Jonathan, you are a highly prolific writer who has published books on a broad range of topics. What do you see as the unifying theme(s) running through your work?

One of my key interests lies in how audiences operationalize media, or, in simpler terms, how meaning is created between items of media and their audiences. More specifically, I'm intrigued with how meaning for something can be created outside of that thing itself. Thus my first book was about how parody aims to "hijack" the meanings of various other genres, recontextualizing how we make sense of them. And the recent book, Show Sold Separately, is about how all those things that surround a film or television show, from DVD bonus materials to ad campaigns, merchandise to fan-created texts, actually play a key role in creating meaning. Satire TV, meanwhile, was in one sense a book about how politics and the news come to make sense in entertainment television. Television Entertainment was a little different, but is most clearly indicative of another central and intersecting strand of my work, which involves exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of media entertainment.

One of your primary contributions to the space of fan studies has been to focus attention on "nonfans" and "antifans." Why have these groups been neglected in audience research for so long? How do they relate to older categories like negotiated and oppositional readers? And what do they add to our understanding of fan culture?

Functionally, fans tend to be easier to study, at least from a cultural studies, qualitative perspective. When one is going to spend a portion of one's life sitting down and chatting with people about their media consumption, or reading their postings online, it's understandable that one would gravitate towards those audiences who are most literate about their subject, and most excited. "Snowball" sampling tends to pick up more fans too, since they can often be keen to be interviewed. Theoretically, a lot of qualitative audience research was motivated in part by a desire to show media consumers as not so hopelessly lost in the system as some suggest, and thus it was rhetorically important to make that case with fans.

But along the way, the risk has developed that fans stand in for audiences in general, when many audiences aren't fans, or define their fandom in very different terms. A particular danger here is that fans tend to know the whole object, and they tend to be very close to it. But what about those audiences who, for instance, know they hate something, even though they haven't ever watched it, or have only seen bits? They also have a relationship to the text, and it's created meaning for them, but it's a relationship that we've not studied too closely. Hence my interest in anti-fans. And then somewhere in the middle are those people who might watch semi-regularly, who have opinions on a show, and to whom the show means something, but who miss episodes and who have poor knowledge of background information. Surely much media consumption is casual and "meh"-ish: non-fans. But what is the show to them, and how do they construct it?

I'd see fandom, non-fandom, and anti-fandom as a completely different dimension from oppositional, dominant, or negotiated readings. After all, as fan studies have shown, some fan readings are deeply oppositional, some are dominant. Similarly with anti-fans and non-fans. As to your final question about what studying such viewers would add, they'll allow us to understand how affect works more clearly. Fandom involves anti-fandom (think of the Star Wars fan who hates Trek, since his galaxy isn't big enough for both franchises, or of X-Philes who hated the addition of the Terminator in the final seasons), and vice-versa (many haters are performing a love for something else). So just as we can't truly understand a concept like gender without interrogating both "masculinity" and "femininity," we won't truly get how affect works generally, or even how fandom works specifically, till we explore anti-fandom a little more.

Some critics have argued that news parody programs cheapen political discourse, trivializing important matters, and represent the further shift away from hard news and towards "news entertainment." Your Satire TV book takes a different perspective. What impact do you think such programs have on civic engagement and democratic participation?

That complaint, that The Daily Show and its colleagues take viewers away from hard news, always seems to forget that very few satiric shows actually compete with the news in timeslot. It also seeks to blame satire for the failings of the news. If people aren't watching the news, it's not because Jon Stewart is doing magic tricks in the circus tent down the road: it's because the news is often a seriously debased entity, reporting in a slack, half-ass way, addressed to an older white male audience, often with little interest in others, in a manner that is often the true circus act. So first off, I'd respond to that criticism by saying that if satire TV is so often being compared to the news, that's because the news is doing something wrong. And if people are trusting Stewart more than many newscasters, the productive question would be what is the news doing wrong and what is Stewart doing right, not how is Jon Stewart responsible for the fall of democracy.

But if we move away from comparing them, and consider the shows in and of themselves, their contributions are many. On one level, they're not afraid to be critical or to ruffle feathers. They also speak in a language that many understand, inviting us in, not just using "inside the Beltway" lingo. When successful, they encourage many of us to care about politics in the first place, and they encourage us to be savvy, attentive, critical citizens, watching and listening to politicians and newscasters with our guard up. They are media literacy teachers, while also being voices that empower us to be citizens, rather than cajole us or guilt trip us into caring about politics.

Satire TV mostly focuses on the role such programs played under the Bush administration. We are now a year into the Obama administration. How has his presidency changed the relevance and tone of The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and other such programs? Why are there not shows about Obama in the same way that Lil Bush made fun of his predecessor?

