My chapter, “The Reviews Are In: TV Critics and the (Pre)Creation of Meaning” takes the press reviews for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Heroes, and Friday Night Lights, and looks at how they attempted to pre-decode the shows. While of course other paratexts played an important role in creating the texts of each show, I became fascinated when reading through the reviews for all three shows by how much they tried to funnel readers into a rather narrow set of interpretations. So, for instance, and as discussed in Show Sold Separately too, Friday Night Lights‘ reviewers overwhelmingly tried to insist on it not being a football show and not being a high school drama; in the process, they may have killed the show’s chances at tapping into two other huge audience segments.

Anyways, I’d highly recommend the book, not because I’m in it, along with my embarrassingly large bio (you even find out where I did my BA. tmi indeed), but because it’s full of wonderful work from wonderful scholars. Thanks to the editors for wrestling the beast to the ground and getting it out.

A very delayed follow-up post, this time with the DVD text for Season 1. Thanks to Jason Mittell for linking to this wonderful collection of pirated DVD covers, which made me realize it’s time to post this. My favorite is the third paragraph!

Since the US ABC television broadcast after the alias of the most popular elements of the latest series. ABC’s Chi Juzi in Hawaii filming the whole story ups and downs, actors performing most vividly, had become a prime-time TV ratings were the highest one.

Story from a professional perspective doctor Jack started on a major airliner crashed in the Pacific islands, a total of 48 passengers lucky survivors. At first, people fortunate survivors, looking forward to the arrival of rescue forces, they gradually found that the island.

New Year’s more creative experts cracked the increased fan! Sina major breakthrough in treatment of liver disease Tourism Jobs Nashi.

Cengjinglaiguo and they seem to like the people, their distress signals had been the release of the 16, but it seems that no one found their presence ……

Face with this barren island populated, how can they survive? Without a good medical equipment, Jack can only use the most rudimentary way people will be dying one by one save. In the struggle for survival in the …

And that’s it. So, if you still want answers about the island, even after watching the whole series, clearly it’s something about liver disease and tourism.

My book on paratexts is finally out: Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Paratexts. ($22, but I see Amazon’s selling it for $14.85. That’s cheaper than a season of Two and a Half Men on DVD! What are you waiting for?). I thought I’d give some tasters of it with a selection of paratexts. The cover, obviously enough is above.

The Contents

Introduction – Film, Television, and Off-Screen Studies

Chapter 1 – From Spoilers to Spinoffs: A Theory of Paratexts

Chapter 2 – Coming Soon! Hype, Intros, and Textual Beginnings

Chapter 3 – Bonus Materials: Digital Auras and Authors

Chapter 4 – Under a Long Shadow: Sequels, Prequels, Pre-Texts, and Intertexts

Chapter 5 – Spoiled and Mashed Up: Viewer-Created Paratexts

Chapter 6 – In the World, Just Off Screen: Toys and Games

Conclusion – “In the DNA”: Creating Across Paratexts

The Back Copy

It is virtually impossible to watch a movie or TV show without preconceived notions because of the hype that precedes them, while a host of media extensions guarantees them a life long past their air dates. An onslaught of information from print media, trailers, internet discussion, merchandising, podcasts, and guerilla marketing, we generally know something about upcoming movies and TV shows well before they are even released or aired. The extras, or “paratexts,” that surround viewing experiences are far from peripheral, shaping our understanding of them and informing our decisions about what to watch or not watch and even how to watch before we even sit down for a show.

Show Sold Separately gives critical attention to this ubiquitous but often overlooked phenomenon, examining paratexts like DVD bonus materials for The Lord of the Rings, spoilers for Lost, the opening credits of The Simpsons, Star Wars actions figures, press reviews for Friday Night Lights, the framing of Batman Begins, the videogame of The Thing, and the trailers for The Sweet Hereafter. Plucking these extra materials from the wings and giving them the spotlight they deserve, Jonathan Gray examines the world of film and television that exists before and after the show.

Word Clouds, courtesy of wordle.com, of Chapters 2 & 3

The Endorsements

“Show Sold Separately will rewrite the rules of what we look at when we want to understand how audiences make meaning of media franchises. Gray, who has long established himself in the top ranks of contemporary scholars of popular culture, writes with particularity about these varied media properties and their paratexts, yet also writes with a theoretical sophistication which feels effortless.”

- Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“Exploring the myriad connections and connotations of a wide array of paratextual materials ranging from movie trailers to action figures, Gray deftly challenges established conceptions of textuality, and opens up intriguing and important new dimensions in media and cultural studies. This is an invaluable contribution, and will change how we think about, and make, media.”

