iDMAa: Alright, so, QUESTION 1, looking back over the past decade (for you), what stands out for you as the most fundamental development in society or culture from digital media and digital arts.

MR: Yeah, I think the biggest change that I’ve come across is what I’d call “the two-way street,” the tighter connection and I can’t really quantify that except to say that there’s a lot of different connections that have sprung up. There’s a connection between a piece of entertainment and its fans, a creator of entertainment and the people consuming it, the critics of entertainment or the people who cover that entertainment, and the people who make it (and the people who consume it!). So to me it’s just been a radical shifting of how people are connected to both the entertainment and the people who make it, and the people who write about it. So I can tweet something or get an email from a show runner or a network executive or a fan, and five minutes later the same goes for the fans. They don’t necessarily need people like me to tell them what they like or what they’re interested in, so I feel like my job has been radically transformed by the fact that one of those connections that has been forged is fans among themselves. It’s not to say that they weren’t active before that. There were always fandoms, sometimes very active fandoms. They don’t need someone with the title “critic” to decide things for them or to evaluate things for them. They’re talking to each other, they’re talking on their own message boards, and they have access or perceived access to the people making the show. They can read interviews wherever. So I feel like anyone who does what I do, if you haven’t seriously redefined or rethought what you do, then you’re probably not going to be doing it for long. Because you know the reason I established the first TV website that I ever did was because of two reasons. One was because it was fun and having that connection is just as important for me as any fan out there (again, all of those different connections). And then two, I thought “This seems insane not to because this is the way of the future.” I guess if I had to sum it up I would say the expectation for anyone consuming entertainment is that it’s a two-way street. That it’s not just about putting something out there for consumption, its about having even a say in what decisions are made creatively or how ten years ago, fans didn’t think… People who consumed entertainment, who consumed storytelling in a digital environment or on TV didn’t expect to have any influence over the creator or over the show.

Now, that is not just a given, it’s expected that they will have input, that they would have comments, that they would be able to talk about it. It’s almost reached the point in some ways, and this is just a subset of fans, but there’s a sense of entitlement at times. You’re not on the set, you’re not in the writer’s room, but you should have some say over what goes down. I think people ignore the people who consume their products at their peril. The flipside is you can either be too afraid of offending people or be catering to them too much and I think it’s just a very strange thing.

Fifteen years ago, I didn’t know the name of anyone who made a TV show. Maybe I did… maybe I knew the name Aaron Sorkin (http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0815070/) or John Wells (http://www.imdb.com/ name/nm0920274/) from ER; I don’t know that when Hill Street Blues was on that I knew who made that (http:// www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=hillstreetb). I mean I saw the MTM logo at the end of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection. php?entrycode=marytylermo) so I think I kind of vaguely knew on some level that her and her husband Grant Tinker (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0863987/) made that show, but it just wasn’t a visible thing. The machinery behind something wasn’t visible and now I feel like there’s a first life that something has on TV, and the second life which is almost as important, takes place online and you can’t have one without the other now. They don’t exist without each other and some people are obviously now only consuming TV shows online and that’s another big shift. People’s connection to how they consume the media is way more under their control. Seriously, we joke sometimes that, like, I’m about to turn 46 in a couple of weeks. I do remember getting up to change the TV channel. It’s interesting though because growing up in the1970s and 80s you did have a connection to what you consumed but it was because you had to in a way. There wasn’t anything else. There were the networks and PBS and I was talking to a friend about this the other day… when HBO came along it was so exciting to go over to a friends’ house to view anything from live concert to fights, it was the exciting thing.

So, now people assume they have choices, now people assume they can consume media where they want when they want. Now people do not just watch traditional forms of entertainment but play games and do whatever else. The assumption that the old forms of media have some kind of control or power over us (http://communicationtheory. org/magic-bullet-or-hypodermic-needle-theory-of-communi- 43 cation/), I think that’s kind of gone. I think they still do, but our relationships with them are much more… In my opinion, our relationships with the media we consume the power dynamic has shifted enormously. To the point where I think people are quite rightly afraid of what consumers are going to do next. I don’t know either, there’s no telling.

