — basically creating a new market for television reruns — with a similar outcome for writers (not nothing, but very minimal residuals).

Since 2005, we’ve had another revenue front open up: the internet. Yes, mucho material was available online long before this, but that year marked the beginning of the official distribution of full-length episodes online, via iTunes, or the networks’ own websites (a practice that has moved from “experimental” to “standard operating procedure” in less than two years). Apparently, though, if we’re to believe the networks and studios (via their representative organization in this conflict, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP)), this content is “promotional,” and thus aren’t really content. Sure, they still sell advertising on them, as they do when they run over the air, and yes, they make a lot of money on that advertising, but don’t call them “content,” because then they might have to pay the people who made the “content.” Which they don’t, at the moment.

So, basically, the strike is about one thing: who gets to profit from the creative work, short-term, long-term, and in-between.

In this regard, it’s been very interesting to see how the sides are waging their war over the past several days. The WGA has done a (mostly) masterful job with relentless pickets at key locations in LA and NY, peppered by celebrities and members of other, supportive unions (SAG, IATSE, and the Teamsters, among others, to various degrees), and culminated (thus far) with the massive demonstration today at Fox’s corporate HQ, which was the largest picket in the history of the guild. As public spectacle, it’s working, except that none of the major TV news organizations are covering it much (hmm, I wonder why not…?) The AMPTP, on the other hand, has no discernible PR strategy, but perhaps they reason that, like Springfield’s Mr. Burns, they don’t need one when they’ve got money and lawyers and the networks themselves. Thus far, they’ve both rattled their swords and tried to blow off the whole thing, which suggests to me that they really are pretty freaked out about where this could be headed (even beyond the virtually inevitable abortion of the 2007-08 TV season).

Along the way, there are some equally compelling side narratives. Let’s call them the “B stories” of the strike for now, but keep an eye on them as the season strike goes on.

The showrunners — the hybrid writer-producers who oversee the creative aspects of TV series and who (technically at least) straddle both sides of this fence — have thus far pledged nearly 100% support for the strike, though they split on how far to go to support it. Some have advocated a complete shutdown of their productions, while others argue that they should honor their contractual obligations for at least the episodes that have already been scripted or shot. Nikki Finke’s report and speculation about the showrunners’ dilemma is a must-read, as is her ongoing reportage on the strike in general. My current work is focused on the role of the television “author,” and the legal and cultural role of these particular “authors” at the moment is fascinating. Here’s several of them at their own picket, at Disney on Wednesday:

Meanwhile, tensions between the striking writers and below-the-line workers are simmering. As is often the case in management’s strategies of divide-and-conquer, many crew members and office staffers have been laid off already. Thus far, the other unions have been officially sympathetic, but there’s a lot of class conflict apparent in this divide, with electricians calling writers greedy millionaires on blog comments. Creative labor takes a lot of specialized labor, and if the WGA is to successfully wage this war, they’ll need the other guilds and unions, and the thousands of now-unemployed technical workers, on board as well.

Over here on the interweb, fans have burst into action, pledging their support, but not quite knowing how to support the writers (although fans in LA and NY have walked the pickets, and fed the picketers). The debate here is about strategy (should I not watch at all? should I only watch the episodes that are already out? who should I write?), but reveals an ongoing development of the fan/producer relationship, which I wrote about, with Cynthia Walker, here. How fans rally around particular writers (and the cult of Joss is thus far the one to really watch), and what impact that has, could be a key development of this whole ordeal.

Lastly, speaking of the internet, there’s the Big Question: can we bury the networks? This post, at the strike’s main info site, articulates well what many are feeling: Google and/or Apple could totally pwn the networks!!!11!1! What’s most striking to me about the post and its comments, and similar sentiments elsewhere, is how variable the knowledge and sentiment is about the ostensibly inevitable merging of the internet and TV. Like the money itself that’s “not” made from online TV distribution, the ability of internet giants to take over the industry is a matter of considerable mystery, fear, hope, and debate. That said, the networks and studios are clearly at least projecting desperation, doing all they can to sustain their economic and cultural relevance.

All in all, what’s possibly at stake, if this really blows up, is nothing less than the entire economic logic of Hollywood. Who gets paid for what and how and when they get paid. When audiences fragment, when distribution costs can be factored out, when content moves to multiple platforms, and when each and every metric for figuring out just what’s going on is under fire…something’s got to give.

We may not have new TV shows for a while, but this is better.

For more academic bloggery on the strike, see Jason and Chuck.