This week is fairy tale week over at In Media Res, a forum for online scholarship experimenting with multimedia collaboration and intellectual discussion. Basically, it’s awesome. They’re always really smart people writing about all sorts of cool ways media, technology, and culture intersect and interact.
This week, I’m luckily enough to be one of them!
My post “Fairy Tales and the Sophisticated Viewer” kicks off In Media Res‘ fairy tale themed week:
Traditional fairy tale narratives are not made for today’s TV. Among a steady increase of smart, narratively complex shows that utilize attributes of the televisual medium, such as seriality and reflexivity, to their fullest, the conventional fairy tale falls flat. Their structures are too linear, too episodic, their worlds too limited, and their characters too static. At the very least, fairy tales’ self-contained stories and one dimensional protagonists would have to be altered to work for TV. But savvy contemporary TV audiences that embrace, and to a certain extent, expect complicated narratives would yawn at a simple retrofitting of the tales. More significant changes on a narrative and structural level are required to entertain today’s sophisticated viewers.
Please go check it out!
You, Me, and TV 