Web Video Round 3 – Drama Time

If the first big explosion of web video centered around UGC and the second wave was all about comedy than the third was is drama.

MediaWeek has a good overview on the state of dramatic webseries:

“Among the more ambitious projects is Foreign Body, a 10-week, 50-episode, adult-targeted soap produced by Michael Eisner’s Vuguru (Prom Queen) that serves as a prequel to a Robin Cook medical thriller arriving at bookstores Aug. 5. Yet shows like Body face numerous obstacles, including the lack of established viewing patterns or creative formulas, along with a risk-averse attitude among some advertisers, who theses have plentiful options for placing video ads on the Web.”

In fact, “Foreign Bodies” has been basically a failure, racking up something like 1 million views over all episodes on all platforms.

SAI has word on another book-to-web series/promo experiment:

“Stephen King has long wanted to break free of traditional publishing, and CBS would love to show there’s some synergy between its oldest and newest media.

So rather than just release another scary story in book form only, publisher Scribner — a unit of Simon & Schuster — and CBS are trying a new approach: Convert an unpublished novel “N.” into a series of 25 video episodes distributed by CBS on the Web and mobile devices.”

You can take a look at a promo for that here.

With more regular TV shows being watched online and the quality of product rising constantly, it isn’t surprising to see people trying to tackle meatier material.  While there is lots of talk about ideal episode length and the importance of hooks, the truth is the same as it ever was:  if you don’t make a good show nobody is going to watch.  The platform is secondary.

Eisner Suxxor at the Web – Foreign Bodies = EPIC FAIL

So, the word is not good for Michael Eisner run Vuguru and their latest entry into the high end of webisodic entertainment, FOREIGN BODIES:

“The first 9 episodes of the show, which started airing May 27, have drawn fewer than 10,000 views. YouTube has recently given the series a push, showcasing it as a “featured” video, but it’s still not burning up the charts: On Sunday, it racked up 43,000 views, but then fell back to 20,000 on Monday. To date, the show has genereated about 140,000 views, according to TubeMogul.” (via SAI)

Ouch.  I have done better with videos shot on a whim.

Why has FOREIGN BODIES failed so miserably?  Well, for starters, there was virtually no wide-reaching publicity.  Over the past week I was able to find only 2 or 3 people who had even heard of the show and nobody I know has watched it.

I watched two episodes and I’ve got to say it was less than engaging.  Sure, there was a hot girl and I think I saw a boob, but really, on the internet that’s not much of an offer. The story was sort of muddy as was the general tone.

But I still think it wouldn’t have been quite this much of a flop if it had some kind of marketing behind it.  NBC would never launch a brand new series without a major PR push.  And even then networks still fail all the time.

Why Eisner thought he could somehow beat the system and just start putting out average looking TV on the web with no marketing and think it would be a hit is beyond me.

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