728376

research-article2017
TVNXXX10.1177/1527476417728376Television & New MediaNavar-Gill

Article
Television & New Media
2018, Vol. 19(5) 415­–430
From Strategic Retweets to © The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
Group Hangs: Writers’ Room sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1527476417728376
https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476417728376
Twitter Accounts and the journals.sagepub.com/home/tvn

Productive Ecosystem of TV
Social Media Fans

Annemarie Navar-Gill1

Abstract
In the current participatory television environment, social media serves both a
social backchannel for interactions between audience members and a direct line of
communication between audiences and production. Because audience activity on
social media becomes part of the media brand, it is a priority for the industry to
achieve some level of control/influence on that activity. In this article, I discuss writers’
room Twitter accounts as a space used to model and reinforce fan behavior that
serves industry interests, arguing that these accounts serve industry needs through
the behaviors they promote and recognize. Through analysis of three writers’ room
Twitter accounts—for Jane the Virgin, Faking It, and Orange Is the New Black—I show
how this process works, as well as the ways in which a show’s individual industrial
context shapes the type of fan that is hailed.

Keywords
social television, connected viewing, media industries, participatory culture, Twitter,
fandom

From casting to cancelation, key decisions at each point in the US television produc-
tion process are increasingly made based on metrics of social media activity (Hibberd
2014; Hod 2015). In this current participatory television environment, social media is
not only a backchannel for interactions between audience members, but also a space

1University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:
Annemarie Navar-Gill, Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan, 5337 North
Quad, 105 S State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Email: amngill@umich.edu
416 Television & New Media 19(5)

of communication between audiences and producers. Media industries control these

spaces by encouraging hegemonic forms of participation that invite fans into the text
while using proximity to keep their activities in line with industry interests (Johnson
2013). Social media has thus emerged as a significant tool in industry moderation of
fan behavior.
In this article, I explore writers’ room Twitter accounts as one type of social media
space that can be used to police and produce fan behaviors. I argue that these accounts
hail ideal fans who serve industrial needs through the behaviors they promote and
recognize. The fan hailed varies by show in a way that reflects each program’s indi-
vidual industrial context. Through analysis of writers’ room Twitter accounts for three
female-centered dramedies—the CW’s Jane the Virgin (2014–), MTV’s Faking It
(2014–2016), and Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black (2013–)—during the 2014–2015
US television season, I show the ways in which each show’s intended audience, criti-
cal status, distribution platform, and associated institutional brand image are all factors
contributing to the type of ideal fan that best serves particular industrial stakeholders.
Despite these different contexts, writers’ room Twitter accounts all use the co-consti-
tutive ecology of social media to shape fan behavior in a way that is productive for the
television industry, promoting particular textual readings, forms of engagement, and
types of fan labor.

Managing Fans: Sanctioned Participation and Social

Interaction
When industrial parties work to promote more active audience behavior, engagement
is often deployed to demarcate boundaries around appropriate participation and to
privilege particular modes of reading the television text (Johnson 2013). As Stanfill
(2015) suggests, encouraging behaviors that are, in general, consumption-focused,
passive, manageable, and measurable appears to be a much more effective means of
shaping media interaction than punitive behavior prevention tactics such as lawsuits.
Given easy access to social media communication tools, the formation of social
relationships between content creators and fans can be a key part of how engagement
is managed. Many television writers and producers engage with fans on social media.
Although Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms can host these interac-
tions, Twitter’s particular affordances have made it the most significant site of social
television interaction for both audiences and industry (Harrington 2014; Tryon 2013).
In particular, Twitter’s orientation toward real-time, synchronous conversation is use-
ful to the television industry because it reinforces the importance of liveness, which
the television industry has struggled to maintain in a media environment increasingly
dominated by Video on Demand (VOD) and over-the-top (OTT) services (Lotz 2014).
In addition, the “directed friendship model” (Marwick and boyd 2010, 116) of
Twitter lacks the technical requirement of reciprocity found on many other social net-
works. This creates hierarchies in which users that can gather large followings hold
sway over a far larger audience than users that cannot. This makes Twitter a “potent
instrument for routing ideas and manipulating opinions” (van Dijck 2013, 74) in a way
Navar-Gill 417

