Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2016

The present article addresses ‘audience making’ in the age of media convergence, when television drama is increasingly produced for both a national and an international audience to be consumed in either linear ‘flow’ or on-demand user modes. It asks about the ways in which key industry executives producing and commissioning television drama envision its audience, as well as the degree to which new production and distribution models impact industry notions of ‘the audience’. In order to address these questions, the article analyses the production and distribution of Lilyhammer, a successful television drama produced by the production company Rubicon TV for the Norwegian public service broadcaster NRK, in collaboration with the American streaming service Netflix. The article argues that how the television industry wants to see its audience influences how it actually sees it, which, again, impacts both the production of television drama as well as the industry’s evaluation of ‘success’ for this genre.

Danish public service broadcasters have taken long strides into the international marketplace at the level of funding, production and distribution of TV drama series. The series are sold across the globe, remade in countries as different as the United States and Turkey, and the international co-production set-ups are becoming increasingly complex (e.g. Broen/The Bridge [SVT/DR, 2013–] and The Team [ZDF/vtm/DR, etc. 2015]). This article tests the limits of cross-national collaboration by discussing two recent co-production initiatives that involve DR/HBO and TV 2/Netflix. The co-production initiatives discussed are located at the intersection of at least three strands of development: first, the commercialization of European public service media that can be traced back to regulatory changes in the 1980s; second, the tendency towards cross-national partnerships regarding television funding, production and/or distribution; and third, the advent of streaming services available on various digital platforms. The article highlights tension and obstacles prohibiting or undermining these two co-production initiatives. In the case of DR/HBO, the obstacles have their source in alternative media systemic logics and differing narrative and aesthetic strategies, whereas competition and business development strategies are particularly pertinent to the case of TV 2 and Netflix.

In the past three decades television has undergone a unique transformation. Digitalization and the integration of traditional media and telecommunication have also allowed films and television programmes to be marketed and used on other technical platforms besides conventional cinema and television. Individual films and television programmes must therefore both be considered in the context of multimedia offerings. Associated social media activities and websites (including webisodes or games) are more and more important for the production and distribution of television drama series. In an era of media convergence single media outlets like television converge with online media. Transmedia storytelling where a story is told on as many platforms as possible to attract audiences is mainly related to television drama series. Based on the analysis of several transmedia outlets of television drama series the article will show how production companies, networks and other TV channels attempt to involve viewers via transmedia storytelling in a fragmented media market with a fragmented audience in creating a 360-degree experience.

The post-broadcast era is witness to a number of transformations in television culture. Similar to other styles and forms representative of broadcast television, even the most ‘televisual’ genre, television drama, is going through some drastic changes. While transmedia storytelling is offering new possibilities for both content creation and promotion of serial drama, it also questions some of the generic conventions by expanding the serial form and narrative structure across various types of media. In this article, I will draw from both television aesthetics and studies on transmedia storytelling in order to study seriality in current television drama. I argue that the serial form of television drama can be studied as a programming strategy, a mode of production, a narrative form and a viewing experience. By applying this framework to Finnish television drama I will identify and discuss the challenges involved in studying television aesthetics in the post-broadcast era as well as suggest possible ways of approaching the emerging forms and styles of broadcast television. Finally, I will consider the concept of quality in relation to post-broadcast television drama.

The idea of transnationality is often used as a key concept to explain current developments in production and distribution of TV drama. However, this term can be understood in different ways with different implications. The main purpose of this article is to map prevalent uses of the term and to investigate the development of transnationality in Danish Noir during the period 2000–2015. The concepts of internationalism and globalization as well as Nordic Noir are used to frame the theoretical discussion of transnationality. Inspired by recent developments in film theory, the argument is that implications of transnationality should be discussed at different levels – production, overall theme and story, aesthetics, reception and distribution. The impact of transnationality at these levels are examined and illustrated in the analyses. Four TV series, all of them authored by Peter Thorsboe and Mai Brostrøm, are selected to trace the transnational development in Danish Noir. Unit One is seen as the international breakthrough. The Eagle and The Protectors illustrate an increasing transnational development at all levels, and The Team represents its provisional culmination. The conclusion seeks to answer whether there is a limit to transnationality.

