New media technologies such as mobile phones, iPods and iPads, email, and instant messaging provide new means for television genres to communicate with fans. The conventional type of American television series, however, will need to transform one key element in order to stay alive in such a rapidly changing media environment – its relationship to audience. In the new media environment, the audience is never static, and very rarely passive. Gone are the days when viewers gather around a television set. Traditional television series will need to transform how they engage with viewers, and the television shows that survive will be the ones that experiment with these new technologies. Familiar genres such as the family sitcom may go the way of the dinosaur simply because the traditional form of television built itself around a domestic situation wherein its viewers were passive, and their attention was more or less focused exclusively on the screen. The passive viewer model began in the early days of television. In McMurria’s words, “broadcast television developed within contradictory developments in modern life where new modes of transportation and communication facilitated a more mobile society while the ideal of self-sufficient family home ownership privileged autonomous dwelling” (McMurria 317). In this model, the television viewer was a spectator only. He or she sat still and watched the sitcom or drama unfold over the half hour or hour format. The time needed for breaks, including food, bathroom, and putting the kids to bed, was most often relegated to the commercials. “Television responded to, and reinforced, this “mobile privatization” of society by providing a virtual window to the world while TV advertising fueled a consumer economy that reinforced the ideals of private home ownership” (McMurria 317). The captive nature of the viewer at that time in television history affected the style of storytelling. Plot structure evolved around advertisements, and the competition for eyeballs was again more or less relegated to the few minutes when the viewer’s attention was away the show. Producers and writers spent the lion share of their creative energies devising ways to compel their audience back to their stories following the commercial break. As McMurria writes, “early television’s insertion of the “public” world into “private” living rooms excited anxieties. Postwar television promotion and programming idealized the detached suburban home for the upwardly mobile white middle-class family as well as threatened to disrupt the private sanctity of the gendered patriarchal family by distracting women from their housework” (McMurria 317). Audiences at that time, although they still had the power to not watch a show, were far more submissive, and most importantly, far less mobile. The idea of home as a static, stationary platform for television content no longer applies, however. Content, specifically in the realm of television genres, must address the issue of audience mobility, as well as the fact that for many content consumers, a hand held device now represents “home.” Mobility of the audience represents the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity for television genres and for conventional television conten