People are always saying “When will we see a big time show runner go into the digital space and create something just online” and I’m responding, “When they do it.” Somebody figures it out, I don’t know. Joss Whedon did that for Horrible (http://drhorrible.com), and everyone thought “Oh, that’s the next wave!” and the next wave didn’t really crest behind him, but I don’t think that’s really how change works. I think somebody cracks the nut and then everyone follows. No one knew they wanted an iPad until the iPad was in front of them. I don’t think there’s necessarily going to be that “a-ha” moment where it’s like “Oh this new show that’s debuting is just like The News Room but it’s purely online.” I was just reading this new article in Emmy Magazine about all of the digital ventures that are going on with Yahoo, with Netflix. I was aware of some of them but actually some were new to me. YouTube has all these channels. I just think it’s going to be one of those things where maybe there will be that “a-ha” moment where someone comes up with an innovation that kind of gives the mechanism of taking the traditional TV industry and putting it more firmly into the online/digital space. Maybe someone will come up with a mechanism for that to happen but for now it seems like its just kind of growing in fits and starts and maybe that’s just the way it should be.

iDMAa: I know I’ve been struggling with trying to figure out the same thing. It’s been fascinating to watch because definitely over the past ten years more has now been developed for the online world and stuff has been developed that is really good for the online world but there hasn’t been that big “a-ha” moment or that sense that there’s going to be this radical merging of the two.

MR: Right, and that’s the thing. I spoke to Joss Whedon around the time Dollhouse was going to premiere and I squeezed in a couple questions about Dr. Horrible because that had just come out like a couple weeks earlier. We were sitting on the set of Dollhouse and I said, “So is your next project going to be… So why go back to television?” And he just shrugged and said, “Look around you.” And we were sitting on this set, it’s gorgeous; it looks like the nicest spa you’ve ever been to in your dreams. And if you look at Dr. Horrible it’s clear that it was made with like $49. They called in a lot of favors, and it looked good, but it looked like a digital series. It did not look like the hour of television on Fox that cost probably two million dollars. The set cost a million dollars on its own. So it’s just not there yet. And I know having covered the strike and talked to a lot of show runners, I know people are interested in that. Tim Kring has this new thing online called Daybreak (http://www.daybreak2012.com) (through a partnership with AT&T (http://www.att.com/gen/landingpages? pid=22871) and BBBO (http://www.bbdo.com). I’m not really sure; I keep meaning to look at it. But there are these things that are kind of around the margins. I think they kind of are on the margins, but they will be until they aren’t. It’s not really going to be long before something takes off on Hulu or Amazon or Yahoo or YouTube and becomes as possible as something on one of the smaller cable channels. You can look at Portlandia and think “Wow, that could just as easily been a digital series that IFC decided to sponsor.” So I think the merger is coming. It’s interesting to be in that place though because it’s like I have enough to write about and cover and to keep track of the on-air stuff and then I do try to watch online series and I try to keep track of that stuff but then its like “Ok great, there’s so much going on!”

iDMAa: There has to be a limit!

MR: No kidding! Exactly, and I don’t know what that limit is and I don’t know how you set the criteria.

iDMAa: It’s kind of like what the viewer is faced with in a weird sort of way. I was reading Emmy Magazine too, probably the same issue, and I was reading the little blurb about youth and television. It was talking about how younger people are watching just as much television but it’s so dispersed that there’s no collective sense of “This is THE show that youth are watching” like there used to be. There’s just so much in a way of options.

MR: And that’s the thing… I don’t think it’s going to be one “a-ha” moment. Maybe there will be, but that moment will be kind of a tipping point of many things happening. It’s not going to be like “Oh, and then this person reinvented TV and now we’re here.” It’s just going to be an interesting journey. I do think that forever in entertainment there has 44 been this huge tension between who has control: the artist or the person putting up the money. And the people putting up the money are interested in spending less money, maybe they give up more control and people who are interested in making things are interested in having more control over that. There are interested parties on both sides and so I think it’s going to continue to come together but I think it will just be one of those things that fits and starts.

iDMAa: I think you’re right. I think it’s going to have to come from a number of areas like the right people, the right legs of the industry and the same time. You’re already even starting to see a little of it on TV with Kevin Bacon’s new show only being twelve episodes and Sigourney Weaver’s show only being so many episodes. These weird little things can happen then where it’s like “Oh if its only six episodes that we’re creating than the money’s justified” to create something that’s high quality.

