I’ve decided that both the best & worst part of this course is the constant exposure to awesome narrative content. I’m more of a movie person (who very likely avoids TV shows subconsciously due to a uncontrollable bingeing habit), BUT through our screenings of Sherlock and this week’s Web-Series selection I’ve been sucked into a range of longer-form tv/web narratives.
After this week’s screening, I first went through all of the High Maintenance episodes online and then spent the weekend watching season 1-6 of The Guild. The shorter nature of the episodes made these series particularly dangerous to my productivity levels. But anyways, I’ve finished watching them now so I can return to watching stand-alone movies and actually getting work done.
The readings this week were pretty interesting to me. Felicia Day’s approach to distinguishing web-series from TV shows was particularly useful. Her assertion that it’s important to create content that is unique to the web is certainly true, and I feel that the web-shows which present more unique characters, scenarios and formats are generally the more successful ones.
High Maintenance utilises a format which is unlike anything we can watch on traditional TV. I really love how the creators have given themselves an immense amount of creative freedom by using ‘The Guy’ as a protagonist/supporting character who links every episode together. Through their ingenious application of this format, they can freely explore the city of New York as well as a massive range of characters, situations and themes (for instance being able to explore sexuality one week & shootings/gun safety in the next).
As Day suggests, the internet is a powerful networking tool, and it can be utilised by creators to reach out to their fans and produce niche content which can be appreciated by a certain community of internet users (in her case gamers).
The Guild certainly targets a niche audience (gamers/pop-culture geeks) and makes no attempt to broaden it’s audience appeal by limiting the amount of ‘in-jokes’ and references that only certain demographics can understand.
I read a pretty interesting comment which suggested that The Guild is what The Big Bang Theory could be if it were written by gamers and for a more specific gaming audience. I think this idea actually carries a fair amount of truthfulness and is interesting to consider.
After finishing season 6 of The Guild, I was surprised to see that there was in fact a comic book that had been created to fill in the backstory of ‘The Knights of Good’ and provide fans of the show with further content to consume. This was actually one of the things we had discussed in class when brainstorming how the series’ that we watched could be transformed into transmedia productions.
The Guild’s format remained fairly consistent throughout its 6 seasons, and this worked for the show. However, there are web-series which experiment with different formats and narrative structures throughout their development. For instance RocketJump’s Video Game High School presents two very distinct narrative structures between it’s 1st season and 2nd/3rd seasons.
The first season is essentially a film split into 9 segments. It’s structure is very cinematic, and if all 9 parts are combined it plays just like a movie. The 2nd and 3rd seasons of the show however are significantly different, and the creators clearly went for a more episodic, TV-esque structure. Each episode has its own independent narrative arc and the episodes wouldn’t form a film-like narrative if combined. (It should be noted that there is still an overarching narrative present throughout the seasons though).
This kind of experimentation is something that I feel is quite unique to online-productions and isn’t really something you see in your typical TV shows. Online creators have far greater freedom over their content, and as a result they can be more experimental with their shows. This is definitely appealing to many creators who want to work free from studio influences.
The web-series movement is certainly an interesting one, and it definitely has a solid place in today’s online media and evolving narrative landscapes.