MI CHAEL SZALAY

HBOs Flexible Gold

THE OPENI NG CREDI TS TO GAME OF THRONES move us
through the rings of an astrolabe that circle what seems to be a sun (g. 1).
We orbit the sun to its right, before breaking through the rings toward
a periphery that becomes a map of Westeros and Essos, the continents upon
which the shows events will take place. According to Angus Wall, the creator
of the sequence, the map occupies the inner surface of a sphere, and this
fact recasts the sun as a molten planetary core. As we move toward that
gently concave surface, we focus in on the sigils of the houses at war in
Westeros. The sigils sit atop cities that now rise, as if sprung fromthe mind of
Leonardo da Vinci, in the form of spinning cogs and gears, clockwork con-
traptions powered to life by a molten core that might be the ery crucible of
some world-shaping foundry.
At the same time, and in spite of the mechanical iconography, the credit
sequence feels computer generated, and the digital origins of its analog
effects suggest that its rings and cities are forged from neither the gold nor
the iron that gure prominently in the series narrative itself. They are
forged, I would suggest, from something at once less material and more
malleable: Time Warner brand equity. Channeled from other corners of the
Time Warner universe, that equity is alloyed and forged, by this franchise,
into a form compatible with other Time Warner properties. The design of
the astrolabe evokes the Time Turner used by Hermione Granger in Time
Warners Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (g. 2). So too the astrolabe
evokes the alethiometer in Time Warners The Golden Compass, a divination
device like a clock, or a compass, with hands pointing to places around
the dial [to] . . . several little pictures, each of them painted with the nest
and slenderest sable brush.
1
But most of all, the circling rings that make up
the astrolabe, no less than the ery orb at its heart, recall Time Warners
Lord of the Rings franchisewhich HBO asked Wall and his team to evoke.
2
abstract Recent HBO dramas like Game of Thrones, Luck, and The Newsroom do more than generate
HBO brand equitythey quantify that equity and determine the conditions under which it might be
converted into other kinds of Time Warner equity. These incipiently nancial dramas are futures
markets that establish rates of conversion between heterogeneous equities and should be understood as
functionally equivalent to the class of nancial instruments known as derivatives. Representations
126. Spring 2014 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-
855X, pages 11234. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/rep.2014.126.6.112. 112
The enamed orb at the heart of the astrolabe suggests the Eye of Sauron
(g. 3), and the credit sequence ends by moving us back toward the inscribed
rings of the astrolabe, where we discover a new ring, one ring, that holds sway
over the others. This ring of power comes adorned with a new sigil: the titled
logoof the brandtowhose genesis we have just borne witness, a brandgured
as a bandof gold, a goldring forgedfromother rings since melteddown, here
to be remade (g. 4).
Before we enter the story proper, then, before the lmed narrative of
Game of Thrones begins, we witness something like the making of the brand
world that mediates between the series and the equity into which Time
Warner converts this and all HBO series, brand equity that, thus imagined,
both precedes and follows the production of any such series. Brand equity
serves as the alpha and omega of this world just as the molten substance that
represents it resides, in the simultaneously extensive and intensive spatial
registers of the credit sequence, both within and beyond the world, as both
sun and planetary core. Story emerges from brand equity as earth and rock
emerge from magma, or as coins emerge from molten gold. Compelled by
the latter simile, we might say that the astrolabe and sigils constitute the
immaterial machinery with which Time Warner mints stories from its own
gures 13. (Left to right) Astrolabe, Time Turner, Eye of Sauron. From Game of
Thrones (Burbank, 2012), DVD, opening credit sequence; Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Burbank, 2004), DVD; and The Lord
of the Rings (Burbank, 20022004), respectively.
gure 4. The brand of gold.
From Game of Thrones opening
credit sequence.
HBOs Flexible Gold 113
brand equity (even as they are themselves minted from that equity). At the
same time, the sequence insists, as most brands do, on the foundational role
of the consumer, who here watches, godlike, as if through Saurons Eye. The
extensive and intensive collide in an act of genesis that understands con-
sumers as both beyond and already within the connes of the Time Warner
universe, as both the recipients and the authors of the brand in question.
Seen this way, the astrolabe and sigils resolve a contradiction at the heart of
all brands by generating worlds that seem at once given and subject to
transformation.
The sigils are particularly revealing in this regard. They invoke seals used
since the earliest civilizations to imprint wax, clay, or paper with an authen-
ticating emblem. But they also invoke symbols that, in medieval and Renais-
sance magic, convert angels or demons into numbers that are then
interconnected to form abstract gures.
3
As with magical sigils, so too with
brands: rather than simply embody authority, each sigil or brand measures
and converts authority into more fungible registers. And as with brands, so
too with programming content: in his study of textual permutation and
volatility in the age of repurposed content, John Caldwell observes that
secondary and tertiary texts consistently migrate toward primary status;
whether in the form of interactive media, promotional paraphernalia, or
credit sequences, a given brand volatizes the programming content it seems
to promote, the better to replace it. Recent HBO dramas reexively quantify
the terms of that substitution.
4
Instruments of calculation and conversion,
they anticipate and manage their transformation into and out of Time
Warner brand equity.
Caldwell describes the manner in which new exible conglomerates
and their television networks embrace a constant permutation of identity
as part of their brand posture and commit to rebranding as a mutating
genre of institutional content.
5
HBO dramatic content promotes brand
mutation, the better to rationalize it. In the pilot of HBOs series The News-
room, a producer yells at his anchorman, who has just changed his approach
to the news, You had a brand! As the producer sees it, you stick to your
brand as long as its making money. In the fth season nale of True Blood,
another HBO series, a receptionist expresses similar sentiments when she
asks a shape-shifter pretending to be a vampire, Where is your southern
accent? . . . Its such a part of who you are, of your brand. He replies, Yes,
but sometimes I like to keep the brand evolving, so consumers are more
inclined to stay on their toes.
6
These words might serve as the mantra of
many recent HBO dramas, in which the evolution of characters (or feudal
houses, in Game of Thrones) and the changing relations between them ratio-
nalize the evolution of HBOs brand and its changing relation to other Time
Warner brands. Here, brand denotes brand equity, a species of worth in
114 Representati ons
need of some relational measure. HBO dramas are incipiently nancial
forms; they are stock markets in proprietary brand equities and, as such,
capture how agship television dramas across the entertainment industry
now internalize and negotiate conversions between otherwise diverse cor-
porate properties. A show like The Newsroom, we will see, is markedly dif-
ferent from its predecessors at HBO both in the self-consciousness with
which it aims less for quality than for quality, an already branded net-
work attribute, and in the sophistication with which it converts that qual-
ity into a given quantity of integrity, an attribute of CNN brand equity.
