Lost: Season 1 Ep 2 - Key Scene

Examples of how to make and justify key points for TV audience appeal.

'Lost': The Making of the Pilot

Uses & Gratifications in action

Here are a few forum/blog comments on our chosen texts. They indicate how fans respond to texts in different ways to different texts and highlight how researching such sites can provide valuable source material to include/quote in your exam responses.

Such research doesn't take long and blogging others comments allows for solid arguments and debates that can help you apply theory in more varied ways.  

Source: Lostpedia forum

Source: Guardian Mad Men Blog

Source: Independent blog

Lost: Article - Media Magazine

How does lost attract its audience?

How does Lost attract its audience? Who is its targeted audience and what strategies does it adopt in its mode of address?

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Lost

Click above to view this case study

MS4 -Text, Industry & Audience: Television

Audiences: Television

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Lost

Lost: Audience

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Lost (Industry)

Read an interview with Matthew Fox the star of 'Lost' on the series and his progression to leading man status for his first starring role in the Hollywood Blockbuster 'Vantage Point'.

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Lost (Industry)

Becoming aware of trends in television is an issue that will help you appreciate why Production Companies either invest in new series or cancel existing ones. Audiences are constantly changing, can become accustomed to formatted shows and may then seek new forms of entertainment, so the industry must adapt in order to survive and retain popularity with their viewers. Read this article 'TV upfronts: Lost loses its appeal as US plays it safe' from The Guardian which discusses how TV Companies commission and plan future shows dependent upon financing and audience tastes.

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Lost (Industry)

For some background information about the creation, casting, marketing and success of this ABC television series visit lostpedia here. It will also provide useful information about scheduling in the US and UK, which you will need to consider for issues of industry and audience.

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Lost (Audience)

Here is a link to a fan site for 'Lost'. It was made for the fans, by the fans and shows how devoted audiences can be to a television series. It includes a forum, episode guide, video clips, cast guide and series related news items.

What Mad Men Owes to Lost

Mad Men’s debt to The Sopranos is obvious — besides its compartmentalized, alienated characters and spooky dream sequences, the AMC drama is the brainchild of former Sopranos writer-producer Matthew Weiner. But watching the show’s two-hour season-six premiere (which airs April 7), one wonders if Mad Men owes just as much to Lost. The episode evokes the sci-fi drama’s setting, themes, and atmosphere and is full of the kind-of-sorta-clues and maybe-premonitions that made Lost the first show to take advantage of Internet-age obsessiveness.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is on a client-paid vacation in Hawaii, gathering impressions for an ad campaign for a resort. He’s cut off from the show’s other characters, smoking pot and feasting on roast pig; between the forlorn palm fronds, crashing waves, and meditative close-ups of our hero lost in thought, there’d be a sense of purgatorial isolation even if he weren’t reading Dante’sInferno. The book seems like a perverse choice for a beach read until you get to the end of this clever, at times tricky season opener. In Lost-like style, it strategically withholds key information that would help us make immediate sense of Don’s behavior, which by turns suggests a prisoner, a sleepwalker, and a ghost.

What does it all mean? Where is it all headed? We’ll be asking ourselves these questions throughout Mad Men’s sixth season, and we have Lost to thank for normalizing this level of attention. True, older shows like The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files prompted clue hunts. But after J. J. Abrams’s Lost debuted in 2004 — coinciding with the birth of social media—fan scrutiny underwent a mutation worthy of the series itself. Each new episode was custom-tooled to prompt post-broadcast debates. What was in the hatch? Who were the Others? Were the characters in hell, or perhaps purgatory? Were the echoes of the Bible, Lord of the Flies, and, yes, Paradise Lost meaningful or the writers’ prankish way of sending overthinkers down lit-crit rabbit holes?

