Toob Talk

The more one bounces around online, the more little interesting things one comes across.

This bit of new online series came my way via Kelly Stables Twitter account, most recently recognizable as part of the cast of Romantically Challenged, the very hastily (and unfortunately) canceled sitcom headlined by Alyssa Milano. Stables is a producer on the show and made mention of it last week.

Soul Fire Rising (official site) is a horror-flavored online series slated for eight episodes. It tells the story of soul-stealing bad-girl Lilith and the part she plays in a little contest between demons and “wingers” (not the classic band, just another term for angels, it would seem). The first three episodes are up right now at KoldCast TV.

So far, I’m liking it. Good, solid production values, not quite on par with a show like the CW’s Supernatural but oddly equitable to ABC’s V. What little story there’s been so far seems pretty solid–some nice touches to Lilith and the demons in the show and it looks like our wingers are going to be just as interesting.

In the lull between regular TV seasons (and possible during the dearth of mediocre to bad shows it looks like we’ll have all summer), check out Soul Fire Rising if you’ve got a hankering for some horror. (You may also want to bounce over and check out Hamilton Carver, Zombie PI, which KoldCast is also carrying–its some good noir with a little undead twist and a firmly tongue in cheek attitude about it all.)

I’d like to see these series do well. With regular network TV producing more shows that doing have much more than a vague spark of life in them, seeing what excited and talented independent producers are doing is very encouraging.

Trenches hit the web today. So far, it’s looking like it was worth the wait. First three episodes are up at Crackle. Here’s the first one:

My friend Kelley doesn’t show up just yet, but the production value is pretty high and the space battle and ground conflict are intense.

It looks like Comcast is well on its way to becoming part-owner of NBC-Universal.

According to a post at the New York Time DealBook blog:

General Electric has reached a tentative agreement to buy Vivendi’s 20 percent stake in NBC Universal for about $5.8 billion, helping clear the path to a sale of the television and movie company to Comcast, people briefed on the matter told DealBook.

This is one of those slightly worrisome business dealings that only gets worse the more one thinks about it.

While NBC may be faltering a bit in the regular TV network ratings, it still holds a lot of broadcast clout. Add in the stable of entertainment properties that it’s Universal branch brought in and the online suite of destinations (like Hulu) and it’s a major player across the new media board.

Comcast, of course, the largest of the big cable companies that now bring television, Internet, and voip phone service to our doorsteps.

The combined NBC-Comcast behemoth would be, without question, one of the most powerful media conglomerates around. Check out this bit of analysis from Media Daily News:

“You become a cable network,” he added. “You become the most powerful network. You would eclipse USA Network.” Malone was one of the main architects of the U.S. cable TV industry in the 1980s and 1990s — especially with his dominant cable system operation, Tele-Communications Inc.

That’s from someone who definitely knows what he’s talking about.

In the paragraph before the one quoted, Malone mentions that the best way to get to that point is for NBC to divest itself of it’s local affiliates. Not something easy to do, but not an impossibility.

Mergers like this do more to hurt the diversity of news, entertainment, and information in general than anything else around. With fewer providers, we’re left with fewer choices. And here we even have the potential for a tremendous loss of jobs (if local affiliates are, indeed, axed in the name of more power and profits).

Will the FCC step in and say something about this? That’s kind of up in the air. Over the last decade, the FCC has been going back and forth on its media ownership and saturation rules. Those are coming up for discussion again. According to the LA Times Blog Company Town:

That the FCC is looking at reevaluating how it measures media could be a good or bad thing for the industry depending on what direction the Obama administration wants to take. The consensus is that his FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, will look more harshly on media concentration than the Bush and Clinton administrations did.

Free Press has set up a campaign to stop the merger. Josh Silver, the executive director of Free Press, said in a statement:

“Approval of such a merger would trigger a new wave of mega-mergers, as other giants like News Corp. and Disney bulk up to exert more control over new media. We don’t have to speculate about what this would mean for consumers. Decades of disastrous media consolidation have already given us higher prices, fewer independent and local voices, and the same cookie-cutter content wherever we go.”

