Audience Appeal In My 3 Main Texts

Within the three main texts they present to us a variety of conventions and representations which appeal to their targeted audiences in a number of different ways. The two main types of audiences are the mainstream market that aims to please a larger audience and the niche, targeting a minute scale that will only appeal to a selected amount.

The first text I’ll be looking at is a series called Mad Men. This series was made to target a selective type of audience; they do this by not conforming to things that the audience expect to view such as non-diegetic sound in a tense scene. Mad Men shows accurate representations of an office life with well thought about mise en scene, the audience have to be active and be able to recognise Stuart hall’s decoding theory to appreciate the text, whether they do this consciously/sub.  In the scene where the company try and win Jaguar they do use a 20 second clip of non-diegetic music to create a sense of atmosphere and introduce this feel of slight hyper reality to the narrative which allows the audience to be gratified by this familiarity of a ‘mainstream’ influence. Some people would react passively to the fact that they’d included the use of non-dietetics taking the negotiated/oppositional reading.

In the second text set in Birmingham, Peaky Blinders. This text was screened on BBC2 and set in the early 1900’s. Due to it’s popular channel screening this series seems like it would be in the mainstream market but the fact that it’s set in the 1900’s could only appeal to a certain type of audience making it part niche. The scene I am going to look at is where Thomas finds out his sister is pregnant with his ex-best friend’s child. A lot more goes on in this episode to show that this series has a lot of information attached to it that the audience sticking to the series would be following and understanding. The character names are made clear in this episode, purposely done by the production to encourage people to feel involved if they haven’t seen the programme before. The use of well-known actors also allows the audience to take the preferred reading by using favoured character roles; this would encourage a wider audience to view the text from the use of familiarity. Leading on from actors the use of film connotations and mise en scene is highly encoded within the text, the use of slow motion, lighting techniques and explored vantage points shows the high budget for the film therefore better quality of production, this would appeal to the mainstream target audience due to the film stylistics, or an audience may take a negotiated reading due to the place in which the text is set, the mixed class of people and dull environments could influence a turn off.

The final text I’m looking at is Lost, manufactured by a big media company called ABC. Lost is set in the present day, which straight the way an audience would take a preferred reading to, relating and gaining familiarity with the ethnicity and origins currently populating our culture. This text was set out to be a mainstream target, a number of producers, JJ abram being one of them. Jj was influenced by Star Wars, a film that targeted a mass audience due to its unique hyper reality quality and use of character mixed character roles from Prop’s theory relating age/genders. Going back to Lost, Jj wrote the main structure of the series with a group of others allowing there to be more ideas of what people wanted in the text. A fan base called Lostipedia was also set up by fans that told the scripters what they wanted to appear in the forthcoming series. The fact that Lost was such a big production and was purely a money making, mainstream targeted scheme wouldn’t appeal to some audiences and they would take the oppositional reading due to the undeveloped ideas and lack of unique qualities, “Everything’s a version of something else”. Looking at the second episode of Pilot, the use of long close up shots are excessive. One shot was 30 seconds long showing a close up of Charlie’s face, creating tension alongside the also excessive use of non-diegetics. This could appeal to the audience by creating a realistic sense of drama. The use of rigid handheld camera work, fast tracking shots and vantage points would widely appeal to the mainstream audience, using realistic connotations and exaggerated which could capture a wider audience appeal. With the text a wide range of ethnicities/ages and genders are used to gratify the specific audience types which allow more people to relate to their aspired character role.