'Decisions, Decisions' Abound As Crackle Stakes Comedy Claim

Comedy is still the king genre of web video. And fittingly there are dozens of sites vying to be the web’s go-to hubs for comedy—Funny or Die, Atom.com, My Damn Channel, Comedy.com—but that doesn’t mean the broader web series hubs aren’t up for some jocularity of their own. Sony’s Crackle.com has had its share of original comedies over the past year, most recently bowing Jon Heder led Woke Up Dead, not to mention earlier jabs like David Faustino’s Star-ving.

But in an effort to bolster their comedy wares, Crackle rolled out its latest push today with the launch of a video slate dubbed “Last Call for Comedy.” The package contains just two new original web series—Decisions, Decisions and So On and So Forth—alongside the online debut of the first two seasons of TBS comedy 10 Items or Less and some cult comedy films like the Wilson brothers debut flick, Bottle Rocket. Both of the new series are out of house pick-ups for Crackle, nabbing them from now-defunct web studios Stage 9 Digital and 60Frames.

Decisions, Decisions: A 15-episode ‘buddy comedy’ series centered around two friends (who in real life are brothers), Roger Ponders (Brendan Countee) and Patrick Shruggs (Adam Countee), throwing ridiculous hypothetical questions at one another. You know, exactly the kind of ‘would you rather’ lobs that make those long road trips bearable. Like: “Would you rather have to take all of your dates to Civil War reenactments OR have to give a live press conference immediately after getting laid?” (see above)

The two stars created the series through their Handsome Donkey production outfit, having last made Squeegees for ABC’s shuttered web content arm Stage 9 Digital. All 15 episodes are released on site today. We scored some exclusive outtakes from one of the eps below:

So On and So Forth: Love triangles are for wimps. This series is a mess of five tangled lovers. There’s Sam (Armen Weitzman) who’s hopelessly in love with Chloe (Diana Gitelman) who “may or may not have just broken up” with Dennis (CSI Miami’s Jon Togo) whose friend Leland (Jake Johnson) just bought a gun and thinks he’s in love with Chloe’s friend Joy (Camille Chen)…and so on and so forth. You need to see this to fully wrap your head around it:

For more from Crackle, don’t forget to RSVP for the December Hollywood Web TV Meetup—Going Pro: Seducing the Studios—on December 15, 2009 featuring the creators of Crackle’s upcoming action series The Bannen Way and Crackle.com head Eric Berger. You don’t want to miss this one!