Michael Sparaga

(On Cable TV, April 2019) One of the consequences of having so many outlets for film in this streaming era has been the rise of the niche documentary. With comparatively lower production costs and an insatiable appetite for content (not to mention the clickbait potential for some documentary topics compared to fiction), there are more documentaries than ever on ever-specialized topics. (And if you happen to be a Canadian Cable TV network looking for Canadian content to meet your CRTC license broadcast requirements, Canadian-produced documentaries are a bonus.)  So that partially explains United we Fan, a Canadian documentary using examples of fan campaigns to save TV shows (starting with Bjo Trimble’s letter-writing campaign that got Star Trek its third season), as a springboard through which to talk about organized fan movements and, much more generally, fannish behaviour in the modern media landscape. Writer-director Michael Sparaga packages the result as an inspiring power-to-the-people kind of film, highlighting how it allows communities to connect, to take direct action beyond watching a show and talking about it, even allow people to realize their personal potential through organization, communication, and so on. (It doesn’t take much for the film to make the link between saving TV shows and social justice to which I’m thinking: Hmmm.)  Many of the interviews are with fans convinced of their self-righteousness, critics/commentators bolstering the film’s claims, and grateful creators/actors of fan-revived shows who know better than to be anything less than grateful to the fans. But as someone with fandom experience dating back to the mid-1990s, I’m curiously ambivalent about the United we Fan documentary—While the film does a good job at presenting and exploring its subject matter, it’s curiously curt about some second-order implications of fan devotion. To put it simply, there’s an entire commercial aspect to “saving TV shows” or other fannish obsession in support to lucrative interests that doesn’t get a lot of discussion here—for all of the nuts sent to a TV network to save Jericho, it’s still consumption in service of consumption, serving the interests of others. If you want inspiring stories of fans achieving more, take a look at those who transformed an interest in consuming media to producing media. But that doesn’t quite have the hook of Star Trek and other TV shows, right? As someone who spent time in the fannish trenches (most notably for Babylon-5), I’ve gone there and back—I’m more interested in critical explorations of how fan energy is co-opted as yet another marketing tactic in service of corporate interests. It annoys me that I have to ignore that dimension and clap along at another self-serving fannish documentary in a growing list of uncritical, superficial essays. But that may also be another lesson in approaching documentaries in general—they may be cheaper to produce than scripted dramas, but they still take time and effort, and it’s not clear if anyone would invest so much in criticizing actions that feel good in a limited perspective, but prove problematic in a wider context. All documentaries are trying to convince you of something, even if that something can be a carefully channelled “rebellion” that results in bigger profits for someone else.