During this week of class, we started to discuss the U&G theory. The U&G theory is to show the amount power and influence the fans really have over media. The fans do not even realize how crucial their opinions are for media corporations. They decide whether any type of media lives or die. The theory is based off of the trends that viewers tend to gravitate towards. The viewers look for affective, social integrative, and tension free media. I personally look for affectiveness in television shows or movies. I like to feel involved with the characters and feel what they feel because then I’m more intrigued and really get into whatever is on. I tend to watch television series with a lot of twists and turns. I find it way more enjoyable to always be on toes while watching something. It’s the unpredictability that I find to be very important for a show or movie to have. It really forces the viewer to pay attention and continuously analyze everything because you’ll always be thinking what will happen next.

A strong fan base can effectively alter an entire television series or a movie. The fans are always analyzing every little thing about a series or movie because they want whatever is to be perfectly in tune for every die hard fan. It usually will be the most intense fans that always find something very crucial or very minute detail that the producers messed up. Fans literally put themselves in the fictional stories but they live it in the real world. These are the ones that truly believe the fictional worlds that are created for entertainment are how they should be living their lives. Although some fans can be overly attached, they have the power to bring an entire series back to television. It was the fans to bring back the show “Family Guy” back to Fox.

We also watched the movie “Galaxy Quest” which was about the cast of a television series called Galaxy Quest who are visited by actual aliens who believe the series was a true depiction of an intergalactic conflict and the cast is then brought onto the aliens ship to help them with their intergalactic conflict. This movie was supposed to show how crazy fans could really become. The aliens were the type of fans that truly believed the cast were their characters they portrayed and that the problems they faced during the show were real. I found the movie to be entertaining because there are fans in the real world that would go to the extents of the aliens did.

-Noah Soriano