MR: Even if it’s like Hatfield & McCoys (http://www. history.com/shows/hatfields-and-mccoys), someone was just saying it’s going to be like the olden days when there were a lot of movies and mini-series. It’s funny because things come full circle, in a way. You also have web series that are sponsored by Kraft, just like the 50’s, the classic era of sponsorship. There are just a lot of models out there and there’s that whole innovators dilemma… how much can people change? I think that no one would have said, “Hey, a series about a female gamer’s issues is going to be huge.” That’s the kind of thing that focus groups are made to kill. I think the networks and the studios, as they stand, are very much wedded to an old way of doing business. I don’t think they can change beyond a certain point. Certainly, the corporate overlords want them to keep making more and more money, not experiment with weird stuff that’s going to make them less money. It’s kind of like they have a little slush fund for “Ok, we’ll take a chance on this.” That’s how it will happen, I think.

iDMAa: So you talked about how there’s two things that you face now: the sheer exponential growth of what you could potentially be writing about and then the fact that the consumer now is looking less for a critic or an arbiter of taste. So what do you see as your roll now in what you currently do?

MR: (Laughing) This is something I’ve thought about so much. I feel like I have, in my own mind, defined up to a point what it is I can bring, although it’s always evolving. I think it always has to evolve. But I think what I can bring to the party is… there are a ton of fan sites out there, but if you’re devoted to Supernatural, that’s kind of what you watch, and maybe one or two other shows. If you are really into Dr. Who and you might watch one other show. I’ve watched everything, but I could sit there and say “Hey, if you liked Falling Skies you might like this. If you liked Revenge, you might like the new Dallas.” I can sort of draw connections for people. I think it’s unfashionable for critics to say this but I do view myself as kind of a consumer guide. Why not? “Should I watch this? No! OK, moving on.” Sometimes what’s great about the explosion of different forms of media is I can just go on Twitter and be like “Oh my God, this is terrible. Don’t watch it.”

I always thought Roger Ebert was this person: he’s your friend who knows a lot about movies, who talks to you in a conversational way that isn’t condescending and off-putting. I don’t put myself in his league but I think that you have to be or you should be. You basically become a trusted source, not trusted to always be aligned with someone’s taste but just to be kind of an honest broker of opinions. “I didn’t like it but oh, this critic really dug it and I didn’t think about this so here’s a link to what they did.” You develop an audience over time if you’re lucky and over time they view you as someone who takes your job seriously and hope that others take themselves seriously. I don’t take myself seriously, but I take the idea that I can provide some guidance seriously. So I can be someone 45 who has seen a lot of stuff and can tell you what’s good/ what’s not, make connections, draw parallels.

One of the most popular things I did this year was a slide show with some of the similarities between Game Of Thrones and Mad Men (http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/11/mad-men-game-ofthrones_ n_1500186.html ). Not to be patting myself on the back like, “Oh yeah, I totally see that! I hadn’t see that connection or that parallel” but it’s just fun just to play around with that stuff. If I can enhance their experience and maybe make them think about something that they didn’t think about before, entertain them; make a funny comment, or an insight that they hadn’t thought of. I think there’s just a desire to like things, and when you like things you want to prolong the experience. If you go to a great restaurant, maybe you meet a friend of yours later and say “Hey, have you been to that place?” and you spend longer than the actual meal itself talking about how good it was and why it was good and why you liked it. And why you wouldn’t go and why you should stay away. It’s a natural, natural thing but I think people always had the water cooler on real life but now you can do it online. You can prolong your angry reaction to something. You can prolong your pleased reaction to something. Or you can just go “What does that mean?” and other people will go “Oh, this is what it meant.”

