Emma Approved and the Trouble with Transmedia
Reality rarely exceeds expectations, and when it does, it begets expectations for the future. When I watched The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, I did not know what to expect, I don’t think anyone did—not even the creators. It was a wonderful experiment that was wildly successful. But Emma Approved doesn’t seem to be meeting the expectations that follow such success.
At first I thought that I was being overly critical. After being inspired by The Lizzie Bennet Diaries to pursue transmedia storytelling and am now pursuing a graduate certificate in digital media. I’m currently taking Video for Social Media where we are focusing on transmedia, dissecting web series and their online presences. But after private discussions with other Pemberley Digital fans, I was assured that I was not being overly critical. I’ve been hesitant to voice my opinions because I truly admire the creative team and the talented individuals behind Pemberley Digital and I don’t want to burn any bridges, since I want to work in this industry in the very near future.
So here is my take on the state of Emma Approved and some steps that could be taken to make it Audience Approved.
“I’ve been hesitant to voice my opinions because I truly admire the creative team and the talented individuals behind Pemberley Digital and I don’t want to burn any bridges, since I want to work in this industry in the very near future.”
I haven’t read below the cut yet, but I really want to take a moment to SCREAM the following message at everybody in the LBD fandom (and to anyone who is part of any kind of fan community in which the creators are active on social media and/or widely revered):
BE CRITICAL. Be so goddamn critical, always. I know Rachel and I have talked about this before, how nobody benefits ever from being shielded from criticism about their work. Hell, I used to work for Pemberley Digital, and I agree with the critics of EA; I think the transmedia is much less effective than it could be at this point, and the in-world/out-of-world noise is confusing as hell. I think it’s essentially not a very good show. And I think that censoring yourself by qualifying every criticism, by insisting that you really admire the creators (or want to work with them in the future, or are friends with them and don’t want to hurt their feelings, etc.) is kind of bullshit. When my friends make things that I don’t like, I let them know.
The same thing is happening right now with Joss Whedon fans who are (rightfully) disappointed with Agents of SHIELD. Even factoring in the traditional first-season suck, I just don’t think it’s going to be a very good show. And sure, I admire the hell out of the Buffyverse and Cabin and Dollhouse and Firefly, so I call myself a fan of Joss, but it gets dangerous when fans start to think of him (or Mo & Jed) as an infallible genius. And I want to work in television — so should I lie and say that I think SHIELD is a great show when I really think it’s full of hackneyed, over the top “Whedonesque” caricatures, textbook “strong female characters,” and forced romantic relationships?
Be honest.
tw: unflattering honesty about what I’m thinking these days about Hank Green
additional tw: novel-length discourse on LBD/PD meta
My interpretation is that LBD got the Emmy because it broke new ground, and did so in two ways:
1) It showed that for a microscopic amount of money (by TV standards) you could take a classic (out of copyright) work and put it on screen, at least on YouTube, with surprisingly high production values, generating sufficient viewership that even with the equally microscopic (by TV standards) payment rates for YouTube advertising, you could break even — as long as no one expected to get rich, or even to be paid a living wage, or even in some cases to be paid at all.
I think that really was a surprise to people in the business of making TV shows. And especially when the kickstarter happened, it validated to some extent that there was something interesting (to people who make TV) going on. Because although the amount of kickstarter money was still very small (by TV standards) it was large enough that people connecting the dots between the YouTube revenue and the kickstarter revenue could start to get excited about the possibility that maybe what they were seeing was not a one-time anomaly, but the start of something that would continue to grow and turn into The Next Big Thing (or at least A Previously Unexpected Medium-sized Thing).
So you had that. But even more compellingly, LBD broke ground in another way:
2) It showed how, by being kind of clever about it, you could extend the show via transmedia, creating in-world content that allowed (some) fans to engage more deeply and imaginatively with the characters. You could allude to in-world events that you didn’t have the resources to show on-camera. You could have the characters give in-world responses to fans, totally making the day of said fans, but also, significantly, making the characters seem more real, deepening the immersive nature of the experience for other fans reading along.
I could go into more detail about what I mean, but if you’ve read this far there’s a good chance you know exactly what I’m talking about because you participated in it directly.
I’m going to tell a story now.
I don’t know if it’s a true story. It seems like a compelling story to me, but that might just be because it taps into stories I’ve heard before, giving my imagination larger-than-life heroes and villains to latch onto. This story has been delivered to me over an extended period of time, in little dribs and drabs on YouTube, with people talking as if directly to me, adding to the illusion that they’re real people with whom I have a direct personal relationship. The story has also been told via transmedia (tweets and Tumblr and Instagram content), and once in a while I’ve had the exciting experience that some fan response of mine is recognized and responded to in-world. And as LBD demonstrates, this can be a very powerful way to tell a story.
But that doesn’t make it true.
Anyway, the story:
Once upon a time, Hank created a webseries. And because Hank had learned how to make vlog-format videos on YouTube really well, and do it for very little money, he could finance the initial production himself. And he was lucky enough to find a collaborator, Bernie Su, who was equally adept in the slightly different area of making more-traditional fictional video content, with casting and production and scripts and actors, but again, he’d done that in the world of webseries, where budgets were tiny.
