The
Online Webseries: Cure for the Writers Strike Blues?
It all started with The Spot. Created by aspiring
filmmaker Scott Zakarin in 1995, this Melrose Place meets The
Real World concoction became the Internet’s first
episodic website. Although it lasted for only two years before folding
for financial reasons, it ignited an onslaught of other online webseries,
each hoping to challenge television’s
supremacy as a storytelling medium.
Such an
aim was ahead of its time, however, as Internet video in the late 1990s
basically amounted to a two-inch screen of poor quality and low frame
rates. It wasn’t until broadband developed into a better delivery
system and the technology needed to film and edit dropped in price that
the lofty ambitions The Spot had aspired finally became reachable.
The Internet landscape is now dotted with a variety of webseries—averaging
around ten-minutes per episode—created by both unknowns like Justin
Kownacki of Pittsburgh (Something to Be Desired) and television
veterans along the lines of Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick (quarterlife).
Kownacki
was a film student who decided to break a script he wrote, which centered
upon a group of twentysomethings working at a fictitious Pittsburgh
radio station, into smaller, bite-sized pieces and post them on the
Internet rather than shoot a short film. Not only did this open his
creation up to a larger potential audience, but also allowed for instant
feedback, important for any aspiring artist. That was back in 2003.
The series, known as STBD
for short, is now in its fourth season and has evolved from that initial
radio-station concept into an amusing character study of life after
college.
Matt Sloan
and Aaron Yonda of Madison, Wisconsin, took comparable paths to webseries
development. According to a recent New York Times article (October
15, 2007), they were shooting low-budget comedy films for the local
cable-access station when a friend suggested they make a Star Wars
parody. After kicking the idea around for awhile, they came up with
Chad
Vader, a webseries chronicling Darth Vader’s
younger brother who works as a shift-manager at a fictitious grocery
store and has endless personal and professional traumas. This comic
masterpiece became one of YouTube’s biggest hits, and has even
been nominated for Best Original Web Comedy Series in TV
Guide's 2007 Online Video Awards.
Although
the Internet makes television production available to anyone with a
video camera and the passion to use it, the webseries is not just for
the aspiring auteur. Herskovitz and Zwick, who have explored the lives
of those in their teens (My So Called Life), thirties (thirtysomething)
and even forties (Once and Again), are prime examples. They
pitched a new show—this one dealing with people in their twenties—to
ABC a few years ago and when the project fell through they retooled
it for the Internet instead. It turned out to be a perfect fit, especially
considering the demographic the series targets has such a penchant for
creativity and social networking. Because quarterlife
comes from two successful Hollywood insiders, it has garnered significant
press and could very well turn out to be the poster-child for this new
entertainment medium.
Felicia
Day entered the world of the web in a similar fashion. A budding actress
(she portrayed potential Vi in the final season of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer), she wrote a pilot about a group of online gamers called
The
Guild. When the networks passed, she filmed it herself
and posted it on YouTube. Because of its subject matter (the online
gaming community is vast) and Day’s notoriety (on the web, being
associated with a Joss Whedon show is an asset), that initial episode
was watched by close to one million viewers while subsequent episodes
have garnered just shy of half-a-million: not necessarily large, but
still significant numbers.
The Internet,
of course, is one of the major reasons the Writers Guild of America
is currently out on strike: writers receive no financial compensation
when episodes of shows they worked on are made available on the Internet.
While the networks argue that the web is still an infant delivery medium
that has yet to realize any significant profit, the writers believe
(rightfully so) that someday someone will figure out a way to make money
showcasing video on the Internet, and simply want their share of the
pie established now as part of a new collective bargaining agreement.
The above
mentioned webseries obviously fall out of the jurisdiction of the WGA
as they are independently produced and financed. And, yes, at this point
they are more projects of passion than cash cows, but the budget to
make these shows is also significantly lower than an actual television
series. Kownacki, for instance, says it costs between fifty to two hundred
dollars an episode to produce STBD, with the majority of that
going towards web hosting costs. Chad Vader is currently funded
by YouTube as part of their new professional partnership program, but
that doesn’t mean Sloan and Yonda are getting rich off of the
endeavor. And while quarterlife has a more substantial budget—reportedly
over $400,000 per hour—Herskovitz and Zwick also have the clout
with, and access to, deep pocket advertisers to help cover it. But even
that number is significantly lower than network television shows, whose
costs can exceed the three million dollar mark per episode.
Production
on those more pricy shows, however, has either shut down already, or
will shortly, due to the writers’ strike, a fact that could potentially
open the door for these indie-like webseries to find a larger a viewership.
The current generation is, after all, more open to Internet entertainment
and has a higher-level of web savvy than its predecessors. But if the
strike continues for a lengthy period of time, is it possible that some
of those striking writers would follow in the footsteps of Herskovitz
and Zwick and turn to the Internet as well? And what effects would that
then have on the industry? Entertainment Weekly has already
posed that question, and came up with an interesting epitaph to the
saga: “That could be the ironic twist ending we’ve been
looking for: Hollywood writers figure out a way to make so much money
from the Internet, the studios and networks end up asking them for a
piece of the action.”
Stay tuned,
this strike could have bigger repercussions than anybody imagined, and
the online webseries might even turn out to be the winner.
November
12, 2007
