NewTeeVee has a good quick look at the three new series launched by Comedy.com
“Undaunted by the comedy competition from all sides, upstart funny site Comedy.com launched three new web series this week, Glitch in the System, Do Unto Others and Incognegro.”
NewTeeVee seems underwhelmed and I have to concur. Once again this is an example of programming that would never make it on TV and yet isn’t special or unique enough to garner a small, dedicated following within a key niche.
These seem to be the two main ways to succeed online: Make something so good that it can legitimately appeal to a large audience or make something so well focuses on a single group that they can’t live without it.
Comedy.com has not done either of these things.
There’s been lots of talk about the return of live, in-show ads in a number of talk shows including Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno and Ellen Degeneres and now networks like NBC are making it clear that their new slate of webisodes will include a new degree of product integration beyond just simple brand placement.
What will this actually mean? Well, it depends on how far they go in the name of the sponsor at the cost of the viewer. It’s not as though modern viewers are used to being bombarded with a constant stream of corporate names and images and if those elements happen to be part of a good plotline with compelling characters people won’t care at all. However, if the show itself is just a vehicle for the brand or the message than viewers will be turned off from both the show and the sponsors.
A bigger question might be whether or not a brand well-integrated into a show will still have the desired effect of driving sales…
Plenty of folks writing about the 1-year anniversary of the Will Ferrell-backed web video site FunnyOrDie. After leaping into peoples hearts and minds with The Landlord viral video the numbers for the site have sunk back down to earth.
The latest figures show just over 500,000 total unique viewers for the month of March – down nearly 1 million from it’s high point a year ago.
Considering this blog, which features only my own little writings a few times a day is able to get 5000 uniques a month with no advertsing or publicity to speak of it just doesn’t seem like 500,000 for a site like FunnyOrDie is all that impressive.
It doesn’t help that they have very little truly original content or that their videos often find themselves widely syndicated off-site but I just don’t understand how the site can survive another year at those numbers.
The webs are abuzz (here, here) with news that the original LonelyGirl15, Jessica Lee Rose, is set to star in her next web series, Blood Cell:
“3:30am (Los Angeles): Julia is jolted awake by the howl of her cellphone; a video message from her best friend, Susan. Her eyes are swollen from crying. Her upper lip shows a painful cut. And she’s scared to death. “I’ve been kidnapped… you can’t call the police… and don’t turn off your cell phone. He’ll kill me if you do…” Susan screams and the message cuts out. Confused, Julia receives a text message from the kidnapper: “Dead Cell = Dead Friend.” A peaceful night turns into a race against time. Using her cellphone as her only lifeline, Julia must rescue her friend and avoid succumbing to a similarly gruesome fate.”
I’ll go ahead and let you decide which recent crappy Hollywood film this sounds like. I’m glad to see webisodics push into the genre world and this certainly looks to do that but it is a little disheatening that they couldn’t come up with a more original setup.
Here’s the trailer. See if you can guess the main selling point:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFzFMsfcvR4&hl=en]
Sands of Passion is a new(ish) web series from the combined minds of National Banana and Crackle and Tilzy likes that it’s trying to tackle stuff you’re not going to find on TV, they’re not convinced it’s a winner:
“Sands of Passion features over-overacting and scene-punctuating close-ups (it never fails to have characters pull funny faces during those lugubrious zoom-ins), but it’s in the sometimes-intertwining plotlines – a wife discovers, with the help of the intrusive Taliban, her husband is gay; an American doctor observes the strange practices of a hospital run more on the principles of religion than science; the son of that suicide bomb-obsessed father falls in love with a girl whose love interests have all killed themselves in the name of Allah – that the show falls flat.”
I watched a couple of episodes myself a few months ago and can’t say I ever found myself wanting to go back and see how things were going. Even though it was trying to be edgy it failed to be funny.
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May 16, 2008 3:38 pm | 
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