The online entertainment community is eagerly anticipating the launch of Strike.tv and its lauded programming lineup featuring writing, producing, directing, and acting from seasoned Hollywood veterans.
In the teaser and on paper, it looks like a winner, but we’ve seen this pre-launch song and dance number before.
Everyone expected big things from United Talent Agency when the company announced it would launch a “ministudio for digital entertainment from established actors, directors, and others,” only to be underwhelmed when 60Frames finally went online with no must-see internet-tv (unless you’re from New Jersey).
So, I’m staying cautiously skeptical, except for two shows, which you’re totally going to to want to watch. Read On…
Chances are, if you’ve heard of Roommating you either watch a lot of web series, or you’re involved in the S&M community. Seriously – I’m not kidding. Check it out:
I met co-creator Erin Gibson at the Independent TV Festival last week, where she explained that the series is something she and co-creator Joel Church-Cooper are hoping to either see picked up for television, find a sponsorship online, or in the worst case scenario just make as a side project for a while before moving on. “The show’s cheap to make,” she explained. “We have the cameras… we only spend money on tapes every once in a while, and get people to help with the filming.”
Tubefilter News got a chance to sit down with Joel, and talk to him about the show, the future of new media, and the untapped online power of the S&M community.
Tubefilter: Your episodes cover topics ranging from sex slaves and porn aficionados to Army life and fanship of The Wire. I’m almost afraid to ask this, but how do you write this stuff?
Joel Church-Cooper: All of our ideas come from real places, whether it be my love for the Obama campaign and amateur porn or Erin’s infrequent menstrual cycle. We will just start joking about these things as friends do, and then sometimes the jokes start to take on the, “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” that lets us know we have a potential episode. The slave episode is funny because it might be the most true. Years ago Erin inherited a [sex] slave when she moved to Chicago from a friend who was leaving town. She would just make him do demeaning things and lock him in rooms without touching him. The only issue was her roommates were not at all cool with it. Which is where we thought, what if I was cool with it and tried to steal him from her like a new bag of chips?
TF: Who is your main audience?
Church-Cooper: The odd thing about our audience is that it is heavily tilted towards the S and M community as ‘Slave’ is by far the most popular video we’ve put out. The response has been uniformly positive from that community because we don’t really make the slave the butt of the joke. He just exists; Erin and I are the crazy ones, and in the end he wins and gets exactly what he wants. The response from that community has been really positive and there have been a lot of comments about people loving Erin’s feet. Otherwise our audience is your standard young lover of alternative comedy which is definitely the group that we feel we belong to. We pretty much just sent our baby out into the world and hoped it would find an audience. We’ve relied on word of mouth up until this point. And while the show has spread, both of us feel it’s time to be more proactive in our approach to getting viewers.
TF: What has development for the show been like?
Church-Cooper: The strength of the show is how close it stays to our actual relationship. There wasn’t really any thought to the show at first beyond slightly exaggerated versions of ourselves living together and getting into wacky hijinks. But as we’ve gone along the tone sort of developed and our “characters” became more defined. The show is organic and as the world is fleshed out we get a better idea of what direction to head in. We are about to shoot our tenth episode this weekend; nine have been released so far, and we have a huge backlog of ideas that our schedules and the reality of a two man production crew (Erin and I) haven’t allowed us to get to.
TF: What are the advantages to releasing a show online, especially from a creative standpoint?
Church-Cooper: My favorite moment in Roommating is one in the very beginning, the second episode, when I’m mad at Erin for giving my secretly hot girlfriend a makeover thereby making her actually hot. I get to say the line, “Do you know how awesome sex is with a girl with no self esteem? It is all blow jobs and doggy style… and you took it away from me.” [That line] would have never made it onto network TV or maybe even basic cable. The freedom to have complete control of your own creative content is by far the best thing about the web.
Every week, Stevens presents a five-minute wrap-up of the week’s sports news (recent topics include Brett Favre, the Olympics and Brett Favre) complete with graphics, sound effects, and mini-skits.
