Is ‘Enlightened’ Enlightened? The Strange, Quiet Brilliance of HBO’s Dark Comedy

Tweet I recently texted a friend to complain about how overwhelmed I was by my lengthy to-do list — which included, incidentally, writing this blog post. Me: “My to-do list is never ending bleh.” Friend: “It always has been Marps. I’ve never met you when you told me ‘oh I’m so chill I got nothing [...]

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Why Creators Should Submit to the IAWTV Awards

Tweet If you’re an IAWTV member or follow the Academy on Twitter — which you should — you’re probably aware the group is calling for submissions to its upcoming awards show in Las Vegas at CES in January 2012. This will be the first show from the IAWTV, of which I am a member, and [...]

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Web Shows Trek Past Sci-Fi’s Color Line

TweetThanks to Racialicious for reposting! From Blacula to Sleep Dealer, filmmakers of color have always been interested in science fiction and fantasy. But these days in Hollywood, sci-fi/fantasy films demand big budgets, and it seems like only Will Smith and Denzel Washington are powerful enough to greenlight a genre film starring an actor of color. The [...]

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Mumblecore After the Rise of Web Video and Decline of Digital Realism

Tweet Academic publishing is slow. Everybody knows that. So it should come as no surprise that only now is my article on mumblecore, titled “Joe Swanberg, Intimacy and the Digital Aesthetic,” coming out in the latest issue of Cinema Journal. 2011 a strange time for an article on mumblecore, since it is now “over.” I wrote [...]

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Web Series Spotlight: ‘The “F” Word’ Brilliantly Satirizes Indie Music Production

TweetA funny thing can happen on your way to success: people start paying attention to your other projects! One happy consequence of Issa Rae’s incredible success with Awkward Black Girl has been greater attention on her “other” web series — her first — Fly Guys Present The “F” Word. Premiering in late 2009, The “F” Word follows three [...]

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Outsiders After Viral Video

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 27th, 2012

Originally posted at Hacktivision

If YouTube’s massive overhaul – many years in the making – revealed anything, it was our deep investments in the transformative potential of web video. Many observers have criticized the company’s move as selling out, a way to streamline the site’s chaos for the benefit of advertisers. (What else is a media company to do?).

We care about web video in part because we care about outsiders and independents making popular and profitable content for mass audiences, on a level rarely seen in media history. Web video, though, has been changing – long before YouTube’s redesign – compelling us to think deeply about who becomes popular, how, why and under what circumstances.

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’30 Rock’ Charms Producers Guild By Mocking TV — On the Web

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 25th, 2012

The Producers Guild joined the WGA this past weekend and honored original web programming. As Tubefilter notes, the nominees were usual suspects, a mix of web-grown originals (Ask a Ninja, The Guild), derivative programs (Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock) and web-to-TV success (Web Therapy). 30 Rock‘s Jack Donaghy: Executive Superhero won. Another of its series, Frank vs. Lutz, won at last year’s WGA, leading me to wonder if 30 Rock‘s self-reflexivity about television production, which helps endear it to voters for bigger awards like the Emmys, similarly works for the web. The Internet can be mystifying, except when it’s about TV.

The above episode of Jack Donaghy satirizes an intra-network dispute between showrunner Liz Lemon and weatherman Al Roker. Roker is apparently using TGS to promote his own books. It’s up to network exec Jack Donaghy to rescue Liz from this transmedia kerfuffle! Spoofing last-place NBC as a particularly dysfunctional example of television’s increasing complexity, 30 Rock‘s on-air and web-only projects are cartoony but always tinged with truth (e.g.: NBC’s programming chart).

Originally posted at Hacktivision.

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Video Awards: Making a Market?

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 20th, 2012

Originally posted at Hacktivision!

Why have awards? Award shows help media creators establish norms and values for audiences. They adjudicate quality, innovation, diversity and help raise awareness.

The past two weeks have seen two big awards developments for professional web video: the IAWTV Awards held at CES January 12 and the WGA nominations. What about video can we learn from them? 

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‘Jack in a Box’ Creator On His WGA Nomination and Writing Jack “Happy”

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 18th, 2012

Originally posted at Tubefilter

In last week’s 30 Rock sixth season premiere, Liz “Cranky Sue” Lemon was, all of a sudden, happy! Fans saw her skipping with animated birds and smooching on a mystery man (James Marsden).

It was about time. Sitcoms about cranks have two options: cling relentlessly to the joke or allow characters to grow. Michael Cyril Creighton, creator and star of the critically acclaimed web series Jack in a Box – who also had a hilarious turn on 30 Rock! — opted for the latter.

“I tried to make him a little happier this past season, which some people weren’t jazzed about. But I needed to do it as a challenge to myself, because it’s really hard to write that character happy…I thought it was time,” Creighton said in an interview.

“We’ll see how long that happiness lasts,” he added.

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In Search of Indie Cosmic

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 17th, 2012

Originally posted at Splice Today

Indie film tends toward realism. It’s not hard to understand why: on a low-budget, the special effects necessary for fantasy and science fiction are hard to achieve.

Creative filmmakers aren’t afraid of a challenge, though. In recent years, and especially 2011, a handful of art house movies ventured into the cosmic, breathing epic life into intimate stories.

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Introducing: Hacktivision

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 16th, 2012

I couldn’t think of a more perfect time to announce a new blog about the future of video and television! Within the last month, YouTube’s re-launch has changed the video landscape, Hulu and Netflix announced more original content, and the web series community has been experimenting with award shows.

Hacktivision is the brainchild of Josh Braun, a Quinnipiac University professor — and recent doctoral graduate at Cornell — who’s been researching new media and television. The site is being supported by Quinnipiac. Braun is the managing editor, and I’m an editor.

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Is Liz Lemon Bad At Her Job?

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 11th, 2012

Previewing the new (hit) Showtime series House of Lies, New York‘s Kera Bolonik offered a brief but pithy aside:

Is anyone on TV bad at their jobs these days? Not if it’s a high-status gig. But feel free to be a bad waitress, or a crappy paper salesman or receptionist, or an ennui-ridden local-government intern, or, a lazy, crazy comic on a low-rated sketch-comedy show.

I assume the “lazy, crazy comic” Bolonik is referring to is 30 Rock‘s Tracy Jordan. And she’s right. Tracy is bad at his job. But what about Liz Lemon, she of the fairly “high-status gig” of network showrunner?

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Over-The-Top, Top-Down and Bottom-Up

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 9th, 2012

If we’ve learned anything about over-the-top video, it has been its agnosticism. Web video distribution can be progressive or regressive, support diversity or concentrate eyeballs at the top. Whether a company loves it or hates it depends very much on how much it has and how much it has to lose.

Last week saw a bunch of new developments about over-the-top video, revealing how complicated the technology can be. It all depends on who’s producing and sponsoring the content.

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Web Series Spotlight: ‘Mythomania’ Strives For Comic Book Stardom

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 5th, 2012

If the 2000s taught filmgoers anything, it was “comics are marketable.” Hollywood mined superhero classics, artier graphic novels like The Watchmen got their due, and even original franchises like Inception were comic book’ed.

Popularity opened up a space for edgier fare: Stan Lee and Alan Moore weren’t the only ones to profit. So did Derek Kirk Kim, the 37-year-old graphic novelist who took the industry by storm in the early 2000s, winning multiple prestigious industry awards, including the Eisner and the Harvey (the former the “Oscars for comics“). His key work, Same Difference, was a reserved, personal text about being young and Korean American.

His writing career stabilizing, Kim recently decided to do what many comic writers only aspire to: make a film! But instead of a film, he chose a web series.

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Can — And Should — YouTube Recreate TV?

Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on December 20th, 2011

Thanks to Chuck Tryon for linking!

A redesign can make or break a website — remember Facebook before the News Feed? — or it can mean nothing at all. The consequences of YouTube’s latest redesign are unknown, but I view it with some ambivalence. I’m excited, but I have my reservations.

Clearly I’m in the minority. As Mike Hale wrote last week in the Times:

But beyond aesthetics lies a deeper change, one that the naysayers have perceived, explicitly or intuitively: the redesign is a muted but firm declaration that the party is over. It’s YouTube’s strongest step away from what will be seen as its short-lived early heyday as a largely unregulated repository of funny cats, anonymous guitar masters, angry Asian bus riders and countless other weird and wonderful things.

Hence the 14,000 dislikes on the video announcing YouTube’s relaunch. Hale’s article is brisk and broad analysis of YouTube’s “new” philosophy: to make the site more professional and ad-friendly, all while borrowing liberally from successful social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (G+ integration, “Trending” tabs, a homepage news feed). YouTube still has to live on the web, but it desperately wants to be television.

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