that serves platform owners, but also the “influencers” who have maintained signifi-
cant followings. As the word “influencer” suggests, those with significant followings
have outsize impact on the norms that develop on social media through a slow, subtle
processes of mutual shaping. Within the fandoms of their shows, television writers can
serve as influencers. These writers are not “celebrities” in the traditional sense, and
although personal branding is increasingly important in any career, they also do not
quite fit the description of micro-celebrities offered by Marwick and boyd (2010).
Their status is perhaps better conceptualized as “subcultural celebrity,” meaning that
they possess all the caché of a traditional celebrity, but only for a limited number of
fans (Chin and Hills 2008; Ellcessor 2012). Celebrity Twitter practices of audience
management are, thus, one useful model for considering how writers’ room Twitter
accounts communicate with audiences.
Celebrity practitioners use Twitter as a venue for sharing apparent disclosures, cre-
ating a feeling of intimacy for their fans, while also reinforcing the asymmetrical sta-
tus between celebrity and fan through the articulation of their connections to other
famous people and their choices about who to respond to (Marwick and boyd 2011).
As Marwick and boyd suggest, a celebrity’s responsiveness marks some users as more
important than others. While these users are most often other celebrities, at times they
are fans. Interacting with fans on Twitter makes celebrities appear relatable and
socially available, key factors in managing and maintaining and audience today. In
these cases, @replies—and the value they confer—are a status marker in fan
communities.
Research into the dynamics of fan/producer relationships created by online interac-
tion has focused on the ways in which these relationships are used to discipline fan
behavior. While the connected environment necessitates strategies of inviting fan par-
ticipation, producers simultaneously work to subordinate fans to their discursive
authority (Johnson 2007; Ross 2008). Chin and Hills’s (2008, 262) study of blog-
based interactions between TV writers and fans provides a particularly salient example
of how online interactions produce particular TV fandom norms. They observed that
writers used practices of personal self-disclosure to control which audience questions
were addressed, to indicate appropriate participation, and to reaffirm producer author-
ity. On these blogs, the writers were able to create “a simulation of confessional dis-
course” that allows fans to feel like insiders while carefully controlling what
information is released to them. The selective acknowledgment of fan comments and
questions in blog comment sections worked to designate model behaviors for fans. In
addition, by controlling disclosures, writers used the relationships formed in these
spaces to teach fans about their codes of professionalism, conditioning them not to
engage in a way that might damage the brand of the television show or the writer’s
career.
Practices like this that educate fans about proper engagement are important to
industry stakeholders because audience conversations on social media become part of
the program’s and network’s brands, but given the number of people involved in these
conversations, it is impossible for the network to fully manage the impact audiences
have on brand image. Writers’ social media interactions with fans provide a way to
418 Television & New Media 19(5)

steer audience social media behaviors in directions favorable to the industry, and to
reward “good” fans by highlighting their comments. In her study of Twitter accounts
representing different BBC programs, Evans (2014) observed that Tweets focused on
either providing news about the shows or promoting various types of “productive”
audience labor that supported branding and marketing strategies. Similarly, in a con-
tent analysis of U.S. television network Twitter feeds, Lin and Peña (2011, 19) showed
that most tweets focused on suggesting tasks that audience members could perform on
behalf of the show such as watching during the live airing. Fewer tweets focused on
personal and emotional communication, but these tweets were more likely to receive
audience response. They suggest that this latter type of interaction on Twitter may be
more effective for shaping audience behaviors, because “socioemotional communica-
tion . . . serves as a reinforcement (positive or negative) function and attempts to guide
people to or away from exhibited behaviors.” Writers’ room Twitter accounts serve a
similar function to the network-managed accounts explored by both these studies, but
have a greater connection to the creative artists responsible for writing the shows. This
may humanize them in a way that makes socioemotional communication appear even
more authentic to engaged viewers.

Tweeting @TheWritersRoom
The first writers’ room Twitter accounts seem to have appeared in 2009, though the
practice did not really start to gain popularity until sometime in 2012. Today, a quick
Twitter search reveals dozens of writers’ room Twitter accounts representing programs
of all kinds: Law & Order: SVU, Arrow, Hannibal, How to Get Away With Murder,
You’re the Worst, Burn Notice, Orange Is the New Black, and Girl Meets World are just
a handful of the US shows that have used a writers’ room Twitter account. While many
showrunners and even lower-level writers and writer-producers engage with fans
using their personal Twitter accounts, the writers’ room Twitter account is an interme-
diate step to all-powerful showrunners, carrying the authority of official show com-
munication while stepping away from the figure of the showrunner that dominates
conversation engaging with issues of authority and molding fan behavior. Since the
1990s, the showrunner-as-author has served a discursive function connecting particu-
lar programs to notions of quality, or at least to recognizable brand names (Mittell
2015). As this discourse has been employed across many spaces for interfacing with
audiences, the writers’ room Twitter account stands out as one of few audience inter-
facing tactics that deliberately steps away from the showrunner, instead foregrounding
the collective creativity that goes into television writing and production. This choice
to represent the writers as a group—and the various ways that different writers’ room
accounts play with the identity they present—invites in those dedicated fans who have
a deeper understanding of how television writing and producing really works.
To examine the ways in which writers’ room Twitter accounts hail fan identities that
are productive in their particular industrial contexts, I used the writers’ room Twitter
accounts of Jane the Virgin, Orange Is the New Black (OITNB), and Faking It.1 Although
all are female-centered dramedies, they emerged from very different industrial
Navar-Gill 419