There’s a section called “GenuInterview” in which Stevens does fake interviews with sports stars giving answers meant for other, more serious interviewers (Stevens asks Michael Phelps how he does with the ladies. Phelps answers, “I need to work on my stroke.”) and the show has fake sponsorships like Steve Smith’s Punch-Out video game.
It’s watchable, clever, and witty, but something’s a little off.
No one said the wait would be easy for life-long friends Josh and Duffy.
In order to be the first ones in for the new Future Space sci-fi flick, they need to overcome superfans dressed as alien triplets that speak and act with one mind (but need more practice), a Spoiler who’s hell-bent on ruining the film for everyone, and an unforgiving five-minute out-of-line rule (though they’re not battling any “professional media whores,” at least not yet).
It’s only through their love of all things Future Space and an unrelenting fraternal bond that they’re able to surpass these, and other obstacles in order to see their object of teenage affection come to life again on the big screen.
The Line, staring Bill Hader (SNL, Superbad, The Jeannie Tate Show) and Joe Lo Truglio, is the tale of these two BFFs who wait in queue for no less than eleven days to see the latest installment of their most favorite movie franchise, which no doubt helped to inspire Josh and Duffy’s arrested development.
Throughout the seven episode series, we see our heroes maneuver between fellow psycho-fanatics and an authoritarian movie theater manager determined to keep order.
It’s a mostly family-friendly fanboy romp with a Disney ending that plays straight into the Comic Con demographic. Although at times the 28-minute series feels as long as Josh and Duffy’s wait outside the theater, the loosely autobiographical premise is fleshed out with a solid narrative that investigates the depths of middle-aged nerddom.
Atomic Wedgie‘s Every Hipsteris a glorious revenge piece on those dudes wearing forty dollar American Apparel shirts, but sipping PBR so they can still hang in the hood and listen to a local Tejano band later at the bistro down the street. Not only that, but Every Hipster is funny.
Derek Miller takes on the title role, skewering our pop-culture-loving society, while still managing to be charming. With a portrayal so accurate, one concludes extensive research into the deep thoughts of the hip one had been conducted. “I think the research was done for us,” Miller says. “Anywhere we went or anything that had a “buzz” to it was occupied by hipsters of some sort or the other, and God bless them, they try ever so hard to be unique that you can’t miss them. Turns out they also think their ideas are very important so they like to be heard as well.”
But it’s Miller’s humility that allows the nameless hipster to remain believable. “As much as I can make the satire meta, there are elements of simplicity that make him more relatable and ultimately humorous. At the end of the day it’s a 90 second clip, and I just want people to laugh.”
After getting a glimpse into this hipster’s cool hobbies, sweet threads, and dope lady friends, perhaps there is hope to get to know the man himself in future episodes. Miller says, “as much as the first couple were simple digs on the culture you will see more layers as the series progresses. Such as breaks in the facade of the character and the fourth wall itself. I mean, hipsters can’t call themselves hipsters, but a lot of this is poking fun at myself.”
In addition to Every Hipster, Miller is working on several other pilots for Atomic Wedgie, part of FremantleMedia, including CubeSoap, a soap opera happening entirely in a cubicle, and Atomic Zoo which goes inside the booth with two obnoxious morning radio DJs.
Cube Fabulous was a trailblazer. In 2006, when most people were fooling around with dogs and skateboards, Jordan Berman of Shorn Entertainment and Broadband Enterprises (comprised of individuals formerly at Warner Bros. Studio 2.0) were figuring out what commercial television would look like on the web.
Cube Fabulous – a “fantastic parody of the endless parade of contemporary makeover shows, touching on everything from bad decorating tips to the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy trope of hosts discussing their makeover victim’s foibles while driving in an SUV with a camera lodged on the dashboard” – may have been ahead of it’s time, but in hindsight, its creators saw the horizon with impressive clarity: a simple concept with a narrowly defined, advertiser-friendly demographic, sponsored by a single brand.
This was MTV content fitted for the web with built-in sponsorship, and it came about a year before anyone else had done anything close.
Dorm Storm, Brodband Enterprises next iteration makeover show, seems to be a continuation of the Cube Fabulous experiment with one interesting exception: though Berman had been developing a similarly-themed Dorm makeover show – Dorm Fabulous – Shorn Entertainment isn’t involved in Dorm Storm.
