3.1: Introduction

In the heady air of an MIT Transmedia conference, the “aca-pro” audience voiced appreciation as the futurist digital media consultant bragged about how nonhierarchical innovation hot spots like the one he’d created in his boutique company were poised to make old, conservative approaches to film and television production obsolete. Like dinosaurs and “Detroit,” he argued, lazy, inefficient “old media” film/TV production professionals—who, like the auto industry, had lived long past their prime—could vanish and no tears would be shed. The unequivocal message: good riddance. Another panelist, an edgy new media branding consultant, sketched out some of his own recent viral marketing and stealth stunts that had successfully created “buzz” while costing the client little money. One stealth stunt involved triggering the Los Angeles Police Department, law enforcement helicopters, and public first responders to hover around a fake emergency. News coverage of this fake “media event” indeed spilled onto the marketer’s covert goal: greater notoriety for a transmedia start-up in Hollywood. Again, the MIT audience knowingly giggled at the sophisticated ironies in tricking tax-supported public infrastructure to unknowingly provide the “free” heavy marketing muscle required to launch a bit of edgy new intellectual property (IP). No one, however, discussed the political-economic or ethical downsides that this stunt buzz-making involved. Who were these people, both the aca-pro panelists and conference attendees, I wondered? How were they paid, and by whom, and for what, exactly? Cultural geography might provide the answers. Most of the visionaries were from New York or Boston (not Detroit or Los Angeles), where creative workers apparently no longer need or want to be paid, or have benefits, like the dinosaur film/TV/auto workers out west, mired as they were in the outdated heavy-industry quagmires apparently entombing them.

And why was I at this conference, given that the celebrated viral marketing “innovations” and free labor being worshipfully gossiped about here would horrify the fieldwork informants that I had been talking to: professional cinematographers, editors, directors, and grips? Of course, like some of the panelists, I had been publishing on “convergence media,” “repurposing,” and programming though “content migration” for some time. But my understanding of these current new media practices now seemed—from the perspective of Cambridge—to have come from some distant planet rather than the clean, cost-free world being celebrated at MIT. Then it hit me. My conference trip to Cambridge involved time travel; I’d fallen back thirty years into art school, and these capitalist marketing executives had become the new avant-garde: conceptual artists, performance artists, street artists, and provocateurs. But unlike their 1960s and 70s predecessors from the art world, these new-media conceptual artists were now handsomely paid for their faux outsiderness, unruly marketing innovations, snark, and boundary-crossing provocations—while simultaneously being lauded for their bored and studied public disinterest in matters of wages, benefits, or job security. If transmedia and viral marketing and branding consultants were the new “conceptual artists” of the twenty-first century, then my research must be clinging to dying professional communities defined by something more archaic and suspect: “craft” (also known as the innovator’s “other”).

Based on this encounter, I’d like to begin with three simple and very basic questions, before taking on and unpacking the three terms in my chapter title. First, why does TV labor matter to media aesthetics or TV studies? Second, how can or should we study it, given widespread and disruptive recent changes? And finally, given those same disruptions, where does TV production actually exist anymore? That is, where and how do we meaningfully locate production for research in the digital era? These questions are particularly acute in the American media sectors within which I operate—where government regulation and funding have withered, where neoliberal economics dominates, where traditional producing arrangements have disintegrated, where online crowdsourcing (via Kickstarter or Indiegogo) has become a legitimate option even for the unapologetic high-level industry professionals who increasingly slum there.

The last of my three questions actually complicates the first two, so I’d like to start there. Two possible answers to the question of where production is located were offered by economic geographer Allen Scott, as well as political economist Toby Miller and his coauthors.¹ Targeting Hollywood, both rebuffed the common clichés about production—that “it is a state of mind”—but did so in different ways. Scott’s research on material resource agglomeration undercut the ephemerality state-of-mind cliché. His account detailed why certain film/television nexus points survive as geographical centers despite the clear economic advantages that might be gained by moving somewhere else. Miller and his coauthors, by contrast, disrupt the lie that geographic inertia or exceptionalism anchors production in any way, arguing that the real subject for production research today can be found in what they term the New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL), which can migrate or shape-shift in response to rapid economic change.

Whereas Scott examines the regional anchoring of production and Miller the global dispersion and splintering of production through runaway production, my research leads me to suggest a third alternative. That is, our current predicament may follow from our failure to recognize that a widely dispersed conceptualizing process may be as central to the core of television/media production today as the industrial and material production of series, formats, and network programming once was (features that once garnered the lion’s share of attention from critics and media scholars). I am suggesting here that hybrid forms of imaginative/economic speculation now systematically animate media production. Speculation—or “spec work,” as I will call it—has become a fundamental part of the complex economies of TV. Figuring out how to manage spec work from the deregulated creative labor “herd” helps provide rationality for TV industries as they seek to master (and eventually monetize) the unstable world of unruly fans, digital media, and remix and gift economies.

