Maybe it’s the strength of Nathan Fillion’s performance of “Richard Castle,” or maybe it’s the scope and skill from the writers of “Castle,” but the writer at the centre of prime-time procedural “Castle” has such a distinct character voice, with such a richly detailed backstory, that it almost seems effortless to create a believable website for this character.

RichardCastle.net is the official homepage for Richard Castle, a long-time author who has found inspirado shadowing a foxy NYPD cop. His site contains a blog which sees the writer reflecting on each week’s case, from lessons he’s learned, to sharing easter eggs such as wedding programs and other photos. The rest of the site includes a self-written bio, a Q&A, and a complete listing of his books, including the “out of print” editions that may not have covers (yet), but live on in proper “Castle” chronology. 

I love that the site also links out to Richard Castle’s Hyperion books author page (which to their credit, doesn’t break the conceit) as well as his Twitter and Facebook profile. But the best part of the whole thing is that they keep Castle’s voice consistent and active through every page, so you really feel like this is his site, and that he would say/write all of these things. 

And now, after reading Frank Rose’s “Art of Illusion,” I also appreciate one aspect of “Castle” that has made the show such a true transmedia hit; The world of “Castle” is richly detailed with a very specific mythology and well thought out, which makes world-extension natural and satisfying from a fan perspective. On the surface, “Castle” is another buddy-cop police procedural with a will-they-or-won’t-they storyline at the heart of it. The NYPD cops themselves don’t have too rich of a world of their own (besides New York city itself), they function just as players in solving weekly mysteries, but Castle… Castle is the perfect vessel for multi-platform storytelling. 

It comes down to details… and with TV, we can get those details episodically, morsel by morsel, because it’s not constrained by running time like films. And as those details come out, mythology is built… and it’s up to the creators of these shows to have at least some idea of what these details mean, or else it just adds up to one big shaggy dog story, ala “Lost” or “Prison Break.”

But Castle, as a man with many passions, experiences, friends in low places, high places, memories, talents, and a career, becomes a larger-than-life foil that can’t be contained through the episodic broadcast alone! And because he has all these things, he can name drop something without having to explain it in a big way, and that allows fans to imagine what that thing he named could be. A good example are the old book titles… he doesn’t go into what each old book was about, but fans can imagine. Then, a site like RichardCastle.net takes it that much further by creating a chronology and synopsis for all these Castle titles, allowing fans to go beyond “What’s it about,” to “What could happen”? In my opinion, this is when TV sites work best, and I love “Castle” and all the platforms they branch out to in order to bring one of the best characters on TV today to life. 

(Source: richardcastle.net)

I’ve been a long-time fan of “Grey’s Anatomy,” though my interest has waned this season… primarily because the show forgot how to be fun, and I don’t really need to watch cliches like Teddy laughing through a grief counselling session or Cristina and Owen fighting… again. 

So when it comes to the “Medical Case File,” I’m kind of torn looking at it… on one hand, it’s a very thorough blog that details the medical cases on the series via a viewpoint from a medical professional — which is a great feature if you’re a wannabe doctor yourself… however, I feel like it doesn’t entice me to want to watch the show any more. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s only those really odd and extreme medical cases that I’d want to read about (ie being encased in concrete), versus “Necrotizing Enterocolitis.” Overall you could say this is a very educational extension, but is that entertaining enough for a prime-time drama?

(Source: abc.go.com)

ABC’s new series developed by “Grey’s Anatomy” creator, Shonda Rhimes, called “Scandal,” is a show about a Washington insider named Olivia Pope who works as a “fixer,” preventing beltway scandals. 

The series is partially based on Judy Smith, a former Bush administration press aide, who leads her own crisis communications firm, and serves as a co-executive producer on “Scandal.”

In order to give a unique real-world look at how she would solve problems that Olivia Pope is faced with on “Scandal,” ABC has provided a “What Would Judy Do?” blog, where executive producer provides a deeper looking into issues of crisis management. The blogs are pretty exhaustive, and serve to add a bit of credibility to the prime-time drama.

While not necessarily a narrative addition to the site’s offerings, this kind of content is great to build out the world that Olivia Pope works in. It would have been fun to have this kind of blog written in-character as Olivia Pope, to give her a detailed staff briefing on her decision making over the course of an episode… but then that would have been a little too out-of-character for somebody who’s job is keeping secrets, instead of sharing them on a blog.

(Source: beta.abc.go.com)

Sometimes you can tell when there’s “heart” involved with a project, and I think there’s evidence of that with NBC’s “Inside Greendale Community College” site for their series “Community.”