But, additionally, such shows model the scenarios under which similar
conversions will take place. They are futures markets that determine rates
of exchange between diverse corporate equities under prospective condi-
tions. Indeed, I argue that they are, for the conglomerates that make
them, functionally equivalent to the class of nancial instruments known
as derivatives.
Understood in this light, the astrolabe and band of gold imprinted with
the Game of Thrones logo is a visual representation of a mechanism of con-
version that allows for ongoing exchanges between the equity derivable
from this series and others at HBO, a mechanism composed less of gold
than of the exible gold that Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty take nan-
cial derivatives to be. As Bryan and Rafferty have it, those derivatives are
commodities whose primary function is the commensuration of other com-
moditiesmeta-commodities that, particularly since the 1980s, have
come to work as market-created money without formal nation-state guar-
antees, by anchoring the global money systemin a way that bears some key
parallels with the role played by gold in the nineteenth century.
7
The
following essay argues that recent HBO dramas like Game of Thrones, Luck,
and, above all, The Newsroom, represent a new kind of market-created money,
the nature of which the profuse commentary surrounding these shows has
yet to understand.
I
Game of Thrones is among the most contemporary of HBOs shows,
despite its obvious debts to the medieval. The ceaseless competition that is
the warp and woof of the serieshowever visceral and brutal, however
seemingly wedded to the archaictakes place in the service of fungible
abstractions. Game of Thrones packages its feudal houses with their own trade-
marks (sigils) and their own distinctive set of virtues and liabilities: the
Starks are honorable if self-defeating; the Lannisters are ruthless and beau-
tiful. No one house is intrinsically better than any other. As is not the case in
HBOs Flexible Gold 115
the magical worlds of, say, Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, todays villains
turn out to be tomorrows heroes: were promised not some nal confronta-
tion between good and evil, but one between re and ice, heat and cold. We
might say, then, that Game of Thrones understands governance as a function of
something like thermodynamics. Or as a functionof mechanical engineering
and cybernetics: the ingenious cartographic title sequence depicts Westeros
as a self-organizing machine or system. Alternatively, we might conclude, with
many fans of the show, that the law governing Westeros is market law, and
governance there a matter of brand management. InThe Economics of Fire
andIce, anongoing series inSlate, MatthewYglesias writes of one characters
need, while pursuing the Iron Throne, to develop a more credible brand;
she must developthat brand, he insists, because the army she wouldmake her
own has a very strong brand identity regionally. Similarly, Shutterstock (an
online source for stock images) produced a campaign that recasts battling
factions in Game of Thrones as a Game of Brands played between modern
corporations: the dragon-riding rulers of Westeros, the Targaryens, become
AirTargaryen, for example, and the Lannisters, who loan money to the Iron
Throne and, eventually, control it, become The Lannister Investment Group
(g. 5).
8
The Lannisters in particular conrm fan suspicions that Game of Thrones
tells a tale about modern corporations. Writing in Business Insider, Walter
Hickey points out that King Robert Baratheon has run the crown into a vast
gure 5. Really, really mad men. Doug Levy, Game of Brands: The Game of
Thrones Houses as Modern Corporations, Shutterstock blog, August
14, 2013, http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/2013/03/board-game-
the-game-of-thrones-houses-as-modern-corporations/.
116 Representati ons
amount of debt to the richest man in Westeros, Lord Tywin Lannister, and
concludes, Debt-based nancing is very risky. Yglesias draws similar if
more elaborate conclusions. In a post The Lannisters Subprime Lending
he argues that Roberts debts arent some kind of countercyclical stabili-
zation policy. . . . That means a fortiori that hes not going to have the money
to pay Tywin back. Hence Tywin Lannister seizes control of the Iron
Throne in an effort to execute a debt-for-equity swap since his debts arent
actually recoverable; Tywin has no choice but to do this, Yglesias sagely
concludes, since the notional gold wealth of the Lannisters is actually
impossible to mobilize on a mass scale without simply sparking ination.
9
Tongue-in-cheek efforts to consolidate conventional capitalist wisdom,
these accounts move quickly past the show they purport to describe. The
Iron Throne is not simply in debt, but made of debt: the throne itself is
composed of iron swords that are, in the parlance of the series, sold
swords, emblems of obligation. And the thrones own obligations, its debts,
are not just to the Lannisters, but to the Bank of Bravos, located beyond the
shores of Westeros in a strikingly Orientalized East. As George R. R. Martins
novels, on which the HBO series is based, progress, and as winter descends,
that bank calls in its debts and wields more inuence. As if to parallel this
development, Martins saga builds toward an invasion of Westeros, also from
the East, by Daenerys Targaryen, whose rst name evokes the Denarius, an
early Roman coin, and whose last name contains within it the name for
Japanese currency. Daeneryss inner circle is peopled by Dothrakithinly
veiled Mongolian horse clansand she commands an army of highly disci-
plined soldiers called the Unsullied, whose affectless demeanors capture the
Pentagons fantasy, organized around drones and other smart munitions,
of war without affect (for the military, if not civilian populations). But Dae-
neryss real power derives from her monopoly on dragons, and these beasts
are more than they seem. Westeros has run out of re-breathing dragons as
well as money, and its no coincidence that Martin names the realms unit of
currency the dragon. The implication is that Daeneryss arrival from the
east might solve the liquidity problems gured in the approaching winter:
her nancial re opposes a descending freeze that Martin associates with
debt and the dead labor of zombielike White Walkers who threaten to arrive
with the crippling cold.
Seen this way, the possible ascension of Daenerys to the Iron Throne
suggests something like the shift in geopolitical power anticipated by Gio-
vanni Arrighi, in which global inuence moves from New York, the nancial
center of the American Empire, to Beijing, which, with Tokyo, now holds
the preponderance of US debt.
10
Writing in the London Review of Books, John
Lanchester argues that Game of Thrones encourages comparisons with the
present. In Westeros, he writes,
HBOs Flexible Gold 117
seasons last not for months but for years, and are not predictable in duration.
Nobody knows whento borrow the minatory motto of the Starkswinter is
coming. . . . Westeros is like our own world, in which hard times have arrived, and
no one feels immune from their consequences, and no one knows how long the
freeze will last. Our freeze is economic, but still.
11
This brings us close indeedtoArrighi, whoclaims, whenelaborating Fernand
Braudels claimthat aneconomys turnto nance typically represents a sign
of autumn, that it was possible to perceive, in the decline of that economy,
the lineaments of an approaching long freeze.
12
Arrighi is particularly
interested in the anomalous case of the United States at the start of the
twenty-rst century. As was not true in earlier epochs for trade-based powers
in declinelike Genoa, Amsterdam, and London, each of which transi-
tioned to nance by funding capitalist expansions taking place elsewhere
on the globethe United States is a declining power whose turn to nance
has accompanied the inux of foreignmonies andthe assumptionof massive
debt. Westeros represents a similar anomaly, and we might speculate, build-
ing on both Lanchester and Arrighi, that the imminent winter in Westeros
represents the long freeze facing the Anglo-American world, as it collapses
under the weight of its debt, and as its geopolitical inuence moves eastward.