Satirists aren't going after Obama as much, as you note. Which is a pity, since every person in power needs to be subjected to a satirist's sting. I'm a big fan of the medieval Fool model. But we're in a two party system, and therein lies the problem, since too often it requires a binaristic way of looking at politics, whereby criticism of one "side" becomes, whether it wants to be or not, support for the other. On one hand, then, if your job is to make fun of stupid things said and done by people in power, how could you be expected to see the Democrats when at times you need to look through Rush Limbaugh is encouraging people note to donate to Haitian relief since it'll only embolden Obama, when Rudy Guiliani and Dana Perino are claiming there were no terrorist attacks under Bush, when Glenn Beck is being Glenn Beck, when Jonah Goldberg is saying the Na'vi should've been Catholic in Avatar, when Sarah Palin thinks universal healthcare is a secret Nazi "death panel" plot, and when Dick Cheney is doing his best Emperor Palpatine impression? As they did under Bush, the Republicans just give way too much A-grade material to satirists. And on the other hand, if your sympathies lean left, as most satirists' do, it must prove hard to focus on Obama when it means supporting the Birthers and the Tea Baggers as a result.

I'm not someone who feels it's impossible to satirize Obama. But satirists go after crazy politics, and until the Republicans find a way to instill a semblance of sanity in their ranks, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and co. will likely continue to focus on the Republicans. While that takes the eye off the presidency - which worries me - it's still a vital task.

You've written about "news fans" and I find myself returning to this concept in trying to think about the cult that currently surrounds Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Are we at a moment where reactionary politics is fueled as much by the fan followings of talk show and news personalities as it is by Washington-based leaders?

It certainly seems that way, doesn't it? Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity on the right are all doing pretty well. And I'd bet that more folk on the left identify with Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann than with many politicians. Rumor has it that Lou Dobbs is even planning a presidential run [shudders]. Granted, few other fan objects get the chance to "cover" their fans on a weekly basis, so there is something of an echo chamber effect. But the more that we find political mobilization looking like fandom, the more that we need to think seriously about the connections. Liesbet Van Zoonen has an excellent book called Entertaining the Citizen in which she broaches the topic, Cornel Sandvoss has done some thinking about this, and you have too. But sadly the folk who study fans and the folk who study politics and journalism have been so successfully segregated from one another in most instances that there's nowhere near enough analysis along those lines.

In the second part of the interview, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jonathan Gray talks about his new book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. Don't know what a Paratext is -- you will soon, as Gray explains how everything from "Oscar Buzz" to action figures help to shape the meanings and emotional experiences we have in relation to the films and television shows we watch. There was not an Oscar given last night for best paratext -- as long as the evening was and as outraged I was to see that Roger Corman (who happened to have trained two of last night's best director nominees -- Cameron and Bigelow -- as well as such recent winners as Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard) and Lauren Bacall (Lauren Fraking Bacall) were given their special Oscars at a separate event! Yet, it is hard to imagine Avatar making the money it did, a low budget genre film like District 9 making the list at all, or for that matter The Hurt Locker building up the critical support it did in the absence of well-crafted campaigns designed to warm us up to these particular projects. And given the huge grosses that Alice in Wonderland took in this weekend, we certainly might pause to pay respect to the creative promotion that the film has received in the months building up to its release, even though much of the press is going to ascribe the box office purely to the growing public interest in all things 3D. So, this interview seems particularly well-timed, even though, in fairness, I should note that Gray answered these questions some weeks ago and might have new things to say today precisely on these topics.

Your new book, Show Sold Separately, centers around "media paratexts." While this concept has a long history, it is apt to be unfamiliar to many of my readers. Can you define it and explain why you prefer it as a category to other ways of talking about these phenomenon?

I draw the word from a book of that title by Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist. He was interested in all those things that surround a book that aren't quite the "thing" (or "the text") itself. Things like the cover, prefaces, typeface, and afterwords, but also reviews. His subtitle to that book - "Thresholds of Interpretation" - is the intriguing part, since it suggests that meaning might be constructed and might begin at these textual outposts, not just at the site of "the thing itself." And that in turn offers a pretty radical proposition, namely that the item that we're studying, whether it be a film, television show, book, or whatever, becomes meaningful and is interpreted in many sites, some arguably even more important than the site of thing itself. The purpose of the book, quite simply, then, was to examine those sites.