I was catching up with Once Upon A Time, and there was obviously some big event or connection that I had missed and I said “Why is this person doing that?” and fifty people on Twitter in two days were like “Oh, they did this!” and it’s like “Ok…” But again I think it is a two-way street. If a ton of people are like “Oh, you should give this show another chance,” or “Have you checked out this,” or “I really didn’t agree with you on that, but I trust your opinion.” The funniest thing about this job is ten years ago when I would write something and someone didn’t agree with it, they would email me at the (Chicago) Tribune, and I would email them back (I could, humanly). People would say “Oh my gosh, it’s a person! I didn’t expect a person to reply to me.” And it always struck me as so sad, like “Well why wouldn’t I write back to you? What kind of monster am I? Of course I would… I’m pleased that you felt that you wanted to communicate with me.” Unless it was like super mean, which wasn’t actually that often. When people would say, “I’m surprised you replied to me” I would just say, “Of course I would.” That just struck me as sad, but now I feel like I would never get that email. I’d get the angry “I emailed you two days ago!” Now I can do the complete switcheroo in terms of how people perceive their place in the ecosystem, which is great because they shouldn’t be the pawns of “the man.” They should feel like they have a say and they have a voice and that they can register their discontent. There are things I feel I can offer because frankly, I view things this way… People don’t have a lot of time to watch TV, to consume media. If I can be someone who they use to narrow the list, and like you were saying there are so many kinds of media, so if I can say, “Hey, this is a funny web series,” or “This is a good essay about books.” Once in a while I will write about books or tweet about books when I’m reading something or if I find a good essay. So we try not to go off-topic too often. I’m really of the opinion that, like just the other day I was tweeting with a complete stranger about books, and he was just reminding me of Michael Chabon (http:// www.michaelchabon.com) and “Wow, I’ve never read Kavalier and Klay so I should do that.” I think that there is a bond that you can establish with people online. It’s not the same as friendship, but it can maybe sometimes lead to friendship. It absolutely is a trusted venue. If tons of people are saying the same thing on my Twitter feed or on my Facebook it’s like “Huh, ok I should pay attention to that.” That’s what’s cool about this day in age but again it’s so much to pay attention to that sometimes it can just be overwhelming.

iDMAa: Completely overwhelming! I can get lost online so easily that I have to limit myself.

MR: Oh, totally! I have to go downstairs and unplug the WiFi all the time. And I’m lazy enough that I know I won’t go down for at least an hour.

iDMAa: So when you were making the shift over to Huffington Post, or when you started using Twitter, what was the most challenging thing about moving to a more immersive career path in digital technology? Were there things that were hard for you to learn about or were there things you had to talk yourself into doing?

MR: I think that the biggest thing was that any digital traffic that I brought to Tribune was a bonus. Now it’s much more quantified, its more paid attention to so that was intimidating. I’ve actually been really lucky. Really I’ve been given 46 the range to kind of do what I want. When things bring in great traffic, that’s great but I’m not… You sometimes hear about how some people are the digital… just driven in this digital realm to put out twelve stories a day or whatever. I don’t have that pressure. I don’t know if I’m just an anomaly in the system but I get time to do interviews, I get time to write what I want to write and do long episodic reviews and no one is standing over my shoulders saying “Gosh, you’ve only done two things today!” There’s an understanding that it takes time. There are some things you do that can just be cranked out but not everything is like that. So that was the one… I wouldn’t even call it a problem it was more of an intimidation factor that I feel like hasn’t finished crushing our own so dramatic as I thought it might be (?). Honestly the pluses of going purely digital outweigh the minuses. One of the big minuses is that I do miss the print audience of the Tribune, I absolutely miss that element. I think there were many people, including my own husband, who only read me in print. I really think there’s an educated, intelligent audience that mainly reads print and I miss those people. I had one day before I quit the Tribune (because it had been so bad there) I had about four weeks of feeling absolute terror and panic and pain at having severed that connection because it was like you cut off your arm. It just felt like “I’m going away and what if people don’t ever find me again.” That was horrendous because I do think that there is still an audience out there for print. I get The New York Times, I read the print, I don’t really go to the website. I’m that person to some degree. So that was hard, that was a much bigger minus than any other pressure I felt going to digital. But having said that, being at a site where everyone is writing about TV and everyone’s covering TV, it’s such a relief.

iDMAa: Has that been the biggest “working environment” plus for you?