contexts, providing insight into the ways in which factors such as distribution channel,
critical reception, and brand recognition shape the way social media is deployed as a
tool of audience management. Women’s prison dramedy OITNB is a Netflix Original
distributed only through the company’s streaming platform in the US. It has garnered
significant critical and awards buzz as a prestige show. Faking It, which aired for three
seasons on MTV, followed teenage best friends who are mistakenly outed as a couple,
sparking one’s lesbian sexual awakening. In line with MTV’s overall brand, the pop
culture–savvy high school series was targeted at an adolescent and young adult audi-
ence. Last, Venezuelan telenovela adaptation Jane the Virgin, which centers on a virgin
who is accidentally artificially inseminated, debuted on the CW in 2014 to enormous
critical praise, garnering the fifth-place US broadcast network its first major awards
nominations. Although appealing to the network’s previous core audience of women
aged eighteen to thirty-four, Jane was also a key part of an attempt to expand that audi-
ence, in part through its depiction of a multigenerational Latinx family. Significantly,
while OITNB and Faking It were in their second seasons during my sample period, Jane
the Virgin was beginning its first. These three shows also share the quality of having
fandoms that are active, but not extraordinarily so. While the bulk of scholarly attention
toward fan practice and industrial treatment of fans focuses on those fan communities
that are highly active outliers, in a time when building online fandom around any show
is an industrial imperative, it is crucial to understand practices and processes of encour-
aging and disciplining participation as they play out in more ordinary contexts.
For this study, I engaged in an analytics-supported qualitative analysis of each
account’s tweets and mentions during a one-month period beginning a week before the
show’s premiere during the 2014–2015 television season. The resulting datasets con-
tained a total of 16,685 tweets, providing an exhaustive record of each account’s foot-
print during my sampling period. In addition to producing numerical descriptors of
these data’s various features, I determined which of the accounts that tweeted to the
writers received reciprocal interaction in the form of a retweet or mention, tracking
patterns of interaction and noninteraction with fans. Due to limitations of my tools,
this analysis does not account for any reciprocal interaction occurring through the use
of Twitter’s “favorite” (now “like”) and “direct message” functions. The information
gathered from analytics served as a road map to guide a textual analysis of the tweets.
@JaneWriters, @OrangeWriters, and @FakingItWriters took different approaches
to their interactions—real or apparent—with their respective fan communities in ways
that served the particular needs generated by each industrial context. The heading ban-
ners chosen for each one of these Twitter accounts encapsulated each space’s approach
to hailing productive fans. On @JaneWriters, the banner was the show’s main promo-
tional image, plastered with laudatory quotes from television critics. This immediately
signals the account as a space centered on promotion and advertisement, an emphasis
that reflects the state of the CW network’s business practices during the 2014–2015
television season and Jane the Virgin’s role in their shifting brand strategy. @
FakingItWriters, in contrast, used a simple photograph of the two main characters
from a high school dance. While a professional still, its resemblance to a candid per-
sonal snapshot signals the space as one that walks the line between community and
420 Television & New Media 19(5)

promotion. This balancing act is enabled by the personal identification of the pair of
friends who run the account and the social media–friendly context of the show’s home
on MTV, a network that has always focused on youth markets. In contrast with the
careful self-presentation of @JaneWriters and @FakingItWriters, @OrangeWriters,
though verified on Twitter, had no banner at all. The absence of a banner is indicative
of the more informal approach to social media enabled by Netflix’s streaming business
model; though social media still serves a purpose for a show like OITNB, it loses much
of its temporal urgency, instead emphasizing discourses of status and cultural capital
that contribute to maintaining a premium brand in a crowded entertainment
landscape.

@JaneWriters: Equating Participation with Promotion

The CW network publicly prides itself on emphasizing social media engagement, at
times even prioritizing social media over ratings when making cancelation decisions,
as they did in 2014 when network President Mark Pedowitz explained the decision to
renew Beauty and the Beast while canceling the higher rated and more critically
acclaimed The Tomorrow People by citing the former’s strong social media activity
(Hibberd 2014). When traditional ratings lag, social media can provide an alternative
currency for quantifying an audience’s value. The frenzied pace of Jane the Virgin’s
writers’ room Twitter reflected the network’s commitment to this alternative cur-
rency. During my sampling period, @JaneWriters posted 1,333 tweets, a number
vastly larger than either of the other accounts I examined, signaling a significant
investment in the writers’ room Twitter as a fan engagement strategy. They received
4,521 mentions.
Despite frequent posting, however, @JaneWriters’ tweets were low on substantive
content. A total of 818 were simply retweets, primarily of audience and critic praise,
links to press coverage, and the writing staff’s personal tweets. Of the 515 original
tweets, episode livetweets, which are intended to drive up show-related tweeting and
hashtagging during time periods tracked by ratings companies, were most frequent.
Other original posts included explicit attempts to mobilize fan labor for promotional
purposes and more links to show press. Although the purpose of such a social media
space is ostensibly to interact with fans, just seventeen tweets constituted actual inter-
actions with audience members (though a larger number of fans received retweets).
The majority of these seventeen audience members were entertainment journalists.
For the half-dozen nonpress fans who received replies, the responses were banal, con-
sisting of some variation of “thank you,” “we’re glad you liked it,” and “watch the
next episode.”
The identity presented by @JaneWriters was difficult to decipher. Although indi-
vidual writers were in some ways represented by the retweets from their personal
accounts, there was little to no sense of either who they were or what their job was like
beyond references to the “genius” of creator and showrunner Jennie Urman. As almost
no content on the feed revealed information only writing staff would be privy to, it was
at least as easy to believe that this account was handled by the CW’s social media team
Navar-Gill 421

