The Guild Season One Review
Cyd Sherman’s life is complicated. “It’s Friday night and still jobless,” she tells her video blog. “Haven’t left the house in a week. My therapist broke up with me.” She then pauses for a moment before adding with a shrug, “Oh, yeah, there’s a gnome warlock in my living room, sleeping on my couch.” With that simple introduction begins the first episode of the online webseries The Guild. Created and written by actress Felicia Day—who also plays the aforementioned Cyd, aka Codex—this award-winning series follows a group of World of Warcraft-style online gamers who suddenly find themselves forced to face real-world obstacles when Codex’s life takes a screwball-comedy turn for the worse.
Day, who admits to having had a two-year addiction to World of Warcraft, originally wrote the script as a television pilot but when she was told that the plot was too “niche,” turned it into a webseries instead with the assistance of fellow producers Jane Selle Morgan and Kim Evey. “I decided to write something to show the world that gamers weren’t just guys in their twenties who lived in their mom’s basement,” she told WoW Insider in August 2007. “That cliché has become so annoying. I love doing comedy and I wanted to write something that didn’t make fun of gamers but was funny to gamers and non-gamers alike.”
Felicia Day has indeed populated The Guild with an assortment of non-stereotype characters, ranging in age from their late-teens to middle-age, and each carrying their own neurotic behaviors and tendencies. Vork/Herman Holden (Jeff Lewis), for instance, is the eldest of the group and brings his own cheese slices to restaurants in order to not pay the price difference between a hamburger and a cheeseburger. (“I want to grow my money,” he says. “Not spend it on cheese-gouging.”) Tinkerballa (Amy Okuda) appears to be in her early twenties and resists revealing any personal information about herself to the rest of the group, insisting that her real name is the same as her avatar and using the plot of Ugly Betty to explain how she earns a living. (“I like you guys the way you are,” she responds when Codex first raises meeting face-to-face. “Cartoon characters who let me feel a sense of achievement in an imaginary world.”) Clara (Robin Thorsen), meanwhile, really does use her given name as her online moniker. A mother of three, she is forgetful, a little bit clueless and often neglects her children in favor of gaming. (“My husband’s in pharmaceuticals,” she tells the group. “And I stay at home with the kids, where I’m in pharmaceuticals, too.”)
Zaboo/Sujan Balakrishnan Goldberg (Sandeep Parikh) is a college student who eventually serves as the catalyst for Codex’s life to spiral downward—mistaking his fellow female cohort’s online interaction for that of affection, he arrives at her doorstep with suitcase and laptop in hand, ready to “woo.” Bladezz/Simon (Vincent Caso), the youngest of the group, adds to the mayhem when he’s banned from the game for twenty-four hours, posts an inappropriate video depicting the Guild’s cartoon avatars naked and refuses to return the group’s “bank” that he has been entrusted to guard.
Despite all the chaos around her, Codex eventually learns to cope not just with the events of the first season but her isolated and neurotic life as well. It turns out that her father was actually gay; the same for a former boyfriend, a musician who’s cello Codex apparently set on fire. Codex, meanwhile, is a violinist. “You know, former child prodigy,” she explains. “Now I’m old.” In the initial episode, her therapist tells her, “You can’t grow if you’re still immersed in an imaginary social environment.” Codex, in one of her video blog entries, even reveals that “I just don’t cope well. With anything. I mean, there’s always a lot of drama in the game, but at the end of the night you can always just log off. You can’t log off from your life.” But as the comedic escapades of Zaboo and Bladezz escalate, Codex finds an inner strength that gives her the needed confidence to rally the online group of gamers to real world action. “We can do this, OK? With just a few of us we can take down a ten-man dungeon. Life can’t be that much harder.”
Give Felicia Day her due—she has crafted a solid, layered plot with three-dimensional characters and witty-yet-intelligent dialogue in a medium that consists of three-to-eight minute episodes. Many traditional television sitcoms fail to achieve the same blend despite numerous years of production. And although all the actors bring the right balance of comedy and emotion to their roles, it is Day who truly shines as the psychologically damaged Codex, demonstrating exceptional comic-timing with her vocal tones, body language and facial expressions.
The efforts of cast and crew alike were duly rewarded as The Guild has won numerous awards, including the 2007 YouTube Award and 2008 Yahoo! Video Award for “Best Series,” as well as the 2008 South by Southwest Greenlight Award for “Best Original Digital Season Production.” The first season, meanwhile, amassed over nine million hits. As further testament to the show’s quality, a majority of the episodes were financed by fan donations, proving that The Guild is both a critical and popular success.
The webseries medium may still be relatively new, but with well-rounded creative talents like Felicia Day amongst the fray, it can expect to have a long and prosperous life.
Anthony Letizia (May 26, 2008)
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