10 things a show needs to produce an awesome fandom

1. Good content that the fans can't get anywhere else
A show that doesn't have it's own clear identity isn't going to inspire that much caring or feedback from viewers to make them into fans. If it's a knockoff, it'll just get written off as "not as good as __", and people will be able to tell if it's happening just because something else was popular elsewhere. That's pandering and it's pointless. People have so many choices in TV now, there's no reason to have two shows that are the same.

2. The idea that the fans are smart enough to keep up and figure stuff out
You've got to trust your audience, not talk down to them, not tell them how to feel about things. One of the biggest things Sleepy Hollow did in it's finale this year (other than pointlessly killing a main character who happened to be a woman AND a poc) was spend a whole act trying to convince us that the stupid thing they'd done was okay. No. Let your fans feel what they feel. And give them stories that are worth keeping up on.

3. A certain "openness"--space for the fans and their ideas inside and around it
Openness in the story for people to fill in gaps themselves. Openness in the show for different points of view. Openness to fan theories and opinions (though not slaves to that). Openness to fanworks and meta. Accessibility of story points, moral stances, and character motivations. You want the fans to feel like they're part of it, not passive consumers with no right to think or say anything

4. Good social media presence
It's great when the actors and writers, creators and producers live-tweet a show with the fans. It's more great when the show's official accounts support fans, answer questions, provide sneak peeks and behind the scenes info, and basically are useful and not just places to sell things. Being on multiple social media accounts at once helps, too!

5. Reliability
Which leads to trust. Trust that the characters will be clearly defined and respected, not bent and deformed for whatever whim the writers or the network wants to follow. Trust that promises made in the story will be paid off, and it's not any sort of 'baiting or intentionally misleading. Trust that there will be good continuity, and not random storylines that are introduced and left dangling forever. Trust that the people making the show know what they're doing!

6. A feeling of collaboration, not competition
A competitive fandom is a fandom that will tear itself apart, so it's better to bring a sense of togetherness and inclusion, and that comes from both the show (or movie or whatever) itself, and from how the official powers handle the people watching.

A feeling of safety around fanworks would be cool, too--no big lawsuits, no weird behavior about them. Either leave them alone, or be respectful.

7. Some sort of positive feels--funniness, joy, playfulness, shippiness, etc--regardless of how the rest of the show goes
A show that is 100% serious all the time is a) exhausting to watch, and b) unrealistic. People crack jokes and snark at other people and say funny things for any number of not-funny reasons. A show that slogs through it's own story like it's a trial will not inspire fans to love it, nor will one that insists on denying it's own best parts as being awesome. Characters who never laugh are no fun. Characters who never fall in love--or at least have the opportunity to-- will be hard to make emotional connections to for a lot of people.

There has to be a break from the heaviness of reality or serious story or dire circumstances for everyone to get a break and get to know the characters.

8. Awareness of the genre-history it comes from, and respect for it
Shows don't happen in a vacuum. Everything had something else before it that either inspired it or gave it something to react to. You have to know your history to do it right, because the fans will definitely know it.

To go back and poke at S2 of Sleepy Hollow: It was insulting because the writers a) didn't seem to be taking any of the things that were the backbone of the show seriously, and b) were directly ripping off shows like Buffy without any understanding of the context or the appeal of the things they were blatantly stealing. Contrast that with Supernatural, which usually respects the stories it's building on and also makes them their own.

It's the difference between acting like your viewers are idiots who won't notice, and respecting that they will and giving them a new take on it.

9. Respect for the fans as actual people and not pawns or product
It's people who carry a show, not numbers on a graph. Treating people like promo-slaves is what bit The 100 in the butt when they killed off Lexa; don't do that. Interact with them one on one, not like a giant media conglomerate telling people what to think and do.

10. Network support
Advertising, so that people know you're there and when to find you. Good media events--especially at cons and related things where the people who make the show can interact directly with the people who watch it. Trust from the producers and network people that the creators and writers know what they're doing and can get it done, so they don't have to try to get it done while navigating interference and meddling. A willingness to let a show find it's feet before dropping the ax on it--XFiles, one of the biggest hits Fox ever had, wouldn't have lasted one season now, with how rough that first season is. A minimum of preemption and no schedule-rearranging without a really good reason and a lot of thought put into it--like NOT putting it up against much bigger shows. No snap decisions!


