Looking for the next great breakout web series? It may very well be YouTube Comment Reconstruction. The recently-released brainchild of English comedy troupe Dead Parrot uses terrible YouTube comments as its fodder, and it is a real gem.
The first YouTube Comment Reconstruction takes an argument between two One Direction fans and turns it into high theatre, with two actors reciting the dialogue across a candlelit dining table. The mood, setting, and black-and-white color scheme feel like Masterpiece Theater, but the source material screams ‘tween girls who spend too much time on the Internet’. The result is something really special.
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YouTube Comment Reconstruction feels similar in many ways to 2013’s biggest breakout web series hit, Convos With My 2 Year Old; like that series, it is short, easily-digestible, and based around a simple bait-and-switch gimmick. In both cases, the scripts write themselves, but the actors bring things to a higher level with their wonderful comedic performances.
Dead Parrot are also adding to the growing ‘dramatic rendition’ genre. Earlier this year, Michael Shannon’s overblown version of the already-insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter became a viral hit for Funny or Die; more recently, Screen Junkies scored millions of views of its own by enlisting Morgan Freeman for a smooth-voiced reading of Ylvis’ ‘The Fox’.
I have no idea how much more YouTube Comment Reconstruction Dead Parrot plans on doing, but since this video is billed as #1, my hope is that there are many other flame wars that are soon to receive a dramatic rendition. There’s certainly no shortage of material.