Jimmy Jellinekstarted something good. Back in March, the former editor-in-chief at Maxim and current VP of entertainment at Heavy, found a way to make the alarmingly successful and amusingly vapid faux reality of The Hills a helluva lot more entertaining.
Substitute the late-teen and early-20-something ex-Laguna Beachers with stunted So-Cal vocabularies for geriatrics, who play out the drama in similar locations and repeat the exact same dialogue spoken by children of privilege 1/4th their age. Genius.
Recasting and reshooting a popular TV show with one kind of archetypal character is a comedic device so good it’s worth repeating. So, Heavy decided to use it on every aspiring female cosmopolitan’s favorite New York City foursome. Except in this word-for-word rendition of Sex and the City, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte get gym memberships and Barry Bonds-endorsed supplements instead of a sip from the wrong Holy Grail.
More news in about the upcoming launch of Strike.TV, the site we reported on in early July. According to our source, a “soft launch” of the site is expected to begin on Monday, August 18th. The private beta will be open to people close to the project, as well as for the first 1,000 people to sign up for updates on the Strike.TV site. Registration will close at 3:00pm PST on Monday, after which viewers will have to wait for the full launch, which shouldn’t be much further down the road.
We also have trailers and behind-the-scenes footage for a few of Strike.TV’s first crop of shows (through Vimeo) – With the Angels(Mary Feuer of lonelygirl15), House Poor (Lester Lewis and Mindy Kaling of The Office), Life in General (Karen Harris of General Hospital), Unknown Sender (Steven de Souza of Die Hard, starring Timothy Dalton), and 5 or Die (Tom Holland of Child’s Play).
Two Guys Drinking At A Bar is the Cheers for the new millennium. Let’s call it a minimalist sitcom. One joke minimum and in some cases half a joke, then tune in next week folks for the punchline. The first ep is a mildly funny joke. I smirked. So is this what it is? But at a minute in length, you figure, well I gotta at least hear the next joke. So second ep, hmm, is that canned laughter in the background? Well, that’s a little clever. Okay, next one…and so on and before you know it, you’re ten-point-five eps in (yes, there’s a Milner Lite ad at 10.5) and you find yourself easter egging the credits and googling Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, basically anything the creator Mike J Nichols watches or as I imagine, has watched in his entire adult life. And you realize, this is post-modernist webbing, and Marshall McLuhan would be proud of all the media commentary. For this reason, as Mike says, “Two Guys Drinking at a Bar is a smart person’s stupid show.” Amen.
The concept originated from a pilot script Mike wrote that he had no money to shoot. So with “four dollars and some duct tape” and a couple of great comedic actor friends of his, Kevin Farley (Chris Farley’s brother) and Paul Preston, he extrapolated two minor characters from the pilot and started what seems to be becoming a minor web phenomenon. Mike tells me he overheard four girls at a sushi bar talking about the show after reading about it in Wired magazine. “That was pretty damn cool.” I’d say.
The show is primarily Kevin and Paul at the bar with the errant cameo by who-knows-who just there to facilitate the joke. Mike says he thinks Quentin Tarantino would ‘get’ the show and would like to announce that Quentin will possibly be on the show though he doesn’t know it yet. I’m guessing it’s the pop-culture referencing he’s talking about. Oh, he’d also like to let us know – and this is for reals – “the show is available in higher quality (if you can even imagine that) via iTUNES. So SUBSCRIBE already!”
Editor’s Note: We are excited to have Jonathan Hludzinski joining the Tubefilter News staff. Jonathan has a graduate degree in film from Columbia University, was once a CE at Wolf Films (Law and Order, SVU, etc), currently has screenplays in development with productions companies Bad Hat Harry and Legendary Films, he’s bald, strikingly handsome and likes walks on the beach at sunset. And ladies, he’s recently single…lucky you.
