Transmedia and the ‘Dollhouse’ Franchise

This week’s secondary source, Henry Jenkins’ “Searching for the Origami Unicorn:  The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” expanded my opinions on the Dollhouse franchise; specifically with Jenkins’ discussion on reading across the media and providing fans with options for consumption.  Jenkins relies heavily on the network of media links The Matrix franchise provides – there are the films, the computer games, web comics, etc. – and argues that narratives, such as the complex one found in the Warchowski brothers’ script, need to branch out and find their way into various forms of media for a few reasons.  “The Matrix is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium” (95).  Jenkins goes on to explain how viewers or fans so deeply invested within the narratively complex world will seek multiple entry points into this story line in order to expand on their knowledge or harvest more clues.  “The most committed consumers track down data spread across multiple media, scanning each and every text for insights into the world” (95).  This is where I began to think about Whedon’s Dollhouse.  There are, of course, the two televised seasons of the story; however, there are also the comic books and, at one point, an interactive web game launched by Fox for the show.  Dollhouse, like The Matrix, had a narrative so large it needed to inhabit more than one form of media.

In other words, like The Matrix, Dollhouse is a transmedia story.  “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.  In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be experienced through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction” (95-96).  The Dollhouse narrative supports this definition of a transmedia story; the story was introduced in a televised format but also, prefacing and then running simultaneously with the show’s debut, offered fans and those interested in multiple mediums for Dollhouse’s story, an interactive game centered around Dollhouse.  The game was a part of Fox’s marketing plan which had players attempting to “save Hazel” – a girl trapped in a room connected to the Dollhouse world.  The Dollhouse comic books were introduced shortly thereafter and expanded on new storylines inspired from the televised narrative.  This also supports Jenkins’ thoughts on depth of experience influencing more consumption and how redundancy – a pitfall of constraining a narrative into one form of media – can kill fan interest, and, consequently, the franchise itself.  While Dollhouse essentially encompassed what it means to be a transmedia story, it still failed as a franchise.  I suppose then there are more factors to having a successful franchise – like The Matrix – aside from employing transmedia qualifiers.

1 comment October 30, 2011