What do you think creates a good fandom?

10 things you're missing out on if you're not watching #12Monkeys

1. An amazing story that's totally Binge-able
As of this moment, there are fifteen episodes. Thirteen for the first season, and two so far in the second. That means that you can watch all of them in one day, if you're really dedicated, and get the full extent of the series without ads or breaks or waiting on anything! It's immensely re-watchable; these writers have put in all sorts of hints and clues and foreshadowing that you pick up more and more of when you rewatch, but the benefit of watching all at once is that you can track all the storylines without gaps between them. It's basically one big story pretending to be episodic, and though jumping in the middle could be confusing, there's so much story crammed into so few episodes, you can start from the beginning and be caught up in a week. (Watch on Hulu or on the Syfy site for the views to count!)

2. Complexity that works
We're two episodes into season two, and there's no signs that it'll be anything less than mindboggling. Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett took the framework of the movie--scavenger from a dying future goes back in time to stop a plague--and blew it up to epic proportions successfully.

There's story happening in our time, in the future, in various points in the past. There's characters who exist in more than one time-frame, even if they're not time travelers, and there's time travelers on both sides of the good-bad divide. There's moral ambiguity starting with "if I kill this one guy, I save billions" and upping the ante through "if I save this one person, it's worth the whole world dying" vs "can I let this one person die if it means saving the world" and onward. There's a lot of character development in just about every character shown on screen, both in real time and in flashbacks--and even, occasionally, in alternate realities. There's time loops, and imposed cycles, and conspiracies, and multi-generational plans in play--and there's Cole, smashing through it like a bull in a china shop, hoping to make things right.

And the world itself! The present day world we know is stranger than we think. The future is a near-perfect apocalypse that's still happening, which feels innovative to me. When was the last time any apocalypse wasn't a postapocalypse? All points they visit are carefully made as real as each other, so that no matter where in time they are, no matter how strange it gets, everything has the same level of clear reality.

And it works. It's like a symphony, it works so well. Or one of those puzzle boxes that's so well made it feels like a gift.

3. The best use of time travel in, like, ever
The best thing: time travel has a cost--it makes you sick and you have to weigh every time you do it against risk and reward, and the only cure so far is literally creating paradoxes inside your own body, which is dangerous, to say the least.

Sometimes time travel is more of a vehicle, getting people from one place to another, but as season one unfolded and into season two, it's more and more an intrinsic piece of the story's structure. Things happen out of order because people who aren't time traveling are stuck in a straight line, past to present to future, and people who are time traveling can hop all along that line, regardless of the usual order of things. People on both sides are working with time and against time while also working against each other, trying to bend history to their own will--and it sometimes works, but mostly it causes more trouble that they then have to work out. It's the main process for several long-games to happen and to play out.

They give us clear indications of which times we're in and there's always a reason for why we're there, and the show as a whole literally couldn't happen without time travel. It's about time travel, not just featuring it.

4. Awesome female characters as complex as the males
The main villain is a woman.

Cassie is the female lead, and as S2 happens, she has switched places in the moral grey-areas with Cole--which is amazing, letting her be as violent and single-minded as he was, something ladies on TV don't get a lot.

The biggest wild card on the show is Jennifer, who is either insane, or the sanest person on the show, depending on where her story goes, but who exists at both ends of the time-travel and is definitely up to something.

The creator of the Splinter Project is wonderful, semi-sociopathic, damaged, brilliant Jones, who is some sort of post-apocalyptic life goal, since I'd be about her age in 2044.

And the only one of the enemy agents we've seen directly so far is a woman.

It's kind of amazing, having so many women around who aren't only love interests, or arm candy, or bit players. There's love in there, but they're also damaged and striving and have goals of their own. They're not defined by the men around them. They're smart and resourceful and as able to take care of themselves as everyone else.

