Complex TV

Authorship

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 it discusses how such paratexts have helped constitute star showrunners such as 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 discuss theories of authorship and posit that viewers rely on an inferred author function to make sense of contemporary television serials.

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