as that it was operated by the writing staff.2 Compared with the other two accounts I
examined, @JaneWriters operated as a promotional tool rather than a space for inter-
facing with fans.
Because it airs on a broadcast network, temporally based measures of viewership
matter to Jane the Virgin. It was not surprising that livetweeting was emphasized on
the @JaneWriters feed. The livetweets, however, are a good example of the ways in
which @JaneWriters emphasized promotion over interactivity, almost never adding
anything to the viewing experience that a viewer could not provide for herself. Typical
livetweets made comments such as “Can we make a contest for the most romantic
scene ever just so this one can win? #JaneTheVirgin @Brettdier @HereIsGina” or
“Thank you for your brilliance @JennieUrman #laughingoutloud #JaneTheVirgin.”
This descriptive praise and excitement over onscreen moments falls short of the insight
a fan might hope to get from livetweets provided by someone with so much insider
status. These tweets were also often repetitive because @JaneWriters livetweeted both
the East Coast and West Coast airings of the show each week.3 The phrasing of the
tweets posted during the two time blocks is altered slightly, but the substantive content
is exactly the same, highlighting identical moments with identical sentiment. For
example, responding to a scene in which Jane is trying to avoid uncomfortable encoun-
ters with two different handsome men at once, @JaneWriters tweeted to the East
Coast: “Best rock and best hard place ever. #JaneTheVirgin @justinbaldoni @jaime-
camil @HereIsGina.” A few hours later, tweeting with the West Coast, they posted,
“How do WE get between that rock and that hard place?” The similarity between the
tweets suggests preplanning, breaking the façade of the medium’s “air of extemporary
intimacy” (Muntean and Petersen 2009).
Although livetweets are indirectly instrumental, encouraging fans to tweet and
hashtag during periods tracked by ratings companies, @JaneWriters also made a num-
ber of direct calls for fan labor beneficial to the brand. Most tweets that invited inter-
activity served a promotional purpose. While on the other accounts I examined, the
convention of question and answer (Q&A) sessions was used to give fans the opportu-
nity to request behind-the-scenes information, on @JaneWriters, the writers asked the
questions (e.g., What are your favorite moments on the show so far?) and retweeted
audience soundbites that they found particularly helpful. The most explicit call for fan
labor in my sample, however, occurred through a series of repeated posts asking fans
to vote for the show in the People’s Choice Awards, providing such suggestive com-
ments as “Are you bored? Feel the need to click something? Multiple times in a row?
Vote @CWJaneTheVirgin for @peopleschoice!” and a link to the ballot. Although
tongue-in-cheek, the exhortation to click the ballot over and over again on the show’s
behalf requests fans freely perform labor that does not provide any affective rewards.
Overall, the emphasis on promotion and tweet volume over value-added content
reflects the needs of a show just starting its first season, particularly a more pressing
need to build a fan base than to serve one.
Looking more deeply at how @JaneWriters tries to channel fan discourse and
behavior, however, speaks to the ways in which social media practices can be used to
serve far more specific needs within a particular industrial context. The 2014–2015
422 Television & New Media 19(5)

television season was a major turning point for the brand of The CW network.
Beginning with upfronts in May 2014, CW President Mark Pedowitz began frequently
repeating an important line: The CW “was not the Gossip Girl network anymore”
(Holloway 2014). From its launch in 2007, The CW had been perceived as a network
that catered to teenage girls. While Pedowitz had been pushing the network to serve a
broader audience since taking over as president in 2011, this perception still lingered
several years later. In promoting the 2014 fall slate across trade and entertainment
press, CW staff made it clear that this was the year that ended. Central to their argu-
ment was the launch of a pair of new hour-long adaptations, Jane and DC Comics’ The
Flash, characterized as a major two-pronged push for demographics the network had
historically performed poorly in—Hispanics and men. Ultimately, both were success-
ful in bringing in these audiences, with Jane boosting the CW’s Monday night ratings
by more than 45 percent, attracting a viewing population containing a much larger
percentage of Hispanics than the overall U.S. population (Holloway 2014). In addition
to targeting a new demographic, Jane finally brought The CW into conversations
about quality television, becoming not just the best-reviewed new show of the season,
but also the first CW show to receive nominations for the Golden Globe and Emmy
Awards. During my sampling period at the start of the season, however, most of these
successes were only beginning to crystallize.
Situated in this context of Jane the Virgin’s role as a centerpiece in the CW’s 2014
rebranding effort, the aggressive approach to industrial social media practice displayed
by @JaneWriters emerges from a need to keep the show in the cultural conversation in
ways that fit its broader role in the CW’s overall brand strategy. Patterns in who and
what @JaneWriters chose to retweet illustrate this nicely. While retweets were most
often used to highlight posts from influencers, particularly television critics with posi-
tive responses to the show, they were also used to acknowledge ordinary fans. Like
everything posted on @JaneWriters, retweets tended to focus on promotion, but a
more granular look at the content of these tweets reveals several significant recurring
themes. By providing the reward and fan status marker (Marwick and boyd 2010) of
acknowledgment to these types of comments, @JaneWriters seeks to route conversa-
tion about the show in ways that directly address the branding needs of the CW. For
instance, the writers often retweeted users who praise the show’s adaptation of
Venezuelan source material or otherwise laud its portrayal of Latinx culture. This
directly ties to the network’s goal of targeting the Hispanic demographic it had previ-
ously underserved. In addition, the account frequently highlighted comments connect-
ing Jane to ideas about quality TV or suggesting crossover appeal with another show
(e.g., Gilmore Girls) known to have a dedicated fan base. Both the emphasis on
rewarding fans whose social content helps discursively situate Jane the Virgin as qual-
ity television and the focus on television critics as the most valuable type of fans spoke
to the network’s broader push toward rebranding. The effort to use the writers’ room
Twitter account to assert Jane the Virgin’s quality status reflects a network that had
unsuccessfully tried to change its image in the past and was now making a substantial
push to do so. The last significant recurring type of fan posts retweeted by @
JaneWriters were self-reports of promotional fan labor, such as inviting others to
Navar-Gill 423

watch the show or voting multiple times in the People’s Choice Awards. @JaneWriters
hailed an ideal fan who was not just willing to help grow the audience this new series
needed, but does so while engaging in cultural discourses that match the rebranding
efforts of the network it airs on.