Like other mini-sites for NBC, such as the ones related to “30 Rock” and “The Office,” the Greendale College site is built out of the show’s own Greendale College, the school at the centre of “Community.” 

It has lots of elements in regards to things you would see on a typical school site, such as details about registration and campus life, but NBC has almost built in callouts to their other extras, some of which are videos… which I can’t view in Canada. However, there’s a long-standing blog with entries tied to episodes of the series, and fun bios on little-seen characters in the student population. 

On top of that, NBC goes the extra mile to not wrap the mini-site in their NBC.com navigation, but allows the only noticeable reference to NBC be in Greendale’s big box ad, which makes the fictional site that much more believable. I’m only a casual “Community” fan, but I found myself engrossed in the mini-site, clicking on every single thing just to see how wide the content stretched.  

(Source: greendalecommunitycollege.com)

I’ve been holding off on jumping into the plethora of online offerings for “The Office” for a while now, but I can avoid it no more. Even if the show is not really funny and makes you feel like a jerk by watching it, NBC has invested a lot of time and energy to build an entire online world for the series, and since they started with blogs in the earlier seasons, that’s where I’ll start looking too. 

When it comes to the online world of “The Office,” Dwight Schrute, a fan favourite and resident oddball, takes up a huge presence. That’s due in part of Rainn Wilson’s expertise as social media, as well as having a character with a lot of mythology and oddball eccentricities that are well suited for the internet rabbit hole. 

For example, when you first hit “Schrute Space,” Dwight’s blog that’s updated every other month or so, you also get links to Dwight’s “Private Investigator” site, a “Diabolical Blog” which seems to be broken, the “Dwight/Angela baby contract,” the Dunder-Mifflin store, the Sabre Corp, a sign up for Dwight’s email blasts and a Trip Advisor page for Schrute Farms.  

For Dwight’s blog, it’s all written in-character, offering up his take on why he thinks everything he does is awesome, and what may have happened around certain events when the audience wasn’t looking. It started in 2005 with a post entitled “Schrute-Space” and describes why Dwight hates Salmon, and what his DJ name would be.

From reading about the creation of “The Office” online offerings, NBC.com hired a pair of writers to fill out all this online content, including the blog, and when you see the sheer volume of it all, you can see where the work went. 

In other blogs, there’s “There’s No Accounting for Taste,” written by Oscar Martinez for the “Sabre Corporation,” though it’s a little lean with only a couple posts. There’s “Creed Thoughts” by the deranged office drone Creed, with archives reaching back to 2007. I find them to be pretty nonsensical, but from what I’ve seen from his character on the show, I guess that would be the point. Finally there’s the Halpert Baby blog, which is Jim and Pam’s “Mommy Blog” for Pam’s pregnancy and subsequent baby-related comings and goings. 

The “Baby Blog” has a pile of outbound Jim-and-Pam related links as well, including the wedding website with engagement photos. The rest of the links are links to “Working Mom” type sites and other blogs related to the baby-mother world, adding a level of reality and utility to their page.

I do wonder, if judging from the infrequency of the updated blog posts, if branching out into too many characters harms the entire enterprise. Character blogs can be a really great way continually engage audiences, especially during repeat breaks or summer/winter hiatus… but I would say that they’d need to be updated at least weekly to keep audiences coming back.

However, “The Office” should be commended for not resting on blogs alone, as their site is very deep with content, and it should be recognized for putting a character’s voice in a blog over seven years ago — and keeping it going for the run of the series.

Set decoration may not be something that comes to mind as a strong element in include as web content for a TV series, but with “The Good Look,” paired with the Twitter account @GoodWifeSetDec, they’ve show that this kind of insight to a series can create a more intimate relationship with fans. There’s some wonky issues with the format of this blog earlier on, but it seems like once they smooth out the technical details, they should be fine. I’m also not totally sure of the show’s demo, but I kind of get the drift that insight into the show’s furniture likely appeal’s to the show’s older demo, who may want to decorate their home in a similar way. I feel like this kind of decor blogging would also be suited to a series like “Big Bang Theory,” which puts a lot of work into using cutting edge and “Cool” gadgets as set dressing, as well as in-jokes and mementos that fill out the guys’ geekdom.

And I hate to use the P word, but if they haven’t hooked “A Good Luck” up yet with Pinterest, they should do so immediately, as this is exactly the right kind of content a scripted show could spin out there, and drive traffic back to their show site. Maybe someone who isn’t a viewer, but loves a couch, may watch the show just to see that couch in action… and get sucked in. 

(Source: cbs.com)