Awkward Family Photos Web Show Debuts on Nerdist

Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist channel on YouTube is making good on its promise of launching a helluva lot of online original series with high profile individuals and organizations, premiering shows with the likes of “Weird Al” Yankovic (and sometime in the not-so-distant future Neil Patrick Harris).

Last week, the channel (that’s part of the YouTube Originals Initiative) continued to make good on its word with the premiere of Awkward Family Photos, a web show hosted by the creators of the popular blog of the same name.

If you’re new to Awkward Family Photos, well then I’d like to welcome you to the Internet and direct you to the blog’s Hall of Fame. With quite a large readership, AFP is a great example of a site that turned a goofy photo in the attic into an appearance in the Huffington Post

, a book deal, and now a video series (see also: Shit My Dad Says, which turned a twitter feed into a CBS sitcom deal). If every funny tumblr blog could achieve that level of exposure, someone would’ve made the people behind Hungover Owls very rich by now.

It’s neat that AFP got a series deal, though at times it may be hard to see the difference between the blog’s still images and its moving picture iteration. The show is basically the the AFP creators, Mike Bender and Doug Chernak, running through a series of photos while commenting on them with a similar witty style found in the text blog’s photo captions. There’s also an iChat convo with Bender’s grandparents and a caption contest for viewers. It’s funny in the same kind of way the blog is funny and is an easy way to tie up the humor of AFP with a nice neat bow (as one commenter sort of sarcastically suggested).

So there you have it. If you like Awkward Family Photos, or you like the idea of blogs making it big, or you just want to support Chris Hardwick and his burgeoning empire, you could do a lot worse than giving Awkward Family Photos a spin. Just try not to get too transfixed.