BigShinyThing

The Fisher King, Part 1 [just aired in the UK, apologies to US readers] was, of course, a cliff-hanger in the traditional season send-off style, with one member of the central team about to get blown away by an evil serial killer. So far so ‘who killed JR’.

But bonus points to any of you who noticed that the episode was also a textbook exercise in transmedia production, as defined by Henry Jenkins in our recent interview:

[T]ransmedia storytelling or more broadly transmedia entertainment [...] [is] a system where each medium makes a distinct contribution to the media franchise, each is left to do what it does best, and the reader is able to expand on their experience of a favorite story by pulling together bits and pieces of information from various sources.

The plot centred around a cryptic series of macabre clues sent by the Bad Guy to the team members — a severed head, a music box, a British butterfly — culminating in a book code left uncracked at series end. But rather than remaining tucked away in some character’s notepad, the whole code was written up on a large whiteboard, next to all the clues, in frame long enough for anyone with a PVR or PC to screengrab, upload and spend the rest of the summer pondering.

And of course that’s exactly what’s happening. Rather than forgetting about the series until next season, fans are working together online to crack the code ahead of the characters. A Google search on ‘”Criminal Minds” book code’ proves that the series maybe be off-air, but the action has simply moved online. Transmedia indeed. And noteable for being so neatly executed in a mainstream drama series — while Lost is built around the idea of puzzles within puzzles, Criminal Minds is still, at heart, a post-Thomas Harris police procedural.

Remember when the future of television was interactive (which always, frankly, sounded a bit tedious)? Turns out it’s transmedial. And fun.