NYLON - September 2008 - (Page 161) INTERNET KILLED THE TV STAR What is the future for scripted shows online? Diane Vadino talks to some of the people shaping it to find out. Illustration by Masa “The fact is, making this thing, we knew we’d never see a dime,” says Joss Whedon, creator of, among other things, the three-act online video Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. “We wanted to make a musical about a super villain, because honestly, what else would you want to use the money for?” However high Whedon’s hopes for Dr. Horrible’s online success, they weren’t high enough, as viewer interest crashed the site on its July 15 premiere. “We imagined it being enormously popular in our dreams,” he says, “but not on our server. We didn’t really see it coming, even if every artist thinks every napkin they draw on will change the history of art.” In this context, though, Whedon’s metaphor may not actually work: Dr. Horrible may, in fact, have changed the course of online video—specifically, scripted online video content, rather than YouTube clips of water-skiing dogs. It’s a pivotal time for the online video world, not least because Dr. Horrible is, at last, a show everyone should see: It’s silly and funny, with actual stars (Neil Patrick Harris, Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) and production values roughly indistinguishable from anything made for television. Whedon will be joined online by Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane, soon to unveil a series of animated clips in partnership with Google, and The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz, who’s developing a new, 20-episode Internet series that will track the goings-on of a fictional rock club in Los Angeles. As Whedon effectively paid for complete creative control over his project, Schwartz will similarly have the freedom to explore some unusual moves—perhaps in inverse relationship to the size of his budget: “When you’re working with the Internet, you’re going to do a different kind of show, and you’re going to have less money to do it,” Schwartz says. Top music critics, like Andy Greenwald, will contribute some scripts. “The idea isn’t just a TV show for the Internet,” Schwartz says. “As opposed to fitting a square peg in a round whole, we’re trying to embrace the restrictions.” Internet video has been a surprisingly difficult nut for Hollywood to crack: The more successful series have often begun as “two guys with an idea and a camera,” as Frederick Levy, author of 15 Minutes of Fame: Becoming a Star in the YouTube Revolution, describes the creators of lonelygirl15. Over the run of that series, which came to a conclusion in August, its creators say they’ve learned several strategies that traditional video makers often fail to grasp. “It’s absolutely critical to understand that this is not just a new place to distribute traditional media and audio,” says Greg Goodfried, a co-creator of lonelygirl15. “If I’m going to digitally transmit Lost, I’d rather transmit it to my 50-inch TV.” Except for (three-act) one-offs like Dr. Horrible, online video also needs to make money, perhaps the biggest challenge for a medium which still quarrels about preferred ways to measure audience size— crucial information for advertisers. MacFarlane’s partnership with Google could represent a quantum leap forward, though Levy, for one, is not entirely convinced: “This seems like one solution,” he says. “But I don’t know if it’s the ultimate solution. I don’t think the problem for Hollywood is that they haven’t been able to create a break-out hit—it’s that they’re still trying to figure out how to monetize it. Unless they can make serious dough, it’s just not in their best interests.” The people who have the most to gain from the slow, fidgety growth of scripted online video may instead be lonelygirl’s heirs: Internet series like Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager (Darth Vader’s little brother manages the Empire Market), one of Levy’s favorites, or Break a Leg, about making a sitcom. “When we do want to make a film, we can say we’ve had press in all these places about our project already,” says Break a Leg’s co-creator, Yuri Baranovsky. For now, Baranovsky writes “for a show like a Daily Show for gadget news” and occasionally cringes at his competition: “I remember seeing an article on the front page of CNN.com about a video of a cat playing the piano, and I was just like, ‘Come on.’” Until they figure out how to make significant money from it, online video may remain a proving ground for unknown talents and, equally, a no-rules playground for A-list creators like Schwartz and Whedon. “You get to keep the purity of the thing, the love and the fun—maybe it limits your audience; our publicity budget was my brother being good at stuff, and you’re never going g to become a billionaire doing that,” Whedon says. “But I had an extraordinary inary experience, and I would love to do more, whether next time it’s Dr. Horrible orrible or something 180 degrees in the other direction. I still think it’d be a blast.” http://www.CNN.com
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