- Derek Kompare, author of Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television

And a bit of the Work – the first par.

A common first line for books on contemporary media, and for many a student essay on the subject, notes the saturation of everyday life with media. Certainly, my list of available cable channels seems to grow every month, while the list of movies in cinemas, on television, for rent, or available for purchase similarly grows at a precipitous rate. However, media growth and saturation can only be measured in small part by the number of films or television shows – or books, games, blogs, magazines, or songs for that matter – as each and every media text is accompanied by textual proliferation at the level of hype, synergy, promos, and peripherals. As film and television viewers, we are all part-time residents of the highly populated cities of Time Warner, DirecTV, AMC, Sky, Comcast, ABC, Odeon, and so forth, and yet not all of these cities’ architecture is televisual or cinematic by nature. Rather, these cities are also made up of all manner of ads, previews, trailers, interviews with creative personnel, Internet discussion, entertainment news, reviews, merchandising, guerrilla marketing campaigns, fan creations, posters, games, DVDs, CDs, and spinoffs. Hype and synergy abound, forming the streets, bridges, and trading routes of the media world, but also frequently forming many of its parks, beaches, and leisure sites. They tell us about the media world around us, they prepare us for that world, and they guide us between its structures, but they also fill it with meaning, take up much of our viewing and thinking time, and give us the resources with which we will both interpret and discuss that world.

Problem is, we’re all struggling with an idea for the cover. This is where you, gentle reader, come in, since I need your help. Any and all ideas welcome.

A few parameters and notes:

• The urgency here is that NYU keep threatening to use a picture of the Simpsons on a couch that many who went to see The Simpsons Movie would have likely seen outside their theater (the big plastic mock-up of the family, which you could sit beside and get your picture taken with them). Problem is that I already have a book with a picture of the Simpsons’ couch. So, yes, the notion of being able to sit alongside the family does allude to what paratexts are all about on one level, but I really don’t want my books to have iterations of the same cover. Or for people to think it’s a second book by me about The Simpsons. Or am I over-reacting?
• NYU prefer a single image, not a montage
• Which leads to the tackling thing: what one image could be metonymic without being painfully reductive? The book argues that all those things that surround film and TV often contribute meaningfully to popular understandings of shows, to the point that they are bona fide parts of “the text itself,” btw. If you read this blog, you likely have a sense of my take on paratexts, and that’s the book.
• And, of course, since it’s a cover, there are legalities to dodge, and I can’t just lift a commercial image and claim fair use when it’s a cover.

So, please, help me with my cover. Thanks!

I’m really excited to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, a collection co-edited with the brilliant duo of Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson. Just as Jon Stewart smacks down Cramer and CNBC, it seems a fine time for the book to come out.

I hope you’ll agree that the cover is really top-notch. We found the picture, but NYU Press did a great job of framing it, and it looks very snappy. After Routledge’s botching of my Simpsons book cover (if only you could see what it was meant to be, you’d share my pain), I guess I was owed some paratextual good fortune, and here it is.

The book began at the Flow conference in 2006, as (by my memory) a result of two walks between the University of Texas and the Dog and Duck Pub. One of them was with Ethan, the other with Jeff, neither of whom I’d met before. If you know Austin, you know that it’s not all that long a walk, but each trip was long enough for us to immediately get along with each other and for us to agree that there wasn’t enough good stuff on satire out there. So we floated the idea of doing a collection, and a month later we were working on it. Jeff and Ethan were an absolute joy to work with, always on the ball, fiercely intelligent, and darn funny guys, thus making the whole process a lot more enjoyable.

We also worked with a great group of contributors. Let me share with you the table of contents:

Foreword by David Marc

Part I: Post 9/11, Post Modern, or Just Post Network?

• “The State of Satire, the Satire of State” (Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, Ethan Thompson)
• “With All Due Respect Satirizing Presidents From Saturday Night Live to Lil’ Bush” (Jeffrey P. Jones)
• “Tracing the ‘Fake’ Candidate in American Television Comedy” (Heather Osborne-Thompson)

Part II: Fake News, Real Funny

• “And Now… the News? Mimesis and the Real in The Daily Show” (Amber Day)
• “Jon Stewart and The Daily Show: I Thought You Were Going to Be Funny!” (Joanne Morreale)
• “Stephen Colbert’s Parody of the Postmodern” (Geoffrey Baym)

Part III: Building in the Critical Rubble: Between Deconstruction and Reconstruction

• “Throwing Out the Welcome Mat: Public Figures as Guests and Victims in TV Satire” (Jonathan Gray)
• “Speaking ‘Truth’ to Power? Television Satire, Rick Mercer Report, and the Politics of Place and Space” (Serra Tinic)
• “Why Mitt Romney Won’t Debate a Snowman” (Henry Jenkins)

Part IV: Shock and Guffaw: The Limits of Satire

• “Good Demo, Bad Taste: South Park as Carnivalesque Satire” (Ethan Thompson)
• “In the Wake of ‘The Nigger Pixie’: Dave Chappelle and the High Cost of De Facto Crossover” (Bambi Haggins)
• “Of Niggas and Citizens: The Boondocks Fans and Differentiated Black American Politics” (Avi Santo)

It was a great group to work with, and they made our job so much easier. Ultimately, we made this book since it was one that we wanted to read, and the contributors didn’t disappoint.