I prefer the word paratext precisely because it has a pretty academic background, and from within textual studies at that, and thus isn't encumbered by a lot of the connotations that surround many of the other words that we usually use. Your readers may be more familiar with "hype," "synergy," "promos," "peripherals," "extratextuals," and so forth. But hype and synergy frame paratexts too definitively as wholly industrial entities. Certainly, paratexts are absolutely integral in terms of marketing, and in terms of grabbing an audience to watch the thing in the first place. But we've often stalled in our discussion of them by not moving beyond the banal observation that hype creates profits. What I wanted to look at is how they create meaning, how our idea of what a television show "is" and how we relate to it is often prefigured by its opening credit sequence, its posters, its ads, reviews, etc. Meanwhile, "peripherals" belittles their importance, since they're not at all peripheral, at least in potential. "Promos" is fairly innocuous, and yet I'm interested not just in how the things that surround a film or show create an image of it before we get there, but also in how reviews, DVD bonus materials, fan creations, and other after-the-fact paratexts might change our understanding later on, so that too seemed inadequate. And though I like "extratextuals" (the title of my blog!), "extra" means "outside of," whereas "para" suggests a more complicated relationship to the film or show, outside of, alongside, and intrinsically part of all at the same time. Hence my fondness for that word in particular.

Let's take the trailer as an example. We've all seen thousands of them. And when you do, you often hear evaluations from the crowd around you. That's because everyone is judging the film before it's even been released. But they're not just saying "wow" or "ugh" - they're learning something about the characters and whether they can identify with them, about the genre of the film, about the kind of world that it's set in. In short, they're getting a pre-view of the film's basic components, and it's thus being constructed as a meaningful entity for them. When the film finally comes along, it doesn't begin with a fresh slate; rather, its viewers have a history with it. They've come with expectations, with engagements with certain characters, and with an idea of how to make sense of it. Indeed, in many cases, they'll already be enjoying the film, as played with in a beautiful way by an Onion News Network parodic item about Iron Man trailer fans being worried about the studio making the trailer into a feature-length film.

But all sorts of other things might happen along the way too. Perhaps the trailer confused us into thinking that the film was something different, and so we sat down to watch an action film and got a drama instead. Or perhaps the hype and paratexts annoy us, and so we decide that we don't want to see the film - we don't need to, since we already know it to be junk. Or perhaps paratexts clash - the trailer looks awful, but then you hear an interview with the director and you're fascinated. The frame of mind that we bring with us to any viewing experience is remarkably important, and paratexts often play the key role in creating those frames. Meanwhile, the story doesn't even end after watching, since other paratexts might reframe an experience. Perhaps a "making of" special or a podcast asks us to think of it in a new light, maybe a fanvid, item of fanfic, or other fan creation challenges our understanding of a character. The great Russian theorist of narrative, Mikhail Bakhtin, poetically wrote that no meaning is ever dead, and that every meaning will have its homecoming. So too with all items of media, which aren't just framed; they can be reframed.

I've spent some time in the blog over the past few months reflecting on the benches that were erected in anticipation of District 9 and the ways they contributed to narrative exposition and shaped emotional reactions to the film, well beyond their roles as pure promotion or publicity. I take it you would read these as classic examples of paratexts. How would you explain their contributions to District 9?

Those are great examples, since they put you into the world. When you're faced with a bench that tells you one kind of being isn't allowed there, it opens up a history, at least in the U.S., of segregation, and of racial intolerance. We like to pat ourselves on the back and think that it's all behind us, but such benches haunt us with the notion that it's not. If you're Black, I'd guess there's a sore wound that's opened. And if you're liberal and White, there might be some liberal White guilt over your potential complicity with the segregation: do you really want to sit on that bench now?

All that can happen before you even know there's a movie. Now when you're told there's a movie, and that these benches are part of it, they've given you an experience of that world. You've set foot in it and had an experience in it. The narrative, in other words, has begun. Your allegiances are being pulled on. Or, to point to another classic example from film history, the Jaws poster scared the crap out of me as a kid. I couldn't swim without thinking that a massive great shark was about to gobble me up, as I moved on unaware, just as with the woman in the poster. So the horror and fear began long before the film (and, damn the designer, continued long after!).

What I'd hope readers would see is how many different media the story can be told over. It's not just the "big" media, like film, television, books, comics, and videogames - trailers can also play a part here, as can opening credit sequences, or DVD bonus materials, posters, ad campaigns, or, as we've discussed, benches. When we recognize that, we move towards realizing how audiences have always been intimately familiar with serial storytelling and with transmedia. We're all already well-trained to keep shows on hold for years, inbetween trailers and film and bonus materials, so I'm dubious when I hear complaints about audiences being unable and unwilling to deal with seriality and transmedia.

