Authorship

Jason Mittel's chapter on Authorship for his book 'Complex TV' is here. It's a long read, mandatory for anyone interested in transmediality and serial audio-visual storytelling.


"Contemporary television has fostered a unique form of creative authorship, establishing the role of 'showrunner' within its production contexts. This chapter discusses the technologically-enabled paratexts of podcasts, making-of documentaries, DVD commentaries, Twitter feeds and blogs that have enabled television creators to speak directly to viewers, and how such paratexts have helped constitute a new model of the star showrunner like Buffy’s Joss Whedon, Community’s Dan Harmon, and Lost’s team of Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. In exploring the textual and paratextual presence of showrunners, I consider how viewers rely upon an inferred author function to make sense of contemporary television serials."


Were I still 'showrunner', still producing 'Gute Zeiten Schlechte Zeiten' I would certainly find Mittel's thinking enlightening.


Is there any relevance to the work of the novelist? The way the very concept of the book is changing, I think there are some points to think about very seriously.