@OrangeWriters: Reinforcing Cultural Capital through

Intimacy and Distance
If @JaneWriters seemed to try to create buzz by posting constantly, @OrangeWriters
took precisely the opposite tactic. During my sampling period, they posted only fifteen
tweets, while receiving 4,104 mentions. This was nearly as many as @JaneWriters
received with almost ninety times as many posts. The ratio of tweets in to tweets out
sets the tone this account creates: this show is an exclusive club, for people with high-
class tastes. The account’s overall aesthetic worked to position OITNB and its writers
as tastemakers in possession of high cultural capital. Like the show’s distribution plat-
form, Netflix, which thrives based on the success of its personalized recommendation
algorithms while remaining fairly secretive about the actual details of its operations,
@OrangeWriters cultivated a sense of personal familiarity with fans while disclosing
little about the show’s production. Looking over @OrangeWriters’ full timeline to get
a broader sense of the material they posted than the fifteen tweets from my sampling
period could provide, I encountered very few transparently promotional tweets, with
the exception of occasional links to press articles about award nominations, a signal of
taste and quality. The majority of posts took the form of fan Q&A sessions, where the
writers answered fan questions for some period of time during their workday. Although
the account foregrounded a collective voice, it also provided a sense of individual
writers through posts that offered insights into details like their musical tastes, their
lunches, and whether or not they like their partners to wear lingerie. Unlike @
JaneWriters, which invested greatly in Jennie Urman as the show’s guiding force, @
OrangeWriters presented its team as being a collaborative group on relatively equal
footing.
Although behind-the-scenes information was the most prevalent form of content
posted by @OrangeWriters, the peeks behind the scenes were almost entirely per-
sonal, as opposed to providing insight on production details, simultaneously creating
intimacy and mystery. The writers posted about eating their favorite snacks and lis-
tening to Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” together. They confessed to playing with
Legos when they should be working, and shared selfies of themselves eating pizza.
They posted personal quotes that emerge during writers’ room discussions—“Years
later, after I was a real estate agent, I went back to that art collective where I used to
live with these two doms”—attributed to the writer who made the comment. Even
when the lack of context renders these quotes somewhat perplexing, they invite the
reader in, creating a sense that they are members of the club and that they have a
relationship with the writers who create this show. When addressing fans directly, @
OrangeWriters adopts a humorous and sarcastic tone reminiscent of what you might
expect if interacting with a comfortable long-term friend. Although the surface
424 Television & New Media 19(5)

meaning of the words they use in responding to fans could actually be interpreted at
times as mocking, posts read like an inside joke, creating an atmosphere of intimacy
even if you do not quite get it.
Still, despite this tone of intimacy, only 0.005 percent of the people who tweeted at
@OrangeWriters during my sampling period received acknowledgment from the
account. And of that 0.005 percent, only 38 percent were fans—the rest were creative
staff on the show. However, a cursory glance over their feed indicated that these writ-
ers have designated periods for fan interaction—roughly one to two a month while the
writers are in session—that last for an hour or two, and it seems likely that they are not
checking to see what questions they are getting in the interim period. During these
designated Q&A sessions, @OrangeWriters answered most questions with affection-
ate teasing. Of the small number of fan questions dealt with in a serious manner,
essentially all invoked a variety of nontelevision taste cultures and hierarchies in areas
such as literature, indie music, theater, and fine dining.
Although the peeks behind the scenes offered by @OrangeWriters were almost
entirely personal, this is not because they did not engage with questions about produc-
tion. Rather, it is because they handled production questions in a joking manner. For
instance, when asked how many writers are on the staff, and which ones write the best
jokes, @OrangeWriters responded “we only hire unpaid interns to write all of the
funny stuff.” This is a typical interaction surrounding production, and it serves a dual
function. First, it perpetuates the sense of intimacy between writers and fans, because
they are being spoken to as friends. Second, however, it humorously reinforces the
idea that though the fans are being invited in, they do not hold any sway over produc-
tion. Furthermore, while some types of production questions are addressed in this
manner, those that specifically inquire about or suggest future story points are always
ignored. These responses reinforced the idea that OITNB is quality, artistic television.
The writers are the authorities, and the fans are expected both to respect their vision
and to go along for the narrative ride with few expectations when the new season is
delivered to them.
This approach to interacting with fans on Twitter is enabled by the nontraditional
business model of Netflix while reinforcing key aspects of the Netflix brand. Although
Twitter’s relationship to ad-supported television is frequently driven by the platform’s
real-time conversational affordances, providing viewers with an incentive not to time-
shift and, thus, increase their likelihood of exposure to commercials (Harrington
2014), it serves a different purpose in the Netflix model. Profit in Subscription Video
on Demand (SVOD) depends on attracting and retaining subscribers, so social media
is useful as a business tool insofar as it buttresses people’s relationships to the series
they follow and the overall streaming platform. In the SVOD space, companies such
as Netflix and Amazon keep their viewership metrics close to the vest, making it dif-
ficult to define what constitutes “success” for a streaming show. In the trades, the
nebulous concept of “buzz”—which Lacey Rose explains in The Hollywood Reporter
as a triangulation of different data points such as press clippings, pop culture refer-
ences (e.g., a Saturday Night Live spoof), and social media activity—emerges as the
best proxy for understanding how well an SVOD original is performing (Rose 2014).
Navar-Gill 425

For a streaming original, being watched is less significant than being talked about in a
way that motivates people to add or maintain a subscription for the service. Thus, a
social strategy that keeps a series like OITNB fresh in the zeitgeist while maintaining
an ongoing relationship with viewers between seasons best serves Netflix’s business
model. In 2014, Netflix was playing a long game with “Netflix Originals,” working
toward transforming the label into a premium global brand by investing enormous
amounts of money into new, high-quality programming (Daly 2014). The relaxed and
conversational style of @OrangeWriters keeps fans talking throughout the year, build-
ing investment and maintaining social chatter that can be quantified as “buzz” during
the lengthy period between seasons. At the same time, because of the all-at-once
release strategy Netflix uses for most of its originals, what viewers are reacting to is
much further from what production is working on than is the case on a typical scripted
broadcast or cable show—season 2 was released during my sampling period, but the
writers were well into season 3, which would not be released for another year. As a
result, it becomes less complicated to base Twitter interaction with fans on personal
information than on production details.