So, if you’re teaching a class (or just a section: NYU Press price their books to sell, so this one’s list price is $22, yet I note that Amazon’s selling it for $14.85 right now) on popular politics, satire, or comedy, please consider the book. Or you don’t need to be teaching the book to enjoy it, so grab a copy yourself. It’s set to be released on April 1, no joke.

Here are the endorsements on the back:

“This smart and savvy crew has noticed something creeping up on us, something with bite. Now we have to take satire TV seriously; it turns out to be the bearer of the democratic spirit for the post-broadcast age. In this field-shaping book, some of the brightest talents in TV studies show us how the marginal has become the model for a much-needed media make-over. See what happens when entertainment bares its teeth.”
— John Hartley, author of Television Truths

“It has been said that if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny.  This wonderful collection proves that nothing could be farther from the truth.  Satire TV takes the study of comedy in new directions, expanding beyond earlier work done on classical Hollywood cinema and the sitcom.  In politically trying times, the contributors to this volume reveal through analysis of programs such as South Park, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, laughter is not the best medicine—it is the surgeon’s scalpel.”
— Heather Hendershot, editor of Nickelodeon Nation

First, though, for those of you who don’t know the meme, here’s how it works:

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to “Random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover (it will need to be a .jpg, not a .gif or .bmp).

4 – Use Photoshop (or similar) to put it all together.

5 – Post it to Facebook as a note and tag the friends you want to join in.

More after the fold

I did two, and was quite amused by both, and by what a random generator could come up with. The first seems like a band that’s modeling itself on Live, trying to be heavy/edgy, yet probably not really all that much of either. The second is clearly a campus band: Family Guy writers meet Crash Test Dummies, with lyrics that rhyme Kierkegaard with Skeletor.

and

I’m also very impressed by this ironically posh Brit pop band that Ethan Thompson came up with:

More impressive than any one album cover, though, is how easy it is to match the industry with such randomness. Compare the above, for instance, with the new U2 (a random Wikipedia entry name for a band if ever I heard one) album, No Line on the Horizon:

Or even this famous album cover from Nirvana for Nevermind:

Or check out these pricelessly bad covers at a site I found while searching for pics for this entry, The Museum of Bad Album Covers:

In looking at all of these, though, I am struck by the importance of font. Ethan’s works so brilliantly, for instance, because he found a great font. I’m relatively proud of the fonts for Drug Eruption and Pastured Poultry too. Or look at Nirvana’s or Moving Gelatine Plates’. When so much else can be determined randomly, maybe it’s the font in an album cover that does all the work? Let’s experiment:

The second looks like a techno album, or some kind of trance music for raves, whereas the first one is indy, and probably really bad with even worse production values (can anything good come of the Comic Sans font?). Of course, we could play the same game and change the band name (random generator comes up with “Diatonic Set Theory”), and all of a sudden a rock band (or techno or indy) becomes definitively techno, or wanky pretentious university band; or we could change the album name (random generator comes up with Reason to Fear This) for something heavier; or the picture (to the below, randomly generated pic) and we get a female singer-songwriter album a la Ingrid Michaelsson:

The point is that we’ve all got such a remarkable sense of genre that tiny variables cue us to what we’re seeing. Flip through your television’s channels, and you’ll likely get the genre in two seconds or less for every show. There’s almost a threat behind this – is that much art that easy to peg? When we go on and on about “bold new sounds” and “cutting edge” this or that, and fetishize originality, it still seems as though genre has most bands, shows, etc. in a vice grip. The “moral” of this story isn’t that originality is dead, though; rather, it’s that originality almost always comes in tiny changes – in a different font, in the use of a different type of guitar, in a character having a different job than one might expect. The flatness of originality suggested by the album cover meme, therefore, shouldn’t actually be a surprise, as most paratexts and most texts have no such thing as an overt originality. It’s all about little changes. Yet like the shower knob that takes one from freezing to boiling with the slightest motion, so too might originality be “small” in motion, yet “big” in effect.