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Paratexts, this book argues, are a central part of media production and consumption processes. But precisely because of their centrality, no single book can do more than scratch the surface of their overall importance to a better understanding of media and culture. The present book focuses on paratexts as textual entities, emphasizing the relationship between paratexts, films, and television programs and audiences. But given their textual properties, and their prominent placement in consumption cultures, greater attention should also be paid to how paratexts are created and regulated. Taking the eye off the paratext, as media studies has often done, impoverishes our understanding of production and regulation cultures, and hence our ability to intervene meaningfully in these cultures. The present project, however, limits itself primarily to consideration of the paratext’s impact on texts and on audiences, as a way of establishing why paratexts matter in the first place.

The book also focuses exclusively on television and film paratexts, though of course the music, videogame, online, and print industries have their own thriving examples. And while theater layout and branding, channel identification sequences, and the like may work as paratexts, and are thus worthy of attention,¹⁸ they do so for multiple texts, whereas here I have chosen to stick to paratexts that “belong” to a particular show. The book’s focus is also restricted mostly to popular and recent Hollywood film and television, in part because Hollywood produces so much paratextuality that it offers an embarrassment of riches for study, and thus rich soil in which to plant a theory of paratexts that I hope can grow elsewhere too, and in part because many of these examples are more accessible than older, independent, or non-American products. I deliberately return to some texts (such as Lost [2004–] and Lord of the Rings) with different paratexts, so that readers can see various facets of their paratextual entourage, but I would like my readers to be able to fill in a fuller picture themselves, hence my choice to restrict most analysis to more prominent shows. By doing so, I do not mean to imply that paratexts are either a recent or an American phenomenon: Hollywood’s current fondness for a franchise-based economy perhaps makes paratexts more voluminous today, but they have always existed and thrived, as they do outside Hollywood and America.

From the outset, it should also be noted that many of my examples are of paratexts attached to niche or fan properties, but the book is not about fan cultures per se. Rather, I argue that paratexts often construct some of the wider audience’s scant encounters with the text, and thus while the show might be a niche or fan property, many of its paratexts (such as trailers, movie posters, hype, reviews, and audience commentary) are not only quintessentially mainstream, but also the mediators of niche and fan entities to both fans and the wider audience. Admittedly, not all will work this way. Paratexts are the greeters, gatekeepers, and cheerleaders for and of the media, filters through which we must pass on our way to “the text itself,” but some will only greet certain audiences. Many fan-made paratexts, in particular, address only those within the fandom. Other paratexts will scare away potential audiences, as the semblance of being a “fan text” is often enough to detract some. In such cases, though, the paratexts create the text for the fleeing would-be audience, suggesting a “geek factor” or an undesired depth that may turn them away. In other instances, paratexts will insist that a text is more mainstream, less niche or fannish. However, regardless of whether the paratexts greet or turn audiences away, they often prove to be vital mediators of the niche or fan property to a wider audience: just as Bart Simpson t-shirts and Butterfinger ads constructed an idea of what The Simpsons was about, for non-fans arguably more than for fans, so too do paratexts regularly address the non-fan, even when attached to fan properties. As such, this book is neither about fan cultures nor not about them; it instead aims to make sense of the textual residue that often flows between all “audiences,” fans, non-fans, and anti-fans.

Chapter 1 begins by defining the phrase “paratext” more precisely and situating it within other existing theories of what texts are, what work they do, and how they do this work. The chapter establishes the textual importance of paratexts, examining the constitutive role they play in creating public understandings of the text. It also distinguishes between “entryway” and “in medias res” paratexts, the first being those that we encounter before watching a film or television program, the latter those that come to us in the process of watching or at least interpreting the film or program. All successive chapters examine a few central case studies, so that the depths of paratexts’ meanings, and of audiences’ interactions with them, can be examined up close. However, throughout chapter 1, in order to set up exactly why paratextual study might be necessary in the first place, I offer a wide variety of examples from film and television and from existing scholarship that further excavates the importance of paratexts.

