Indie Spotlight: ‘#Throwback’ Rips Social Media Satire From The Headlines

We receive a ton of tips every day from independent creators, unaffiliated with any major motion picture studios, television networks, new media studios, or other well-funded online video entities. The Indie Spotlight is where we’ll write about and shout out to a select few of them and bring you up to speed on the great (and sometimes not-so-great) attention-grabbing series you probably haven’t heard about until now. Read previous installments here.

The trending topics on platforms like Twitter and Facebook fill visitors in on the subjects that, after being discussed ad nauseum for a few days, will disappear into obscurity, until they are dredged up weeks, months, or years later as nostalgic footnotes. The Dress. Left Shark. Marco Rubio’s water bottle incident. Once, they were hot topics on the Internet. Now, they are merely memories.

The rise and fall of social media trending topics forms the basis for a web series called #Throwback, created by Hoff Matthews. In his series, Matthews looks back one year in the past and writes short comedic episodes that riff on the topics that were, at that point in time, trending on social media.

The protagonists of #Throwback are employees at a social media agency, and in each episode, we get to see the process by which they shoehorn trending topics into the tweets they send for their clients. Sometimes, it’s not possible to find a good fit; after all, how could the Twitter feed of a plumbing company give a natural shout out to #BlackLivesMatter? It is through those poor matches that #Throwback

derives most of its comedy.

At the same time, the series chronicles the lives of its characters, who have higher aspirations than their peon-like existence would suggest. In a way, #Throwback is a show about how the deluge of social media interactions that occur in a single day make it harder for any individual voices to stand out. If that’s too deep for you, don’t worry. There are plenty of silly Hamburglar jokes, too.

OTHER UNDER-THE-RADAR SERIES TO CHECK OUT

• It’s Food! with Vanessa Charbonne. After receiving a DUI, a former beauty queen must follow a court mandate and launch a food show.
• Roadside Deadguys. A unique version of the afterlife plays out along a lonely stretch of road.
• Skirtchasers. This catty series can be found on LGBT-skewed platform Tello.

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