Core response: Week 6

I found what Mark Andrejevic had to say about the enthusiasm and critical mind of fan culture to be something that I resonated with. I, too, have found myself being a stronger critic and more thoughtful consumer of media by "being plugged in [and] invested" in a show and its creation.

It's also true that this relationship (and, most particularly, its increasing accessibility) is a source of tension for both fans and producers of a show. As Andrejevic notes, the "promise" of online forums for fans was to "have their voice heard within the confines of the sequestered site of production," while the promise for producers "is the ability to monitor viewers." This creates a sort of short cut straight to the heart of (what are believed to be) some of the most impassioned viewers a show can have — and all the good and ill that come with it.

It's hard to say if there's a right way to handle this, but it certainly feels like there are wrong ways: "Chuck" was a mid-aughts show essentially kept alive by a small but vocal fanbase (and a, I guess, profitable Subway partnership). But when the show kept getting saved from the clutches of death by fans, those same fans believed that they had a bit of ownership around the show—they wanted their main ships to be together, and the writers, in their mind, had the duty to facilitate it. (Never mind whether the writers were in pursuit of that very story, just on a longer time table!) On the other hand there's "Veronica Mars," a show that was also on the bubble and thus worked overtime to keep fans happy. Creator Rob Thomas has spoken at length about plot lines, characters, and even the revival movie production, all of which made him feel penned in as a writer. (Never mind that the idea of a grown man in charge of a production should probably be OK taking some artistic risks and not off-loading that onto the fans!)

These two cases represent some more extreme versions of how fans and creators navigate the "creative work of making a show" in response to each other. But there are plenty in between: Damon Lindelof has become much more proactive in publicly discussing his motivations and construction of his shows, post-"Lost." David Lynch famously never does anything of the sort. It's now up to fans and creators alike to decide if something is worth their attention — sincerely or not.

It's also up to them to decide if they want to embellish the story they are viewing to see something deeper they might also want to see. As Henry Jenkins notes in this week's piece on "Star Trek," fan forums quickly turned to romance stories, at least in their initial writing. This would ultimately be something that was rarely addressed in the confines of "Star Trek"; for every long-term pairing of crew members there's more than a handful of fan-exclusive couplings — most notably Kirk/Spock, which is probably one of the only truly verboten ones that creators won't go for.

Still, "Star Trek" represents a unique case, where fans not only developed a keener sense of storytelling — growing increasingly skeptical of the "Mary Sue" character and contrived plot devices — and making their own version of the "Star Trek" that they wanted to see, even merely as a side to the main course. These fans' versions have been acknowledged or received in some way by the creative team (they're name-checked in the recent Leonard Nimoy documentary, and the fandom culture around the show has notoriously made it one of the longest running franchises of all time). But they're also merely "embracing the modicum of interactivity that makes it possible to identify with the position of the producer," as Andrejevic writes.