Audience Homework - television Industry

1a) Matthew Weiner's Mad Men has been encoded for an active audience. As Mad Men is not a mainstream series showed on a popular mainstream channel, it is also aimed at more of a niche audience.

1b) Mad Men targets a more active audience through it's use of high quality cinematography. This high level cinematography would gratify it's more active audience members as they would question and analyse how the text is encoded and constructed as they watch it.

1c) An active audience notices and analyses the construction of a text. Mad Men is a highly constructed series, therefore the active audience would appreciate the gratifications this show gives.

1d) the scene when Don Draper and Peggy are discussing her resignation to join a competing company has an extremely high attention to detail, from the objects on Draper's desk to which books are on his book shelf. This is the high quality cinematography that an active audience would be gratified by.

2) JJ Abrams' Lost appeals to a passive audience by using a variety of conventions that enable he passive audience to decode the text without difficulty. However, it could be argued that a small number of Lost's narrative devices provide the gratifications for a more active audience. For example, the use of enigma codes make the audience question the narrative, causing them to become active.

3) Lost's characters all represent stereotypes with how they are presented and with their constructed personalities. This means that they can be quickly and easily decoded by the passive audience. For example, Shannon is introduced as a skinny, youthful blonde woman who is sunbathing, despite having just been in a plane crash. From just this small section of the text, the audience knows her personality because it fits with the well-known stereotype of a vein, young woman.

4) Mad Men's characters are difficult for the audience to decode. For example, Don Draper is a complex character with how he behaves and treats certain people, predominantly women. He treats his own wife like she is an object in his possession, but is kind and somewhat caring towards Peggy; even when she quits her job to join a competing company, he kisses her hand and wishes her farewell. This complex nature of the characters requires an active audience to decode and gain gratifications.

5) One convention encoded into Stephen Knight's Peaky Blinders to gratify a passive audience is the use of a narrative that is easy to follow...

(unfinished - struggling with the rest of these questions.)