The feudal economy depicted in Game of Thrones is a far cry from twenty-
rst-century capitalism. But its not surprising that an HBO drama should
gesture to nancial crisesthose recently concluded and those yet to come.
Thenetworks lmToo Big to Fail (2011) chronicledthe2008meltdown, andwe
might expect any network committed to precipitating water cooler conversa-
tion among the nations elites to reference churning markets and mounting
debts, even fromwithin what might seemits most escapist fantasy. At the same
time, to understand the current importance of branding within the media
industry is to understand that HBO shows want, most of all, to precipitate
conversation about HBO itself. Let us oblige, then, by recognizing in Game of
Thrones another level of allegory, one that depicts HBOs largely successful
struggle to become the preeminent brand within the debt-riddled Time
Warner.
13
Its hard to think of Westeros as Time Warner, in part because, with the
possible exception of Disney, conglomerates dont brand themselves in the
same way that they dotheir networks, studios, andshows. According toSimone
Murray, while media companies treat individual media properties as com-
ponent units inanoverarching brandmanagement exercise, any givenglob-
alizedmedia conglomerate thinks of itself less as a householdbrand thanas
a house of brands.
14
And yet, while parent companies dont brand them-
selves as afunctionof thebrands that they contain, recent HBOdramas do, and
do so, I want to suggest, to engage in a competition between HBO and other
118 Representati ons
units within Time Warner. Units win that competition, Ill further suggest, less
by defeating their competitors than by demonstrating an ability to coordinate
over time the various forms of equity produced by those different units.
What is Game of Thrones, after all, if not a drama about a house of
brands limping toward a sustainable management structure? In Murrays
words, Time Warner is the company that most famously embraced synergy,
but it has a long history of operating as a fractious assemblage of feuding
baronies (429). Westeros also has a history of operating as factious assem-
blage of feuding baronies. Debt denes both that shared history and the
competition at the heart of each kingdom: Robert Baratheon accumulates
massive debt while bringing order to the warring baronies in his kingdom, as
did Time Warner CEO Steve Ross, who oversaw the tumultuous transforma-
tions that led to the present form of that company. In January of 2000, in the
biggest merger in US corporate history, AOL purchased Time Warner. Ross
and his counterparts at AOL believed that the resulting conglomerate might
contain within its ever-growing body the means to produce and distribute
a wide range of content that could be transferred across multiple media
platforms; the new company was made up of lm and television studios,
book and magazine publishers, record companies, amusement parks, sports
teams, and cable and internet networks. The logic was simple: why pay
another conglomerate for the aftermarket use of content (its lms or tele-
vision programs, say), or for access to distribution networks (its cable or
internet systems), when you might shepherd your own content from one
unit to the next (from your publishing company to your lm studio to your
television networks, for example), and then distribute it over your own cable
and internet networks? At the heart of this question was a new understand-
ing of what media companies actually made: as the Economist put it in 1998,
at the height of the trend toward conglomeration within the media industry,
The industry used to produce lms, TV programs, books, and music. Now
it makes brands.
15
During the 90s, the rise of digital technology was low-
ering the expense of converting content from one medium to another.
Given the high xed production costs associated with producing any one
property, and the increasingly low marginal costs associated with repurpos-
ing that property for delivery over a range of platforms as part of a transme-
dia franchise, corporations anticipated the multiplier effects to be had
fromwhat Murray calls the abstractionof content fromthe constraints of any
specic analog media format.
16
The media industry has not fully retreated from this vision.
17
But the
AOL-Time Warner merger proved disastrous for the companys stock price
and came to represent the high-water mark of media conglomeration and,
more broadly, the maximum ination point of the dot-com bubble. The
merger took place three months before the NASDAQ peaked in March of
HBOs Flexible Gold 119
2000 and captured perfectly the New Economy struggle for higher and
higher burn ratesa measure of the speed with which a given company
could spend money it didnt have, while accumulating if not exactly proting
from elusive forms of brand visibility. In the years that followed, the United
States witnesseda massive erosionof wealthandaccumulationof debt (China
increased its holdings of US securities roughly tenfold during the rst ten
years of the new millennium), as well as the continued ascendency of nan-
cial strategies and instruments meant to generate revenue in the face of
increased global volatility and, more generally, the autumnal waning of a
phase of material expansion that depends, for Arrighi, ontraditional forms
of commodity production.
Time Warners expansion during this period required the accumulation
of massive debt. As Scott W. Fitzgerald reports, the 1989 merger between
Time Inc. and Warner Brothers left the new entity with $11.8 billion in debt;
the merger was possible at all, he adds, because it narrowly escaped new
regulatory restrictions against highly leveraged transactions that resulted
in a ratio of debt to total capital of higher than 75 percent.
18
According to
Fitzgerald, Time Warner serviced its debt over the course of the 90s, while
continuing to grow, by raising equity in an often shady fashion: by forcing
a $2.76 billion rights offering on its shareholders, for example, or by solicit-
ing a massive capital investment from Toshiba, which was promised and
then ultimately denied a management role in the company. The companys
debt reached staggering levels, however, after its purchase by AOL. By late
2002, the new entitys debt stood at roughly $28 billionthis after a series of
scandals involving misreported income at AOL.
19
The need to service this debt led to changes within what Fitzgerald calls
the organizational form of the media conglomerate. Put simply, the debt
has meant less autonomy for thosewhorunTimeWarner relativetothecapital
markets towhichthe company is still heavily indebted. As the companys stock
underperformed inthe years following the merger withAOL, activist share-
holders placed new constraints on upper management, and this led to a new
kind of leadership within the company. Thus, in 2008, after Time Warner
suffered a 39 percent drop in its share price, the companys new CEO, Jeffrey
Bewkes, afrmed a new investor coalition between owners and managers at
the heart of Time Warner, whose strategy, he reassured, was no longer about
the kinds of transformative deals championed by Ross or any visionary
synthesis between the companys many units, but rather about making
money the way Wall Street wanted it made: with a careful eye on price-to-
earning ratios, price-and-earning-to-growth ratios, and enterprise-value-to-
revenue multiples, for example. We intend and we expect, he promised,
to have superior returns in the media sector for investors.
20
He might have
added that, like any Lannister, a Bewkes always pays his debts.
120 Representati ons
Bewkes rose to prominence within Time Warner while serving as the
CEO of HBO, from 1995 to 2002, and after working as a commercial banker
for Citibank. Its tempting, given these facts, to suggest an analogy between
Jeffrey Bewkes and the banking monarch Tywin Lannister, each of whom
assumes power in the larger kingdom while assuaging investors and preach-
ing scal prudence, and each of whom aims to cut back on the expensive
pageantry indulged in by his predecessor. Or, we might make much of the
fact that the rst Lannister to assume the throne after Baratheons death is
named Joffrey. Then again, these readings likely risk taking the allegorical
impulse too farGame of Thrones more pragmatic lesson might simply be
that the fact and quantity of debt matters more than the qualities of the
leader called forth to service it.