Chapter 2 offers several examples of how paratexts work as gateways into the text, establishing meanings and frames for decoding before the audience member has even encountered the film or television program. The iconic examples here are movie posters, trailers, and advertising campaigns that surround films and television programs, not only encouraging us to watch the shows, but also establishing the frames through which we “should” interpret and enjoy the shows. Through examining first several movie posters, and then the promotional campaign in New York City for ABC’s Six Degrees (2006–7) and its official website, I argue that hype can determine genre, gender, theme, style, and relevant intertexts, thereby in part creating the show as a meaningful entity for “viewers” even before they become viewers, or even if they never become viewers. I then turn to trailers, examining the starkly different trailers for Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter (1997)—one American, one Canadian—and arguing that the difference resulted in the sale of, effectively, two different films. Finally, I maintain an interest in paratexts’ abilities to create “proper interpretations” that audience members are encouraged to adopt, by discussing television opening credit sequences and their roles as both mini-trailers for new viewers and ritualistic anthems for returning viewers. Ultimately, chapter 2 takes several examples of producer-created paratexts to study the degree to which producers can proffer interpretations and readings of their texts even before they begin.

If chapter 2 is about how paratexts create meaning for texts, chapter 3 is about how they create scripts of value for them. In particular, the chapter examines how author, aura, and artistry—all qualities often said to be lacking in the age of big-budget blockbusters and for-profit art—are hailed and awarded to texts by their paratexts. I begin by examining how reality makeover shows’ promise to serve society is given weight by their webpages’ attempts to code them as philanthropic, community-generating programs with considerable civic value. Much of the rest of the chapter examines the particularly important role that DVDs play in giving value to fictional texts through their bonus materials such as commentary tracks, making-of documentaries, special effects galleries, and alternate scenes. I turn to the prominent example of the Platinum Series Special Extended Edition DVDs of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, a four-disc set replete with various bonus materials. I argue that these materials richly layer the text, paralleling the cast and crew’s travails in making the film to the epic campaign against the ultimate evil depicted in the tale. As a result of these materials, the DVDs posit the film as above the mundane products of a commercial industry, and as a crowning aesthetic achievement that represents an “older,” nobler form of art. Part and parcel of this process, too, is the lionization of Peter Jackson, the film’s director. Thus, I will also examine the role of DVDs, both The Two Towers and numerous DVDs for television shows, and of podcasts and other sources of authorial interviews, in attempting to resurrect the figure of the author that literary and cultural studies theory has long thought dead. My argument is not that television or film have improved with DVDs and podcasts, but rather that the DVDs and podcasts repeatedly insist that their shows are better, becoming a key site for the construction of discourses of value.

Chapter 4 focuses both on how paratexts manage a broader system of intertextuality and on how grouped, sequenced, or otherwise related films and television programs can become paratexts themselves, their decoding processes so intricately intertwined with those of their related films or television programs that we might regard them as occurring under the long shadow of former texts. My first case study draws on work conducted with Bertha Chin into online would-be audiences’ reactions to the Lord of the Rings films before they had even been made. Chin and I found not only enthusiastic discussion of the films, but actual early interpretation and evaluation of them, and thus this case study examines the degree to which their proposed frames for making sense of the films had been inherited from the Lord of the Rings books by J. R. R. Tolkien, and how audience discussion managed this system. Continuing the story, I then look at how the Lord of the Rings films, after release, became their own paratexts for would-be viewers of Peter Jackson’s next outing, King Kong (2005), and for the adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005). Next I turn to Batman Begins (2005) to see how the film’s plot and casting seem to have been guided in large part by an awareness of the dark shadow cast over the Batman franchise by the previous Batman film and cinematic atrocity, Batman and Robin (1997). Finally, I turn from films as paratexts to the author as paratext, examining online postings from the early days of television producer J. J. Abrams’s Lost and Six Degrees that suggested fans were using Abrams’s previous work and their constructions of him as artist to make sense of and predict plot threads in his new work. Through these various examples, chapter 4 aims to analyze how dependent all interpretation is on various other films and television programs, on audiences’ varying levels of familiarity with those films and programs, and on how the paratext of audience discussion circulates and coordinates intertexts.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 all take products of the entertainment industry as their topic. Given Hollywood’s huge coffers, its intense need to make each of its films and programs stand out in a media-saturated environment, and its success in turning many paratexts into revenue-generators, a large proportion of the paratextual world is commissioned into existence by Hollywood. However, it would be a grave mistake to consider audience-created paratexts as lesser in potential importance or complexity. Thus chapter 5 studies numerous examples of audience-created paratexts. Much has been written elsewhere on how fan fiction and mash-ups can be used to contest the “official” meanings proffered by Hollywood, but the chapter’s first two case studies instead examine how paratexts can be used to intensify certain textual experiences, less working against the industry’s version of the text than cutting a personalized path through it. First, I draw on work conducted with Jason Mittell into Lost fans’ consumption of spoilers (advance information of what will happen in the plot) to study how this consumption shows a move away from the strict plot-based mode of engaging with Lost and toward a more puzzle-, character-, and/or experiential-based mode. Second, I examine “vids,” fan-made videos that splice and edit together multiple scenes from a film or television program with a piece of music. While, again, vids have been studied within the framework of fan rebellion and critique, this section instead concentrates on how character-study and relationship vids can be used to examine a particular character’s or theme’s path through an otherwise busy film or program, thereby allowing time for the viewer to pause and reflect. Finally, I turn to press reviews as audience-made paratexts that do battle with Hollywood’s own paratexts, usually before the film or television program has even aired, and I focus particularly on reviews of NBC’s Friday Night Lights (2006–) as an example of a show whose reviewers engaged in a concerted effort to reframe NBC’s own publicity for the show. This final example grows from a discussion of the ways in which various audiences have differing levels of power and privilege to frame or reframe films or programs.

