The Surprisingly Fantastic Script: Imaginative Immaterial Labor, "Multitudinous" Screenwriting, and Genre Innovation Within Peak TV

Abstract

Analyzing the production relations between television writers, producers, and showrunners, this project conceptualizes connections between diversity labor and the teleplay form, focusing on the negotiated nature of script authorship during the digital era of Peak TV. To map structures of immaterial labor within the global production of corporate fantasy, reposition televisual fantasy as a spiritual storytelling mode of community expression rather than its default definition as a commercial genre, and interrogate the corporate-media conceptualization of “innovation” as individualistic white-male achievement, I integrate economic lessons from teleplay writers’ script development, entertainment news, industry folklore, and my own class history, with life stories of African American, indigenous, LGBTQ, immigrant, and female writers/producers. I conclude that to enrich their exchange value in racialized and gendered labor markets while creating quality TV, teleplay writers from marginalized “multitudinous” groups deploy hybridized genre tactics innovatively by pairing commercial sensibilities of form with cultural knowledges grounded in community.