As well see, The Newsroominsists on the one-to-one correspondences that
Game of Thrones only tentatively encourages and asks to be read as an account
of why HBO, as opposed to its sister corporate units, should be granted the
keys to Time Warners House of Brands. But its not just an argument on
behalf of HBOs hegemony: The Newsroomunderstands itself as an instance of
the incipiently nancial work upon which that hegemony must rest. Industry
critics have long noted the way in which lm studios and television networks
operate as nancing agents. Jeff Ulin argues that studios and networks are
venture capitalists managing a specialized portfolio; they make educated
bets on and upfront investments in projects that they hope will offer
staggering ROIs [return on investment]. He wonders if they shouldnt
therefore be classied as a specialized form of VC or private equity investor
nancing a variety of projects that it helps nurture but not directly produce/
manage?
21
But Fitzgerald is potentially more useful when delineating the
consequences of Time Warners debt to Wall Street. If HBO operates as
a nancing agent, it does so by virtue of its ability to repackage debtinto
brands (as Game of Thrones repackages debt into swords). The companys
debt, Fitzgerald says, leads to changes in the organizational form of the
media company. But it might also lead us to a new sense of the organiza-
tional formandfunctionof the brands producedby sucha company. We
might read the content of those brands, in other words, not simply as the
occasion of debt (the reason Time Warner borrows money), but as the par-
ticular form given debt by particular corporate exigencies.
II
The Newsroom aspires to inuence; it wants to move the needle, as
Aaron Sorkin puts it, on the important issues of the day.
22
To wit, the fth
episode of the rst season drives home the dire consequences of Bill Clintons
HBOs Flexible Gold 121
repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept separate the nations commercial
and investment banks. Days after it ran, Sanford Weill, Citigroups former
CEO, nicknamed the King of Capital and once an advocate of banking
consolidation, declared the acts repeal a mistake. What we should probably
do is go and split up investment banking from banking, he said. The public
relations rmJ. Roderick Inc. immediately asked, Did HBOdrama inuence
SanfordWeills Glass-Steagall proclamation? The rms website reportedthat
while legislators had been debating banking reform for some time, there was
a quantitative spike in Twitter mentions of Glass-Steagall just after the airing of
the episode. And just like that, the site concluded, as breathless as one of
Sorkins characters, a national debate about banking regulation and reform
began.
23
But for whom does J. Roderick work? Is the rm paid to generate buzz
for HBO? We dont need to know, one way or another, in order to recognize
these as the kinds of questions asked by The Newsroom. Anchorman Will
McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) rufes feathers within the media conglomerate for
which he works, Atlantis World Media (AWM), when his nightly news pro-
gram goes after the Tea Party and the Koch brothers. Hes told to stand
down by CEO Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda; g. 6), because she needs Tea
Party legislators on Capitol Hill to further AWMs interests. But McAvoy has
the backing of the intrepid Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), the president
of AWM subsidiary Atlantis Cable News (ACN), and the two stand their
ground. Soon after, McAvoy nds himself attacked by a gossip newspaper
he assumes is owned by Rupert Murdochs News Corp. But AWM owns the
paper; Lansing is using it to generate grounds for McAvoys termination. You
cant understand the media industry, The Newsroom insists, until you under-
stand who owns what. Surely were meant to understand, then, that The News-
room takes aim at one of HBOs sister units and, by extension, its parent
company, Time Warner.
24
Atlantic Cable News resembles CNN (Cable News
Network): the Atlantis in its name evokes Atlanta, CNNs base of opera-
tions, and the presence of Jane Fonda recalls Ted Turner, CNNs founder
(g. 6). More basically, The Newsroominsists on the necessity of rebranding the
kind of prime-time news programcurrent at CNNwhen the series premiered.
McAvoy and Skinner reject the middle-of-the-road, each-side-gets-its-say cover-
age staked out by CNNover the last ten years in favor of what is allegedly more
hard-hitting and analytical fare.
Understood in these terms, The Newsroom means to inuence less those
who gather before their at-screens on Sunday evening than those who
decide how CNN should be run. CNN has been eager to conrm that inu-
ence. On the day after HBOaired The NewsroomSeason One nale, CNNhost
Piers Morgan told the Los Angeles Times, Theres a lot of internal debate
going on about tone and opinion. Ive been given more license to express
122 Representati ons
my opinion.
25
It would be wrong, however, to imagine the show as a clarion
call urging the news division to grant its stars more leeway to voice their own
opinions. Its rather an argument that CNNneeds HBOs patina of indepen-
dence as part of a carefully orchestrated rebrand. Thus the New York Times
reported, one day after the season nale, that in a bit of corporate synergy,
Time Warner is planning todipintoone of its strongest cable channels, HBO,
to help revive the fortunes of one of its weakest, CNN. The Times reported
that Time Warner had encouraged CNN, which recently suffered from its
worst ratings slump in 20 years . . . to look for creative ways to incorporate
HBOs sports and documentaries into its lineup of news programs.
26
Evidence of Time Warners desire for corporate synergy between
HBOand CNN might have been found earlier, one month after the premier
of The Newsroom, when Jim Walton resigned as head of CNN Worldwide,
citing poor ratings and the need for a new vision within the network. CNN
had been losing audience share for years, and Time Warner CEO Jeffrey
Bewkes surprised nobody when he accepted Waltons resignation. Is it pos-
sible, then, that Sorkins drama functioned, within the darker reaches of
corporate headquarters, as an intradivisional memo? Did Bewkes green-
light The Newsroom as part of an effort to force Waltons resignation and the
rebrand of CNN? Initially, this would seem to make no sense; after all, The
Newsroom announces that a news division should retain its autonomy in the
face of managerial pressure to enhance its ratings.
That message conrms at least one account of how CNN thinks it works.
CNN prides itself on being very church and state, a senior executive at
a cable news channel who used to work for CNN told me. Rick Davis, the
gure 6. Fonda at the helm. From The Newsroom, created by Aaron Sorkin
(Burbank, 2013), DVD.
HBOs Flexible Gold 123
head of Standards and Practices at CNN on whom Skinner is partly based,
the executive said, would never allow any corporate agent to inuence the
handling of a given story. This same source insisted that Bewkes would never
get involved in scripts, and that what seemed like a remarkable convergence
between The Newsroom and Waltons resignation was attributable only to
Aaron Sorkin reading the tea leaves right. And yet, leaks to the New York
Post reported that Richard Plepler, whom Bewkes made boss of HBO in the
summer of 2013, played a key role in advising Bewkes on the rebrand of
CNN.