@FakingItWriters: Walking the Line between

Authenticity and Promotion
Compared with @JaneWriters and @OrangeWriters, @FakingItWriters presented a
more multifaceted forum for fan engagement. During my sampling period, @
FakingItWriters posted 107 tweets, receiving 2,542 mentions. The Faking It timeline
showcased the same practices that appeared on the other two accounts—livetweeting,
linking show press, hosting fan Q&As, and asking fans to promote the show—but also
included a more diverse range of posts. @FakingItWriters often highlighted fan com-
munity practices, sharing fan art, cosplay, and fan-initiated trending campaigns. They
also engaged in public service messaging in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-
gender, queer, intersex, asexual (LGBTQIA) teens.
What distinguished @FakingItWriters most from @JaneWriters and @
OrangeWriters is the way that it handled the question of identity. @FakingItWriters
was explicitly comanaged by the show’s two young staff writers, Carrie Rosen and
George Northy. It was frequently possible to determine which one wrote a particular
post. Conversations threaded back and forth between the writers’ room Twitter and
their personal accounts, positioning @FakingItWriters as a hub for Twitter conversa-
tions among a fan community that these writers were actively involved in. Although
the very idea of a writers’ room Twitter account inherently connects it to a group of
people, the other accounts I examined presented a singular identity on behalf of that
group. By explicitly acknowledging who is responsible for the account, @
FakingItWriters comfortably navigated the presentation of multiple selves, allowing
Rosen and Northy to switch between promotional behavior and community-building
behavior without sacrificing much authenticity. For instance, Rosen and Northy pre-
sented livetweeting as a “group hang” between them and the fans: “Livetweeting
tonight! @GeorgeNorthy and I (@carrierosen) ar having a watch #FakingIt and eat
426 Television & New Media 19(5)

sushi party. Please join us!” This established their Twitter feed as a social space where
fans could congregate while receiving insider information. Although more fans are
still ignored than acknowledged by @FakingItWriters, the Faking It writers replied to
a larger number of actual fans (twenty-five) during my sampling period than either @
OrangeWriters or @JaneWriters (both six), and their responses were much more sub-
stantive, providing specific details about day-to-day processes in the writers’ room,
their favorite parts of their job, and teaser information about upcoming episodes. The
fact that they have established these social dynamics makes their instrumental posts
requesting fan promotional labor feel more natural. For example, while trying to dem-
onstrate the program’s social media support as it waited for renewal, @FakingItWriters
posted “Time to confess! In 20 mins share your most funny/awkward/embarrassing
#FakingIt to fit in story for #FakingItFriday #RenewFakingIt.” This tweet’s instru-
mental purpose was to trend Faking It related hashtags—something that matters to
MTV—but it did so by starting a conversation about ways in which fans could relate
to the characters and their struggles with identity. To make these disclosures a two-way
street, the writers contributed their own personal and embarrassing anecdotes to the
conversation.
Livetweeting episodes was a significant function of this account. Faking It drew a
small audience, but MTV was heavily invested in its social presence, citing the pro-
gram’s strong social media as a reason for its second season renewal (Andreeva 2014).
However, the character of the livetweeting was quite different from that of @
JaneWriters. Although a number of the livetweet posts were similarly descriptive and
affirmational, each episode’s livetweets also provide fans with several informational
nuggets that they could only get from the writers, such as script excerpts showing how
material moves from page to screen and alternative versions of jokes that were pitched
and dismissed in the writers’ room. For instance, during a plotline satirizing the
homophobia of Chik-fil-A through a fictional fast-food chain called Cluck-N-Go,
Northy shared that his favorite pitch from the room was naming the restaurant
“Crispianity Fried Chicken.” This emphasis on value-added livetweeting further bol-
stered the community atmosphere.
That the social strategy of an MTV sitcom appears more adept and confident than
that of other networks’ shows is in many ways unsurprising; the network’s youthful
audience—in 2014, MTV’s median viewer age was 23.5, while the average viewer of
television-at-large was more than two decades older at forty-four (Umstead 2014)—
has grown up with social media. The cable network was a fairly early adopter of social
media and has a history of relatively positive engagement with grassroots fan prac-
tices, at times sponsoring fan-fiction contests and putting fan art onscreen. MTV has
even admitted that listening to fans online can drive creative decision making more
readily than most other networks (see Aquino 2012). While remaining contained
within the needs of a media conglomerate, the MTV approach to social media as rep-
resented by Faking It offers something closer to audience empowerment.
But in observing Faking It’s social media strategy on @FakingItWriters, such
empowerment intersects with MTV’s somewhat cynical deployment of queer repre-
sentation as a branding technique. From the groundbreaking casting of AIDS activist
Navar-Gill 427

