YouTube to boob tube

Evan Bass, left, Seth Kirschner, centre, and Patrick Cohen star in the hit web sitcom We Need Girlfriends. (Ragtag Productions)

The premise of the online comedy We Need Girlfriends is as simple as it sounds. Three recent college graduates — clean-cut everyman Tom (Patrick Cohen), jerkish, mirrored-sunglass-wearing Rod (Evan Bass) and sweet, dweeby Henry (Seth Kirschner) — move into a scruffy apartment in Astoria, Queens. Newly dumped and single for the first time in their adult lives, they approach women with the awkwardness and stunted ability of an aquarium-bred whale freed into the Pacific.

We Need Girlfriends is the work of Brian Amyot, Angel Acevedo and Steven Tsapelas, three New York filmmakers born in the 1980s who found inspiration in their own post-college break-ups, as well as their reaction to Entourage, HBO’s popular series about a movie star and his buddies. “Entourage is the complete opposite of us,” says Tsapelas, the show’s writer and creator. “While they’re cool and slick and know how to work a room, we’re almost wallflowers.”

After screening their earlier work to small audiences at film festivals, Amyot, Acevedo and Tsapelas turned to the internet. The filmmakers built a small online following through MySpace profiles and blogs that they posted in character; in 2006, they aired the first seven-minute episode of We Need Girlfriends. A new episode of the show was posted every month for nearly a year. After the show was featured on the front pages of YouTube and MySpace, top-rated episodes exceeded 700,000 total page views. Then, in what could be termed a Hollywood ending, CBS gave the trio a “script commitment” to develop a pilot with producer Darren Star, most famous for creating Sex and the City and Melrose Place — shows about affluent, good-looking sexpots. Amyot, the show’s director, jokes that “we sometimes call our show No Sex in the Suburbs.”

If the creators of We Need Girlfriends seem unfazed by the transition from YouTube to the boob tube, it’s because the gap between the internet and television has already narrowed. Web comedy is becoming more like TV, while TV is becoming more like web comedy. Neither good nor bad, these changes simply reflect the tastes and viewing habits of the “broadband generation,” audiences quite happy to watch their favourite TV shows on their computer screens alongside their viral videos.

In its short history —  from the time that broadband internet became commonplace, around five years ago — viral video has mined laughs from pop-culture mash-ups (Brokeback to the Future), celebrity parodies (Tom Cruise), over-the-top characterizations (Chris Bosh’s used-car salesman; one teen’s impression of a “crazy” Asian mother) and absurd situations (a belligerent infant in Will Ferrell’s wildly successful The Landlord). The music-video length of many of these clips makes them easy to watch on a work break, and has also led to disproportionate amounts of musical comedy (including Saturday Night Live’s “Lazy Sunday” and droll musical tributes to Garfield creator Jim Davis). These videos draw inspiration more from the sketch comedy of SNL and Monty Python and the irony of The Onion than the character-based comedy of, say, Roseanne or The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Will Ferrell's comedy short The Landlord has been an online sensation. (Gary Sanchez Productions)

Viral-video entertainers embrace old-school appeal

More recently, however, makers of viral-video entertainment have embraced the old-school appeal of serialized narrative and character and story arcs. The mockumentary Clark and Michael, the first internet-only series produced by CBS, follows Superbad’s Michael Cera and his real-life friend Clark Duke as they struggle to write and sell a television series. Yacht Rock is a popular series that spoofs the “smooth music” of the Doobie Brothers and Christopher Cross. Although the cheap wigs and fake moustaches might remind viewers of an SCTV skit, one key Yacht Rock storyline (involving Kenny Loggins’ decision to abandon smooth music for harder-edged rock) plays out over several episodes, like Anakin Skywalker’s turn to the Dark Side.

“We didn’t think anyone would watch a video over five minutes,” says Amyot, but as viewers became invested in We Need Girlfriends’ evolving characters and storylines, its creators felt they had the latitude to stretch out. Over the course of We Need Girlfriends’ first online season, episodes grew from seven to 14  minutes.

