#GomorraLaSerie: Converging audience and enhanced authorship on twenty-first-century Italian screens

Abstract

Based on Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorra (2006), production of the TV series Gomorra – La serie (2014) was met with scepticism as many feared it would glamorise organised crime and, consequently, attract young people toward Camorra affiliation. The series’ bleak portrayal of criminals and criminality was offered as a response to such concerns. Despite the preoccupations, Gomorra – La serie was hugely successful and, because of its quality, was sold to other countries. In Italy, the series’ success can be measured by the popularity of its Twitter hashtag #GomorraLaSerie. Engaged with Henry Jenkins’ theories of media convergence and based on a corpus of tweets bearing this official hashtag, this article proposes a quantitative analysis and advances conclusions regarding the Italian TV audience and second-screen viewing practices. Additionally, through a qualitative study of Saviano’s tweets about the series, it examines the writer’s use of the social media platform as a tool of narrative continuity. Finally, the article highlights a few examples of fan-generated media and concludes with remarks regarding Saviano’s problematic position at the centre of a transmedia object.

Keywords:

• Roberto Saviano
• Gomorra
• Twitter
• television
• Camorra
• media convergence

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Modern Italy’s anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an early draft of this article. He is also grateful to his mentors Giorgio Bertellini and Elena Past for their invaluable support and advice, and to Julie Babcock and Robert Hallmark for their scrupulous readings and copyediting. This is for Jamie and Grace. All translations from Italian are the author’s own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As I will show, Roberto Saviano talks about the series’ realistic style in terms of its connections to documented events of the history of Camorra and of the verisimilitude of the characters for their language, methods, and criminal behaviours. While a full discussion of the series’ realist representation as a result of narrative and visual conventions goes beyond the scope of this article, I note how Saviano’s 2006 book and the subsequent movie directed by Matteo Garrone in 2008 engendered a lively debate regarding realism and the documentary value of both works. See, for instance, Benedetti et al. (2008), Casadei (2010), Pocci (2011), Serkowska (2011, particularly XVIII–XXVI), and Antonello (2012).

2. In a Variety! online review, Gomorra – La serie has been equated to the American series The Wire (2002–2008), probably because of both series’ focus on the drug-dealing business (Vimercati 2014). The Italian series, however, particularly for the everydayness of its characters and their conversations, can also be connected to The Sopranos (1999–2007) (Willis 2002; Toscano 2014).

3. The data regarding the hashtag #GomorraLa Serie were reported online by the Italian news agency Ansa on 11 June 2014 (Ansa 2014; retrieved in February 2015). On Twitter’s homepage, users find a list of ‘Trends’, that is, a series of hashtags and keywords which are currently being used in large numbers of tweets. By default, this list is tailored to the users’ interests, determined by their location and by whom they follow. The trending list can also be set to display popular topics among users of a certain location.

4. The BBC News article was based on a Pear Analytics study of 2000 messages in English, retrieved over a week. The study is available here: https://www.pearanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Twitter-Study-August-2009.pdf (retrieved in February 2015). For the BBC report, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8204842.stm (retrieved in February 2015). The study was the source of other similar news reports by CNBC, NBC, and the Daily Mail.

5. ‘Twitter Facts’ available here https://about.twitter.com/company, retrieved in February 2015.

6. For a succinct overview of the ways in which Twitter has been studied since 2006, in parallel with a narrative of the evolution of the tool, see Rogers (2014).

7. The definition was originally posted on Rosen’s blog and is available here: http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html.

8. In a subsequent article, Couldry (2004) introduces the idea of ‘online liveness’ to describe the online co-presence of spectators (356).

9. For a thorough analysis of the ‘Glee case’, see Benecchi and Colapinto (2011). See also Vellar (2011) for a study of Glee and an Italian audience.

10. See Grasso and Scaglioni (2010) for an overview of the practices of convergence in the context of Italian television.

11. See Benecchi (2013) for more details about Quo vadis, baby?, particularly regarding its online presence (126–129).

12. The 2004 novel Quo vadis, baby? was the basis of the 2005 film of the same title directed by Gabriele Salvatores. Similarly, Michele Placido directed Romanzo criminale in 2005 after the 2002 publication of the novel with the same title by Giancarlo De Cataldo.

13. D’Aloia (2010) accurately describes the audience response to Romanzo criminale. He refers specifically to the online reception on Facebook (204–209).

14. Twitter Italy ranked the hashtag #GomorraLaSerie third in the list of trending topics in the category ‘TV Series’ for the year 2014 (data available here https://blog.twitter.com/it/2014/2014-l-anno-su-twitter, in the Livia Iacolare’s blog entry ‘2014: l’anno su Twitter’). The first hashtag of this category was #BraciallettiRossi, a Rai production that pursued aggressive online marketing strategies, targeting its teenager audience with an app and a video contest. As part of the contest, messages with the official hashtag and links to the fans’ video were posted automatically on Facebook and Twitter.

15. See, for instance, Nespoli (2013) for criticisms of Gomorra – La serie’s violence, and Caprara (1995) and Maltese (2000) for the polemics surrounding La Piovra. See also Fumarola (2008) on Romanzo criminale and Giancarlo De Cataldo’s explanations of the importance of representing evil in fictional works.

16. Jenkins’s entire chapter “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” in Convergence Culture, 93–130, is relevant for the understanding of ‘transmedia storytelling’. I will return to this category in my conclusions.

17. As another Twitter user aptly noted, this kind of fraud was also shown in Gabriele Salvatores’ 1993 Sud.

18. For Jenkins’ full discussion of fan-generated media, see the chapter “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry”, in Convergence Culture, 131–168.