5. An epic love story--literally
Cole and Cassie--Casserole--is a ship that sails itself, but in between them meeting and any confessions they might have in the future, there's plenty of time for story, and it's Big Story. Cole comes back from the future specifically to meet Cassie, Kyle Reece style. Cassie believes in him so strongly that she goes off script to save him more than once. Now that Cassie is compromised, Cole is staying by her side to make sure she's alright, despite differences in opinion about how the mission should work. In season one, Cole saves Cassie's life three times, because her dying always results in history going bad. Their love is literally what is saving the world in those cases. It's a ship for the ages!

6. Anything can happen
Because of the time travel and the way they can rewrite history, they can do insane things like kill a main character three times and fix it. They can have scenes and episodes in any time period they want. They can interact with each other out of order, and characters can interfere with each others' pasts and futures. The entire world can literally be changed, and it will make perfect sense within the story.

It's brilliant!

7. Kicking a squeamish TV system in the shins with awesomeness
TV as a whole doesn't seem to like things like complexity, male-female equality, gleefully being smart and assuming your fans are too, and taking risks with characters and plot and reality. You know, the stuff that the target audience is specifically looking for, and that critics love. By watching 12 Monkeys and making it more popular all the time, you're poking holes in that dumb idea that lowest-common denominator is the best way to go! By not watching, you're proving that only cheap, stupid shows get views.

So watch the good ones and improve TV as a whole!

8. Stopping the Standard Fate Of TV Scifi in it's tracks
Ask any scifi TV fan about shows they're still mad about, and most of the list will be shows that got messed with, ruined, or cancelled before they could tell their whole stories. That's become a cliche--but also a trap. People want good shows, but they don't trust that regular TV will take care of them, so on channels like Fox, lots of the potential viewership just doesn't bother watching. And that means that the show gets cancelled anyway--a self-fulfilling prophesy. Syfy really should be the exception to that, being specifically for scifi, but it's a channel like any other, and even if ratings are an inaccurate way to judge viewership these days, they still want the ratings.

The only way they can get them is if WE watch the shows we want TV to keep making. The only way we can break the cycle is to give them such good ratings that scifi proves that it can support an audience over many seasons the way a show about doctors or lawyers can, even if the numbers aren't as high as those.

Let's not let 12 Monkeys be the next Firefly; let's make it the next Star Trek--seven years and a slew of movies and books!

9. Some of the best fandom and creator-fan interactions around
The 12 Monkeys fandom is a great one, full of smart, talkative people who understand both the show and the genre it comes from. Better yet, the actors, writers, and creators on the show do their best to be very interactive, answering questions and giving hints and reblogging links. It's (so far--knock on wood) a remarkably adult and drama-free fandom with lots of ideas and thoughts and opinions, and it's a great fandom to belong to.

10. Hope
A lot of scifi drama lately gets mean. The heroes can't actually make any headway. People die for no reason (cough - Walking Dead - cough). Things are needlessly grim and violent. The overall tone is nihilistic and soul-crushing, focusing on how pointless everything is.

12 Monkeys isn't like that. The show itself is aware of how cool all of this stuff is, and while it gets a little dark and very dramatic, it doesn't go down the grim-for-grim-sake path. And at it's core, it's not about how people can't change anything, or how Big Events ruin lives. It's about characters interacting with each other and finding better ways. It's about how mercy and love are better than slavish fate. And that's amazing after BSG showed everyone such a dark version of scifi.

12 Monkeys isn't sappy, it's genuinely emotional. It's not mean, it's about being better than meanness. It takes the story about making the world better and looks at it from all sides and strives to actually do what it says. And the existence of the show can make the genre better, too, if we keep it alive.

Ten things I love about Doctor Who

I basically love Doctor Who, as a whole, in about any incarnation that the Doctor or the show gives me (even angry, over-acting Six with his very small budget and HORRIBLE special effects), but here's ten things that I love most about the show, and if they're there, it basically ensures that I'll have no problem at all adapting to the changes. Cuz, you know, there'll be changes.