As went Lost, so goes Mad Men. If you followed both shows simultaneously when their runs overlapped (2007 to 2010), you may have experienced déjà vu. Fan-driven microscrutiny of every line, reference, and prop on Mad Men was Lost-like, and the show did everything it could to stoke that frenzy. Weiner has even adopted an Abrams-esque anti-spoiler policy, one that bizarrely treats a realistic adult drama as if it were a superhero movie whose bad guy would be revealed at Comic-Con. The letter that accompanied the season-six premiere screener is a meta-masterpiece of mystery creation; Weiner’s request that critics not reveal particular details — such as the year the season begins, the status of Don and Megan’s (Jessica Paré) relationship, and “whether the agency has expanded to an additional floor” — made me think, Few of these questions seem particularly ­important — but might they prove important later? Or is he asking me to avoid these things so I won’t fixate on other, more spoiler-y things? Writers for Lost frequented chat rooms and blog comments sections, monitoring reactions to manage expectations and outwit plot-guessers. If they and Weiner ever got together — and who’s to say they aren’t playing poker at this very moment? — they’d have plenty to laugh about.

For example, during the Hawaii sequence, Don goes drinking at a hotel bar. He meets a Vietnam-bound, soon-to-be-married soldier, agrees to play “father-in-law” and give away the bride during a wedding the next day, then accidentally swaps lighters with him. Don doesn’t realize until later that he has the soldier’s Zippo; he tries to get rid of it, but it keeps coming back like a bad penny. Is the swap a commentary on Don’s secret history as a deserter who assumed a dead soldier’s identity in Korea? Is it a harbinger of future plotlines?

Lane Pryce’s (Jared Harris) suicide was foreshadowed here and there last season; just one episode into season six, though, and we’re already up to our necks in death imagery. The premiere opens with a shot staring at the ceiling from the perspective of a man having a heart attack. Don pitches an ad for the resort that seems to imply a suicide — an image of footprints vanishing into the ocean — and everybody senses its morbidity but him. There’s a shot of Megan closing his eyes with her hand, as you would to a person who died. Will this be the season in which Don’s secret life is exposed, his world of manufactured signs and symbols collapses, and he plunges into despair, echoing the falling man in the show’s opening credits? We might or might not learn the answers to those questions, or to others posed by season six; and, this being Mad Men, we’ll be all right with not knowing.

Which brings us to the most important (albeit unintentional) legacy of Lost: Its ending was so profoundly unsatisfying that it prompted viewers to soul-search about why, exactly, they watch television, and whether any show, no matter how carefully constructed, can ever give fans the cathartic closure they want. Mad Men is often about the unsatisfying, unknowable, uncontrollable nature of both life and storytelling — about the impossibility of life taking on the neat contours of fiction, no matter how many faintly literary allusions and how much foreshadowing it may contain. As D. H. Lawrence wrote in Sons and Lovers,“Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as if it was slurred over.” Lost didn’t mean to line up art with life for us, but it did, and Weiner should be grateful, because it made it easier to sell one of Mad Men’s most effective and consistent tropes: the notion that it’s all a big mystery, and at the very end of it, you get heartbreak, and then somebody closes your eyes.

This review originally appeared in the April 8 issue of New York magazine.

Source: vulture.com/2013

Making Sense of Audience Theories

Researchers investigating the effect of media on audiences have considered the audience in two distinct ways.

(A)       Passive Audiences

The earliest idea was that a mass audience is passive and inactive. The members of the audience are seen as couch potatoes just sitting there consuming media texts – particularly commercial television programmes. It was thought that this did not require the active use of the brain. The audience accepts and believes all messages in any media text that they receive. This is the passive audience model.

The Hypodermic Model

In this model the media is seen as powerful and able to inject ideas into an audience who are seen as weak and passive.

It was thought that a mass audience could be influenced by the same message. This appeared to be the case in Nazi Germany in the 1930s leading up to WWII. Powerful German films such as Triumph of the Will seemed to use propaganda methods to ‘inject’ ideas promoting the Nazi cause into the German audience. That is why this theory is known as the Hypodermic model.

It suggests that a media text can ‘inject’ ideas, values and attitudes into a passive audience who might then act upon them. This theory also suggests that a media text has only one message which the audience must pick up.

(B)        Active Audiences

This newer model sees the audience not as couch potatoes, but as individuals who are active and interact with the communication process and use media texts for their own purposes. We behave differently because we are different people from different backgrounds with many different attitudes, values, experiences and ideas.

This is the active audience model, and is now generally considered to be a better and more realistic way to talk about audiences.

Uses and Gratifications Model

This model stems from the idea that audiences are a complex mixture of individuals who select media texts that best suits their needs – this goes back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The users and gratifications model suggests that media audiences are active and make active decisions about what they consume in relation to their social and cultural setting and their needs.

