In the current participatory television environment, social media serves both a social backchannel for interactions between audience members and a direct line of communication between audiences and production. Because audience activity on social media becomes part of the media brand, it is a priority for the industry to achieve some level of control/influence on that activity. In this article, I discuss writers’ room Twitter accounts as a space used to model and reinforce fan behavior that serves industry interests, arguing that these accounts serve industry needs through the behaviors they promote and recognize. Through analysis of three writers’ room Twitter accounts—for Jane the Virgin, Faking It, and Orange Is the New Black—I show how this process works, as well as the ways in which a show’s individual industrial context shapes the type of fan that is hailed.
In this article, I examine how and why “platformization” was initially made sense of by writers in the American television industry. As streaming platforms entered the production space and became important homes for the commissioning of longform television content, they sought to build brand images as places that were both “data-driven” and characterized by work cultures of “creative freedom.” At least for a time in the mid-2010s, they succeeded in selling this conceptual link to the professional culture of Hollywood television screenwriters. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews from 2017 as well as a longer ranging analysis of trade press, I identify those features of the production culture established at major streaming platforms that forged the somewhat counterintuitive notion that “being data-driven” created an environment of greater “creative freedom” in the mid-2010s. However, these were the very early days of streaming platform production cultures, and norms began to crystallize, it was these very same features that began to undermine creative comfort with streaming platforms.
Because companies, not writer-producers, are the legally protected "authors" of television shows, when production disputes between series creators and studio/ network suits arise, executives have every right to separate creators from their intellectual property creations. However, legally disempowered series creators can leverage an audience mandate to gain the upper hand in production disputes. Examining two case studies where an audience mandate was involved in overturning a corporate production decision-Rob Thomas's seven-year quest to make a Veronica Mars movie and Dan Harmon's firing from and subsequent rehiring to his position as the showrunner of Community-this article explores how the social media ecosystem around television rebalances power in disputes between creators and the corporate entities that produce and distribute their work.
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