INSTRUCTIONS
Final Research Paper: You will write 3000-3,500-word essay on a television program of your choosing. This can be any program other than our shared course text (True Detective, season 2, 2015).
Guidelines for the final paper:
It should be written in a style that incorporates industrial and economic analysis (such as found in Amanda Lotz’s chapter 7 case studies in The Television Will Be Revolutionized) AND ALSO close textual analysis of the kind pursued in Mittell and Thompson’s How To Watch Television. The overarching question you should keep in mind is: how does your chosen show’s success or failure relate to the stability or instability of economic (e.g. production and financing), industrial (e.g. network structure, labour conditions), critical (e.g. audience engagement), or technological (e.g. distribution models and platforms) conditions during the period of its broadcast? And how do its stylistic or narrative traits reflect (or reject) dominant conventions? The goal is to explore a television program as a socio-cultural form—a text that can tell us something about the circumstances in which it was produced and received. It is therefore very important that you incorporate both textual close analysis and considerations about technology, industry, historical context, and/or social activity.
Creative pitch: 3000-3500-word proposal for a TV program that you plan to offer to a particular TV channel. Make sure you name the channel and take into consideration all our discussions around the post-network state of television when you create your pitch.
Guidelines for the creative pitch:
Imagine yourself in the shoes of a screenwriter who wants to make a break-through on TV with a story in a genre of your choice. In the creative pitch that you develop here your purpose is to convince the prospective producer of your TV series (Netflix, Amazon Prime, CBC, HBO, Hulu, etc.) that the show you’ve written is financially, aesthetically and narratively appropriate for their channel. Your pitch is no longer than 3000-3,500 words and it provides information on such things as: the topic and genre of your screenplay, including the main story arcs of the characters (central and secondary) broken by episodes. The number and duration of your episodes as well as screening locations, cast and salaries, duration of filming, postproduction period, audiences, fandoms and advertising campaigns. Make sure to explain how industry and technological practices influence your narrative and creative choice. Remember that a successful creative pitch requires ideas for original and imaginative programming rooted in the spheres of material production and labour. Your pitch needs to engage both the creative and the production side of television.