Since 2009, Aymar Jean Christian has studied, discussed, and contributed to the web series community. Between his writing (which has occasionally appeared on this very blog), his role as a professor at Northwestern University, and his work on his Open TV research project, Christian has established himself as a knowledgable voice in the online video world.
Now, Christian has distilled some of his most relevant knowledge into a literary format. His first book, also titled Open TV, is now available, and it uses lessons from the history of web television to inform the current state of the industry.
Each chapter of Open TV — which Christian worked on for five years before publishing — takes on a particular theme, whether it be production, representation, or distribution. Along the way, Christian supports his arguments by citing seminal web series from the past decade, including Felicia Day’s The Guild, Issa Rae’s The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, and the Ikea-branded Easy to Assemble. “In all, I feel like it covers a lot of web series,” Christian told Tubefilter.
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A recurring topic in Open TV is the relationship between indie web series creators and legacy media brands. As Christian explains, digital-native filmmakers have influenced the direction of the television medium, even if traditional media holdouts have been slow to catch on. “The internet led to wholly innovative television,” Christian told Tubefilter. “I think it’s really important that we value that those are legitimate contributions to TV.”
Christian cited Hollywood executives as one of the groups he hopes will read Open TV. He thinks that by receiving “a sense of the history of this stuff,” producers and distributors can better understand “what audiences are looking for.” “This is the talent that’s not getting picked up,” Christian said. As a new crop of platforms, such as Netflix and YouTube Red, bring change to the TV industry, Christian hopes execs will not replicate “the inequalities of the legacy network system.”
Open TV is not just for suits. Christian hopes his fellow academics can cite it as a “meaningful contribution” to the field, and he also believes it contains plenty of lessons for creators. For that class of readers, Open TV can “give them a sense of all the possibilities, challenges, and histories that came before them, so they can do better than the people who came before them.”
More information about Open TV is available through publisher NYU Press. In addition, Christian adapted part of his text for an article in the L.A. Review of Books.