Pedro Zamora in The Real World: San Francisco to the infamous kiss between
Madonna and Britney Spears at the Video Music Awards (VMA), MTV’s approach to
queer sexualities has often been one of taking two steps forward and one back—simul-
taneously pushing the bounds of progressive representation and visibility while engag-
ing in transparent opportunism that deploys queerness to generate controversy and
notoriety. In 2014, MTV’s scripted original slate, which included series such as Teen
Wolf and Awkward along with Faking It, offered a fair amount of LGBT representa-
tion, yet did so in a way that frequently provoked critique from fans and LGBT groups.
The Advocate’s entertainment editor argued that it seemed MTV had recently been
“ramping up gay appeal to court a young audience” (Peeples 2014) using a combina-
tion of both genuine representation and queerbaiting. For instance, while they intro-
duced a gay character on Teen Wolf sooner than anticipated because of social chatter
(Aquino 2012), within the same text, they actively teased a gay relationship between
two more popular male characters while refusing a canonical payoff (Peeples 2014).
While Faking It is an explicitly queer text that tries fairly successfully to rise above a
premise built for queerbaiting (“fake lesbians pretend to be a couple”) through a nar-
rative about the pain of awakening to homosexuality by falling in love with a hetero-
sexual best friend, the insistence that the story is about this type of queer pain rather
than a true romantic relationship between main characters Karma and Amy ensures
that the show is queer—but not too queer.4 But despite the show’s depiction of Karma
as presumably straight, fans latched onto the “Karmy” pairing.
Although @FakingItWriters did not ignore fan investment in Karmy, livetweets
throughout the second season seemed to be pushing the audience away from the rela-
tionship. During the first episode in which Amy’s new love interest, Reagan, appeared,
@FakingItWriters posted more tweets expressing excitement about this new character
than Reagan had lines in the script. Although it was obvious that this new character
was interested in Amy, there were no clear signs that she would become a recurring
member of the cast. However, over the course of the episode, a distinct tonal change
took place in @FakingItWriters’ mentions. At the beginning, fans are tweeting “make
[Karmy] be tOGETHER PLS IT HAS TO HAPPEN SOME TIME” and “Team Karmy.
#karmy #FakingIt.” Later in the night, after several of the writers’ enthusiastic tweets
about Reagan, most of the responses shifted focus: “the new girl is so hot I want her to
date Amy. she was eyefucking Amy” and from a user going by the name of i_love_
karmy “ok I’ve been seeing REAMY everywhere!! Who’s in this ship!?!?” Although
this speaks to producers’ success in creating a new love interest fans could embrace,
@FakingItWriters also modeled a level of excitement about the new character dispro-
portionate to her time onscreen. It would be extreme to say that Twitter modeling
changed the fan base’s opinion, but it seemed to have successfully reinforced a shift in
textual engagement.

Hailing Productive Fans

The atmospheres of these twitter accounts directly connected to the productive fan
each hailed. For Jane the Virgin, the ideal productive fan is content to operate in a
428 Television & New Media 19(5)

paradigm of affirmational fandom, enthusiastically celebrating the onscreen content

and providing free promotional labor through her online activity. By using a personal
and intimate, yet distant, tone and repeatedly invoking taste cultures, @OrangeWriters
suggested that both their show and their ideal fan possess high cultural capital and
excellent taste that afford them an insider status. However, with this status comes a
particular understanding about artistic authority in quality television. While fans of
OITNB can joke around with the writers like friends, they are not on an even playing
field, and they are not invited to engage with the show’s narrative in speculative ways.
Faking It, a program intended for a younger generation on a network that is happy to
sponsor fan-fiction contests, had a much more open mind toward creative fan prac-
tices, frequently acknowledging and highlighting the love labors of fans. For them,
fans may be friends in a more “authentic” way than the distant intimacy practiced by
@OrangeWriters, but the hailed fan is still pushed to read the show’s narrative—and
its pronouncements about sexuality—in specific ways.
Myriad factors create contexts that produce productive fans. Distribution platforms,
for instance, play a significant role. The strategies that @JaneWriters and @
FakingItWriters engaged fans with were highly bounded by the temporal nature of
network and cable broadcasting. Although these shows were easily accessible through
time-shifted means, the business model supporting them still depended on producing
an audience at a specific time and—because both were distributed by networks that
place a premium on social media engagement—proving that audience possessed social
media savvy. In contrast, the strategy of cool distance used by @OrangeWriters was
afforded by the binge-watch–fueled Netflix distribution model. While @JaneWriters
and @FakingItWriters tweeted constant reminders to watch in the days leading up to
their season premieres, @OrangeWriters tweeted just one: “Happy Season 2 Premiere
everyone! Please remember to eat and come up for air this weekend,” a sentiment that
contained implicit assumptions about the class identity of an audience composed of
people who can simply take the weekend to dive into a TV show.
The strategies employed by these Twitter accounts also reflected the specific brand
contexts from which these series emerged: Netflix, MTV, and The CW. @
OrangeWriters’ air of exclusivity and mystery dovetailed with Netflix’s history as a
company that, unwilling to share details about its viewership and subscriber base,
garners buzz without being beholden to hard numerical data about popularity. With its
interactive and multifaceted approach, @FakingItWriters felt like a space more com-
fortable with the context collapse endemic to self-presentation on social media
(Marwick and boyd 2010). This fit with MTV’s youthful brand while the territorial
attitude toward fan interpretation of their text still matched MTV’s ambivalent history
of using diverse representations of sexuality in circumscribed ways. The intense,
always-on promotional tone of @JaneWriters reflected its place as an emerging flag-
ship on a network in a state of transition as it tried to push away from the Gossip Girl-
centric brand of the newest broadcast network’s first years. The practices that emerge
in social media spaces like these writers’ room Twitter accounts show how, in an era
where interactivity is the norm, creative workers and, through them, fans are pulled
into broader industrial and commercial imperatives surrounding television texts. As
Navar-Gill 429