This article examines the first season of the hit television series True Detective (2014) with respect to the claim that it deliberately adopted a form fitting the new world of digital television. The article argues that this embrace is less than complete: the show seeks an immersive, novelistic experience rather than something entirely new. It further argues that this immersive experience is supported by the series’ richly detailed background and by its invocation of various aspects of weird fiction. The article also discusses some of the institutional factors shaping the series: the availability of the puzzle film genre as an interpretive framework, the existence of an audience interested in assuming the attitude of what Jason Mittell has called the forensic fan, and the choice of a traditional, one-episode-per-week release schedule. Finally, the article discusses the show’s ending and the disappointed reactions of critics and fans, arguing that the idea that the show intended to exploit digitization by adopting a more game-like approach, offering clues that could only be found using digital tools, is undercut by the many loose ends left unresolved by the finale. The article concludes that the density and detail of the series’ background, inviting viewers to explore, should be regarded not as providing pieces of a puzzle to be solved, but as an opportunity to deepen viewer engagement.

This article converges insights from media geography, international business, marketing, linguistics and cognitive science in an exploratory discussion that examines the relationships between language convergence in the TV drama series The Team (2015) and the notion of Born European/Born Global products and companies. It presents the linguistic notion of ‘code-switching’ that occurs when multilingual speakers shift between languages and reflects this in the views of the scriptwriters and participants of two group interviews that differed in their sensitivities to multiple languages. By considering how people ‘see’ what they ‘hear’, the article considers how multilingual resources are used aesthetically, politically and strategically with business goals in sight. These views are further associated with conceptual developments in the notion of ‘Born Global’ that describes the characteristics and activities of companies that conduct international activities from their inception. The article uses these developments in thinking about the novel convergences present in international intrapreneurship, the labelling of phenomena as European/regional/global, and the identification of product attributes such as culture-specificity and domain-specificity to suggest that language convergence, and especially the presence of English, becomes an integral attribute of The Team. Language convergence simultaneously textures The Team with Europeanness, regionalness and globalness and fills it with the potential for wide distribution and viewership.

The proliferation of original programming by cable networks and the increasing availability of digital video recorders, video-on-demand services and broadband Internet access has led many observers to assert that American television is in the midst of its ‘third golden age’. Such claims rely heavily on the recent prominence of cable crime drama. Yet, to date, there is little scholarship addressing TV’s rising cultural status from the perspective of audiences. Using qualitative data gathered from 31 respondents (ages 18–34), this article focuses on viewers’ relationships with select crime dramas appearing on basic cable (advertiser-supported) and premium cable (subscriber-supported) networks and cable omnivores who watch cable crime dramas produced in a variety of economic contexts. Considering not only what viewers watch, but also how they choose to engage with some programmes and not others, the findings indicate that post-network audience reception practices vary with the cultural status of a given show.

The social media driven paradigm shift and convergence of mass media has transformed celebrity culture, and affected the way fans are entertained and audiences interact with celebrities and fan communities. The series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D marked Marvel Studio’s first foray into the medium of television. In a convergent media environment in which content saturation is a potential barrier to audience attention and commercial success, the leveraging of celebrity friendship is an effective means of promotion. The series was launched at the 2013 Comic Con in San Diego, during which the cast participated in interviews that were distributed online. This article explores the success of celebrity friendships as a marketing device through an analysis of audience comments in response to one online interview. It examines how displays of friendship generate online discussion, audience hype and reward loyalty, and the significance of perceived authenticity on the reception of bonds portrayed. It proposes the term ‘buddy banter’ as a means to illustrate the presentation of close celebrity friendships in a multi-gender, group environment. Analysis revealed banter to be a useful means of attracting audience attention, while audience interpretation of celebrity dynamics favoured the reading of close crossgender friendships as heterosexual couples.