Television: His Dark Materials - Audience and Industry

 His Dark Materials: Audience and Industries blog tasks

Create a new blogpost called 'His Dark Materials: Audience and Industries blog tasks' and answer the following questions:

Audience

1) What audience do you think His Dark Materials is aimed at and why? Think about demographic and psychographic groups. You can revise Pyschographics here.

  • Aimed at a contemporary family audience for the BBC Sunday night broadcast slot (8.10pm)
  • Targeted at fans of the fantasy genre along with fans of the original books by Philip Pullman.
  • Diverse representations of gender and race may appeal to a younger audience.
  • Rated for 14+ by HBO due to some scenes that may be frightening to younger children.
  • The UK DVD release of His Dark Materials season 2 is rated 12 by the BBFC.

2) What audience pleasures are offered by His Dark Materials - The City of Magpies? Apply Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theory to the episode. Make sure you provide specific examples from the episode to support your ideas.

Personal Identity: friendship, loss/isolation(danger).

Personal Relationships: Will represents everything character (normal) unused to magic; children need protection.

Diversion (Escapism): supernatural different worlds and talking animals.


3) Thinking of the 3 Vs audience pleasures (Visceral, Vicarious and Voyeuristic pleasures), which of these can be applied to His Dark Materials? Refer to specific scenes or moments in the episode to explain your answer. 

VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE: Watching something you wouldn't normally get a chance to see. This is because you seen the daemons and witches ad overall supernatural things that are unusual.

4) How did fans react to Season 2 of His Dark Materials? What about critic reviews? You can find some possible answers for this in this BBC website article on the critical reception for His Dark Materials and watch the fan reaction video above.

The launch episode of the second season, titled The City of Magpies, was watched by an average of 4.4 million viewers on Sunday evening.

The Independent's Ed Cumming said: "It looks great, it's robustly made, and there are great actors everywhere, occupying well-built universes.

"But it doesn't inspire as much wonder as it ought to."

In a three-star review, he added: "Viewers who've invested in the series won't stop now. For a series about magical worlds, aimed at younger viewers, however, there's not quite enough magic."

Cumming said that some elements of the books had been lost while being adapted for the BBC One drama.

5) What might be some of the preferred and oppositional readings for His Dark Materials? Why did some fans love it? Why have other people criticised it?

The preferred reading may have been that this is something adventures and something the girl and boy need to figure out together in order to understand the world they are in.

The oppositional reading may be that they are against older people as there's not as much of them and the world that they are from have no adults.

Industries

1) Which companies produced this His Dark Materials series?

  • Co-production: a media product produced by two separate companies or institutions. His Dark Materials is a big-budget co-production between the BBC (from the UK) and HBO (from America).

2) What were the UK viewing figures for A City of Magpies? How did this compare to season 1 of His Dark Materials?

The CSP episode is the opening episode of Season 2, The City of Magpies, and was first broadcast in the UK on Sunday 8 November 2020 on BBC1 at 8.10pm. It was made available on iPlayer on the same
day, and on DVD from 28 December 2020.

3) What was American network HBO's role in making His Dark Materials and why is this important? Look at the notes above for more on this.

HBO is an American pay-TV company that is known for producing some of the greatest TV shows of all time from The Sopranos to The Wire to Succession. As a co-commission with the BBC, His Dark Materials had two hugely respected media giants behind it - and in HBO's case a huge amount of money.

4) What famous stars are in His Dark Materials and why do you think they were selected for the show? Watch the Comic Con panel video in the notes above to see the stars talking about the show.

As His Dark Materials was aimed at an international audience, the show features both British and American star names such as Brits Ruth Wilson and James McAvoy and American Lin-Manuel Miranda who wrote the smash hit musical Hamilton.

5) Who are Bad Wolf and what do they produce?

Bad Wolf was founded in 2015 to create ambitious, imaginative and relevant drama for the global TV marketplace.  From its headquarters in South Wales the company has built up an international reputation as one of the foremost independent production companies in the UK, producing over 50 hours of high-end drama for broadcasters and networks including HBO, BBC, AMC and Sky.

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