But if I talk of "us" needing to realize that, meaning "us" as analysts or fans, it's also production cultures that need to learn from it. Towards the end of the book, I draw on several interviews I conducted with transmedia producers, and they all point to an industry that isn't currently set up to facilitate discussions between the marketing department, the writers, the DVD producers, the videogame designers, and so forth. Let's imagine a future in which communication improved, and thus one in which all these paratexts and sites didn't work against each other or simply in spite of each other, but instead contributed to the serial development. Then, as audiences, we could have a much richer product, and I imagine the producers would be much richer too.

I don't mean to foreclose the possibilities of resistive readings. But someone very smart and way more knowledgeable about fandom already wrote Textual Poachers, and if there's only one thing that many people in cultural studies know about slash fanfic it's that it's supposed to be doing interesting, resistive things with gender and sexuality (I say "supposed to" only because some don't believe that). So when I came to the chapter on fan-created and -circulated paratexts, I didn't need to make that point. Instead, I wanted to focus on how one can use paratexts to cut one's own groove through a text in a way that isn't necessarily working against the producer's version, but that is personalized nonetheless. Many relationship and character study fanvids, for example, don't necessarily repurpose a character, but they do ask us to stop and think about that character and his or her history in ways that the official text, in its breathless progression, may not have time to do. I don't mean to suggest that this is either the dominant form of fan use of paratexts, or even one that's necessarily changed in a more obviously convergent media era. But it might help cultural studies to back away from some of the desires for an orcs vs. hobbits style bad-and-good battle between The Industry and The Fans, and to focus on smaller, humbler moments of repurposing.

Critics in the 1980s talked about television series such as He-Man, Masters of the Universe as half hour commercials for toy lines, suggesting that the commercial tie-ins stripped them of any real meaning or narrative interest. Your work suggests something different -- that the toys become vehicles for extending the meanings of a series into everyday life. How have action figures impacted our interpretations of blockbuster movies like the Star Wars franchise?

Star Wars is a great example here, since what we had was a text that was seemingly put on ice (or should I say put in carbon-freezing?) for three years between each film. That's a long time in a child's life, so excellent or not the trilogy likely wouldn't have held the attention of those of us who were kids at the time if it weren't for the toys. The toys kept Star Wars alive by transferring the story and the world to the playground, and hence by keeping that galaxy from drifting far, far away.

However, precisely because the text entered the body of the toys for such a long time, we need to ask how they contributed to the popular understanding of Star Wars. On one level, for instance, I think they worked to gender the text. When all the toy boxes and ads were showing boys playing with them, when FAO Schwarz in New York required one to march through a tunnel of GI Joe figures to get to the boys' palace that was their Star Wars section, and when all the figures had guns (even when all we see them do is drink or press buttons in the films), the toys were strongly framed as for boys. The toys also helped, I'm sure, to amplify fans' nostalgic feelings towards the texts, since those of a certain age can think back to countless days spent playing in school yards or excitedly opening a Millennium Falcon for Christmas or so forth, and all of a sudden Star Wars seems such a huge part of our childhood ... courtesy of the toys as much if not way more than the films. So toys contribute to how we make sense of all these films and shows, and to the cultural meanings that surround them.

But more than that, they also teach kids to expect transmedia and participatory culture. When I talked to Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof about what got him into transmedia, he told me the tale of the Boba Fett toy. When I asked Jesse Alexander of Heroes and Day One the same thing, he too waxed eloquently about Star Wars. Licensed toys let us into fictional worlds, and I've yet to hear of a company send a cease and desist letter to kids for playing with toys, even if they're wedding Han to Luke. So if many of us grew up expecting to be able to play with texts, and move their characters into new realms, let's look to toys for where it may've all started.

I'm glad you asked, since I find it amusing when people hear the topic of my book and quickly pronounce that they hate "that stuff" (hype and paratexts). They'll often list the blockbuster of the moment for illustration, so right now everyone claims to despise Avatar when they want to impress me with the height of their brow. But there is no such thing as a text without paratexts. So it's not a question of preferring a text without paratexts - it's a question of which paratexts are one's poison. Oscar buzz is great for the middlebrow audience, New York Times reviews, buzz at Cannes, or even what their film prof says works for some, and for others it's trailers and huge billboards. So there's no escaping paratexts. If we think we live in a media saturated world, the films and shows are only a fraction of that world - the paratexts are everywhere.

Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches and teaches on various aspects of television, film, and convergent media, including satire, comedy, audiences, and textuality. His most recent book is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), though he has also written Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and is co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), with Robin Andersen of Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World</em>. He also blogs at The Extratextuals and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.