From the New York Times: Art in the Age of Franchising

The New York Times recently published an article lamenting the impending demise of Friday Night Lights, posing the question "Why is Friday Night Lights a bust?" Author Virginia Heffernan suggests it fails in part because it's just a television show, and nothing more. It's not cross-media.

She expresses the idea of what it means to be a cross-media property very well, so well that it's worth quoting a large passage:

The fault of “Friday Night Lights” is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise. It is not and will never be “Heroes,” “Project Runway,” “The Hills” or Harry Potter. It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There will be no “Friday Night Lights: Origins,” and no “FNL Touchdown” for PlayStation.

This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication, the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans. It’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture. In fact, rhizome art is both lower-brow (“American Idol,” Derek Waters’s “Drunk History”) and more avant-garde (“Battlestar Galactica,” Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area”) than linear, author-controlled narrative, which takes its cues from the middle-class form of the novel.

With “Friday Night Lights,” however, there are no shoots; the exquisite episodes are all you get. The show, which is inspired by the 1990 book by H. G. Bissinger and Peter Berg's 2004 movie of the same name, ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity. It shuts fans out. Even though NBC .com offers plenty of streaming video — whole episodes, as well as tightly produced hagiographies of the show’s actors — no independent “Friday Night Lights” wiki has formed on the Web to rival the “Heroes Wiki,” “Lostpedia” and the polyglot “Battlestar Wiki.” Nor has “Friday Night Lights” inspired any significant body of fan fiction (viewer-written stories that take off on the canon), though at the outset a few viewers eagerly awaited an outpouring of “slash” fan fiction (chronicles of hypothetical romances between male characters) from a football show.

She makes an excellent point here about the role the audience can play in cross-media properties. When it works best, it engages the audience by inviting them to feel a part of things. Creators exclude the fans at their peril:

Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art — at least when it takes the form of prime-time TV. They won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love of attention, and thus money, and thus life. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.

As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

With television at a crossroads and studio oligopolies looking mighty suspicious, the object lesson of “Friday Night Lights” — no production is an island, entire of itself — should be as plain as its allure.

Well said.