Week 9

What role does Hills (2004) suggest the fans play in the construction of cult TV? How is new media central to this?


“Being a fan of cult TV doesn’t mean just displaying subjective enthusiasm or a ‘special devotion.’ It also mean, at the very least being able to attempt to account for and defend one’s fan passions.” Hills (2004) Hills (2004) suggests three ways in which fans play in the construction of cult TV. Firstly is the transformation of TV programs into cults by fans. He also says that while some fans are committed to just a single TV show or actor/actress, the other majority use individual series to relate pr connect to a fan community. The second point he suggests is that “fans self-consciously use the term ‘cult’ to describe these networks of texts as distinctive.” Third suggestion was that fans organised themselves into social appreciation groups/societies. These fan groups are formed after the TV programs first airing and can be lead to becoming a cult rather than a ‘social appreciation group’. In these groups, fans share their interests, work together to keep the fan culture alive, they meet together annually, and change meetings into events held in geographical locations.

The internet has had a huge impact on fan clubs. It has allowed fans to talk about their favourite TV programs and create/produce commentaries, fan fiction, episode guides, etc. They could possibly even (with the knowledge they have of TV programmes) start new cult TV programmes…well, one’s that are fan worthy.

Even though fans created the term ‘cult TV’ and other things, once the media step into the picture, a lot of things will change and be moulded to suit media producers views of what counts as cult or how it should be viewed.

Wilcox and Lavery (2002) identify 9 defining characters of quality TV – can you apply any of these to other television series that you have viewed recently? Are there any other characteristics that you could add to their list?

3 - “Quality TV tends to have a large ensemble cast” (Wilcox and Lavery 2002)

In relation to Buffy’s large ensemble cast I thought of the series LOST and its large ensemble cast with 14 major roles. Matthew Fox as Jack Shephard plays the role of being the survivors’ leader; Evangeline Andrews as Kate Austen, ex-fugitive; Jorge Garcia as Hugo “Hurley” Reyes, mentally unstable millionaire; Naveen Andrews as Sayid Jarrah, former torturer; Yunjin Kim as Sun Kwon, grieving wife; Henry Ian Cusick as Desmond Hume, three-year islander; Michael Emerson as Ben Linus, he played as the former leader of the island’s native population, also known as the others. The storyline of this series LOST follows two different time periods so there are two groups of cast members, the previous list is the first and the second is as follows.

Josh Holloway as James “Sawyer” Ford, crash survivor and con man; Elizabeth Mitchell as Juliet Burke, former Other and fertility specialist Dr.; Daniel Dae Kim as Jin Kwon, crash survivor and former enforcer; and three science team members from a freight offshore, who later on join the crash survivors they are Ken Leung as medium Miles Straume; Rebecca Mader as Charlotte Lewis, anthropologist; Jeremy Davies as Daniel Faraday, physicist. Terry O’Quinn as John Locke on the other hand is the only character who is involved in both storylines.


Reference List

Hills, M. (2004). Defining Cult TV; Texts, Inter-texts and Fan Audiences, The Television Studies Reader, in R. C. Allen & A. Hill. London and New York: Routledge.

Wilcox, R. & Lavery, D. (2002). Introduction, in R. Wilcox & D. Lavery (eds) Fighting the forces: what’s at stake in Buffy the vampire slayer. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.