So far that means the office of Britain’s Prime Minister has discovered that the internet’s a good place to distribute photo/video opportunities featuring Gordon Brown that no one would want to watch anywhere else. Except for when he saves animals from Harry Potter books. Everyone loves stuff like this:
Oh! I was thinking of Thestrals, not Kestrels. Still, it’s a cool looking flying thing from around London, but ridiculous that it’s the best video of the bunch.
1) There should at least be a comprehensive archive of Prime Minister’s Questions and 2) Gordon Brown and Britain’s House of Commons would do well to watch their regal counterparts’ online video initiatives.
Considering the web’s come down with a severe caseofelectionfever, you’d think more people would be trying to capitalize on that other contest that happens every four years in front of a global audience. But so far world-famous blogger Kanye West is one of few content creators to upload notable videos with an Olympics-based hook.
It would’ve been way cooler to see Puppet Kanye come in not-first and then totally flip out, but it’s still cute, Kanye. Cute.
Far better than Atom‘s zero-budget attempt at capitalizing from the Beijing Games with 60-second, faux-history lessons photoshopped on the cheap with barely-moving animation and storylines that wouldn’t make it past the editors of Mad Magazine. Though probably not quite as entertaining as NBC’s Going for Bronze, at least not in context.
It’s less than a year from now, America is under martial law, the Patriot Act has been expanded during the nation’s continued state of emergency, George W. Bush is still President and there’s rebel activity in the Hollywood Hills. Oh, and three major American cities have been destroyed by an unknown force.
2009 A True Storyis a sci-fi drama of a daunting glimpse into the not so distant future that asks the question: What would life be like for ordinary citizens of the United States if the war came home?
It’s Cloverfield meets lonelygirl15 meetsGeneration Kill in 13 succinct episodes that present the story of Sara Ford (played by Kate Maloney) and her brother, US Army Specialist Adam Ford (Cody Harnish) who are separated by war and utter chaos. We journey with them as they try to keep from going crazy while searching for one another.
Each episode is told via a spilt POV between brother and sister via Sara’s camcorder and Adam’s helmet camera.
2009 is Tony E. Valenzuela’s (Creator/Writer/Director/Editor/Producer) debut web series. “I never expected 2009 to go where it’s gone and receive the attention it’s gotten,” Valenzuela said. “If you watch along you’ll get a huge reward. We believe our audience is smart, talented and interesting and we want to cater to those people.”
Now Valenzuela is having lunch and coffee all over town with the pioneers of web TV. Valenzuela and his production company, Strange Radio Productions hooked up with a diligent production team that includes D.P., writing partner and Co-Producer Jeffrey Hunt (2nd AD from Numb3rs), and Producer Jason Bernstein.
Valenzuela also enlisted the highly supportive services of Matt Sigloch and Jon Barton from The Gun Metal Group whose job it is to ensure all of the details of the scenes that involve the military are as realistic and accurate as possible. The group has also worked on Heroes, Cloverfield, and a slew of CBS projects.
2009 was shot for around $20,000 using a DVX (Highres, 4:3 ratio) and was “junked up” and pixilated to avoid a super clean look. “We wanted to stay away from anything that resembled Network Television,” said Valenzuela. “Anything that felt like regular TV was either altered or tossed out.”
No detail of this project has been overlooked. In fact, the www.2009atruestory.com landing page changes four times a day, depending upon where in the world you are. As ‘HNS’ the “Homeland News Services” reminds us to “Keep the dream alive, America,” we wonder quite logically, how we got here, what’s going on and what’s going to happen next.
The series originally aired on April 11, 2008 and the production team had been hoping for 10,000 views in total with 500-1,000 per episode. To date, episode one has 1.7 million viewers and counting on YouTube with the subsequent ones averaging 70,000 a piece. Valenzuela hopes his audiences will make up their own minds as to what the story is really about. “Every audience member/viewer holds a piece to the puzzle. Every opinion is valid,” he concluded.
Want more? Season 2 of 2009 kicks off on January 1, 2009. Word has it that Valenzuela and Strange Radio Productions also have some other sci-fi web projects in the works.
The new media studio conceived earlier this year in the shadows of picket signs held by striking writers is about to beta release premiere episodes of its flagship shows.
Two Guys Drinking At A Bar
It’s Cloverfield meets 