27
This is the same Plepler who green-lighted The Newsroom, and the
same Plepler who last year reiterated HBOs most essential mantra: Were
. . . not determining success on the basis of numbers. Were determining
success on the basis of quality and we believe the numbers will follow.
28
There is of course no contradiction between Bewkess preoccupation with
CNNs ratings performance and his desire to rebrand that network with
help from the company unit, HBO, whose commitment to quality ostensibly
countermands this measure of value. HBOs heavily branded quality is
essential to its own ratings performance.
29
Nor is there any contradiction
between Bewkess reliance on Sorkin and his rumored reliance on the arch-
conservative Roger Ailes. We just dont have someone with a mission, said
a source within CNN in September. We need our Roger Ailes.
30
Later
news leaks had Ailes lunching with Bewkes, and speculation centered on
whether or not the mastermind behind Fox News was advising Bewkes on
the CNN rebrand.
And why not: the corporate mission is ideologically neutral. HBO mat-
ters to that rebrand exactly as FOX might; the one networks quality is
functionally the same as the others right-wing fervor. FOX makes money for
News Corp because and not in spite of the fact that its programming appears
to value ideological purity over and above the simple fact of generating
revenue. Analogously, The Newsroom converts HBO brand equity (quality)
into CNNbrand equity (integrity) by suggesting the necessary indifference
of both attributes to ratings. Thus Bewkes would argue, when announcing
that Jeff Zucker would replace Walton, that CNN had no more of a ratings
problem than did HBO.
We dont try to win the night at HBO because thats not how you make money at
HBO, he said. Thats not how you strengthen the brand. CNN and HBO have
a lot in common, he continued. Did we pick Girls because we wanted to have the
highest ratings? Did we pick Sopranos or Game of Thrones? No. . . . Some things
youre going for niche, youre going for the brand identity of the network.
31
These are the same arguments made by Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet)
in Sorkins Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the short-lived NBC dramatic comedy
(20062007) that takes us behind the scenes of a ctional late-night comedy
124 Representati ons
revue.
32
McDeere is the new President of Entertainment at the ctional
National Broadcasting Service, NBSmodeled on NBCand shes explain-
ing to reporters howshe plans to run her network. Quality is not anathema
to prots, she tells them (1.2). Better, she insists, to invest in truly good
shows than in poor ones that might be more immediately protable: quality
will attract the right kind of viewers and make you more money in the long
run. McDeere wants to rebrand the network as a place for high-end viewers
(1.5). With this goal in mind, shell refuse to bid on a reality TV program that
seems a surere hit, and instead sign a drama, Nations, about the United
Nations. McDeere convinces the creator of Nations not totake it toHBO, which
is eager to have it. Hes initially reluctant; HBOis where people expect more
literate programming (1.5), he tells her. But McDeere means to change that,
whichis why shell speak atteringly of HBO, andght the networks adoption
of reality TV, which she terms illiterate programming (1.12).
McDeere wants her talent to knowthat she plans torebrandNBS along the
lines of HBO. At one remove, NBC wants to assure its viewers that McDeeres
commitments are its ownthat it too wants to be a home for quality television.
NBCwas the home of Sorkins The West Wing, after all, whichrst airedin1999,
when The Sopranos did, and also ran for seven seasons. But the quality repre-
sented by The West Wing (or by ER, or Seinfeld, or Friends) was never NBCs:
Warner Brothers Television made those series, as it did Studio 60. In the sixth
episode, a cast member walks his parents through the ctional studio from
whichStudio 60takes its name. National BroadcastingServicetookthebuilding
over fromWarner Brothers back inthe forties, he informs themina way that
is loosely analogous, were meant to understand, to how NBC was taking over
shows from Warner Brothers television. Networks dont buy shows exactly as
they dobuildings; they buy the right toair them. But they conance shows with
studios, and in this case, NBC paid for a means of converting Time Warner
quality intoNBCquality. Studio 60does more thansimply trumpet themerits of
HBO programming, in other words; it converts HBO brand attributes into
NBC brand attributes (its about broadcast TV, after all, and it describes
a late-night comedy revue modeled on NBCs Saturday Night Live).
Can that conversion and exchange be quantied? How do you measure
ineffable characteristics or intangible values with numbers, so as to enable
an exchange between them?
33
These questions animate the head of NBS in
Studio 60, who invests in a media startup that promises to reduce the writing
and running of shows to mathematical formulae, so as to liberate networks
from the dependence on writers and showrunners. (These same questions
also animate Sorkins Moneyball [2011], wherein the manager of the Oak-
land Athletics learns to evaluate his players with the sabermetric analysis
promulgated by baseball statistics guru William James.) Media executives
know that quality is worth something. A quality brand will generate earnings
HBOs Flexible Gold 125
over and beyond the subscription fees to the show from which it is derived
for example, from the future sale of DVDs, clothing, books, or licensing
agreements (in 2006, HBO sold The Sopranos to the A&E network for $2.5
million an episode).
34
But these numbers dont tell us exactly what The
Sopranos brand is worth to HBOhow many subscriptions it alone brought
to the network, how many shows it inspired writers to bring to HBO, or how
much merchandise it has yet to sell, for instanceany more than they tell us
exactly what HBOis worth to Time Warner.
35
And, in fact, there is no agreed-
upon metric for determining the value, or equity, represented by a given
brand. David Aaker denes brand equity as a set of brand assets and liabil-
ities linkedto a brandname andsymbol that addtoor subtract fromthe value
provided by a product or service to a rmand/or to that rms customers.
36
The consultancy Interbrand, totake another example, understands a brands
value as the current worth of its future ownership. It calculates brand equity
by identifying the actual benets of future ownership; that is, the current
and future earnings or cash ows of the brand; their security and predictabil-
ity and, therefore, the multiple (of prots) or discount rate (to cash ows)
which can with condence be applied.
37
And yet, determining the actual benets of future ownership is no
simple matter, even under the best of conditions. Relating the present to the
future in this manner must be especially difcult when the stability and
predictability in question depends on a relation between different brands.
So difcult, in fact, that capital markets invented a new species of famously
sophisticated nancial instruments to price similarly complex relations.
Those instruments are called derivatives, and in the next section Ill argue
that Studio 60 and The Newsroom work like derivatives in their ability to
rationalize and stabilize over time exchanges between different measures
of worth, like the brand equity represented by HBO and NBC, on the one
hand, or HBO and CNN, on the other.
III
Derivatives play an important role in the entertainment industry. In
the twelfth episode of Studio 60, Jordan McDeere learns that an overseas pro-
ductionof Dracula has shut down. The productioncompany couldnt affordto
pay the cast and crewwho then made off with the camera equipment
because the Romanian currency had been devalued. The kind of conglom-
erate for which McDeere works would typically use derivatives to guard
against a range of similar contingencies. As we learn from Time Warners
2012 annual report, Time Warner uses derivative instruments, principally
forward contracts, to manage the risk associated with the volatility of future
126 Representati ons
cash ows denominated in foreign currencies and changes in fair value
resulting from changes in foreign currency exchange rates.
38
The deriva-
tives thus described stabilize exchange rates over time; they would have
allowed McDeeres production company, for instance, to place hedges
against the devaluation of the Romanian leu. Those hedges wouldnt involve
the buying and selling of the leu; theyd involve the buying and selling of
agreements to exchange the leu at particular rates of conversion into other
currencies. The central, universal characteristic of derivatives, argue Dick
Bryan and Michael Rafferty, is their capacity to dismantle or unbundle
any asset into constituent attributes and trade those attributes without trad-
ing the asset itself.
39
Brands dismantle and unbundle in a related manner. The twenty-four
episodes of Studio 60 rented by NBC are not themselves the shows brand
they constitute what we might think of as the brands dramatic under-
lier. Rather, the Studio 60 brand organizes and extracts prot from the
frame of engagement called forth by those episodes. If you were a fan of
Studio 60, that frame might be your interactions with others, or your sense of
what you shared with others. As Adam Arvidsson puts it, brand manage-
ment is mainly about managing a productive process which is external to the
brand-owning organization. Brands are for him a virtual real estate that
subsume[s] and appropriate[s] what consumers do with the brand in mind as
source of surplus value and prots. Brands arose from the insight that the
cultural context of consumption could be programmed, worked upon and
come to function as a mechanism for the abstraction of value, as a form of
immaterial capital.
40
The very immateriality of that capital, however, leaves its precise mechan-
isms obscure, and we might understand particular concatenations of HBO
quality as risk-mitigating hedges that seek to stabilize a revenue-generating
process necessarily external to the network. HBOs subscriber-based business
model is itself a species of risk management: it offers more predictable
income streams than those associated with either the gate receipts generated
by lmor the advertising revenue generated by broadcast TVand basic cable.
But HBOs ultimate value, its brand equity, depends on the revenue that its
quality can be seen to generate beyond those subscriptions alone, external
to HBO, whether withina fans living roomor withinrival networks, like NBC
or CNN. Consequently, HBO must be able to rationalize its capacity to buy
and sell a form of equity not reducible to its programming, a form of equity
for which there is no ready measure. As Bryan and Rafferty point out, deri-
vatives are a form of meta-capital that turn the contestability of fundamental
value into a tradable commodity and thereby provide[s] a benchmark for
an unknowable value.
41
We might say that HBOs prestige functions as
a form of meta-capital (quality) that facilitates the transfer of brand equity
HBOs Flexible Gold 127
across a diverse array of products over time, within and beyond the connes
of HBO.
42
Knowing when to execute these transfers in the case of serial television is
famously difcult, because it requires knowing when to bet on one brand
relative to another. It no doubt feels to those involved like buying or selling
a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. That language is Ian Stewarts,
and it describes the Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists
Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, [which] provided a rational way to price
a nancial contract when it still had time to run.
43
Stewart isnt the only one
to have seen a resemblance between derivatives and betting on horse races
or media brands. The rst and only season of HBOs race-track drama Luck
features a long conversation between Chester Ace Bernstein (Dustin Hoff-
man) and a young investment banker reportedly skilled with municipal deri-
vatives. Derivatives, Bernstein says, dripping contempt; You spin numbers
off fromwhat theyre supposed to represent. But values, except for numbers,
go into the shitter, [and] money becomes only itself. Bernstein would sta-
bilize the spin and mitigate the shit with what he takes to be the stability of
aesthetic value, which is why hell remark that while smart and ambitious, the
banker has no sense of style.
44
A beautiful horse is for him an example of
a real if intangible value, as no doubt a truly quality drama is for those who
make and own them. Then again, as Luck amply demonstrates, you dont
need to breed or own a horse to make money at the track.
Bernstein will complain that the banker answers questions with ques-
tions. Answering a question with a question is something like the rhetorical
equivalent of a derivative: it puts one uncertain value in relation to another.
You dont need to own a horse to bet upon its performance relative to other
horses, just as you dont need to own a particular asset to make money in the
derivatives market. Of course with derivatives theres no end to the race,
since youre betting on the performance of one asset relative to another as
they run. Noting this fact about derivatives, Bryan and Rafferty remark that
it is as if the stock market has gone inside the derivative itself: the deriv-
ative is dened so as to spontaneously absorb market calculation (69). Im
suggesting that we understand the contest between horses on Luck, like the
contest between rival houses on Game of Thrones or the contest between
creatures both natural and supernatural on True Blood, as an effort to absorb
and internalize the kind of market calculation faced by HBO in its efforts to
manage its brand equity relative to the brand equity with which it is in
competition, but with which it nevertheless conducts ongoing business.
HBO shows might compete with NBC shows, as one set of horses against
another, but HBO belongs to a company that also wants to rent its shows to
other networks. Similarly, HBO might belong to the same company as CNN,
but it competes with that network all the same. In fact, Fitzgerald argues that
128 Representati ons
the dramatic expansion of derivatives as the largest single component of
the world nancial system has changed how we think of what is external
and internal to media companies. Because derivatives allow nancial mar-
kets to track the performance of individual corporate units relative to the
performance of similar units in other rms, they reinforce the shift, origi-
nally described by James Crotty, away from Alfred D. Chandlers view of the
corporation as an integrated combination of real assets with high sunk
costs assembled to pursue long-term growth and innovation, toward a more
properly nancial conception in which the corporation is seen as a port-
folio of liquid subunits that home-ofce management must continually
restructure to maximize the stock price at every point in time.
45
A victim
of its owncompulsiontowardextreme liquidity, the corporate body dissolves.
Over the last eight years, Time Warner has sold AOL and its sports teams, as
well as its publishing, music, andcable divisions. Andyet the twodivisions that
remain (Networks, and Filmand Television Entertainment) are saddled with
roughly $20 billion in debt, and struggle to meet the benchmark or hurdle
rates established by the nancial sector. Such increased pressure leads not
simply to greater competition between Time Warner and other media com-
panies but also, more importantly, to intensied competition between the
different units that make upits increasingly decentralizedprot centers. As
Fitzgerald explains, its only since the extreme nancialization of the media
industry that individual corporations have come to understand their individ-
ual units, andthe brands that they produce, as being ina potentially cutthroat
struggle with each other, as each tries to establish its greater protability,
relative not simply to each other, but also to what Wall Street expects from
such units generally.