This was summed up by theorists Blumier and Katz in 1974;
‘Media usage can be explained in that it provides gratifications (meaning it satisfies needs) related to the satisfaction of social and psychological needs’.

Put simply this means that audiences choose to watch programmes that make them feel good (gratifications) e.g. soaps and sitcoms, or that give them information that they can use (uses) e.g. news or information about new products or the world about them.

Blumier and Katz (1975) went into greater detail and identified four main uses:

Surveillance – our need to know what is going on in the world. This relates to Maslow’s need for security. By keeping up to date with news about local and international events we feel we have the knowledge to avoid or deal with dangers.

Personal relationships – our need for to interact with other people. This is provided by forming virtual relationships with characters in soaps, films and all kinds of drama, and other programmes and other media texts.

Personal identity – our need to define our identity and sense of self. Part of our sense of self is informed by making judgments about all sorts of people and things. This is also true of judgments we make about TV and film characters, and celebrities. Our choice of music, the shows we watch, the stars we like can be an expression of our identities. One aspect of this type of gratification is known as value reinforcement. This is where we choose television programmes or newspapers that have similar beliefs to those we hold.

Diversion – the need for escape, entertainment and relaxation. All types of television programmes can be ‘used’ to wind down and offer diversion, as well as satisfying some of the other needs at the same time.

Lost Power Points

Exam Response Content (Television)

B3. How do your chosen texts attract their audiences?

It is likely that candidates will need to begin by explaining (defining) the target audience for the text/s. Candidates may refer to some of the following points in their answer, depending on the media industry selected:

• content: form (TV, Film, Magazine etc.) and structure 

• content: representations, characters 

• mode of address (Language used, stylistics: these will be appropriate for differing audiences) 

• placement/scheduling (Channel, production company, viewing time/s)

Some references may be made to theories such as the uses and gratifications theory and to ways in which audiences are attracted to texts depending on the cultural positioning.

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Lost (Audience/Industry)

Review: 'Lost':

Only two weeks into ABC’s new plane-crash-survivors-on-a-tropical-island thriller “Lost” and already the mysteries are flying fast and furious. Are the castaways alone? Is that really a polar bear? And what’s that huge, growling thing in the jungle, flattening trees and sending the island’s new residents scrambling in terror?

Yet the most intriguing mystery is less about the adventure and more about the people watching it unfold: How has “Lost” attracted such a huge audience? Nearly 18 million viewers found the Sept. 22 premiere — making it ABC’s most-watched drama debut in nine years. The ratings for the second installment weren’t as sky-high as the highly hyped premiere, but the still impressive numbers (16.3 million viewers) suggest that the initial spike in viewership was no fluke.

Scoring big — or, let’s be frank. even respectable — ratings has traditionally been an uphill struggle for a show like “Lost,” the latest offering from J.J. Abrams, creator of “Alias” and “Felicity.” Genre-bending TV — programs that combine several hallmark elements from distinct styles of shows — is more often than not relegated to cult status, pulling in a tiny but enthusiastic audience.

Most cult shows are all but ignored by mainstream America, who’d rather while away the hours with tepid fare like “America’s Next Top Accountant” or “Last Pork Roast Standing.” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel,” for instance, were extremely well-crafted horror-comedy-drama-thrillers — and attracted a middling viewership in only the single-digit millions each week.

So what’s “Lost” got that other hyphenated (and now cancelled) shows didn’t? If the number of billboards and bus placards is any indication, it’s got the support of its network behind it. More importantly, it’s got several buzzworthy elements designed to appeal to a large number of people — and get them talking. In fact, “Lost’s” first episode actually added viewers as the show went on, indicating that phones and computers were busy with word-of-mouth suggestions to “Turn to ABC. You’ve gotta see this show!”

Genre-bending thriller

Ostensibly, “Lost” is about 48 plane crash survivors fighting to stay alive on a tropical island, a basic premise which has been done again and again, from “Robinson Crusoe” to “Lord of the Flies” to the exploits of a certain skipper and his little buddy. But it’s already shaking out to be much more than a “Gilligan’s Island” retread. Viewers of the show’s initial hours already know that “Lost” is a competent, high-concept thriller. But it’s also a character-driven drama, a compelling mystery, and maybe even — stay tuned — a sci-fi adventure.