MR: Oh, totally! Absolutely. It just felt like you don’t have to sit there and convince people of what’s important or what needs covering. It’s a huge relief in a lot of ways. I found a really welcoming environment and some good colleagues so I feel really lucky.

iDMAa: Do you get to meet them?

MR: I have met them, yes. I work out of my house but we’re on G-Chat and email and just online all the time.

iDMAa: Well looking back on the past ten years as the digital world has really taken off, is there an aspect about television and digital media that you wish you’d learned more about or you wish you had skills in?

MR: That’s a good question. Honestly, Garage Band, Photoshop… I know how to do some video editing but I’m not great at it. I’ve never had any formal instruction in graphics, audio, editing, or web design. I don’t know that… whenever I go speak to classes like yours I always say “Learn that stuff” because I didn’t and I’ve had to teach myself. When it’s two in the morning and you’re trying to cut together a ComicCon interview when you don’t know what you’re doing it’s kind of torture. Most of the stuff you pick up you can pick up on the fly; it’s not that hard. There are those moments when I’m like “Boy, I bet people in Journalism school now are just learning digital programs for editing,” and all sorts of things (web design) like it’s nothing. And I certainly didn’t have that.

iDMAa: Is there any aspect of digital media and television combined that you’re most excited to explore or learn about in the next ten years? (If you had time to do it.)

MR: I think I’m just really interested in storytelling and how it works. What works in one venue and doesn’t work in another, like why does a novel work really well? Why did Game Of Thrones get better when it started sticking less-closely to the books. What is a movie doing differently than a TV show? What I’m excited about is the fact that there’s a whole new toy box of creating online videos where… I’ve said this a lot. I don’t think that digital TV shows will really come into their own until the next… Netflix has bought Arrested Development, but when it discovers a new voice, a new creator, that wouldn’t have gotten a chance without Netflix or Amazon or YouTube or anyone like that giving them a chance. When someone of a caliber of… even the next Grey’s Anatomy, or the next whatever. When a voice or show comes into our world from that medium and it’s not from any traditional TV show or any traditional storytelling modes that we already have.

Felicia Day (http://feliciaday.com) is an example of that. She took the resources that she had and made something out of it and made something suited for that genre. And she was not someone that would have ever gotten a chance in the traditional media because she tried and she got rejected. So to me, that’s the promise of what’s coming next. People telling the kind of stories that fit in that medium and that work in that medium and that have 47 the possibilities of that medium baked into them. Online, why can’t your series be 8,000 episodes long? Or eight episodes? Or two? Or one and a half? To me, the possibility of digital entertainment is almost endless and it’s going to take “Where’s the next Louis C.K.?” to come from that environment. Maybe he’s already out there and I just don’t know about it, I’m fully willing to admit that. To me, there’s a whole generation of people coming up, a few generations in fact, that takes creation and the nurturing of their own voices for granted. They take it as something that they should be able to put out there and that they will put out there and that they can put out there with limited resources. So it’s kind of like ten or fifteen years ago there was a revolution in music because for a few hundred bucks you could buy the tools to make you as decent a recording artist as anyone else out there. You could do it in your house, you could do it in your barn, whatever. Now I think that same possibility’s here for storytelling in the digital realm and I’m just really interested to see the next wave of creators come up and take advantage of that. I’m hoping it’s a much more diverse bay of creators than the heterosexual white men who generally make TV now because try as I might to draw attention to this situation, the studios and the old media companies are not at all interested in diversifying the array of who makes TV.

iDMAa: It really fascinates me given the kind of constant crisis mode that the traditional TV industry is in, that they’re not taking more risks in that area.

MR: That’s exactly what drives them to go to the same people who made a hit eight years ago. It does not matter what they’ve done in the interim, if they’ve done ten film flops, if there’s a perception that they had a success at one time, and because the way the industry runs, that success is probably going to come to a white man of a certain age. I don’t have anything against white men of a certain age, I’m married to one, they’re great/real cool. It’s just preposterous to me that any other Fortune 500 company has to have diversity mandates. It’s just to keep yourself valuable in the market place. The majority of births last year in America were non-white. When those people come of age, are they going to want to watch white heterosexual males go do their shtick on TV shows? It’s hilarious to me, it’s like “Good luck with that, that’s going to work out great!”

iDMAa: It really actually baffled me, especially the lack of Latino characters on TV I find so particularly stunning. It just really shocks me.