Recent HBO dramas internalize that competition, and the range of mar-
ket calculation that impinges upon it, the better to facilitate the portability of
HBO brand equity within and beyond Time Warner. Along these lines, Ive
argued that The Newsroomprecipitates exchange between HBOquality and
CNN integrity. But more than this alone, The Newsroom functions as a for-
ward contract, insofar as it represents a guess about the future correlation of
those twobrandattributes. Sorkins drama is about the relationof the present
to the future in basic ways. The rst episode of The Newsroom describes events
that took place roughly twenty-six months before the series premier; the last
episode of season one describes events that took place roughly thirteen
months previously. This is to say that over the course of the ten-week season,
the news cycles described within the show accelerated in relation to the
present tense of the shows broadcast. This is also to say that the increasing
rate of that acceleration brings the HBOdrama closer and closer to the status
of a CNN broadcast: as the news items within the show move closer to the
present, the representation of those items moves closer to the kind of live
HBOs Flexible Gold 129
broadcast that denes a news program. This temporal bridging coordinates
the relation between assets in the present the better to extend that coordi-
nation into an uncertain future: The Newsroom functions as a hedge that
guards against the unforeseen risks attendant upon the conversion of HBO
into CNN brand equity.
What John Caldwell might call The Newsrooms industrial reexivity
its eagerness to anatomize not just the kind of labor important to the cre-
ation of news on the one hand and dramatic content on the other, but the
whole range of corporate practices through which media companies gener-
ate revenueimagines the conditions under which HBO might transfer its
brand equity to CNN, just in advance of Time Warners avowal that it would
begin to explore more closely linking the two networks. But only begin to
explore: CNN would not name a new chief (Jeff Zucker) until November 28,
2012, and The Newsroom might therefore seem, airing during the lead-up to
a presidential election, like a trial balloon meant to test the applicability of
HBO liberalism to CNN centrism. The fact that McAvoy is an avowed Repub-
lican, and that Sorkin spoke repeatedly of his desire to add conservative
writers to his staff, suggests the series readiness to adjust itself midstream
and recalculate the intracorporate values it was designed to exchange. From
this perspective, The Newsroom functions as a clearinghouse for the exchange
of corporate futuresas a site that transfers managerial risk into a prot-
generating vision that might or might not become corporate policy. This is
to say something more than that the HBO series seeks to anticipate and
thereby absorb the risk of any unanticipated outcomes associated with the
rebrand of CNN. It is to say, rather, that the series functions as a managed
arena, or market, in which contested forms of agency negotiate future con-
tingency in the process of discovering their exchangeable value.
46
That said, it is currently impossible to recognize the value of brands on
corporate balance sheets in the United States, and notoriously difcult for
media companies to assess the relative worth of their brands, which have
concrete value only when they are sold.
47
But its easy enough to see how that
obscurity might itself be valuable (just as its easy to see why Time Warner
might want AaronSorkin, andnot Jeffrey Bewkes, tooat the rst ideas about
how CNN henceforth would function). If nobody within Time Warner can
accurately price HBO, then nobody outside that network can tell it how it
should be run. Similarly, while it might make sense to transfer HBO brand
equity to CNN, the very nature of that equity countermands the logic of scal
accountability imposed on upper management in the wake of nancializa-
tion. Seen this way, the occult value of prestige restores to managers the
autonomy theyve otherwise lost to shareholders and investors, evenas it apes
the function of the nancial derivatives central to the process of nancializa-
tion generally. Dramas like The Newsroommake plausible claims to producing
130 Representati ons
forms of worththat dont showuponbalance sheets andthus allowmanagers
the breathing room on which the media industry ostensibly is based: the
freedom to support this or that project regardless of its immediately appre-
hensible scal utility. At the same time, quality dramas like The Newsroom
understand the value that they produce, and might subsequently produce, in
strikingly precise ways, whichis why it makes sense to viewthese shows as both
the negation of nancialization and its continuation by other means.
No t e s
1. Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (New York, 2006), 78.
2. Tim Appelo, Secrets Behind Game of Thrones Opening Credits, Hollywood
Reporter, April 19, 2011, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/secrets-game-
thrones-opening-credits-179656.
3. See John Michael Greer, The New Encyclopedia of The Occult (St. Paul, 2003), 438.
4. John Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reexivity and Critical Practice in Film
and Television (Durham, 2008), 234.
5. Ibid., 235, 251.
6. Alan Ball, Save Yourself, True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season, season 5, episode
12, directed by Michael Lehmann, aired August 26, 2012 (Burbank, 2013),
DVD.
7. Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of
Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class (New York, 2006), 155.
8. See also the parody Game of Desks, a Late Night Digital Original produced
by Jimmy Fallon, which transposes the HBO drama onto a contest between
warring late-night hosts, each of which represents a different network, produc-
tion company, or conglomerate.
9. Walter Hickey, 9 Political Lessons from HBOs Hit Show Game of Thrones,
Business Insider, April 7, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/political-
lessons-game-of-thrones-2013-4#; Matthew Yglesias, Economics of Ice & Fire
II: The Lannisters Subprime Lending, Slate, Thursday, April 18, 2013, http://
www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/18/lannister_subprime_lending_
the_king_owing_you_money_spells_trouble.html. There are countless posts
online about the series and contemporary economic life: one, by a hedge fund
manager, lists 6 Lessons for Entrepreneurs Courtesy Game of Thrones; another
asks those working on Wall Street to debate the proposition Finance is Like
Game of Thrones. Taken together, the posts might be said to represent some
small capitalist triumph. Conrming conventional economic wisdom from
within the connes of a feudal fantasy, they suggest the sheer difculty of
imagining a time not organized by the dictates of nance. See Adam Hausman,
6 Lessons for Entrepreneurs Courtesy Game of Thrones, Capitalist Creations,
June 12, 2013, http://capitalistcreations.com/6-lessons-for-entrepreneurs-
courtesy-game-of-thrones/; and WallStreetOasis.com, Finance is Like Game
of Thrones, post by Broheimist, June 10, 2013, http://www.wallstreetoasis.
com/forums/nance-is-like-game-of-thrones.
10. See Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (2007).
HBOs Flexible Gold 131
11. JohnLanchester, WhenDidYouGet Hooked?, reviewof ASong of Ice andFire: Vols
IVII, by George R. R. Martin, London Reviewof Books 35, no. 7 (April 2013): 2022,
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n07/john-lanchester/when-did-you-get-hooked.
12. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of
Our Times (London, 1994); see also, Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism,
15th18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World, trans. Sian Reynolds (New
York, 1984), 246.
13. For powerful allegorical readings of earlier Time Warner productions, see Jerome
Christensen, Americas Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion
Pictures, 19292001 (Stanford, 2011).
14. Simone Murray, Brand Loyalties: Rethinking Content Within Global Corpo-
rate Media, Media, Culture & Society 27, no. 3 (May 2005): 424.
