Tubefilter News

Stop reading. Just watch the video first. This one is too good to pass up. Italian male model Fabrizio Brienza (yes, he’s really a model) hits the streets of New York showing off his years of pickup artist mastery in The DiGiTS Show which just popped up on the interwebs this week.

It’s beauty is its simplicity. There’s nothing creepy about a 40-year old womanizer stopping 20-something female joggers, right?

This little gem only has one episode out, but already blows away VH1′s short-lived The Pickup Artist. Fabrizio’s even has wallpapers (of himself, naturally) and ringtones of his best pickup lines—”Maybe I should question you… can I get your number?”

Season 2 of “bicultural dramedy” web series Ylse (pronounced EEL-Say) kicked off today starting a 12-episode return. Ruth Livier, who’s also the creator and lead writer of the series, is back as Ylse, an aspiring TV host working her way up the talk show circuit hoping to one day reach the level of her espoused idol Oprah. For now, however, Ylse is stuck in the dregs of the TV world on a bizarre Spanish language talk show.

We’ve had our eye on this series for a while now, and we’re glad to see it back for another season. The series had been picking up fans over the past year which included locking up a distribution deal with LatinHeat.com last fall and scoring the “Best Webisode” award at the 2009 Reel Rasquache Festival. Livier’s bilingual script effortlessly jumps from English to Spanish, making the comedy easily accessible even for us Spanish newbies.

Livier wrote recently on LatinHeat Online:

Like my friend [Executive Producer and creator of Showtime’s Resurrection Blvd.) Dennis Leoni says, “The oldest form of affirmative action is the ‘Good Ol’ Boy’ network.” And he is right. Try breaking through that! If you are not a part of the GOB network, mainstream media is super expensive. Let’s be real, the opportunities to break in through ‘traditional’ channels are slim. New Media is such a fantastic option. It affords us the opportunities that traditional media hasn’t.

Livier, a working actress who starred in Showtime’s Resurrection Blvd. is that rare blend of actor-writer-producer that pulls all three of them off. For the new season, she brought on some fresh guest stars like Alex Mendoza, who plays Ylse’s new love interest, Judy Reyes and Yvonne De La Rosa to join regulars Marlene Forte, Alejandro De Hoyos and Gabriel Romero.

A few years ago, an undergrad student starts a campus radio station that airs between the hours of midnight to 4 AM. Viola (not her actual name because, as she states, “it seemed being DJ this or MC That would sound even more pretentious than admitting that I’m a sucker for Twelfth Night”) begins bringing guests onto her show and one in particular who goes by the name of Sol begins garnering her a larger audience with his…interesting…government conspiracy theories. Once Viola decides to focus on grad school, she gives the station to Sol, who decides to take Radio Free Krakow on the road…in a bus no less.

But this isn’t where Radio: Free Krakow starts for everyone. As the introductory audio on the show’s site explains, Radio Free Krakow is a multi-platform interactive series that builds a world in which a digital resistance is fighting a villain seeking control of government, media, and industry. Participants choose how deeply they would like to immerse themselves into the story. The more you choose to participate, the more you can be rewarded with private messages, e-mail, videos, and rank within the show’s sites.

Written by Kate Tremills, the series is executive produced by Timo Puolitaipale and Ryan FitzGerald, the team behind RFK has years of traditional film, new media, and ARG development experience to back them up. FitzGerald was a writer on the popular Nine Inch Nails ARG Year Zero and there are some similar themes in both games: government surveillance, resistance to authority, the promise that you CAN make a difference. And interactive designer Dwayne Rudy has built quite the online experience.

Next New Networks is doing something right and putting out word that they crossed the 600 million views mark in August is a smart move. What more impressive is thee online network cleared 90 million of those views in just the last three months. The 600 million number count views since its launch in January of 2007, and they are staking their claim as “the all-time most viewed original Internet television programmer on the web.”

We have to applaud this announcement. Some of the traditional studios have been notoriously shy to reveal viewing numbers, probably because they aren’t exactly holding their own with the online-only studios like NNN and Revision3.

Looking at the stats out of the company, it’s clear their savvy pickup, by their Barely Political arm, of our summer favorite, Auto-Tune The News has paid off nicely, coming out as the most popular episode across their network last week. And despite 2009 being a non-election year, Obama Girl proves to still be able to bring in the views, making the top episodes list several times including an “Obama Girl DIES!!” ep that racked up over 1.5 million alone.

