The Impact of the TV Series

Logo of the tv series Salem.

According to the website Metacritic and its average reviews based on 16 critics (including the NY Times, E! Weekly or Washington Post for example), the first season of Salem is ranked 49 out of 100. Actually, Salem is an interesting tv series that shows historical facts and fictional elements, a mix that works for the audience even if the creators decided to cancel it after three seasons. But it did not prevent from being amazing for fans and many reason.

First  of all, since the series had been launched no prize has been won, but there were several nominations. In 2015 Janet Montgomery was nominated at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards in the category of Favourite actress on television for her role of Mary Sibley. During the same year, Saturn Awards nominated Salem in the category of Best syndicated/Cable television series. In 2016 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards nominated Janet Montgomery once again, for Best actress. Moreover Salem was nominated in the category of Best TV Series. Concerning the Best supporting actor, Seth Gabel (Cotton Mather) was nominated and Lucy Lawless (the Countess Marburg) for Best TV Supporting actress. Finally the last nomination was for the Best TV Make-up/creature FW for Matthew Mungle and Clinton Wayne.

A lot of fans of Salem are gathered into a big community present in different social networks because new technologies attract people and the channel WGN America knows how to promote the show. First, an official website was created to get information you need about the show: http://www.wgnamerica.com/series/salem/. There are several tabs allowing people to get through it. First there is help to understand better some scenes, then the presentation of the cast and the crew to learn the role of each person involved in the show. Another tab was made (‘Gallery’) especially for the viewers to (re)watch videos from the series but also to download pictures in high quality. The tab ‘Experience’ is really interesting such as it compares historical facts with events that happen in the series - and it is clearly what this blog is about - to help understanding elements that might be difficult if you do not have knowledge in witchcrafts. The tab ‘Activities’ is made of little games revolving around the Salem. Actually you can create your own gifs with videos extracted from the series and write whatever you want. You can also play to the ‘Book of shadows quiz’ (You know what the Book of shadows is, right? Come on, the precious book of Hale’s family!). If you have a Facebook account you can log in and create your witch’s hive or on Twitter vote for your best squad between Mary Sibley and Anne Hale. Finally there is the online shop which depicts the commercial aspect of the series. If you like it so much you can afford t-shirts, beanies, hoodies, jackets, sweaters to indulge in yourself and it will advertise the series Salem when you are walking in the street with a their product.

Then since 2013 an official Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/SalemWGNA) exists to watch videos related to Salem like teasers, ‘behind the scenes’, trailers or clips. This channel also organised weekly videos for each season called ‘Ask Salem’ in which the main actors answer questions from fans. It is a good way to interact between celebrities and viewers because they add information that you can not necessarily notice in the series and give their opinion towards subjects related to the series. Salem has an official Facebook page (https://fr-fr.facebook.com/SalemWGNA/) with more than 450,000 people liking the page which helps to spread and expand the impact of the series because people speak about it. On the official Twitter account of the series (https://twitter.com/salemwgna?lang=fr) ‘tweets’ are posted in order to write a very short message to say the most important thing to remember about the new coming like the date of the next episode or promoting sales for their online shop for instance. They are currently more than 50,000 followers, expressing they opinion about what they think of the series, reacting to the tweets of the channel. Another social network exits for Salem, the official Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/salemwgna/) which already have almost 40,000 followers to share pictures of the series, actors, behind the scenes, to let the viewers get deeper into the series. The series is present everywhere on the net, even on Tumblr (http://salemwgna.tumblr.com/) still to post multimedia (images, videos, gifs) into a mini blog. Finally, a fan website was created to give much more information about Salem (http://salem.wikia.com/wiki/The_Salem_Wiki). Their 347 articles are totally dedicated to analyse the episodes, the characters, the external events the actors participated to promote the series, historical facts but they also make polls and ask fans to interact with them.

Still on the net, some of fans invented what is called “fan fictions” which is only fictions written by fans. For instance there are the Witch Trials seen from a particular point of view of a character, or a fan imagining what could have been Salem as a comedy. It is a new way of discovering the series and people can share their ideas and opinion about it. Here are the links of two websites hosting a few of those fan fictions: https://www.fanfiction.net/tv/Salem/ and http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Salem%20%28TV%29/works

The last point to comment on is the impact of the series Salem in the Comic Con International that takes place every year in San Diego (USA). Indeed it is a convention where pop culture and entertainment like comic books or fantasy films, novels, videos games, toys are presented. The main actors of Salem are part of it as you can see on the picture below. They speak at conferences and answer questions of journalists to promote the series.

Comic Con at San Diego (2014). From left to right: Seth Gabel (Cotton), Janet Montgomery (Mary),
Iddo Goldberg (Isaac), Elise Eberle (Mercy), Ashley Medekwe (Tituba) and Shane West (John), .