2 - Carpool Karaoke On the drive to platforms

Summary

The 2010s were a pivotal decade in the digital transformation of television. Not simply a domestic ‘box in the corner’ delivering programmes through broadcast, cable and satellite, television was increasingly understood as an online service. The development of the internet as a mature distribution channel for film and TV created an ecology of entertainment websites, portals and apps linked to the inexorable rise of ‘platforms’. This term is associated with the ‘big five’ platform corporations (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) that own and operate online services that automate connections between users, content, data and advertising. However, the term also describes platform companies that operate within specific sectors and that often ‘disrupt’ established industry practices: from booking a taxi using Uber to watching TV through Netflix (van Dijck, Poell and De Wall 2018). If the entwinement of television and internet culture has been driven by platforms, this chapter considers a micro-genre that took ‘the drive’ literally in the 2010s. Using vehicles as a site for chat, nattering, singing and interviews, passengering became a premise for short-form content highly attuned to the mobile digital environment taking shape. It is perhaps no surprise that in an era of ‘platform mobility’ (Tryon 2013), where audiovisual media can be produced and consumed on the move, that digital shorts filmed in cars should flourish.

The auto micro-genre in question has taken various forms, from standalone web series and online TV segments to vlogs-in-vehicles by social media ‘influencers’. In using the term micro-genre I am not referring to the ‘ultra-niche’ explored by Molly O’Donnell and Anne Stevens in their anthology The Microgenre (2020). Rather than point to the ‘obscure and hyper-specific’, I refer to content that uses passengering to renew, refresh and refine TV talk show formats. Early examples include web ventures such as Robert Llewellyn's Carpool (iTunes/Dave, 2009–14, 2010–11) and Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (Crackle/ Netflix, 2012–17, 2017–20). Both series used the habitat of the car as a moving space for conversation with comedians and comic actors, the footage then edited and distributed through streaming platforms. The micro-genre reached its apogee with ‘Carpool Karaoke’, a recurring segment of The Late Late Show with James Corden (CBS, 2015–present).