The University of Warwick MA in Creative and Media Enterprises
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Becario Colfuturo 2013 The University of Warwick MA in Creative and Media Enterprises The Global Audience 2014 Becario Colfuturo 2013 “Colombianizing” Breaking Bad: Setting-Up an Audience for The Future? Metástasis, a Colombian remake1 of the award-winning 5 season series created by Vince Gillian, Breaking Bad, will premiere in Latin America in the second semester of 2014 on the basic-cable television channel MundoFOX2. The remake’s success is still to be seen, but Internet blogs and news sites commenting upon it reveal that fans of the original series are really upset, predicting it to be a complete failure. While identifying and explaining the process of adapting both the particular character and the “world” portrayed in Breaking Bad to make them as believable as possible for the Latin American audience, this essay will discuss whom its target audience might be. Thus, based on an analysis on cable television, it will propose that a stronger reason for the realization of this remake is to set-up a new audience in Latin America for the future benefit of United States television networks. A teaser trailer of what Metástasis will be can be found in the following YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoH2gu7snwc Becario Colfuturo 2013 “…the transformation of the drama series illustrated by programs such as Breaking Bad and a few others – for the most part associated with the HBO phenomenon- may be the sign of a kind of “permanent revolution,”…” (Barrete and Picard, 2014, p.132) Chapter 1. Understanding the Breaking Bad Phenomena Breaking Bad was produced by both AMC, a basic cable TV channel known before for just showing American Movie Classics and Sony Entertainment Television, a global entertainment network. Among the successful original series produced by AMC are Mad Men and Walking Dead, which positioned the channel almost at the same level of recognition as the one HBO has for its original content. Vince Gillian, executive producer of highly successful TV series like The X-Files pitched the idea of Breaking Bad to AMC and Sony Television executives as the story about a character that goes from “Mr. Chips to Scarface” (Vince Gillian, 2013). The Pilot was aired in September 28 2008 under the attractive premise “A high school chemistry teacher is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and resorts to selling methamphetamine to provide for his family when he is dead” (IMDB). Eliot Logan (2013, p-156) describes Breaking Bad as “movements between the prosaic and acceptable, and the extraordinary and unacceptable”. Logan’s approach to Breaking Bad will be helpful later for the purpose of identifying the “worlds” portrayed in this series and the complexity of its transformation into acceptable ones in Latin America. For now, Logan’s analysis can be used to explain a key aspect of Breaking Bad: this is the story of an average, but very smart guy living a normal United States middle class life gradually turning into an evil drug lord (two personalities) after he finds out he has cancer. The extraordinary events experienced by the main character, Walter White, through the 62 episodes of the series, as well as the other characters around him, won the attention of millions of people around the world. Breaking Bad phenomena was so big that months after the final episode was broadcasted, fans are still producing their own material based on the series. Becario Colfuturo 2013 Walter White’s story wasn’t that successful from the beginning. The first season averaged 1.3 million viewers in the United States, far away from the average of 8 million viewers the series had for its last season, and even further away from the 10.3 million viewers it had for its final episode (Pomerantz, 2013). What happened in between? Attention has been put on the exceptional writing by Gilligan, the compelling storytelling used by the directors and cinematographers, the award- winning performances of Bryan Cranston and his fellow actors… but, all that just made Breaking Bad a nice show (Dodds, 2013; Adalian, 2013). According to Eric Dodds (2013) from Time Entertainment, the availability of Breaking Bad´s first seasons on Netflix played a crucial role on the later success of the series. People were able to catch up with the previous seasons in a matter of days and after that they could continue to watch the series as it premiered on AMC. As many TV series that are also shown on Netflix don’t have the same successful story, it’s important to clarify that the Breaking Bad case is probably due to many factors, including the ones mentioned earlier like the great acting, writing and directing as well as the new distribution factor proposed by Dodds (2013) or Adalian (2013). Also, social networks, blogs and specialized fan based sites served to propagate a substantially good word of mouth for the series and, eventually, all these factors lead to the creation of a community around Breaking Bad. This community not only watches the series, but, as mentioned before, also produces material around it and distributes it openly on the Internet. Even further, in cases like this, the considered “Scholar fans” that write theories and pieces about the series, as Andy Ruddock puts it, “play a role in forming the very objects they set out to study” (Ruddock, 2007, p.80). Breaking Bad, as with series like The X-Files or Sex and The City in their moment (Ruddock, 2013), has its own high contributing scholar fans. Fandom was so important for Braking Bad that a new series called Talking Bad was created to run during the days the last eight episodes of Breaking Bad premiered on AMC. Talking Bad was an interview type show hosted by Chris Hardwick that had Vince Gilligan as a guest next to a super-star-fan of Breaking Bad. Mr. Gilligan would answer questions about the series and, at the end of Becario Colfuturo 2013 the show, he would reveal a secret or give something away about the next episode. (Talking Bad, 2013) Breaking Bad fans range from film stars to business millionaires, like Warren Buffet, to film and TV critics and scholars to average middle class Americans. Some of these fans are in Colombia. They were able to watch the series on premium cable television, Netflix, or pirate websites. In the United States, cable television channels look to attract audiences between 18-49 years old, because that’s where the target audience for the advertising companies is (Beam, 2012). Breaking Bad has accomplished something great, and that is to narrow down the highest demographic audience of the show to the 18-35 years old (Beam, 2012), which is the audience that will engage productively with the series, spreading content and using social networks to talk about it. This also could be the audience in universities and of those who still have a very active social life, which means they have the need to be updated in the latest social experiences like TV shows so they can be part of a conversation with their peers. This audience profile could extent to many countries with a similar social structure to the United States, but the question that concerns this essay and that I will analyze in depth later is if it translates directly to the audience in Latin America, in countries with a very different social, political and economic structure. Breaking Bad has big numbers in United States cable television, but it doesn’t come close to the numbers TV shows from regular open networks (American Idol) have, meaning that the series is successful in a niche group that is big in the United States but not necessarily in Latin America. Doing a Breaking Bad remake implies adapting the basic middle-class American world portrayed in the show to one that is “real” for the Latin American audience. Those are very different worlds. Becario Colfuturo 2013 Chapter 2. Adapting Worlds. Difficult Men For Brett Martin (2013), something happened by the end of the 20th century when Tony Soprano (The Sopranos) first showed his face on the TV screen. It was the beginning of the “Third Golden Age” of television, portraying “Difficult Men” as lead characters that the audience will love despite their “self-absorption, horniness, alternating cruelty and regret, gnawing unease (all because), give or take Prozac and one or two murders, (they were) the American Everyman” (Martin, 2013, p. 84). Don Draper (Mad Men), Tony Soprano and Walter White had all that in common and more: they represented the middle-class, post-modern man´s desire or “longing for a life outside the bounds of convention” (Martin, 2013, p.88). As Logan (2013) suggests, what Walter White experiences is this transition (sometimes in the same chapter) between his prosaic-world socially accepted undermined personality, and that unaccepted glory that he obtains from being the boss in the underworld where he is known as Heisenberg. Characters like these could be found in novels and films, but they were not common or accepted in television, Martin (2013) suggests because of the possible interference between the advertisers that didn’t want their products to be related with a type of show that didn’t represent their core values. As HBO wasn’t concerned about advertisers, they took the chance with David Chase’ The Sopranos, and that changed cable television forever. In the “world” of Tony Soprano, killing a man with your own hands because that man “is a rat” and then kissing your wife, was totally OK (Martin, 2013). Further more, these men were loved because they were the best at what they did, they were always the smartest guy in the room and that made them heroes (Martin, 2013).