Our 2025 Console-ing Passions panel, “Chucky Three Ways: Narrative, Industry, Fandom,” has two distinct origin stories. The first begins at Console-ing Passions 2024, when Amanda Ann Klein attended a paper by our panel’s eventual respondent, Kristen Galvin, titled “The Queer Loves, Lives, Deaths, and Horror Nostalgia of Chucky.” After hearing Galvin’s scholarship and watching select clips, Klein was inspired to watch every Chucky movie and all three seasons of the TV series. The second is through a horror group chat where we (along with other media scholar friends with an interest in the genre), regularly exchange recommendations and discuss what we happen to be watching. Over the past year, this discussion included the third and final season of Syfy television series Chucky (2021-2024), a transmedia extension of the Child’s Play franchise, which introduced the killer doll in a 1988 film and has since spawned six sequels and a 2019 film reboot. Below, we reflect on our respective interests in and approaches to the franchise, and how our panel more generally reflects the legacy of Console-ing Passions as a conference that takes devalued or culturally marginalized media objects, genres, and audiences seriously.

Child’s Play was released in 1988 and centers on the story of a serial killer named Charles Lee Ray, who, in an effort to escape death, is able to transfer his soul into a large doll. Child’s Play was followed in quick succession by Child’s Play 2 in 1990 and Child’s Play 3 in 1999. Later films introduce Chucky’s love interest Tiffany, and their child, GiGi. The final two films, Curse of Chucky in 2013 and Cult of Chucky in 2017, feature a new victim and key character, Nica, whose trauma will continue through the USA/SyFy series TV series. The Chucky TV series, also created by Don Mancini, and featuring most of the actors who appeared in previous Chucky films including Brad Dourif (the voice of Chucky as well as an elderly Charles Lee Ray), his daughter Fiona (who plays both Nica and a younger version of Charles Lee Ray), Jennifer Tilly (who plays herself as well as a body possessed by the soul of Tiffany), and Alex Vincent (who plays Andy). There is also Child’s Play and a Chucky comic miniseries and a video game entitled Chucky: Slash and Dash. To date, the franchise has generated over $250 million. Because Chucky and his victims have been on screens (both big and little) for nearly 40 years, the franchise offers a rich archive for studying genre, seriality, fandom, and merchandising.

Our panel engaged the Chucky universe through three different analytical perspectives. In “‘Previously on F*cking Chucky…': Linear Seriality in an Age of IP,” Amanda Ann Klein explores how the continuous serialization of Chucky, a franchise with a “persistent” narrative universe, consistent tone, and familiar characters that have continued over the span of nearly 40 years highlights how film and TV as experiential categories are becoming less and less meaningful to audiences. Its continuity is uncommon in media franchises for obvious reasons: actors age and die, new target audiences may have little attachment to legacy characters, and reboots offer the prospect of casting a beloved IP with contemporary A-list actors. Klein uses the Chucky franchise as a case study for better understanding how genre, IP, and the rise of textual multiplicities is dissolving the once-firm boundaries between film and TV.

Matt Boyd Smith interrogated the shifting production and distribution contexts of the franchise  in his paper, “‘Grateful for the Killer Three Years We Did Have:’ Content Strategy in the Time of Chucky.” Beginning with the Chucky’s cancellation after three critically-acclaimed seasons with high viewership, Smith traces some of the different strategies employed by the television show’s producers, the networks, and their parent company, NBC Universal, in an attempt to find an elusive audience at a time of major industrial changes. In line with Klein’s argument about the franchise’s unique narrative linearity over four decades, Smith pointed to Chucky’s inclusive gender politics and the increased visibility of LGBTQIA+ themes and characters in horror films and television productions as a means of attracting and appealing to a younger audience. Smith also discussed how NBC Universal deployed a multi-platform distribution and release strategy - including simulcasting on two different networks, YouTube, and various streaming platforms - in a bid to find the audience where they are: online. Both factors point to many of the difficulties facing producers and networks as audiences continue to abandon traditional and legacy media outlets for the more diffuse and disparate outlets in the twenty-first century.

Finally, Suzanne Scott’s presentation, “‘The Chucky money just pays for my snacks’: Transmediating Tilly Fandom,” focused on how Jennifer Tilly’s star text creates unlikely fannish contact zones between two very disparate franchises: Chucky and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Scott's analysis focused on an episode of the Chucky TV series (“Death on Denial,” S02E04) in which Tilly’s Real Housewives co-star and real-life gal pal Sutton Stracke appears as herself, references to the Chucky franchise on Real Housewives, and fan responses to these intertextual moments on social media. Scott suggests that despite what might be perceived as generic and fannish asymmetry between the Chucky and Real Housewives franchises, this specific contact zone and the way Tilly’s star text is operationalized across these texts ultimately reveals how the slippage between reality and fiction is central to both franchises’ narrative appeal for fans. 

Together, these three papers offered a comprehensive view of the Chucky franchise, considering both production and reception contexts as well as its narrative texts, star texts, and promotional paratexts. While the focus was on one specific franchises (and admittedly one with a cult rather than a mass media following), the papers collectively gestured to broader ways that we as media scholars need to think about the complexities of media franchises in a time where corporate-owned IP is an extremely important component of the creative and business contexts of production and distribution, and how this in turn shapes fan reception. While ostensibly localized around the Chucky television series, thus aligning with the conference’s historic focus on television, the underlying issues raised across these three papers gesture to the porous and deeply intertextual nature of our contemporary media landscape.

Console-ing Passions has always afforded a unique space where media scholars are welcome to take on new, sometimes experimental, areas of research and collaborate as a community of scholars. This panel in particular highlighted how Console-ing Passion’s ethos of exchange and generosity fosters scholarly collaboration, and the relationships built there continue on in our everyday lives, where we continue to share and discuss our shared media interests. In name, but also in content, Console-ing Passions has always foundationally encouraged the embrace and scholarly reassessment of “bad” cultural objects, guilty pleasures, queerness, and camp. Our panel, and the Chucky franchise it centered on, similarly embraced these themes, with renewed appreciation of the distinct scholarly space that Console-ing Passions has carved out within media studies.