CBS, Owen Benjamin Get Ready to 'Heckle-U' at NCAA Tourney

Word out from CBS Interactive today that they are launching a new 10-episode web series set to debut in February, just in time for the ramp up to the network’s coverage of the 2009 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

Heckle-U will star web series vet Owen Benjamin (Gaytown, Owen Benjamin Presents) as an underachiever who has found his calling heckling at men’s college hoops games. He is egged on by his bartending uncle played by Tom Arnold, who by the way has been making the rounds in web series lately—see Overkill and Easy to Assemble.

Procter &

Gamble products will be integrated into the series as part of the deal and will be rolled out through the CBS Audience Network. That means CBS.com and its distrubtion partners including AOL, Fancast, MSN, Veoh, Yahoo!, YouTube and others.  According to Nielsen NetView, (April 2008) their network reaches 92% of US online users.

This is the latest out of CBS Interactive, who has been steadily producing a broad range of web series from Stephen King’s N earlier this summer to this fall’s Saturn-integrated Novel Adventures series.