In saying this, I am not reverting to Scott’s and Miller’s target—media as “a state of mind” cliché—since the dispersed conceptualizing process I am targeting is as much a result and defining property of contemporary media labor as are the onscreen series that TV labor officially produces. TV is more than just the end product of TV production labor. I take television labor to be anticipatory as well—to include the endless prototyping, brainstorming, work shopping, ad hoc viral repackaging, and vocational spinning that precede and follow the shows for which TV companies officially take credit. Significantly, anticipatory spec work adds economic value to TV shows even if TV producers and executives ignore it. I am especially sensitive to Mayer and Stahl’s critiques of labor “erasures.”² My books Televisuality and Production Culture were both premised on paying greater attention, even in aesthetic studies, to the cultural functions and institutional logics of physical production and creative workers—things that critical TV scholars had in many cases largely overlooked or dismissed.³ Over the past two decades, I’ve also found that an entirely different work activity infuses physical production, one based on recurrent cognitive speculation about imagined, experiential, onscreen worlds of one sort or another. To clarify: I am not talking about the construction of “imagined narrative worlds” driven by fans in “transmedia franchises” of the sort Henry Jenkins has postulated.⁴ I am, rather, talking about the commercial “labor” of habitual and calculated speculation now found in workaday, frequently unremarkable television job sites.

Significantly, spec work can be found in both below-the-line and above-the-line production sectors. Which means that conjecture about imagined worlds increasingly functions as part of lowly, run-of-the-mill trade practice. Anticipatory labor is not owned or triggered exclusively by the “creatives,” executives, and producers, and can be found as well in the lowly technical crafts. In rejecting the exceptionalism we normally assign or reserve for the creative higher-ups in TV—the showrunner, producer, director, or executive—I am only arguing that we need to augment what we research; that we take seriously the rich terrain of cultural conjecture and anticipatory expression that now makes up the below-the-line worker’s skill set. Such things now function as an integral part of the bigger system we think of as “television.” Spec work is both workmanlike and ubiquitous, rather than unique in any way, and thus challenges media studies to rethink the parameters and boundaries we assume in production labor research.

Before drilling down deeper to examine spec work as a practice, I must clarify that the shift toward habitualized speculation as craft/creative work on the micro level, which I have just described, is linked to bigger changes in the macroscopic market predicament and thus transnational goals of many production companies, studios, and networks today. Specifically, success in media markets today depends less and less on the fabrication of a durable distributable entertainment object—which historically was the basis for television’s core project of owning shows and syndicating series. In the old system, we thought that a production was over when we “locked” picture and soundtrack, then timed (or color-corrected) and archived a stable program master, and sold copies and versions in markets for distribution to buyers. Now the notion that our program masters are never done, always prone to change, goes well beyond the traditional alterations—remixing, recutting, dubbing—required for international distribution. Producers now know, upfront, that it is even possible (via corporate contracts as yet unknown) to completely recreate interior scenes through the digital imposition of new product placements, online links, and integrated sponsorship within preexisting narratives, onscreen. And this directly affects creative decisions creators make on the set. Digital renders masters completely malleable, reworkable, remakable, endlessly. These changes are not completely novel but a matter of degree, since we have always trimmed scenes for breaks to intercut ads, converted NTSC to PAL standards, panned-and-scanned or letter-boxed, and altered program masters for foreign languages when needed. What was once secondary is now primary, however, with masters now malleable not just at the level of plot or episode but at the level of the pixel, with effects layers “inside” fictional narratives and dramatic scenes as well. The growing presumption of an endlessly malleable program master means that the entire process of television production can now be imagined as an anticipatory function of postproduction, with the potential for (and goal of) an endless lucrative life on the “back end” of a project. Proliferating digital technologies mean that most forms of production can be understood as functions of postproduction—where the cognitive work of preproduction speculation on the “front end” has ramped up to keep pace with the reiterative work of digital repurposing on the “back end.”

Issues of intellectual property stimulate these changes. Rather than make the durable syndicatable object the company’s primary goal, spec work enterprises now obsess over the creation of potentially endless, malleable, and self-replicating IP. For clarity’s sake, we can further distinguish (especially within the same corporations) between “big” self-replicating IP (the blockbuster or high-concept), and “small” self-replicating IP (reality TV and the unexceptional online consumer interactions that go with it). As we will discover, there is now a necessary economic relationship between “big IP” and “small IP” in the transnational multimedia conglomerates. That is, diversified corporations now need vast amounts of the cheaper, reality-based small IP to pay for their expensive big-IP blockbuster and prestige cinematic needs. We need to think beyond specific tactics of content migration or repurposing to consider this broader intraconglomerate dynamic that embeds them. That is, spreadable speculation now animates and monetizes production well before—and well after—the series or episode in question.⁵ This temporal spreading of pre- and post-speculation is precisely why spec work has aligned so well with transmedia production, industry–fan interactions, and viral marketing, which mirror it.

I am arguing that spec work provides the broad conditions that facilitate linkages and synergies between the malleable digital “material” and technologies of TV production, on the one hand, and current corporate management strategies aimed at developing malleable and self-replicating IP (which ideally suits corporate reformatting, franchising, branding, and transmedia), on the other hand. Before mapping out the fuller range and logic of spec work, it is worth considering something more provisional—that is, how spec work fits within the rapidly changing industrial and economic landscape. This mediascape can be usefully understood within a three-part model of craft world, brand world, and spec world.