And that’s the beauty of “Lost.” It’s made up of seemingly dissimilar elements that each appeal to a specific audience. And the sum of its parts is all the more impressive.

It’s tough to be all things to all people. But “Lost” seems to be enough things to enough viewers to draw in plentiful, if disparate, audiences, each looking for something particular out of the show. From cheesecake and beefcake — good-looking people showing plenty of skin in a tropical setting — to harrowing disaster scenes, tense suspense and smart comic relief, “Lost” is delivering the goods. Something about it is familiar enough to attract mainstream viewers. And it’s unique enough to give fans of genre shows plenty to chew on.

Video: ‘Lost’ and found Sure, “Gilligan’s Island” employed many of the same basic plot elements. But I’m confident enough in Abrams to know that a group of robots isn’t going to challenge the Harlem Globetrotters to a basketball game anytime soon. But, who knows? Just when viewers think they’ve got “Lost” figured out, it zigs, then zags, then zigs again. It’s “Jurassic Park” one minute, “Gosford Park” the next. If television has taught us anything, it's not to pigeonhole J.J. Abrams.

His “Felicity” started as a girl-moving-to-the-big-city show, and ended as a time-traveling fantasy (seriously). “Alias” is at its core a globetrotting spy procedural. But it's also a science thriller that beats the pants off anything Michael Crichton has come up with recently, as well as an is-it-or-isn't-it-sci-fi-meets-historical-prophecy-techno-jumble that would have “Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown scratching his head.

So maybe a coconut phone or bamboo jet pack is indeed in “Lost’s” future. With Abrams, you never know. And that’s part of the fun.

Characters to care about

Still, all the rollercoaster plots in the world aren’t going to amount to much if the characters riding them aren’t worth worrying about. While Abrams can craft multifaceted characters, much of the depth can likely be attributed to another co-executive producer on the show, Damon Lindelof, who co-produced the talkier “Crossing Jordan.” Even without the taut suspense and breathless thrills, the characters on “Lost” stand on their own as interesting people, layered with interesting quirks, questionable motivations and, no doubt, plenty of secrets.

And the acting is on par with the slick writing. Matthew Fox (“Party of Five”) delivers a sympathetic-yet-heroic turn as a beleaguered doctor who finds himself in the middle of this nightmare. Newcomer Evangeline Lilly is a likable and levelheaded woman who’s harboring at least one big secret. Former hobbit Dominic Monaghan plays a helpful-yet-shifty musician who was up to something when the plane crashed. And nearly a dozen other characters, many of them familiar TV faces, play roles of varying importance. On the surface, anyway. It’s plainly clear that a bit player now could become integral to the plot as the series continues.

But don’t get too comfortable with these specific castaways. Abrams has killed off major characters before. What’s especially intriguing about “Lost” is that if some, or all, of the original bunch of lead castaways are rescued — or picked off by the hungry thing in the woods, there are three dozen other characters hanging out on the beach, just waiting for their time in the spotlight.

Is this finally a horror-sci-fi-suspense-thriller that Great-Aunt Marge can feel comfortable admitting that she watches? Early returns say yes indeed. Abrams has disregarded the traditional rules of these standard genres, deconstructed them, then reassembled them into something wholly new and appealing.

Of course, we still don't know what's lurking amid the foliage or many of the other surprises the show has yet to unleash. But no matter what the producers have planned, it seems that they’ve already learned how to dress up what have typically been dismissed as nerdish elements in normal-people clothes so they appeal to the masses.

It’s still early in the game, but “Lost” apparently knows exactly where it’s headed.

Brian Bellmont is a freelance writer in Minneapolis.

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Mad Men/Lost/Louis Theroux (Audience/Industry)

Cinematic TV dramas spark a revolution in online viewing

US online distributors look to copy success of BBC iPlayer as 'boxset' culture grows among viewers.

Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent

The Observer: 23/10/11

As more television viewers choose to watch their favourite shows on "catch-up services" or by recording whole series in bulk, American online distributors are planning a revolution in the way we are presented with high-quality drama.

