Perhaps part of my reaction to these series is simply that they don't resonate with me, but neither do many shows on TV and I can still sense that there is some crucial difference between those shows and web series. I stated earlier that while some web series bear superficial similarities to professionally produced TV content (in production values), they lack a certain something(s): proper pacing, really good acting, good dialog, funny jokes. They remind me of the films I used to make as a 20-year-old film student. Part of me feels entitled to slag off others because I, too, produced content that I'm quite sure was utter crap and bilked others out of $ to help fund its creation. I guess you could argue that I'm just bitter that I wasn't more talented, but before judging me, assume that my argument is at least in part based on an intimate familiarity with the quality of amateur film/TV. My films and other student films were "awful" in many of the same ways as some web series, only they lacked the polish and distribution and promotion channels of today's amateur TV.
That professional TV has a certain snap that web series don't is not surprising when you consider the fact that creators of professional TV are likely freakishly talented, the top .0001% of people who create content that is intended to appeal to others, and/or they have been at it for 10+ years. Part of the differences, I think, are due to the lack of experience of web series creators.
But the Lotz book, in particular the chapter on distribution, have me thinking about how crowd-sourced funding like Kickstarter yield a different kind of content than the kind of content that has gone through more traditional channels: pitched to execs, tested before small audiences, acceptable to advertisers, in competition with thousands of other ideas for shows.
Let's imagine a show creator who shoots a couple of short episodes of a show and puts them on YouTube. They get over 100,000 views. To finance the rest of the web series, the creator starts a Kickstarter and asks the people who like his videos on YouTube, directly, to help fund the creation of more episodes. These aren't family or friends, so they have no reason to pay hard-earned money to the creator other than wanting to see more of the content they like.
Part of the challenge of making good TV is maintaining a certain level of quality and novelty. Regardless of whether you're telling a serial story, creating a series of standalone episodes, or a reality show, you need to maintain a level of quality and novelty that keeps audiences coming back. This, it occurs to me now, is incredibly hard. Its something that those in the TV business, collectively as an industry with secrets of the trade and individually as showrunners with 10+ years experience, have gotten quite good at over the years. Nothing about the aforementioned Kickstarter scenario yields the kinds of shows that get audience's attention and keep it. Viewers who contribute to the Kickstarter may think that they'll enjoy the next episode(s) of the web series, but its hard to know that for sure, or keep it going indefinitely.
Its not as if I think that professional TV is necessarily all that great. As I said before, I'm aware of how commercial interests can yield lowest-common-denominator dreck that doesn't appeal to large swaths of viewers. But I'd argue that it's mostly an issue of the values conveyed in the work or perhaps a certain type of humor not synching up with would-be viewers. They all still have some mastery of pacing and rhythm that is hard to achieve and really hard to maintain year after year. Web series are likely better at appealing to niche values and esoteric senses of humor, but they're often bad in other ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment