Mock Question - Mass and Specialised audiences

"It is essential for a TV programme to simultaneously target both mass and specialised audiences"

Explore this statement with reference to Les Revenants

Thirty minutes

I agree it is essential for a TV programme to simultaneously target both mass and specialised audiences. The term 'Mass Audience' came from the mass broadcasting on television in the early days of its creation. With only a few available television channels, the content had to appeal to a wide range of people and include different ways for this wide range of people to connect with the content. Now that narrow broadcasting is a thing of the past with more TV channels, online streaming services (e.g. Netflix) and piracy existing, there has been space for more specialised audience shows to be made. These are often referred to as 'cult' shows with an intense following behind it and fans who engage with the show in more ways than just watching it, for example, fan-fictions, fan art, 'shipping' pairs of characters together (imagining them in relationships), creating extensive Wikipedia pages, and more. 

It is often beneficial for shows to establish a cult audience as it means they have a group of people who will always come back for more and engage heavily with the product being created with more incentive to support it, but it also means that this audience may be small, meaning less people watch the show. This is a good reason to combine appealing to mass audiences and specialised audiences. You will be able to get lots of people watching as well as having a group who go the extra mile to engage with it. Canal+ is the producer and distributor of Les Revenants. They have an ideology similar to that of the UK 'Channel 4' where they want to be subversive and play a variety of different shows challenging the norm of TV. This is the reason Canal+ decided to take on Les Revenants, its ability to break paradigms and create mystery. 

Les Revenants is a subversive, polysemic show because it falls into a range of different genres. It could be described as a Supernatural Zombie French Drama show and that probably wouldn't even cover the litany of sub-genres it also falls into. There are many places which these genres can be scene interacting with each other and creating multiple readings for the audience to discover. 

In the scene where Camille's mother first sees her there are many conflicting representations we can see. Using Stuart Hall's reception theory we can figure out the different audience reactions to the scene and how this caters for both a cult and mass audience.

The scene starts with slow, droning non-diagetic soundtrack instantly creating a sinister atmosphere. This is immediately contrapuntal to the scene in which a mother is seeing her dead daughter and the preferred reading here is to create a feeling of tension in the audience by off-balancing them with this soundtrack. The shots of the scene show over the shoulder shot reverse shots of Camille and her mother in which the mother walks slowly towards her. This not only gives connotations of approaching a dangerous animal, but also adds to this contrapuntal reading of the scene by confusing the audience with this separation of mother and daughter. The mother is framed with low key lighting in which we can barely see her face. This effect was most likely done in post-production colour grading to create a paradigm of the horror genre. Camille is framed with high key lighting creating a binary opposition between them, the living and the dead. 

In this scene the audience is given lots of different readings. The preferred is that Camille is dead and the mother is scared but a negotiated reading may be that the mother is going mad, or even that Camille is the evil antagonist through her anchorage with the music but juxtaposition with the high key lighting. It is almost made intentionally to confuse the audience and give them lots of ideas through Roland Barthes symbolic and hermeneutic codes. This intentional confusion of representations in this scene appeals to all of Les Revenants genres. Supernatural through use of lighting and sound, family drama through the conversation of a mother and her child, zombie through Camille coming back from the dead, and French through the setting (the alps) and lexis used. 

While some audience members may be annoyed by this confusing representation, many will find something they are invested in. 

One specific example of Les Revenants seeking a specialised audience is their use of the band MOGWAI to create their soundtrack, later released in album form 'Les Revenants'. MOGWAI is a 'Post-rock' band from Glasgow, Scotland. They have a slow, reflective and mood driven sound which is subversive of their genre.