After watching a few episodes of several different web series, I get the sense that they're somewhere in between a series of YouTube videos made in someone's back yard and a television series. This is true of how their produced, distributed, and promoted, but it also feels true (at least to me) of the finished product. Certainly, the look of some of these series is virtually indistinguishable from video content made for television in the traditional mode of production. The move away from expensive sets and toward more hand-held camera work made the aesthetic of "professional TV" easier to imitate. A generation of young people seem to have absorbed (either from film school or just watching tons of TV and film) how to compose a shot. I've watched a few minute-long promos for web series and they look like hip new shows on HBO or Fox.
But the actual episodes lack something, and most of the ones I've watched lack the same things. The pacing seems slow. It seems slow when you compare it to professional TV and seems glacial when you compare it to YouTube clips or GIFs. I recall thinking during the early days of online video (2005-2011) that no one would ever watch a video longer than 3 minutes online. But I've seen the way college students have incorporated Netflixed 20-minute episodes of their favorite shows into their media diets, so I think that it's not an attention span issue. It's a pacing issue. In web series, more time elapses between jokes. The shots seem longer in duration.
Also, the jokes seem, well, worse. I know this sounds like arbitrary, groundless criticism, and there's something weirdly personal about bad-mouthing a web series. You're not critiquing a millionaire. You're critiquing someone who bet their life savings on a passion project. Some of these shows are promoted and sometimes funded through word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth often starts with friends, so in many cases, the audiences are pre-disposed to liking (or saying they like) the show. Early audiences for web series seem divided into two groups: anonymous, cynical "haters" who permeate every corner of online discourse and friends who don't want to see the creator of the show emotionally, professionally, and financially destroyed.
Unlike professional TV, the content didn't have to pass before a group of experienced judges. People love pointing out how homogeneous TV content is due to the fact that it has to either please advertisers or garner big audiences to stay afloat. They like to point out the many times stuffy execs passed on shows that became hits. These are good points, but still, the system almost certainly weeded out scripts that were too slow-paced or unfunny to entertain people before the shows were actually produced. TV networks and advertisers were flawed proxies for audiences, but, I'd argue, not as flawed as a show's creators and their friends. The web series environment is not a good environment to produce the constructive feedback that is necessary to generate content that many people want to watch.
Unless, of course, you look at it differently. Maybe making a web series is this generation's version of starting a band. You're making an artistic statement that resonates with your generation, not trying to create the next Two and a Half Men. A handful of successes give creators the impression that their shows can become hits. And getting a decent sized audience (let's say 100,000 viewers) is easier online than with TV because you're pulling from such a large pool of potential viewers (anyone with a broadband connection or a smartphone), much larger than any TV show creator had when they made their show. Get a few opinion leaders to post links to your show and you've got your audience. Keeping them is another matter. In the world of infinite content and distractions, I think it would benefit web series creators to make single-season shows that die before audiences have a chance to lose interest.
But I think there's an allure to creating a show even if it doesn't become a hit, in the same way that there was an allure to being part of a band even if it never became really popular. People whom you don't know (potential boyfriends/girlfriends, really) get to see you do something interesting, funny, cool. And you get to express yourself and maybe hit it big.
It's not a precise analogy. I doubt that web series creators will be seen as "cool" in the same way that people in a band are/were seen as cool. But if I were 16-27 and I wanted to do something that attracted the right kind of attention, I might get some people together and make a show.
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