Until recently, many TV producers treated internet video as an inexpensive opportunity to create buzz. Cult TV favourites Flight of the Conchords, 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother have successfully marketed their shows online with standalone music videos lifted from televised episodes. In 2006, The Office kept the momentum between its second and third seasons going with a series of short “webisodes.”

At the same time, the sitcom format was already moving away from the standard multi-camera, laugh-tracked format used in shows from I Love Lucy to Two and a Half Men. More sophisticated sitcoms tended towards “single camera” formats that incorporated elements of sketch comedy (Arrested Development and 30 Rock), reality TV and Christopher Guest-style mockumentary (The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm), all of which were closer in spirit to web videos with their more tangential sense of humour and fluent allusions to pop culture. Even the grubby-chic anti-heroes of Conchords and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have more in common with the sub-telegenic stars of web comedy — slackers with spare time to spend goofing around in front of a video camera — than, say the preppie protagonists of Friends.

The internet series Quarterlife made the jump to TV but was cancelled after one episode. (Elisabeth Caren/Associated Press)

Web series only lasted one episode on TV

Michelle Daly, an executive at the Comedy Network, sees the web sitcom as a viable route to a career for a budding film or TV maker: “It’s a low risk way to test out an idea — especially in Canada, where we don’t have a pilot season like our neighbours [down] south do.”

Amyot shares this sentiment: “One of the great things about being on the internet is that you can get away with not having a big star or shooting with the best camera out there.” Even though each episode of We Need Girlfriends was made for about $200 — the show’s main expenses were tape stock and meals — the show is remarkably well-staged and acted. “People are more focused on the story,” says Amyot, “than whether you’ve spent a million dollars or a hundred dollars.”

But word-of-mouth and eye-popping page views don’t always guarantee prime-time success. Quarterlife, a dramatic web series about a group of video-blogging twentysomethings, received plenty of attention when it was picked up by NBC, but was then cancelled after only one episode.

“Quarterlife wasn’t a problem of translating the show from the internet to the idiot box,” says Daegan Fryklind, a writer for series like JPod and Robson Arms. “For me, [the problem] was in offering a completely unlikeable protagonist and ‘zeitgeisting’ the show at 2002.”

Unlike Quarterlife, where the characters are more ambivalent about adult ambition, the man-children of We Need Girlfriends are lovably straightforward and earnest. Over its 11-episode season, its heroes stumble through singledom: Tom, whose ex writes a blog called “I Probably Never Loved Tom,” dates a woman still sharing an apartment (and a bed) with her own ex; Rod creates a digitally-altered picture of himself having sex with Henry’s old girlfriend; and Henry begins dating an old friend from middle school but can’t help wondering aloud whether “there [isn’t] someone better than me that we could set her up with.”

The creators of We Need Girlfriends conceived the show as a sitcom boiled down to the essentials. But as it completed its original online run, the show began to resemble classic sitcoms like All in the Family and Family Ties, which Amyot, Acevedo and Tsapelas cite as influences.

“Towards the end, we were dealing with multiple storylines and characters,” says Tsapelas.

Development deal with CBS

The crisply written dialogue found humour in pop culture and generation-specific anxieties like finding out that your ex-girlfriend is dating again through her social-networking page.

“We didn’t see anything out there that represented us, or was in our voice,” says Amyot. “That’s why people have responded.”

Season One ends on an unresolved note: one character must handle an unplanned pregnancy, one has decided against reuniting with his ex and another has begun a relationship.

But Season Two is temporarily on hold, while Amyot, Acevedo and Tsapelas focus on their development deal with CBS. The real cliffhanger might be whether we see their characters’ ongoing adventures play out on our laptops or on our televisions. Given the increasingly porous relationship between the two mediums, it could well be both.

Kevin Chong is a Vancouver writer.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.