U of A grad’s latest honour? An Emmy
Bestselling novelist Sean Stewart, 47, has won his fair share of awards over the years for his works of fantasy, science fiction, and magic realism.
Among the many honours the University of Alberta and Old Strathcona High School graduate has earned are an Arthur Ellis Award for best Canadian mystery for his debut novel, the dystopian detective thriller Passion Play, two Aurora Awards for best Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy novel, for both Passion Play and his young-adult fantasy, Nobody’s Son, and a World Fantasy Award for his futuristic romance, Galveston.
But this month, he added a new and surprising award to his shelf: an Emmy, for his role as one of the executive producers of the online digital HD program Dirty Work. The show, which is available for download free, and commercial-free, won the Emmy for outstanding creative achievement in interactive media, for original interactive television programming, at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Sept. 15 in Los Angeles. It was the first time the Academy has given the award to a show created only for an online audience.
“The category has always been for, you know, ‘online enhancements’ of Real TV shows,” Stewart says. “So we are pretty happy about the academy actually getting, ‘Oh — it’s a real show.’ Original content that assumes the web is not an afterthought to broadcast TV, but in fact a new ecosystem whose capabilities will slowly but surely change how and what we watch.”
A few years ago, Stewart became a co-founder of Fourth Wall Studios, a Hollywood production company dedicated to creating a new generation of high-tech interactive “television” programs that you watch on your laptop, iPad, or smartphone.
Instead of passively consuming the story on the screen, viewers become a part of the story. When you register to start streaming the story to your computer or mobile device, you provide the service with your email and phone number — and the characters on the screen start communicating directly with you — sending you texts and emails that help to move the story forward or enhance your appreciation of what’s happening on the screen. And since you’re watching the show on a device equipped with keys and buttons, you’re invited to click on various spots on the screen to find clues or reveal hidden subtext.
Think of it as TV with footnotes. The long-term goal is to create a new kind of “transmedia” entertainment for young people who spend more time online or playing video games than watching conventional TV, for multitaskers who get bored without two or three streams of input.
The TV audience is aging, says Stewart, with the average American TV-watcher now in his or her early 50s. With studios — and advertisers — desperate to find ways to reach new viewers, Fourth Wall hopes to create the kind of hip, fresh video entertainment that will appeal to people who’ve turned off their televisions.
Viewers don’t get to change the actual outcome of the story. The shows aren’t interactive in that way — although Stewart says a lot of people expect them to be. But he doesn’t like that mode, because, he says, it shatters the illusion that the story is real, and throws people out of the narrative.
“You kill the fiction,” he says. “It’s as though you actually said, ‘It’s all a dream’. It tears down the fourth wall in a bad way, and radically invalidates the idea that the thing is real. Think of what we we’ve created as a semi-permeable membrane. You are inside the story. You don’t get to control the story. But you are periodically called upon to contribute to the story.”
Dirty Work itself is a dark comedy about three hapless young people who work in “bioremediation” — cleaning up crime scenes in Los Angeles. It’s the kind of edgy production you probably couldn’t find on conventional television — even cable. But the gore is mitigated by the fun of playing with the buttons, and by an ironic “narrator” who pops into the story with “fun facts” about the characters and the story.
Although Stewart is listed as the head writer for Fourth Wall Studios, and has written other shows for the site, on this project, his role was as the adviser who helps to round up financing from venture capitalists.
It’s all a long way from his student days in Edmonton, where, he once joked to me, he dreamed that one day his writing might allow him to afford to buy his family brandname Sapporo Ichiban instead of generic Asian noodles.
These days, he lives in Santa Monica and occasionally can’t quite believe his new Hollywood life. He even bought — not rented — a tux for his first trip to the Emmys.
“It’s hysterical,” he says. “I’m playing the role of a plutocrat. I heard myself say to someone the other day, ‘I have to go to Cannes for a trade show.’ And I suddenly thought to myself, ‘Who is saying this? Who is having this life?’ Not bad for a kid from Edmonton.”