Online Media Cultist

Felicia Day is a talented actress, writer, and producer, and gets it to boot:

Felicia Day, the creator of The Guild and star of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, talked today about how different the world of Hollywood and the web are. Speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference she said there’s a complete disconnect between the two worlds and told aspiring webisode creators to make sure they understand the difference between the two mediums. For her, the web is about showing real life for real people, rather than the artifice and perfection shown by Hollywood.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog got a huge boost in buzz and interest because it was created by Joss Whedon (disclaimer: I’m an unabashed Whedon Worshipper) and starred Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Day. But it also got it, playing extremely comfortably within the online “webisodic” medium.

Beyond being a darkly comic sci-fi musical (how’s that for starters, by the way?), the content played with technology extremely comfortably and well. Dr. Horrible, played by Harris, videoblogging within the realm of the story about his evil intentions, announced that he was going to rob a bank. Cut to a later scene, and he’s shown battered and bruised because, well, the cops watched his videoblog on the Internet and therefore were waiting at the bank well ahead of time. A comic stretch to be sure, but it worked.

The business side of Dr. Horrible was also handled extremely well. It was released for free for a brief period of time, before going on sale exclusively at iTunes for a reasonable fee. (You can now also watch it for free on Hulu and on the official site.) As noted below, by Internet standards it was a huge hit.

And, for its efforts, Dr. Horrible was awarded as part of Time’s best inventions of 2008 under the heading of The Direct-to-Web Supervillain Musical:

It’s hard to imagine a studio green-lighting an idea as weird and ostensibly uncommercial as a 43-min., three-part online supervillain musical. But in a medium that rewards the unconventional — the Web — Dr. Horrible was a hit. After its July debut, the series reached No. 1 on iTunes’ video chart, with 2.2 million downloads a week.

Here’s a taste of Dr. Horrible if you’re not familiar:

Thanks go to Paul Moore at Spout for alerting me to the fact that Joss Whedon dropped word at Comic-Con that there will be more episodes of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog to come.

Check out more thoughts on Dr. Horrible here and dig the trailer below:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Though there’s no hard numbers available, the speculation is that Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog did pretty well for itself by web standards. No idea of course if that’s true or if Joss Whedon’s tragicomedy about a wannabe super villain and his quest for love even came close to covering production costs, but the model is very interesting.

Here’s what happened:

· Dr. Horrible was rolled out in three “acts” over a week, available for free viewings
· They got a bunch of great buzz from press and from reviews as well
· No more free viewing after the third act was up for just a few days
· Now you can buy the whole thing for about $4 on iTunes. TV Squad: “I do know that at the moment Dr. Horrible counts for 3 of the top 4 episodes and the top season on the U.S. lists.”

Now it gets even more interesting in that it’s a musical so we’re going to see the 1) soundtrack and 2) DVD w/ lots of extras for sale.

Joss Whedon’s fan base makes this a unique case to be sure (DVD sales brought Firefly back from the dead and lead to Serenity being made), but the model is pretty intriguing.

Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris, together on the interwebs. It just might not get better than this.

I’m not really sure what Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is (it’s some kind of mini- or side-project cooked up by Whedon in the midst of the writer’s strike), but I am sure that we need it. If nothing else, this trailer is fantastic.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

(via Time.com’s Nerd World)

Meanwhile, we eagerly await Whedon’s return to TV in the form of Dollhouse, which premieres this fall. ” A futuristic laboratory assigns different tasks to its various residents, who then have their memories erased upon the completion of their assignments.”

That’s what I’m trying to say.

The more I make use of Twitter, the more it fits into the gaps and obsessions that might be called my work, er, lifestyle.

I’m a big TV fan – I’m far more excited about the spring and summer television season, for instance, than anything that might be coming out in theaters. (Show me movies that can contend with The Sopranos and The Shield and Rescue Me!) Now that my wi-fi troubles seem to be in the rear view mirror (note brilliant foreshadow), I’m partial to having the laptop on my, well, lap as I kick back on the couch and watch TV of an evening.

Twitter plays very nicely into this as I can “mini-blog” away about the shows I’m watching (my Twitter profile can be found here. 140 character maximum messages force you to be short and snappy – it’s a nice welcome challenge as compared to the universal blank page I’m faced with in blog world. For example, right after this week’s episode of The Shield I wrote:

Brilliant ep of The Shield, Damn if CCH Pounder isn’t one of the best actresses on TV. Surprised to see Vic v. Kavanaugh resolved this early

And from Sunday’s Sopranos premiere:

Great sopranos as always. A “small” ep that reintroduces the themes surrounding Tony, post-shooting. Slightly slower, thinking about future

Much as I would love to, I can’t cover the entire galaxy of things I’m interested in as a blogger. Twitter is a great tool to mind the gap, as the London tube tells us.

Because of my great affection for both Twitter and TV, I was very interested to see – thanks to BloggersBlog I believe (a great resource for all things Twitter) – that Drive executive producer Greg Yaitanes not only is on Twitter, but will be posting live Twitter updates during Sunday night’s two-hour series premiere on Fox.

Twittering from live events is a surface that is just getting scratched, and getting the live reaction and (short!) thoughts from the exec producer of a TV show is an absolutely fabulous idea.

I’m interested in Drive, by the way, for two reasons and two reasons only: Nathan Fillion and Tim Minear.

Fillion is best known as Mal Reynolds of Joss Whedon’s brutally short-lived Firefly and later in the film, Serenity. He can play super serious and downright menacing one moment, and playful and nearly goofy the next. He absolutely anchored Whedon’s cowboys-in-space realm, and brought a quirky charm to the role of a lifetime.

Minear also comes out of the House of Whedon, having written and produced on Angel and later exec produced Firefly. Minear is a brilliant and tragic figure of sorts in my view as he exec produced three screamingly and outrageously promising shows that were axed light years ahead of their time: Firefly, The Inside, and perhaps most heartbreaking of all: Wonderfalls.

Let’s hope that Drive is half as good as those shows, and lasts twice as long. Meanwhile, Twitter on!