3.5: Spec Work, Prototypes, Pretesting, Pilots (Brand and Franchise Fodder)

I research speculation work because corporate/professional apologists for free/gifted labor provoke my long-standing interests in industrial aesthetics, production’s cultural politics, multimedia branding rationality, and industrial reflexivity.¹³ Those concerns resonate with many current labor practices: the spec script, the pitch aesthetic, the craft-worker’s Facebook network, the technician’s how-to demo, the underemployed editor’s clip reel, the disgruntled crew member’s theoretical deconstruction of executives, the creative producer’s fan-pandering Twitterverse, and the endless proliferation of reps, agents, middlemen, “contact men,” and handlers. Such mediators and facilitators complicate the para-industry. Yet they also provide scholars with many new opportunities for para-industrial research.

In some ways, the pilot is no longer just a preliminary artifact setting up more durable or primary forms of lasting screen content. Rather, the pilot now arguably defines all film and television production. Or, said differently, all film and television productions now ideally function as pilots, in the broad sense of the term. This is because most films and shows (even year-long series) merely stand in as prototypes that create the possibility of endless systematic iterations of the same concept. This posturing in turn heightens the prospects that a corporation can endlessly monetize its proprietary IP. For only through endless speculation, conceptual pretesting, work-shopping, and “piloting” can a brand or franchise succeed. Such is the spec world. The fact that much of both the material burden and the justification for spec, prototyping, pretesting, and piloting has been financially off-loaded onto workers means that labor will continue to persist as a nagging but important complication in media studies.