Page 213 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Innovat on and Im tat on n Commerc al Med a

looking to find something new but not too different from their established tastes.
For critics skeptical of commercial culture, formulas and genres are recipes to
limit creativity and innovation, restricting cultural expression to predefined
standards and limited possibilities.
Another strategy of commercial culture is to build explicitly upon previ-
ous success, such as the widespread proliferation of sequels, prequels, remakes,
spin-offs, and clones across media. In the contemporary media landscape, most
media production occurs within a few conglomerated corporations that use syn-
ergy as a strategy to maximize the profits of any successful content across their
various media holdings. Thus, a successful comic book like Batman will spawn
cross-media incarnations across the landscape of the Warner Bros. corporation,
spawning feature films, musical soundtracks, animated television adaptations,
stories in news magazines, video games, and any other media properties that
might tap into the property’s established fan base and name recognition. For many
critics, such cross-media cloning dominates and crowds out the creative mar-
ketplace, eliminating more original works that might not work as well as a video
game or action figure.
Other media productions present themselves as original and new works, but use
a logic of recombination, merging established precedents into new examples—CSI
combines the detective procedural from Law & Order with the scientific investiga-
tion from medical dramas, and then spawned a full franchise of spin-off programs
mimicking the original formula. And some cultural products do not even hide
their lack of originality, as with the proliferation of pop starlets and boy bands who
do not deny how they are created by the industry to mimic previous hit makers,
with televised programs like American Idol and Making the Band documenting
the imitative process at work. While critics of a more traditionalist perspective
see such artificial practices of manufactured celebrity and mass-produced fame as
vulgar and distasteful, many viewers and listeners embrace such examples, explic-
itly embracing the machinery of imitation and the culture industry. Is this a new
phenomenon unique to the contemporary media landscape?

the CyCle oF iMitation

Innovations and imitations tend to cycle through commercial media. We can look at the
case of reality television in America for an example of a cycle of innovation and imitation
at work. Traditionally, prime-time television has offered either fictional scripted program-
ming or public affairs offerings of news and documentaries. In the summer of 2000, CBS
aired Survivor to surprising ratings success, triggering a wave of reality programs across the
prime-time schedule. Survivor itself was not a fully original offering, as it was a remake of a
Swedish program, and the reality format itself had clear precedents in the game show genre
and with earlier programs like The Real World and Cops. Yet once CBS struck ratings gold
through this innovative recombination of previous programming and Americanization of Euro-
pean formats, all networks and cable channels began to imitate Survivor under the new label
of “reality television.” Many subsequent programs emerged by remaking European hits (like
The Mole and American Idol ), or by combining Survivor’s competitive elimination structure