writers and other creative figures embrace practices that serve the industrial institu-
tions that employ them, they model ways for fans to become part of the same produc-
tive ecosystem.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. These data represent a selection from data collected for a larger study that sampled from
seventeen different writers’ room Twitter accounts with the aim of creating a typology to
describe industrial strategies for managing fans on social media.
2. Through access to a former Jane the Virgin employee, I know that at this time, the account
was managed by Jennie Urman’s assistant (personal correspondence, March 2016). However,
my emphasis here is not on the reality of how these Twitter feeds are managed, which is rarely
publicly accessible information, but rather on how posted content may be perceived by fans.
3. It is a more typical practice to livetweet either the East Coast or West Coast broadcast.
4. After Faking It’s cancelation, showrunner Carter Covington revealed that the next season
was meant to have Karma and Amy begin a romantic relationship but ultimately break up
to preserve their friendship.

References
Andreeva, Nellie. 2014. “MTV’s ‘Faking It’ Renewed for Season 2.” Deadline. http://deadline.
com/2014/06/faking-it-renewed-mtv-season-2-786720/.
Aquino, Judith. 2012. “Transforming Social Media Data into Predictive Analytics.” Customer
Relationship Management 16(11): 38–42.
Chin, Bertha, and Matt Hills. 2008. “Restricted Confessions? Blogging, Subcultural Celebrity
and the Management of Producer–Fan Proximity.” Social Semiotics 18 (2): 253–72.
Daly, Kyle. 2014. “2013: An ‘Original’ Year.” SNL Kagan Media & Communications
Report, Charlottesville, VA, January 1. http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/
docview/1474466686/abstract/FDD7040025E4327PQ/1.
Ellcessor, Elizabeth. 2012. “Tweeting @feliciaday: Online Social Media, Convergence, and
Subcultural Stardom.” Cinema Journal 51 (2): 46–66. doi:10.1353/cj.2012.0010.
Evans, Elizabeth. 2014. “Tweeting on the BBC.” In Making Media Work: Cultures of
Management in the Entertainment Industries, edited by Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare,
and Avi Santo, 235–53. New York: New York University Press.
Harrington, Stephen. 2014. “Tweeting about the Telly: Live TV, Audiences, and Social Media.”
In Twitter and Society, edited by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt,
and Cornelius Puschmann, 237–47. New York: Peter Lang.
Hibberd, James. 2014. “CW Explains Renewing ‘Beauty’ While Axing ‘Tomorrow People’.”
Entertainment Weekly, May 15. http://www.ew.com/article/2014/05/15/cw-supernatural-
spin-off-tomorrow-people.
430 Television & New Media 19(5)

Hod, Itay. 2015. “How Hollywood Actors’ Twitter Followings Have Become as Important as
Talent.” The Wrap, March 10. http://www.thewrap.com/how-hollywood-actors-twitter-
followings-have-become-as-important-as-talent/.
Holloway, Daniel. 2014. “The CW’s Male-Pattern Boldness.” Broadcasting & Cable 144 (39):
12–15.
Johnson, Derek. 2007. “Fan-Tagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Conservative Hegemonies of
Fandom.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan
Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 285–300. New York: New York University
Press.
Johnson, Derek. 2013. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture
Industries. New York: New York University Press.
Lin, Jhih-Syuan, and Jorge Peña. 2011. “Are You Following Me? A Content Analysis of TV
Networks’ Brand Communication on Twitter.” Journal of Interactive Advertising 12 (1):
17–29.
Lotz, Amanda D. 2014. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. 2nd ed. New York: New York
University Press.
Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. 2010. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter
Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13 (1): 114–
33. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313.
Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. 2011. “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter.”
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17 (2):
139–58. doi:10.1177/1354856510394539.
Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New
York: New York University Press.
Muntean, Nick, and Anne Helen Petersen. 2009. “Celebrity Twitter: Strategies of Intrusion and
Disclosure in the Age of Technoculture.” M/C Journal 12 (5). http://www.journal.media-
culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/194.
Peeples, Jace. 2014. “Op-ed: The Trouble with ‘Teen Wolf’.” The Advocate, September 17.
http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/09/17/op-ed-trouble-teen-wolf.
Rose, Lacey. 2014. “How Valuable Is That Netflix Show?” Hollywood Reporter 420:44.
Ross, Sharon Marie. 2008. Beyond the Box. Blackwell Publishing. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/10.1002/9781444304817.ch/summary.
Stanfill, Mel. 2015. “The Interface as Discourse: The Production of Norms through Web
Design.” New Media & Society 7:1059–1074. doi:10.1177/1461444814520873.
Tryon, Chuck. 2013. On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Umstead, R. Thomas. 2014. “The Graying of the TV Viewer.” Multichannel News 35 (33): 31.
Van Dijck, Jose. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Author Biography
Annemarie Navar-Gill is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at the University of
Michigan. Her research focuses on the technology and labor of entertainment industry/audience
relationships. Prior to pursuing a PhD, she wrote for the television series Gossip Girl.