SpoilerTV Article - The Future of Television By A.D.Harris - Join the Debate

Hey Guys,

Consider this my sequel to my 'Where Has TV Gone Wrong' article from February this year.

We are approaching the time of year that we all get excited for. That moment is around mid-September when the television industry launches the next wave of ‘home’ entertainment- the hope to create a brand which becomes commercially successful. However times, they are a-changin'. It is still only in the very early seeds of development but I feel it is beginning to become more visible with each passing year. This is that television is no longer just about watching.

It is an experience.

Television these days is not necessarily spending one hour a week with a group of characters and then going the rest of the week without sparing them a thought. Now it is about interaction, it is about connecting. It encompasses all areas of life; we wear it on t-shirts, we have it on our desktop backgrounds, it sits on our DVD shelves and we read it in magazines.
The perfect example of such a show is LOST. LOST transformed the medium of television into the on-line experience with people who lived and breathed every ounce of island related air. There may be other shows which also started this process, but none succeeded or were as important as LOST. The show deserves a lot of credit in how it changed television. Whether you found its ending to be worthy of the time you put into it is irrelevant. That’s not the point I’m trying to make. To many people, LOST was about the journey and the experience of trying to understand the grand-mythos of life on the island. A LOST fan would do that with people across the globe. Perhaps had The X-Files been born a few years later it would have done the same, but the simple truth is that LOST was a success not just because of its quality and scope. It was because it launched at the time when television was finding its connection with the online world and the way LOST was created was the ideal fit to do so.

If you look around the web, you will find that a lot of websites and communities were born out of what LOST did or what people tried to copy from it and use in their own shows. Regardless of whether you loved LOST or not, the fact that you are reading this article is credit to what happened between 2004 and 2010.

There is no denying that nowadays all shows are beginning to find their feet on-line. Some shows have moved faster than others, often the shows that have larger mythologies that require analysis. Supernatural, Fringe, The Vampire Diaries are examples of these sort of shows, which nowadays have entire online experiences created by fans that others can immerse themselves into without even watching the official product. There still are shows that continue on from the pre-internet experience days, but those shows such as CSI will be the last of their kind. Looking at more recent types of the CSI format, The Mentalist and Castle amongst others, it’s even clear to see here that communities are forming that can create fan-fiction and other online experiences about these characters. There is a reason why Law & Order: LA should fail whilst The Mentalist should not. One show is living in the pre-LOST time, and the other is adapting to the post-LOST world.

Within the next ten years television will have changed completely. It will soon be a worldwide enterprise. If it hasn't then it will perhaps not exist at all. The perfect and easily relatable subject is films. Films are using worldwide launches much more regularly than they did even four to five years ago. When one country gets to see a movie, so does every other country. Look at Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End as well as the final Harry Potter. Both films opened to virtually every country within twenty four hours. Everyone got together, globally and watched them. Look at the box office figures of both movies and you will see just how incredibly popular they were. Sure, they both came from big franchises, but that is irrelevant. The key factor is that for the week leading up to those releases, if you were talking about films you were talking about those films. That is regardless of where you were in the world.
Television is still not at this advanced stage. Admittedly it is a tougher format to transfer to a global market, but it is still too far behind. Even shows such as House, The Mentalist & Fringe had UK airings which were still (at a minimum) being released seven days after the US. Whilst some films may be able to cope with this time gap, I assure you that television will not. It is just not good enough.

That is not because television is much easier to find at a higher quality within hours of an airing. That is not denying that point but it is irrelevant. What is relevant is that being a part of a television show is being part of a community. A film is a two hour 'dip' into the life of a stranger who you can connect with briefly, likely only once, and then you leave his world behind. Television isn't a 'dip' into the world, it's an immersion. You stick with these characters for years. In a bizarre way, you don’t just watch the show; you join the life of the characters. The crucial part is that you become part of the community that also immerses themselves with those characters.

