Increasing serialised web shows

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When I think about Web series, I tend to think: Well, I can go to Hulu.com and watch Lou Grant free. Why would I watch Ask a Ninja or Hardly Working? That’s grossly unfair and reflects, unflatteringly, my age and generally mainstream taste. It’s also true. If someone were making Seinfeld right now and putting it online a week at a time, I’d be there. But as my colleague Virginia Heffernan pointed out, serialised Web shows are popping up faster than ever. And the television industry, hedging its bets, is heavily involved in the format.

Many “original” series on network Web sites are simply marketing tools for television shows. And a look at a few current, more truly original Web series with television connections demonstrates that if you’re not packaging Big Brother outtakes, it helps to have an independent revenue stream. Nielsen isn’t covering these things yet. Hence Gemini Division, the first four episodes of which can be found at nbc.com or more easily at geminidivision.com. It’s a generic science-fiction thriller, in three-to-five-minute chunks. It’s also a series of ads for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system, a futuristic version of which opens each episode, locating Dawson’s character on a 3-D map of Paris.

Gemini Division is the work of Brent Friedman and Stan Rogow. They have some interesting visual ideas having to do with recreating the feel of comic books on screen. But perhaps because of the cost of hiring a known actress like Dawson, the execution is lacking. The actors are pasted on top of static photo images of hotel rooms and Paris landmarks, and very little animation has been done. The Web series are less promotional and more plentiful at the Independent Film Channel (ifc.com. One of the current serials, Get Hit (ifc.com/gethit), has a cleverly nonsensical premise: it's a six-part, step-by-step primer on how to make a successful viral video, presented by the creators of a (fictional) crotch-kicking video that drew 1.6 trillion hits.