On this, I tend to agree with him.

We’ve seen very clearly what big business can do when it gets “too big to fail”. For years we’ve let our media companies–old and new–glom together into larger and larger homogeneous hunks, all the while sliding into more and more partisan places. Polarization is not diversity. Homogeneity is not choice. And lack of competition does not breed quality. (Though these days I often wonder what does breed quality in the media.)

I’m going to wait for a few more details to come out over the next few weeks before I really start to worry, but I will be watching. If you care about your media–be it online, in print, or over the airwaves–I’d recommend you keep an eye out, too.

If this goes through and bad things happen, we have only ourselves to blame.

Just a quick reminder that Dr. Horrible’s Sing A Long Blog “opens” in a handful of hours.

Am I still excited? Yes I am.

Of course, I won’t be watching it until I’m home from work Tuesday night, so I’m expecting to be scooped on everything.

But I’m still going to enjoy it. No matter what! (Unless, by some terrible catastrophe it sucks, in which case I will happily rip Joss a new one.)

If you’re even a passing fan of anything Joss Whedon has done (Buffy, Firefly, the upcoming Dollhouse series, etc.), you’ve probably already heard of his latest project.

It’s a little ditty called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. And it looks like it’s going to be a tremendous amount of fun.

Of course, it’s a musical. Even better, though, it’s a musical with Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris as hero and wannabe villain (respectively). The whole thing was mostly put together on favors and friendship, coming together during the writers’ strike.

Matt Roush, over at TVGuide.com, has an exclusive review of this sure-to-be cult phenomena. Between that and the teaser that’s currently up on the main site, I know I’ll be eagerly watching the online-released version on July 15, 17 and 19. I’ll be even more eagerly awaiting it’s release on DVD at some undisclosed future date.

Again, this is one of those potentially ground breaking experiments in the realm of Web and Television entertainment. It’s not starting out as a full series, like Quarterlife, there’s not a whole lot of pressure to be picked up by a network or an ongoing cost. Dr. Horrible is, for now, a one-shot deal to see if the model works. We can only guess that, with Whedon’s built-in fan base, there will be at least some moderate amount of success when looking at site hits and video views. The real question is: Will he make enough to be able to pay the people who volunteered to help make the thing in the first place.

If that economic hurdle can be overcome, if a lean production schedule (six days of shooting) and talented team can turn in a professional level entertainment and get it out to people, we may finally see one of the shifts advocates of Web-based shows have been hoping for for a long time. (Anyone who’s ever seen or participated in a 48 Hour Film Challenge knows that high quality can be achieved in a time crunch and on a low budget–but that doesn’t always scale from those 7 minute films to 40+ minutes of show.)

The world will know for sure in just about two weeks when Dr. Horrible tries to take over the world–one computer at a time.

This Tuesday at 10 p.m., Quarterlife (which I mentioned a while back) makes the leap from the computer screen to the TV screen when it debuts on NBC after the next episode of The Biggest Loser.

If you haven’t checked out this show online already, catch it when it hits the main stream. From the same people who made the age-group touchstone shows Thirtysomething and My So Called Life, it has more substance and heart than most things I’ve seen lately that feature 20-somethings out in the world. It’s not all glitz and glamor. The biggest problem isn’t some outlandishly contrived ratings sex-stepped grabber. These characters have real problems and live in the real world.

As most 20-somethings do, they’re questioning themselves and their place in the world. But because they’re 20-somethings in the 21st century, they’re able to do these private musings in the most public of settings–on a video blogging web site.

Even viewed online the production values looked good and the performances all-around are on par (if not slightly above par) when compared to other similarly targeted shows.

So, give it a look. (Even if that means time-shifting it because it’s on opposite Jericho on CBS). Even if you’re not a 20-something now, you were one not too long ago.

I’m apparently a little behind the times.

There’s a new show that should be hitting the NBC airwaves next year and I just found out about it.

Normally, that’s not too disconcerting of a thing. After all, I live in the DC area and not LA or NY.