That community isn't restricted to being just within the walls of your own home or your own country. It's worldwide. When I want to talk to somebody about Fringe, I could go online and type 'Fringe' into Google. The three top fan-made websites for the show are fringetelevision, fringepedia and fringe here at spoilertv. Clicking on any three of those pages will undoubtedly find me at a point where I need knowledge of the season 3 finale to avoid being spoiled. So if I was in a country where Fringe currently was not available up to that point, then what do I now do? I am alienated from the communities. The result that any television fan will find being pushed into is to watch this show where it is available. That place is unfortunately the many websites that litter the globe with the episodes available illegally. The incredible thing is that the companies who own these shows are the ones pushing their own fans towards these places.

When you look at social media, and how rapidly that has grown thanks to Facebook and Twitter, you can see exactly what the heads of the networks need to know. On a Friday night in September at 9PM Eastern Time I dare you to type #SPN or #Fringe into the search bar. You'll see something that is incredible. You'll see millions of Americans sharing their experience of watching an episode of Supernatural and Fringe. There will be comments, there will be arguments, there will be love and there will be hate. But what there actually is, is connection. That is the connection between the millions of people from across America. In fact, on three occasions in the 2010-2011 season the actors and executive producers of Fringe actually joined in and interacted with the fans first hand!

On that night scroll down a few pages and you'll find a few different kinds of tweets. You'll find the people who aren't in America. They will be either disappointed at being spoiled or they will be angry that they are missing out.

I was one of the many who was awake in the wee hours of the morning seeing how LOST ended. I remember I had a small screen on the left side of my laptop with Jack strolling through the bamboo forest; I also had the darkUFO chat open on the right hand side of my screen with over 5,000 people commenting like crazy. In front of me was my alarm clock in the corner of my eye reading 4:57. That was the greatest moment I have ever been in whilst experiencing television. At that moment, it was clear to me exactly what I was invested in. My heart beating and a slight tear in my eye I found myself there, next to Jack, with thousands of other people watching the last moments of a show I was deeply affectionate for.

Had I sat on my own, without other people there ‘alongside me’ it wouldn't have been the same. After all, don't we as humans like to know what other people think? Why else would we care when someone blasts that film we happened to like? It needs to be officially noted that television isn’t just television any more. To view it in such a way is perhaps the most basic and fundamental error that can ever be made on the subject.

When I said that television is beginning to sow the seeds to understanding this you need only look around. There is everything that television networks, studios and people seeking money from these enterprises should see... I mean I can see it. You can see it. Surely they can!

There is this experience. There is this worldwide community. And it costs them nothing!
That experience transforms thousands/millions of people into devoted followers. So how is it that they can't yet implement changes in these places where there are free communities? Could a multi-million dollar company not find a financially viable method to grant access to a video player? Sites worldwide could embed this beside the chat rooms with the shows playing, with adverts, with actors tweeting and answering questions and interacting with fans over the entire world.

There should be optimism amongst fans of television though. Events such as Comic-Con are beginning to illustrate the importance of the fans and the global community. Elements such as webisodes are starting to bridge that gap. Some networks are offering opportunities for these communities to connect with the actors via conference calls or webcam sessions. Sites and features from names such as Ausiello and Kristen are highlighting to the show runners and network executives the demand there is on the internet from communities.

Even in the darkest of nights, looking at Fringe being renewed for season four is perhaps one of the greatest hints that the message is beginning to get through. I almost see Fringe as an experiment for Fox. It is like an experiment to see what the internet can do for a show which has such a huge community. If that is the case then Fringe fans are lucky, but all fans should look around and watch what happens.

Think back a few years. The writers of America took strike action. It was all about making money online. Remember just how long and hard their opposition fought. That is because they knew, deep down, there’s something worth fighting for.

I'd consider that message received.

Now it is just that wait. Hopefully then we can all breathe easy...

I hope at that point, whatever year that may be, come mid-September and pilot week I can sit down and watch a TV episode of the latest new and exciting TV show with you. All of you.

Together...

AdDHarris
Adam

Source: SpoilerTV