ABSTRACT
This chapter pulls together three short ‘pilot studies’ of cases demonstrating trends of fundamental change in the narratives of promotional authorship, focussing particularly on television. The cases all deal with the ways in which changing industrial conditions, such as expanding demand for proven media brands, stretch the persistent dimensions of the narrative to encompass people, identities, and forms of work traditionally excluded or obscured. First is the case of Shonda Rhimes as celebrity showrunner and woman of colour, addressing the ways in which she constructs her creative identity and negotiates ideas of authority and value in the face of auteurism’s long historical association with White men. The second examines J. J. Abrams and his production company Bad Robot, and charts out the relationship between Abrams and his collaborators as an evolving variation on the megaproducer model that draws elements from the workshop model of Renaissance art. Finally, the chapter looks at the writer’s room Twitter account for Sleepy Hollow (Fox, 2013–2017) as an example of a new site for communication between producers and audiences around ideas of authorship and production, showing a third emergent model of promoting a dispersed, non-subsumed creative process.
