A few words about fanservice

Time once again for another installment of Geek Jargon Explained, this time featuring “fanservice”. You might know this entertainment phenomenon better simply as “pandering” but there is a genuine, if scant, justification for differentiating the two. “Pandering” generally involves delivering entertainment which is expected to appeal to the least common denominator, which means you can pander to an audience as broad as The American People if you’re so inclined. “Fanservice” is pandering aimed specifically at fans, playing off their expectations and their inherent desires (and sense of entitlement) with regard to the object of their obsession. If Friends were still on the air, and the writers worked in Robert Pattinson as a guest star, that would be pandering. But if the writers brought back the guy who played Paolo to reprise the character, that would be fanservice; you have to be a superfan just to remember the euro-trash obstacle to Ross-n-Rachel and even realize you’re being pandered to in the first place.

That’s a fairly innocuous example, but of course as with many geek domains there is a seamier underside. A long (and arduous) argument could be made as to whether or not the movie Star Trek: Generations is one long piece of fanservice because it gives hardcore Federationistas something they always wanted: a Kirk-Picard team-up. But more often than not, fanservice has a dirtier connotation (which, to be fair, is the exact same dirty connotation that pandering has, which actually might be the original denotation if we go all the way back to Pandarus from Troilus and Criseyde, further discussion of which can be found at my other blog, Insufferably Arcane Allusions!)(Note: no such blog. Yet.). Sexing things up is as American as apple-pie-flavored edible underwear, but again, fanservice specifically goes after the wants (possibly perceived as needs) of the existing, devoted audience. Random scantily clad hot chicks on Friends? Pandering. Jennifer Aniston in the Slave Leia bikini? Fanservice.


I know I’m getting set in my overthinking ways as a by-product of age, but it’s gotten to the point where blatant fanservice can either amuse me or make me vaguely uncomfortable, but rarely will it have what I imagine to be its intended effect. The most recent case in point for this was last year as I was working my way through yet another box set of Smallville on DVD. I really love Smallville and I’m pleasantly astonished that it just got renewed for its tenth(!) season. You might think my own fandom for a modern Superman on tv would go without saying, but then you might be surprised to know how many comic book fans really dislike Smallville, mainly because it decided early on NOT to be beholden to the source and rather to tell its own stories using the core concepts of the Superman mythos. (I’ve always argued the series made this decision before the first episode ever aired, because it’s always been the adventures of young, pre-S-shield Clark Kent set in the here and now, whereas in the comics Superman is always the world’s premier superhero in the here and now and his childhood and early career are already in some indeterminate past. Smallville isn’t a re-telling of Superman’s origin, it’s a totally new history that borrows a lot of the same elements. So.) I watched the first season of Smallville as it broadcast pretty faithfully, but then I fell behind on it and because it is something of a soap opera with some long, overarching storylines, I decided that rather than catch it infrequently when I was home, I would collect the DVDs and watch every episode in order. (In my defense, I was still single when I initiated this plan.)

Anyway, I got to a certain point in Season 5 of Smallville where the fanservice was threatening to make my head explode. There had always been a fair amount of network-tv-friendly titillation from time to time on the show, but suddenly I hit a run of three consecutive episodes in which (1) Lois Lane has a brief fling with Aquaman and spends a lot of the episode in a bikini (which, because Smallville takes place in Kansas, she wears to … the lake); (2) Lana Lang joins a sorority of slutty lipstick lesbian vampires; and (3) Lois goes undercover (uncovered? Eh? Eh?) at a strip club. Objectification of women aside (not because it’s unimportant but because it goes without saying), at this point in the Smallville continuity Lois and Lana are supposed to be about 18 or 19 years old. Obviously the actresses playing those parts are significantly older but it still stopped me in my tracks as I had to consider that the show was inviting me to ogle barely legal babes, and it forced me to decide if it was all harmless fun or if it was a little too creepy for comfort. I haven’t gotten back to Smallville since, which to be honest has way more to do with an utter lack of DVD watching all around, but at some point I’ll have to sort out if the show I was enjoying up to (and, I’ll admit it, right on through) those episodes is worth the attendant ickiness.

I suppose I could always be one of those apologists who says, “No, no, I watch Smallville for the articles.”

I was thinking about fanservice recently after the latest episode of Community (which, I know, was five days ago, but I have never once promised any of you that this blog would be super timely) which saw the Jeff character progressively strip down more and more while playing pool against a crazy phys ed associate prof who hates fashion-obsessed hipsters. (Or something like that.) You could consider this a bit of fanservice if there are a significant number of Community fans out there who also lust after Joel McHale (which seems plausible to me). But I processed that thought on the way to realizing that it was actually a metatextual parody of fanservice where, instead of getting Jeff all nakers under flimsy narrative pretenses, he ended up there via mind-bogglingly convoluted pretenses. And yet his B story beats still meshed perfectly with the ostensible A story about Abed’s self-confidence with women, which in itself was also subverting and parodying those kinds of stories.

If you are not watching Community because you think it’s just another ensemble sitcom that gets most of its punchlines from how lame community college is, I have to correct your misapprehension and inform you that it is fast becoming one of my favorite shows. It is an ensemble sitcom and it does get some laughs out of the community college premise but what it’s really about is prototypical sitcoms, about setting up the tropes with their attendant expectations and knocking them down again, except when it zags when you expect it to zig and lets a trope play out in full but ends up in the last place you’d expect. It is, essentially, an overthinker’s dream show.