And they gathered collaborators, people with talent and experience and skills they’d honed in their own particular areas: producers and writers like Jenni and Margaret and Rachel, and artists and production people like Katie and Adam, and transmedia people like Jay and Alex, and other people whose names I can’t recall off the top of my head, for which I apologize, because I know their contributions were also important, people who lit and recorded and edited, and fed and clothed and did makeup. And then there were the actors, who, in my fannish way, I maybe tend to accord too much credit for the end product. But they were the ones in front of the camera making the magic happen: Ashley, especially, but also Julia and Mary Kate and Laura, and all the others who came later, all the way to Kelsey.
And all those people collaborated with each other, and poured their hearts into the work, and it was a labor of love, and together they created something beautiful. Not perfect; there were always problems here and there if you pushed to find them, and some of those became more obvious over time because some people did push, and because the show increasingly was weighed down by its own previous storytelling decisions.
But there was definitely awesomeness if you looked for it.
And then it was over, and the kickstarter happened, and a lot of fans took advantage of that to express their love of the show and give something back, especially since there’d been statements from “Hank and Bernie Su” that the overage was going to be used at least in part to compensate the people who had donated so much of their lives to making the show happen. And that was good of them to do, because honestly, the stuff that was great about the show was the result of many different people, not just a few people, and especially not just one person.
And the Emmy happened, and that was good, too, because the show had been groundbreaking in both those ways I mentioned before, and it deserved to be recognized.
And then Hank, who had mostly been off-camera and way behind the scenes, to the extent that many of the people making the show never even met him until much later, got it in his head that really, the show’s success was largely the result of him. And he thought that because it really was his idea at the beginning, and his money, and his pre-existing YouTube audience that initially got the show going. And that certainly counts for something. But also, he thought that because he’s a bit of an egomaniac who sees himself as the center of the universe, which is something all of us do, but with Hank there seems to be just a little bit more of it, and just a little bit less of that humility that all of us also possess in some degree, and that helps balance out the egotism.
And this led to things like his using revealing language on social media in reference to “my” Emmy (rather than “our” Emmy), which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except there also were some fairly ugly rumors that emerged and were never responded to, becoming a “dog that didn’t bark in the night”, about how a lot of the kickstarter overage was sucked up by things like “producing fees”, with the promised compensation to the people who’d worked for free or nearly for free on the show being reduced to amounts that were so low as to be frankly insulting.
Now that last part is based on secondhand grumbling, and I don’t have strong evidence of it. But it sounds consistent with other things I’ve seen from Hank, and with what I know of human nature, where it’s the rule rather than the exception that if there’s money involved, and a lack of transparency, people often find a way to rationalize taking more than their share.
I suppose it’s also possible that I’m laying too much blame for this state of affairs on Hank, since most of the relevant communications from Pemberley Digital have been signed “Hank and Bernie Su”. As far as I can tell the two of them are Pemberley Digital, so if there’s something smelly in how the kickstarter money has been spent or how those expenditures have been (or haven’t been) documented publicly, it’s arguably on both of them, rather than just on Hank. But this is my story, and I guess my headcanon is influenced by the fact that Bernie Su has been more accessible through all this, and has tended to come off as much less of an egomaniac, which is probably unsurprising, since in terms of actually coordinating the efforts of other people that allowed LBD to be created in the first place, it was all Bernie Su. So he’s almost certainly more of a people-person and less egotistical than Hank.
Oh, right: What this all means in terms of Emma Approved. What it all means, I think, is that many of the people who made huge contributions to LBD have moved on, and those who are left are those who weren’t burned by Hank as part of the LBD aftermath. And the show they’re creating reflects a mistaken view that the reason LBD won the Emmy was mostly reason #1 above, and not so much reason #2. That is, it reflects the view of Hank (and maybe to some extent of Bernie Su), that what made LBD special was their own individual contributions, in terms of knowing how to make compelling vlog-style/webseries YouTube content with good production values for very little money.
But because Hank (and to a lesser extent Bernie Su) were not personally responsible for the compelling transmedia integration that was LBD’s other great innovation and reason #2 for the Emmy, they’ve pretty much completely discounted that aspect of the show in the creation of Emma Approved. Bernie Su was quite honest about it in the Google hangout in which he explained the whole in-world/out-of-world split: It was driven by a concern that casual audience members would miss seeing the videos if they weren’t promoted in the particular ways that were problematic in terms of the believability of the world and the immersiveness of the transmedia. So they simply discarded believability and compelling transmedia immersion as a component of the show.
Basically, the creators of Emma Approved didn’t, and don’t, care about that. Or at least, they don’t care enough, so when push comes to shove and a choice has to be made between the integrity of the world and the transmedia experience on one hand, and the ease of creating a high-production-values TV show that will satisfy a more-casual fan on the other, they choose the latter over the former.
The sad thing for me is that I think they’re actually wrong about which of the two reasons for the Emmy was more important. Being able to make a classic literature adaptation and put it on YouTube cheaply is cool, and it’s wonderful to see how other people besides PD have picked up that ball and run with it. But tying the real and fictional worlds together via immersive transmedia was, at least for me, much cooler.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/67279982626.