15. A Brand New Strategy, Economist, November 19, 1998, http://www.economist.
com/node/176615. As Simone Murray explains, At the core of the contem-
porary phenomenon of media branding lies the abstraction of content fromthe
constraints of any specic analog media format: any media brand which suc-
cessfully gains consumer loyalty can be translated across formats to create a raft
of interrelated products, which then work in aggregate to drive further con-
sumer awareness of the media brand; Murray, Brand Loyalties, 417.
16. Murray, Brand Loyalties, 417.
17. See ibid., 428.
18. Scott W. Fitzgerald, Corporations and Cultural Industries (New York, 2012), 202,
205.
19. Ibid., 205, 206, 208.
20. Ibid., 8.
21. Jeff Ulin, The Business of Media Distribution: Monetizing Film, TV, and Video Content
(New York, 2010), 1, 107.
22. Expectations were high for The Newsroom, which premiered on June 24, 2012.
Aaron Sorkins The West Wing and David Chases The Sopranos both premiered in
1999, and the two shows ran alongside each other for seven years, both earning
numerous awards and accolades along the way. Judging by the number of
quality television dramas produced in its image, The Sopranos changed the
subsequent course of television in ways The West Wing did not. But there can
be little question as to which show wielded greater inuence in Washington;
Sorkins idealization of the Clinton years has left an enduring legacy there. As
Juli Weiner put it in Vanity Fair in April, 2012, Its been nearly 6 years since the
series nale of The West Wing, and more than 12 since the one-hour drama,
which Sorkin created and largely wrote, rst walked and talked its way through
NBCs Wednesday-night lineup; and yet you might think the series never
ended, given the currency it still seems to enjoy in Washington; Juli Weiner,
West Wing Babies, Vanity Fair, April 2012, http://www.vanityfair.com/poli-
tics/2012/04/aaron-sorkin-west-wing.
23. Brian Erni, Did HBO drama inuence Sanford Weills Glass-Steagall proclama-
tion? J. Roderick, Inc. Public Relations, July 26, 2012, http://jroderickblog.com/
2012/07/26/did-hbo-drama-inuence-sanford-weills-glass-steagall-proclamation/.
24. At moments, AWM resembles Rupert Murdochs News Corp. The Newsroom will
implicate AWM in the kinds of phone hacking recently perpetrated by News of
the World and, like the privately controlled News Corp, AWM is run by a parent-
child tandem. In most other respects, AWM evokes Time Warner, though
a Time Warner that has not yet spun off its theme parks, sports teams, cable
networks, and publishing holdings.
132 Representati ons
25. Scott Collins, Is CNN Looking for Its Own Game Change?, Los Angeles Times,
August 26, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/26/entertainment/
la-et-st-cnn-conventions-20120826.
26. Amy Chozick, CNN Looks for a Boost from HBO Shows, Media Decoder, New
York Times, August 26, 2012, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/
26/cnn-looks-for-a-boost-from-hbo-shows/?_phptrue&_typeblogs&_r0.
27. Claire Atkinson, CNNCrisis Call: TimeWarner Eyes Big Guns toRevive Network,
New York Post, September 25, 2012, http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/
cnn_crisis_call_FQ9bxOj1sbiwX49vPd1glM.
28. Daniel Feinberg, Press Tour 11 Live-Blog: HBO Executive Session, Richard
Plepler and Michael Lombardo Meet with the Press, HitFix, July 28, 2011,
http://www.hitx.com/blogs/the-en-print/posts/press-tour-11-live-blog-hbo-
executive-session. Free from having to sell its programming to advertisers, HBO
bundles its hits together with its more esoteric fare, and thus ascribes to rst-
as opposed to second-order commodity relations. See Mark C. Rogers, Michael
Epstein, and Jimmie Reeves, The Sopranos as HBO Brand Equity: The Art of
Commerce in the Age of Digital Reproduction, in David Lavery, ed., This Thing
of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (New York, 2002), 46.
29. On an early form of the quality discourse within television, see MTM: Quality
Television, ed. Jane Feuer (London, 1985). For an account of how HBO
claimed quality as its own, see Quality TV: Contemporary Television and Beyond,
ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (New York, 2007).
30. Atkinson, CNN Crisis Call.
31. Jeff Bercovici, Time Warners Bewkes on Zucker Report and How CNN Is Like
HBO, Forbes, November 28, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/
2012/11/28/time-warners-bewkes-on-zucker-report-and-how-cnn-is-like-hbo/.
32. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: The Complete Series, created by Aaron Sorkin (Bur-
bank, 2007), DVD. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by season and
episode number.
33. For a largely sociological answer to this question, see Lucien Karpik, Valuing the
Unique: The Economics of Singularities (Princeton, 2010).
34. Ulin, Media Distribution, 266.
35. As Simone Murray has it, Media executives frequently betray uncertainty over
branding: aware that industry thinking denotes prestige brands as a media
companys top asset, they nevertheless display confusion as to which aspects
of their brand best drive consumer take-up; Murray, Brand Loyalties, 422.
36. David Aaker, Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name
(New York, 1991), 15.
37. Tom Blackett, Trademarks (Basingstoke, 1998), 9192.
38. Time Warner Inc., Annual Report (2012): 80.
39. Bryan and Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives, 52.
40. Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture (New York, 2006),
7, 65.
41. Bryan and Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives, 13, 37.
42. Chris Anderson asks, How does a conglomerate such as General Electric knit
together its subsidiaries? He cites Jerry Useem, writing in Forbes: In most cases,
a conglomerate generates returns by trading in and out of businesses; its
basically a giant mutual fund. But he doesnt pursue the implicit point: media
conglomerates knit together their subsidiaries not just by trading in and out of
businesses, but by coordinating the distinct intangible values produced by their
subsidiaries as mutual funds do individual equities. See Anderson, Creating
HBOs Flexible Gold 133
the Twenty-rst-Century TelevisionNetwork: NBCinthe Age of Media Conglom-
erates, in NBC: Americas Network, ed. Michelle Hilmes (Berkeley, 2007), 280.
43. Ian Stewart, The Mathematical Equation that Caused the Banks to Crash,
Guardian, February 11, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/
feb/12/black-scholes-equation-credit-crunch. My thanks to Joshua Clover for
directing my attention to this quote, which he examines in a ground-breaking
analysis of derivative poetics, collected in this volume.
44. Luck: The Complete First Season, created by David Milch (Burbank, 2012), DVD.
45. Fitzgerald, Corporations and Cultural Industries, 43.
46. Romanced by the neat, self-conrming circularity of brand metaphysics, we
might say that The Newsroom is both a hedge against and an instance of equity
transfer: it both tests the waters for, and precipitates, a particular corporate
outcome by virtue of having described it in a way that resonated with viewers.
Or, just as plausibly, we might say that the series becomes the kind of capital we
associate with derivatives by virtue of having calibrated the always-changing
temporal relations between price forms beyond itself.
47. See Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Measuring and Representing the Knowledge
Economy, Buffalo Law Review (May 2006).
134 Representati ons