fan sites

While doing research for my thesis this week, I started thinking about online fan communities for television shows.  I've been frustrated that one of the only fan sites for the show I'm looking at - Meerkat Manor - is run by Animal Planet, the channel on which the program airs.  You have to become a member of My Animal Planet to join, a program that is primarily affiliated with the Discovery Channel Store.  While the community is quite active - there are 838,552 registered members - I assume that those posts are being looked over (and perhaps deleted) by Animal Planet moderators.  (When I tried to see the personal profile of one, it told me I didn't have permission to see it.)  Of course, I have no idea if this is true.  Perhaps I'm being overly suspicious (and maybe I'm just annoyed because the site is really slow and it makes me log in every time I try to access a different section).

What I was really looking for was a fan-run site.  This turned out to be more difficult than I'd expected.  Most of the others are part of larger sites like TVGuide.com and FanPop.com.  One of the only fan-run sites I've found is The East Coast Meerkat Society - "an informal group who share a passionate interest in meerkats" and "work together to turn our passion into projects o better the lives of meerkats in zoos and those who research meerkats in the Kalahari desert."  I'm not totally sure whether or not the site was started in response to the show, but the date the site was launched seems to indicate that it was.  Unfortunately, the discussion forums on the site aren't very popular and they refer you back to the Animal Planet site.

Anyway, I started to wonder whether most shows' fan sites were now run by networks instead of by fans.  I was going to be pretty disappointed if that was true.  Fan sites can be great places for enthusiasts to chat, spoil, and critique (the show and the network).  If the sites are run by the networks, how much shifts from spoiling/critiquing to hyping the network?

Thankfully, I was wrong.  Fan-run television sites are alive and well.  There are popular (and easily navigable) ones for shows like The Office, Heroes, Ugly Betty, and CSI.  I wondered if there was some relationship between network shows and fan-run sites, but there are also sites for cable shows like The Sopranos, Dexter, and Project Runway.  Many of these sites are the first result on Google searches.  And of course, SurvivorSucks (a popular spoiling and discussion site the seniors may remember from reading Convergence Culture) is still active.

Also, YouTube has become a popular place for fans to come together.  See, for example, this video memorializing the meerkat matriarch, Flower.

- Allison