Tubefilter News

It’s no coincidence that TheWB.com’s new web series is helmed by former teen heart throb Jason Priestley, this time in the director’s chair. The show is chock full of juicy rich kid/poor kid drama reminiscent of a certain Beverly Hills show, but this time it all goes down by a lake (one excellent excuse to shoot attractive people constantly dressed in bathing suits).

While The Lake is undoubtedly a sudsy Summer soap, it is unapologetic about what it’s all about, making it all the more enjoyable to escape into just like a vacation on a lake. With the first four episodes up today, each handily setting up dating and relationship drama for the next, it’s hard to click away despite the interruption of J&J’s Clean and Clear ads right in the middle (the show’s nicely captured sponsor for a show aiming to capture an O.C. and Gossip Girl type audience).

The show also seems a nice get for writer-creators Meredith Lavender and Marcie Ulin who both served as writers on the short-lived series Eight Days a Week. These gals really know how to tease and pay off juicy teen drama and gossip ala dealing with divorced parents, teen pregnancy, and summer jobs all while looking good in a bathing suit. Heather Ann Davis stars as Olivia, a newcomer to the lake scene which is complete with beach-body teens including queen bee Alexis (Samantha Cope).

“How much acid do you guys do?” asks a commenter on the YouTube page for the first episode of Sunset Television. It’s an appropriate question.

The New York Television Festival (NYTVF) announced today its official selections for the pilots competition at the fifth annual festival scheduled for September. Making the selections cut were a host of original web series including MERRIme.com, GOLD, Leaving Bliss, Man-Man, Blue Movies, Johnny B. Homeless, Hell Froze Over, Odd Jobs and Streak to Win. Trailers for all of the 37 pilots in competition are now up on the NYTVF YouTube channel.

Similar to the just-wrapped ITVFest in Los Angeles, NYTVF is taking a step further in bridging the gap between traditional independent television and the emerging web television medium. The festival is bringing back what it calls Digital Day, which is an entire day of programming based around the online space. The festival runs from September 21-26 in Midtown Manhattan.

Web TV offers up a lot of content specifically geared toward adults. But what if one wants to just sit down with their four-year-old and click on something that doesn’t require parental censorship? If there is one area where web TV falters (or succeeds, some might say), it is that it lacks clean material for language-conscious parents who don’t want their children watching web shows loaded with expletives or sexual innuendo.
Workshop, a mockumentary-slash-situational comedy about six actors and their efforts to make it big time, wants that audience and more. Nate Golon, co-creator and producer of Workshop, said much of the show’s first season will poke fun at casting workshops.

Ironically, the show stars a couple of actors with experience in soap operas, a genre known for its outrageously adult themes. One of those actors, Phillip Jeanmarie, played a hermaphrodite as a series regular on Passions. The show also stars Leanne Wilson, one of FHM’s sexiest women who had a role on Casualty, an ER-like drama that airs in the U.K.

Go ahead and watch the teaser below. It’s for the sci-fi web series called Condition: Human, and it conveys two important things about the series.

Do you know what it takes to be an Orlando Magic Dancer? Probably not, but with this sports and dance niche web series, Orlando Magic Dancers: The Journey, you get a behind the scenes look into the competition.

The web series is produced by freelance producer, Jason Dewberry, and Orlando Magic Broadcasting. Dewberry worked with Magic for eleven seasons, and originally they did an interactive five-week series for TV, and then every year after they did a one hour special. This last season they wanted to follow the dancers past auditions through the season, and decided the web was were they wanted to take it.

Roommate comedies in some form have been dominating entertainment basically since Three’s Company, but when they work, they work. Sean and Jilly Move In is as simple as it sounds. A couple decides to move into together to save their relationship. And simple it is. So simple in fact, the actors shamelessly wear microphones placed strategically sometimes on their arms to pick up sounds from two actors at once—ah, the joys of love-budge web series making.

But somehow it is easily forgivable as Sean O’Connor and Jillian Federman have an easy, engaging, and entertaining demeanor, and you’d rather hear what they have to say, even if they are wearing microphones on their arms.

New media and traditional television have long been on a collision course, but it seems the moment of impact might have actually arrived. And there’s no better evidence than the 4th annual Independent Television Festival, which brought together independent television producers and web TV creators alike, showcasing the best of both worlds side by side in an unprecedented manner.

“We started out as a television festival and were exclusively focused on broadcast television and finding new voices for that medium,” explained AJ Tesler, Executive Director of the ITVF. “And then somewhere between our first year and second year, YouTube became extremely popular and we realized that if we didn’t embrace new media we would become irrelevant very quickly.”