'Blood Cell' Quietly Rings TheWB.com

Somehow without much fanfare, all 18 episodes of Jessica Rose-starring Blood Cell snuck out this week on TheWB.com. What was once one of most anticipated (if YouTube trailer views mean anything) series cooked up at the now-defunct 60Frames, is now tucked away on TheWB.

Right off the bat, this on is, well, gripping. A girl has been kidnapped and her friends Julia (Rose) Alex (Sara Sanderson) are lopped into the hunt when a late night call from their kidnapped friend Susan jolts Julia. Being a web series, the media-rich phone shows a video friend Susan—crying and scared. The kidnapper is a disturbingly grotesque thing

(think Saw’s tricycle riding clown and you wouldn’t be far off), but there’s a catch: Julia can’t turn off her phone – if she does, her friend dies. A text message hits the phone moments later: “Dead Cell = Dead Friend.”

Over a year ago we looked into what happened to Blood Cell, which seemed to have squandered its healthy web buzz. The trailer, which featured a sultry close-up pan shot of Rose, racked up almost 7 million views since its release in April, 2008. Now the thriller web series, created by genre director Eduardo Rodriguez and produced by Jeremy Bell, is finally online—though unfortunately the roll out made no use of the show’s popular YouTube channel.

The episode titles actually make for a decent recap poem:

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Side note to TheWB: The Verizon FiOS pre-roll ads on site are acting funky, as in every time you pull away from the window the video is playing in and then return, the ad repeats itself. The glitch is making the player almost unwatchable.