We have all heard the saying “when the cat is away, the mice will play.” In this particular case, it’s the Executive Assistant and the Receptionist at a high-end fashion magazine that are the ones doing the playing.

Mode After Hours is a spin-off webseries that follows two characters from the popular ABC dramedy series Ugly Betty and their office antics when the rest of the staff has gone home. Marc St. James (Michael Urie) and Amanda Tanen (Becki Newton) are “besties forever” and their frantic and odd devotion to each other is topped only by their disturbing obsession with themselves. From Amanda’s “Me Pile” (packages delivered to the office that mysteriously end up “lost in the mail” only to be opened by Amanda when she’s feeling down) to Marc’s pretending he is babysitting a newborn just so he can stalk Jake Gyllenhaal, these two are dysfunctional with a capital func. But whether you identify with them in a “hey, I know people like that” way or just thank the heavens you aren’t anything like them, there is something about Amanda and Marc’s relationship that keeps you watching. Kind of like how you slow down to watch a car on fire on the side of the road.

NFL season finally got under way this past weekend and as I checked my lineups and last-minute injury reports to make sure my fantasy football squad was good to go, I couldn’t help but wonder why aren’t there any web series about this national obsession?

This market is huge, with an estimated 27.7 million Americans playing at least one fantasy sport, it’s said to be a $1.5 billion market and growing. It even has its own trade association now. Just for comparison, the much-lauded so-called “World of Warcraft market” has about 11.5 million monthly subscribers. Arguably the most popular scripted web series to date, The Guild, has a large part of its success to owe to that audience which it so playfully depicts.

So with a high-value audience, accustomed to shelling out cash for premium content, it only further begs the question of where are the web series for this crowd?

As luck would have it, I happened to pop open my email inbox to serendipitously find that question answered with a fresh tip of a new web series dubbed The League. It’s too early to try to make any direct comparisons between The Guild and The League, but it did catch our eye. Even the URL they chose, watchtheleague.com is conveniently close to watchtheguild.com.

Nothing says geek like comics and nothing says “dream-job” to geeks more than working in a comic book shop. That’s the basis for The Variants, a new situation comedy co-created by Richard Neal from Zeus Comics Media in conjunction with Stepladder Productions.

One might imagine that a comic book shop is an insane yet exciting place to work, and the show aims put insanity front-and-center. The series, directed by Joe Cucinotti, captures the craziness of retail life made all the more complicated by characters in tights and those obsessed with said characters. Think Clerks, with every bit the irreverent humor brought on by the Kevin Smith films. Cucinotti said the show is meant to bring to life some of those insane situations.

“Our set is the actual store. Other than Ken and myself, our main cast consists of the people who really work behind that counter,” said Cucinotti. “Many of the extras and minor characters are played by loyal customers of the store. While we exaggerate some of the events, the presentation is still very authentic.”

Cucinotti stars in the show alongside Barry Fuhrman, Ken Lowery, Keli Wolfe, and Richard Neal. The real-life, award-winning Zeus Comics is in fact owned by Neal.

There’s a lot of news to digest here, so let’s start with the highlights:

Keanu Reeves is starring in a web series.
It’s called Spärhusen and is actually a spin-off of IKEA-backed Easy to Assemble.
It’s part of a 7-show slate of web series from My Damn Channel premiering October 8, 2009.
You know the medium is growing up when we get news of not only another A-lister headlining a web series, but the fact that it’s a spinoff of another web series. Keanu Reeves is starring in Spärhusen, a spinoff series about fictional Swedish rock band of the same name that despite oozing musical talent, never quite hit the ABBA level. It actually came out of an episode of Easy to Assemble from last season.

For the first season, Spärhusen is basically a Behind the Music look at the “in-studio tensions” from the recording sessions of the band’s 1972 single “Apples & Fish.” Reeves stars as “famed” Swedish record producer Vorste Fierron who apparently can’t get along with the band’s long-time manager Björn Epstein (Wallace Langham) over a fish. On top of the series, they are actually putting out a real-life album from the band, dubbed “The Best of Spärhusen,” set for release later this fall.

Illeana Douglas, the star and creator of Easy to Assemble, co-created Sparhusen along with fellow stars Rob Mailhouse and Todd Spahr. CJP Digital, the same firm behind newly-renewed The Temp Life, started working with Easy to Assemble for season 2, and brought the two-pack of series to My Damn Channel who won out after a little bidding war.

The new season, “Co-Worker of the Year” adds SNL vets like Cheri Oteri, Tim Meadows to the cast.