What’s disturbing here is that the show I just found out about is by a high-powered producing team, with a solid (though not well-known) cast, that’s already drawing in viewers.

How’s it doing that if it hasn’t hit the network yet? By hitting the Web first.

The show is called Quarterlife and it’s the brainchild of David Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (they’re the ones that brought us My So Called Life and Thirtysomething).

I spent some time today watching the six parts that have been posted so far (over at MySpaceTV), each between seven and fourteen minutes long. In the television world, they would be strung together to make the first hour-long episode. Online, they’ve been posting two a week for the past three weeks.

Unlike last year’s LonelyGirl15 stuff, Quarterlife doesn’t try to sneak in as a genuine blog–it is unabashedly a produced series. Even better, it’s got production values on par with your normal network show. If they’ve really cut any corners, they’ve been more than covered up by the style (kind of quickly cut and quirky) and basic format (online video) of the show.

The basic premise is relatively common–a handful of 20-somethings living with or near one another, trying to make sense of the world their in, trying to make friendships and romance work, trying to figure out life and work in general. There’s an actress, a couple of film makers and then there’s the character who’s the audience’s gateway into this world: a video blogger.

If that isn’t a cutting edge show, I don’t know what is.

It’s not the most original premise, but the first six parts definitely touch on themes that have been commonplace in entertainment media for generations. This show just frames them in something it’s current target audience can really relate to. Fifteen years ago, it would have been centered around that same bunch of friends accidentally finding the online message board postings of the main character. Twenty years ago, they’d have to actually be reading a paper diary or the main commentator would have to actually have a print column somewhere–in other words, it really wouldn’t work the same at all.

The performances by the cast are pretty good based on normal television pilot standards and excellent based on what you normally see on independently produced videos. The difference, I’m guessing, is in the amount of money and time the producers have had to invest in the thing. The actors have all shown up in other places before–I know I spend a lot of time thinking “Hey! I’ve seen them somewhere before!” and, sure enough, a quick check of the show’s listing on IMDB turned up slightly unfamiliar names with much more familiar credits.

As an interesting side note, the producers tried a show with almost the same name (and a similar premise) a few years ago on network TV. It was called 1/4Life and didn’t quite take (I didn’t even remember it until I really sat and thought for a while–and even then only because Shiri Appleby was in it).

If Quaterlife does make it to air on NBC, as has been reported, it will be the first show to make the leap from independent web production to mass network consumption. Even better, since the show is already well into production for the web, the ongoing writer’s strike shouldn’t really have an effect.

Could this be the way of the future? Short runs of shows done for an online audience that then vie for the attention of the TV networks? Do the “five or ten minutes here and there” habits of online video watchers translate to the “you’ll watch when we say you’ll watch” mentality of traditional networks?

I’d like to think that, at the absolute least, we can count on more high-quality online shows. While I’d love to see some of the better ones make the leap to the traditional mass media screen, I won’t be holding my breath. If there’s one thing the major media companies have proved again and again it’s that they adapt slowly. (They are, after all, still using sweeps months and Nielsen ratings to determine what stays and what goes and not at all taking into account the changing viewing habits of their key demographic.)

If things go exceptionally well, the online arena may, indeed, become where nascent shows duke it out. We all know that the online community can be more vicious than any network executive. We also know that it can be a fully interactive process, with the viewers and fans communicating directly with the people who make the decisions on how the show progresses. That’s something that traditional TV has never really had on a large scale. It completely inverts the power structure.

For now, though, I say check out Quarterlife. It may not be the future, but it is good entertainment. It touches on important issues for those of us who communicate and hang out here in the Blogosphere should be well aware of. How our personal observations, when posted in a public forum (be it accidentally or on purpose), can deeply affect those around us. How this new method of communication is still growing and still experiencing growing pains.

We’re all learning how to best interact here in the public digital realm. We may as well watch some fictional characters muddle through it, too.

And then, if they end up on our television screens, watch how it plays out in the “real world” of the general population.