Many of the book’s examples are of paratexts that have been appended to a text, either before or after the fact, but in chapter 6 my interests turn to paratexts that more directly challenge the binary of paratext and film or program, forcing us to wonder exactly what is “primary” or “the original” and what is “secondary” or “peripheral.” Star Wars action figures feature first, as I examine their significant imprint and impact on the films, and on both public and fan understandings of them. Whereas cultural critics have long seen licensed toys as a particularly egregious instance of mindless and manipulative consumerism, I argue that the toys became a viable source of the text, framing and intensifying many of the film’s themes, while also allowing the Star Wars universe to be inhabitable. This concern with making storyworlds accessible and inhabitable then extends into a discussion of various forms of film- or television show–related games that allow players into a text to explore, sample, and/or create parts of the storyworld interactively. In particular, I explore licensed videogames that place the player in control of an avatar situated in the storyworld, enabling a limited set of interactions with characters and places within the broader text. I also examine an increasingly popular form of game, the alternate reality game (ARG), focusing on the What Happened in Piedmont? ARG that preceded the broadcast of A&E’s Andromeda Strain (2008), and that opened up significant room for audiences to learn about, engage with, and “taste” the storyworld independent of the mini-series.

Finally, since the book argues that paratexts create texts, in the Conclusion I discuss examples of the entertainment industry ignoring this logic and producing facile paratexts of little to no value or intelligence, or, alternately, embracing this logic and surrendering parts of their texts to their paratexts, often producing fascinating and significant results. Drawing from numerous interviews with paratext creators, conducted by myself and others, I briefly address the practical issue of how film and television creators can more meaningfully integrate paratexts into the storytelling and production process. To be of value or impact, and to be worthy of close study, paratexts need not be integrated, but by ending with a discussion of integration, I hope to highlight several key issues involved in the production and study of paratexts and their worlds.

Ultimately, through the book’s multiple examples and through its theoretical wrestling with concepts of paratextuality and textuality, I hope to illustrate how vibrant and vital a contribution to meaning-making and the development of storyworlds paratexts offer us. While paratexts can at times be seen as annoyances, as “mere” advertising, and/or as only so much hype, they are often as complex and intricate, and as generative of meanings and engagement, as are the films and television shows that they orbit and establish. To limit our understanding of film and television to films and television shows themselves risks drafting an insufficient picture not only of any given text, but also of the processes of production and reception attached to that text. Paratextual study, by contrast, promises a more richly contextualized and nuanced image of how texts work, how and why they are made, and how and why they are watched, interpreted, and enjoyed.