Who Wants Web Series?

Leap Year on YouTube

Eliza Dushku appeared in 3 episodes of the web series Leap Year in 2012. Dushku was excited to be a part of the project and loves web series “because that’s where more people are. The internet has clearly exploded in the last few years—you can access whatever you want to watch on your iPhones or your Androids. It’s definitely more user friendly and instantly accessible, and there is really creative, cool stuff going on. You get to really play, to really explore, and to have creative license and freedom."


The thing is, Leap Year has 1014 subscribers on YouTube. Season 1 episodes don't break 5 digit view counts, and season 2 episodes don't break 6 digits - despite celebrity appearances from Dushku and Emma Caulfield. Were I not researching web series online, I would not even know Leap Year existed, and even then, I got the news a year late.

Granted, this series is intended for Hulu. Often times, when I surf the web for information about web series, I hear tales of the original content on Hulu, and yet I don't know a single person who watches a Hulu show. I've never seen a Hulu show shared or discussed on my Facebook feed. Even going to the Hulu web site, I can't find original content even if I wanted to. The Genres page doesn't have an "original" or "web series" category. It's been six years since "The Guild," and yet, web series still isn't "a thing."

That is, it isn't "a thing" for audiences. It's a thing for content creators and filmmakers. It's a thing for creatives to experiment, sure, but that experimentation costs money. Thus, it's a thing for creatives to spin their wheels, and infect each other with false hope and to sweet-talk cash out of investors who salivate over the sexy, ever-growing web content consumption numbers. Yes, people are watching video online. Yes, more and more people are flocking to YouTube. But they are not watching long-form narrative content, no matter how badly we want them to.

If we're going to present series to web audiences we have to stop lying to each other about the way the web is now. We know that people will watch long-form content online - I just consumed the entire first four Seasons of SyFy's Eureka on Netflix without so much as glancing at a single second of it on television. Web series needs a portal of legitimacy. We need to point people to a home for web series where audiences know they will find quality content, so we can watch the numbers rise.

Come on, Hulu. Come on, YouTube. Us dreamers are counting on you.

Fox Television signs WIGS

This week, apparently, Fox Television signed a deal with the YouTube channel WIGS. WIGS, a drama channel geared toward female viewers, was launched during the YouTube Original Channel initiative last year along with projects like SourceFed and MyMusic. WIGS was unusual being that it had appearances from mainstream celebrities like Julia Stiles and Jennifer Garner, and had a format much more like what you might find on HBO than on YouTube. Right now, it's unclear whether or not Google is continuing to fund WIGS, but apparently Fox is going to be contributing to programming, marketing, ad sales, and distribution.

I have no idea what this deal means. Kevin Reilly, Chairman of Entertainment for Fox says, “Our overarching goal is to create an ecosystem where creative people and ideas can find expression independently in the online environment, but benefit from the resources that the larger platform of the network affords." This makes it sound like he is interested in developing the web as a platform because of it is a less expensive means of distribution. However, he continues to say, "[WIGS has] spent a year building a novel production process and a vibrant alternative pipeline, and we're excited to help them take those tremendous stories and talent and develop them into long-term digital or on-air assets." What intrigues me is the idea of using WIGS to develop long-term content for television instead of just for the web. It almost seems ominous.

Does Fox want to use WIGS and YouTube as a cheap playground to test out TV content, because the potential for new content to fail on TV is so expensive? Is the web going to become a "pilot" portal? Or will it be a final destination for premium drama content? WIGS has already become the number one spot for drama on YouTube, but it's only boasting 100 thousand subscribers, making it seem less viable for long-term growth. In my opinion, for something like WIGS to survive, it can't just be a cheaper alternative to TV. It has to offer something TV can't by utilizing the interactivity of the web platform. We'll have to see what happens.