Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production. M. J. Clarke. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 242 pp. $100 hbk. $29.95 pbk.Critical approaches to media scholarship often avoid incorporating the process of production from the perspective of the producers. Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production by M. J. Clarke, who earned his PhD in Film and Television from UCLA in 2010, attempts to challenge this trend by taking up the intimidating task of reaching out to producers to integrate industrial data in the form of both business strategy and individual practice with textual data through the analysis of programming and [suggest] the ways in which programming trends replicate, complicate, or anticipate the conditions of production itself. The result is a book that seeks to advance our understanding of how today's television functions to create meaning as well as researchers' methods for understanding those functions.Transmedia Television is written in two parts. The book begins with a short but effective introduction that explains Clarke's approach to research that includes the nature of production and argues for the consideration of ancillary paratexts in media research. Part 1 examines four of these ancillary texts: the comic book, the tie-in novel, the video game, and the mobisode. Each of these is part of what Clarke calls an attempt by media producers to bring transmedia storytelling to the television experience. This section focuses on how these four types of texts are produced and used in relationship to the television series. These chapters provide some useful evidence as to why contemporary television is struggling to find its form in an everchanging landscape.While Part 1 focuses heavily on the production aspect of tentpole TV, Part 2 turns to three textual analyses of twenty-first-century television programs. Clarke uses these critical analyses to explore the ways in which transmedia television must account for problems of time, space, and continuity. Chapter 5, for example, is a detailed study of Lost to explore two trends, non-linear episodic texts and persistent master narratives, which are seemingly at-odds. Chapter 7's argument that reflexivity in the show Alias works to respond not only to its own characters and narrative but also to the nature of its production also provides some valuable insight.Part 1 of Transmedia Television feels like a failed exercise, not on the part of Clarke but on the part of the media producers themselves. When Clarke is able to incorporate the feedback from producers, it is often only the producers of the ancillary texts that contribute, and much of what they have to say involves a lack of communication, cooperation, or interest on the part of the television producers to dedicate themselves to the tentpole TV experience. This is best exemplified in the chapter on the mobisode, where Clarke opens up by admitting the mobisode is already largely a dead end in the practice of transmedia. …