1. When the Doctor looks proud at his Companion being brave or saucy or otherwise not what the villains expect. Especially if it's someone who gets underestimated, even by him.
2. When the Doctor forgets to act human--like when he's not sleeping or eating, and everyone else is. Or like in Midnight, when he's not trying to blend in.
3. When the Companions get to do something so beyond the call that they get to steal the show--and the Doctor loves it.
4. When the story is positive in the end--hopeful and joyful, and convinced that people are basically good and strong and able to overcome anything.
5. When the Doctor acts the wrong age for how he looks--like when he's a childish old man, or a cranky old young man.
6. When Companions collect each other, and more than just two go off on adventures.
7. When the Tardis has opinions and makes them known.
8. When the setting is truly alien, or is a specific moment in actual human history.
9. When there isn't really a villain because everyone has understandable motivations and the conflict is a misunderstanding that can be solved through something other than blowing things up and killing everyone.
10. When everyone lives.

What ten things would be on your list? What do you like most about the series?

Ten reasons The Walking Dead has restored my faith in itself (and a number of fannish panic attacks)

Wow, look how big the cast was for a minute there.

In case you've been living under a rock and haven't seen the internet in the last 24 hours, last night was the Season 4 Finale of the Walking Dead, and it was so good. It was also alarming, but at its best, this show is always alarming, so sometimes I can ignore that. Best of all, it came back around to a place where I really, really, REALLY love it again, and most of that was because of this brilliant second half of the season. Here's what I loved:

1. I absolutely LOVED the cast being broken up. I mean, I usually hate that in a show, but this one, like Lost at it's heyday beforehand, did it so right. Because they were in smaller groups, we got to have whole episodes devoted to characters, to their reactions and actions, to the meaning of what has been going on, and it was amazing.
2. Daryl and Beth were about the sweetest and most ship-inducing pairing I have seen in ages. Which is double amazing because before the Great Split Up, I don't think I even knew, really, who Beth was, and was previously invested in Daryl and Carol.
3. The whole Lizzy thing. Shit. Damn. God, it was harrowing, but it was done so well. And it shows a lot about what this world does to young people, and offers a counterpoint to Carl's development, and lays a lot of guilt on Carol who has been guilt-free for several seasons and apparently needed some.
4. The Glenn-and-Maggie storyline was amazing--so many relationships wind up being a failure or a weakness, but for those two, it's a strength, and that's a wonderful, human, living core for the show to keep having.
5. I'm glad they got out of the Prison. It was too...I don't know. It separated them from the world too much, it stopped them from wandering, it seemed safe and wasn't, it didn't manage to be a functioning society...it just wasn't what I wanted to see.
6. Michonne! Everything about her re-humanizing, her friendship with Carl, even the cute vaguely flirty interactions with Rick. Beautiful.
7. The quietness. I love this show best when it's just quiet, interspersed with horror, and the rest of the time it's people dealing with their shit and the world. Again, that episode with Daryl and Beth where they burn down the house, and Carol and Tyrese and the girls at that little homestead, with Carl and the pudding--they hark back to the first episode, which was just Rick, just wandering, taking it in, processing it, dealing with it, and they were perfect.
8. That dog. He as fab, and I really hope he comes back.
9. Judith didn't die! She's wee-tiny and helpless, but she survived everything so far!
10. Reunion! Well, mostly reunioned. We've still got Carol and Tyrese who could help from the outside if they're smart enough not to get caught, too, and then we get another reunion to look forward to. And because everyone is back together, Rick knows who and what he is, and he is a badass again.

And now, the panic attacks:

1. They said, on Talking Dead, that "next season will be really different" or something to that effect, and I'm immediately like "OH MY GOD HOW ARE YOU GOING TO KILL ME NOW???"
2. Where the fuck is Beth and is she still alive and if not will Daryl burn now the world???
3. Was Beth taken by the probably-ritualistic-cannibals, or is there a third party out there being crazy and stealing pretty girls???
4. Why do I have to wait so long for the new season????
5. How can I go so long without Chris Hardwick helping me process this show????