Internationally acclaimed series such as The West Wing, Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Lost, The Wire, Mad Men and The Killing have been setting the cultural agenda for some time. But now the industry has woken up to the fact that these shows are affecting the way much of the public watches television.

American online programme services such as Netflix – along with rival providers Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, YouTube and Hulu – are moving to capitalise on the fact that the most popular shows being streamed on their sites are drama series. "Maybe we will start to premiere multiple episodes so you can do the binge-watching from day one," Ted Sarandos, head of content for Netflix, suggested.

Speaking this month at Mipcom, the annual TV marketplace held in Cannes, Sarandos revealed that up to 60% of the filmed content viewed on his site is television programming and that shows such as Mad Men are top of the popularity poll. As a result, his company has started to buy series directly from the producers and distributors who financed them: cutting out the TV networks and cable channels. It now plans to make these shows available as early as possible, during what is known as "the first-run window".

Among Netflix's first purchases is the political thriller House of Cards, an American remake of the successful British television adaptation of Michael Dobbs's novel, which will feature Kevin Spacey among its onscreen stars and producers. Netflix has also bought the Renaissance Italian drama, Borgia, starring Art Malik, a European rival to the Showtime series The Borgias, which stars Jeremy Irons.

The change in viewing habits has also jogged the youth-oriented US service Hulu into buying the cult British series Misfits, which goes out in Britain on E4. In a dramatic shift in practice, Hulu, which developed its business by supplying TV shows aired on expensive cable channels, took a gamble on the forthright show and got lucky.

"American cable channels can be conservative, and we needed to find the right place in America because of the rudeness of Misfits," Petra Fried, the programme's executive producer, told the Observer. "We were excited about Hulu because they wanted to start showing original drama and wanted something that would make a splash."

Screened this summer, Misfits was Hulu's most viewed show and has now had a total of more than nine million viewers. As a result, Clerkenwell Films, the London-based makers of the show, announced on Thursday that they are now developing a US adaptation of the show with Josh Schwartz, the man behind the hit American series The OC and Gossip Girl.

"It suited the youth-skewed audience for Hulu, so it was a great place to start," said Fried. "People watched Misfits on their computers then tweeted about the experience, so it did well very quickly. This sort of computer viewing mirrors the way that older viewers watch box sets in one go. People were watching one episode of Misfits and then going back to the beginning to watch all of them."

The shows being developed to feed this appetite for complex storylines spinning out over several seasons has led to the phrase the "cinematisation of television" in America. One of the big beneficiaries in the marketplace has been BBC Worldwide, which is the world's largest distributor of TV programmes outside the major US studios. It saw revenues from digital rights rise by 32% to £82m in the last financial year, which represents 8% of its total revenue.

Analysis carried out by the BBC and by Screen Digest shows that most of the time-shifted viewing takes place just a few days after the original broadcast, so this benefits primetime drama content the most. People feel more relaxed about committing to an emotionally engaging series when they know they are not going to miss an episode.

Although there is no cheap equivalent to iPlayer or ITV player in America, the intelligent recording service TiVo and the computer streaming providers are beginning to alter behaviour. It is no surprise that the BBC's recently confirmed Delivering Quality First budget cuts have attempted to protect its investment in drama and the iPlayer service.

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Mad Men/Lost/Louis Theroux (Audience/Industry)

In Section B of the MS4 paper (Television/Music) it will be useful for you to understand the approaches to answering the type of questions that are likely to be included. The chosen texts (Mad Men/Lost/Louis Theroux - TV) will need to be compared and contrasted throughout the response as well as some detailed reference to key scenes to support your answer.

Question:

How do your chosen texts attract their audiences?

It is likely that candidates will need to begin by explaining (defining) the target audience for the text/s.

Candidates may refer to some of the following points in their answer:

• content: form and structure (the style of programming)

• content: representations, characters (in detail)

• mode of address (language and narrative style)

• channel/scheduling (transmission times: satellite/terrestrial)

• some references may be made to theories such as the uses and gratifications theory and to ways in which audiences are attracted to texts depending on the cultural positioning.

•For a C grade: a viewpoint will be emerging and examples may be used more relevantly. Answers are likely to be more descriptive.

•For a B/A grade: the analysis of the relationship between text, industry and audience will tend to be more analytical. An understanding of how meanings and responses are created will be evident.