Reposted from Linked In April 17, 2025
After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century explores how the changes in the business of television over the last 30 years tie to changes in the content made. The book expands on 40+ years of academic conversations about the role of scripted fictional storytelling in society and people’s lives. Those conversations are also relevant to those interested in the business of media, and the book is written to be widely accessible, but this is a book primarily about how and why stories matter rather than commerce.
The book says things that might make people angry. A whole chapter considers why it makes sense to describe limited series as ‘10-hour movies.’ It says that television made in the US has never really been very ‘American.’ And it suggests that viewers aren’t as concerned about watching stories about/set in their country as decades of scholarship and policymaking has assumed. It says these things to push conversations into some new directions. It doesn’t have all the answers, but it suggests some new paths toward them.
The key proposition of the book – per the title – is that the world of screen storytelling has changed. Even the ‘hits’ do not function as sites of shared mass consumption anymore, and yet that expectation persists in so much that is thought and written about the sector. The idea that nearly everything now reaches a ‘microaudience’ relative to the old norms and ingrained way of thinking does not diminish the cultural importance of stories, but it does require we do the work to understand anew how they matter.
The book argues that the range of commercially viable stories expanded over the last thirty years and owes to the emergence of multiple ‘modes of industrial practice’ in contrast to twentieth-century, US norms that were built around a singular ‘industrial-grade mode of practice.’ All the things we thought true of ‘television’ or the ‘television business’ until the 1990s were true of the industrial-grade mode, not of television.
These new modes of industrial practice tie to new business models, production norms, and distribution technologies that support different subsectors of industry than existed before (deeper dive into the concept of modes of industrial practice here). They enable series built on a ‘spectacular’ mode in titles such as House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power that is similar to Hollywood blockbuster film logics, encourage an ‘international’ mode that imagines a transnational viewership in the first instance (The Day of the Jackal, The Serpent, Sense8), and also a ‘character study’ mode that enables introspective series that extend the stories long limited to art film to longer narrative and living rooms around the globe (Atlanta, Better Things, Somebody Somewhere). The multiplicity of modes explains why it has become nearly impossible to make claims of ‘series’; because series are now a field with so much internal variation that consistent claims cannot be made.
The arguments about a multiplicity of modes and how and why titles expand is made with careful evidence and prepares the back end of the book that argues that we understand very little about why stories matter to people now. The work of talking with people about why they watch what they watch in a world of greater choice and control is my next act, but I lay groundwork in the last chapters of After Mass Media that dare to imagine ways that people connect with scripted stories different from twentieth-century frames that assumed answers would be found in demographics or nationality. We’ve already learned that a lot of viewing for many has little to do with what they watch but is valued for the time spent sharing that viewing: for example, Carry-On was a ‘good enough’ Christmas movie because it was good enough for everyone I wanted to watch with, but not a title I loved. In a world of easy access to thousands of titles, what explains what we love, what resonates? What other uses do these stories play in our lives?
These questions may seem miles away from the business of media, but I suspect the findings will bring us full circle. I’ve now spent nearly thirty years trying to understand how changes in the business/technology of media change the stories that can be made and how those changed stories affect the culture(s) that consume them. While we – academics, journalists, industry – are asking better questions than we did a decade or two ago and understand the rough terrain better, ingrained thinking from another era has prevented us from seeing the full possibility, and risks, now available. The answers are with media users – when we understand the reasons they watch and what they love and build organizations and strategy to deliver it – we’ll find the answer to business questions.
