Does a successful TV show need the internet?

Worried by the failure of Friday Night Lights to build an audience, Virginia Heffernan wonders whether a modern TV show needs an internet fanbase to survive:

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.

Personally, I enjoyed the first season of Friday Night Lights quite a bit when it ran on ITV4 last year. However, it seems to me that the “fault” of the show is not extrinsic at all.

For one thing, Friday Night Lights was essentially a character-led drama that relied upon viewers getting to know the characters. For another, it was easy to dismiss at first glance as a niche show – a teen show or a sports drama. In fact the adults – and especially the Best Married Couple On Television – got very nearly as many plotlines as the high school kids, and there was an average of maybe five minutes of on-field football action per episode. Finally, surely the fact is that most TV shows don’t attract big online followings, particularly ones in real world settings. This is why the shows that do have a serious online following get stories written about them in the offline media. Heffernan touches on this last point later in her article:

Perhaps the characters’ motives and futures are too haphazard and lifelike to be guessed at by fans. Perhaps the “Friday Night Lights” narrative lacks a set of logical givens, the kind that are a staple of sci-fi and fantasy, which empower fans to speculate about outcomes.

Half the fun of a new science fiction or fantasy show is to try to figure out the world the writers have built, particularly in a show like Lost or Heroes where the very structure of the show makes it amply clear that there’s a lot we don’t know yet. Even in an SF show lacking a well-defined story arc, there’s by definition work to be done unpicking the setting and theorising about what we haven’t seen yet.

Good SF shows, the ones that will still have active fansites half a decade or more after they’ve gone off the air, will also have engaging characters and intriguing plots, but a lot of the initial attraction lies in inspecting the writers’ worldbuilding.¹

In a show set in the ‘real world’ where most episodes began or ended with a high school football match and the real drama lay in interpersonal relationships, there wasn’t as much scope for fans to erect an online encyclopaedia.

Perhaps the series is like fine embroidery or precise machinery: it extinguishes the desire in laypeople to try it themselves. It’s possible that “Friday Night Lights” even brings on museum fatigue, a sense of uselessness and enervation in the face of art that doesn’t need us.

Or perhaps it’s just that a lot of perfectly decent TV fails to pick up the audience it deserves.

¹ One of the problems writers of SF shows face is that if their show is picked up and runs for a few seasons they’ll find themselves filling in some of the gaps in their worldbuilding and discover that their most diehard fans would rather they’d not gone in that direction. See, for example, the number of fans of Babylon 5 who would much rather have seen the show end at season 4, episode 6 (but without that “Now get the hell out of our galaxy!” speech) or at the end of season 4. Or the number of Buffy fans who can’t forgive Joss Whedon for seasons 6 and 7.