Between-the-Lines: Social Media, Professional Identity, and TV's Liminal Laborers

Increasingly, online spaces for self-disclosure (personal websites, social media networks) are offering television laborers spaces in which to form distinct and comprehensive professional identities in relation to dominant conceptions of industry hierarchies. This article considers television laborers who position themselves "between-the-lines" in these spaces, where they have access to discourses of creativity and authority associated with above-the-line laborers but nonetheless occupy marginalized positions within industry hierarchies. Drawing on a central case study of composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead), the article explores how his experience establishes "between-the-lines" as a precarious form of professional identity formation, inaccessible to many and unsustainable without careful, ongoing, and uncertain negotiation.