MR: That’s why the Latin networks are beating the traditional networks in many cities.

iDMAa: They’re just nonstop, especially in the newscast areas. That’s tremendously obvious. Did you see the whole phenomena with that Shit White Girls Say…?

MR: Yeah, I think so.

iDMAa: It kind of fascinated me because all of my students had heard of it, and I didn’t find out about it until Anderson Cooper did a thing on it on TV (http://www. andersoncooper.com/2012/01/10/bleep-white-girls-sayto- black-girls-creator-speaks-out/). So I found out about the web phenomena through a TV show but my students learned about it more directly, through social media and through their friends tweeting about it and that sort of thing. I think one of these watershed things that is going to happen is that people will find out about content digitally, immediately. It makes it that much easier when someone 48 49 ttells you “You should watch this thing,” it’s a big difference if you’re already on a device that immediately lets you go and check it out. And that will be an interesting phenomena as people go “Ok, now I can immediately go and watch it for at least five minutes.” They won’t forget, so to speak. This was always one of my more intriguing things to think about… a lot of people argue that this kind of dispersed media environment occurs where there are so many options that a lot of people frame it as a cost, a cultural cost, is that we don’t have those TV shows that everyone talks about and that everyone shares as a common language. Do you see that as something that is indeed a cultural/social loss? Is it not as much of a bad thing as people make it out to be?

I don’t know that it’s a terrible thing. I think I do miss it a little bit, like today Dallas is premiering. I remember the “Who Shot J.R.?” thing as being all over the culture. I think whatever little pockets of things that you’re into, it’s going to be a big deal in your world. I know certainly with certain TV show finales I’ll be online with other people, or I’ll be on Twitter… the season one finale of The Killing felt like a huge deal to me and it was not a tempest in a teapot. People I follow on twitter where it was honestly the biggest thing that had happened since “Who Shot J.R.?” I think people find their own ways to make it a big deal, and it is a big deal in their little worlds that they’re traveling in. It doesn’t bother me as much… theoretically, I think it should bother me but I think the shared cultural events… they have more ways to filter out now. When something crazy happens in the pop culture, there are like a million more avenues for your friends or your family to tell you about it. I think that there are shared experiences; they just may not come out the same way.

iDMAa: What’s interesting is I’ve noticed a lot of reporting recently about the uptake in numbers of live broadcasts… like award shows, sports events… it’s almost as if people are turning to those things that you can (at least for now) only easily capture on TV (in droves).

MR: I agree; I think it’s just evolved and it’s going to keep evolving.

iDMAa: I like that way of thinking of it, as evolving instead. The last question is our personal question; looking back on the role that digital media and the shifts in television have played in your personal life, what has been the best and the worst thing to change for you at the everyday level?

MR: The best thing, without a question, is the invention of the DVR. I don’t know how I ever… it’s still my favorite thing ever. We have an iPad, all that kind of stuff is great. The worst thing: Getting too distracted by obvious digital media and not doing my job. Allowing them to become time wasters when they’re fun but, sometimes I just sit there and go “Oh my gosh I just lost two hours.”

iDMAa: I do that to myself all the time. It’s really bad… “I’m going to go to bed in twenty minutes, right after I go see what people are saying about…” and then it’s 2:30 in the morning! I think that’s probably got to be it for myself, as well. The DVR is definitely my favorite thing and once they figure out how to make it hold things through infinity, I’ll be really happy! I don’t know how, but each time they manage to increase what you can hold on there, I still manage to fill it up.

MR: You have to go to weakknees.com (http://www. weaknees.com). They sell extra DVR (space) for DVRs.

iDMAa: Oh my God, that could really be the undoing of me. It’s unbelievable because we save stuff for a while for my son, so we DVR little cartoons and kid shows for him, and then we don’t want to delete it in case he’s throwing a fit one day and has to have that episode. So there’s a huge amount of space for that and then there’s just things we fall behind on. It’s really remarkable how quickly it can happen. I’m going to have to go there I think. Thank you!