Tubefilter News

What a week! Monday kicked off another installment of Web Television Week out here in Los Angeles, a full week of web television and digital entertainment related events like the IAWTV Prospective Member Meeting, Digital Hollywood Fall, and of course, Going LIVE! presented by the Hollywood Web Television Meetup. We made a little announcement as well about our friends over at Tilzy.tv.

And speaking of going live, Sandeep Parikh’s comedy The Legend of Neil followed up its Season 2 finale with a live chat on UStream with the cast.

The big news of the week was the breaking story of Rob Corddry’s Streamys-nominated comedy web series Childrens’ Hospital heading to able network Adult Swim after negotiations broke down between Warner Brothers and Comedy Central.

And Roku might be pulling off a sneak-around with its next rollout bringing on a whole new crop of streaming original web content.

Continuing in the vein of U.S. shows like Harper’s Island and Heroes, the popular and award-winning UK soap EastEnders has announced it will tackle its own internet spin-off. The 13-part EastEnders:E20 web series tracks four new characters who move into Albert Square, the location of the parent show.

Conceived by EastEnders executive producer Diederick Santer as a way of nurturing new, young talent, both on- and off-screen, he also wants the series to explore the stories of the soaps’ anonymous bystanders. Says Santer: “There are always other people (in EastEnders) milling round the market and houses that we never go into. There are four or five parallels you could do. It will be nice to see well-known characters through strangers’ eyes.”

NBC’s hit comedy The Office has been approaching multi-platform status in the past few years. Even from the start the show was getting terrible numbers until it started releasing over iTunes, which some insiders say is the only thing that saved the comedy from the network axe. Now over four years after the US version debuted, itself a spinoff of Ricky Gervais’ British version, the franchise is now set up all over the world, with French, German, French-Canadian and even Chilean versions all on the air.

It’s partly the internet-heavy US audience for the show mixed with NBC’s bullish digital strategy have led to a slurry of Office web series coming out over the past two years, all with at least a few of the lead actors—The Accountants, Kevin’s Loan, The Outburst and Blackmail. The latest web series, three-episode Subtle Sexuality, will premiere October 29 on NBC.com.

This time it looks to be Kelly (Mindy Kaling) and Erin (Ellie Kemper), the new receptionist, who have formed a girl rock group, dubbed “Subtle Sexulatity,” with Andy (Ed Helms) and Ryan (B.J. Novack) as backup singers.

Making a documentary is a true test of a filmmaker’s stamina. After shooting hundreds to thousands of hours of footage, you have to hope you’ve caught enough interesting moments to string together a compelling story. Now try doing that on a time crunch because the subject you are covering is time sensitive. Oh and there are zombies. Lots and lots of zombies.

That is exactly what Joone Studios and Zombie Army Productions are doing with their reality-based web series Days of the Living Dead. The show follows a rag tag group of renegade actors, artists, technical directors and filmmakers working together to produce one of the largest and most heralded haunted houses in the country, Statesville Haunted Prison. If you’ve ever wanted to know what Hunter S. Thompson looks like as a zombie, wanted to watch people play a game involving kicking around severed heads, or wondered at the proclivities of lesbian zombies then this is definitely the show for you.

We had a chance to catch up with Jayme Joyce, half of the two-woman team (with director Jessica Christopher) behind Joone Studios. Joyce also shoots and edits the project. She had this to say about how this unique series came about: “I met John LaFlamboy in 2006 on his first music video for a local band 20 spot. Two months later we were doing a feature together called Squeal and later that summer a trailer for his haunted house feature epic, Haunted House the Movie. John and I share a very strong commitment to stay in Chicago and build a film community here and have collaborated quite a bit. But John also runs one of the hugest haunted houses in the country, Statesville. So for a few months out of the year he drops out of the film scene and does ‘that’. He’s tried several times to do a documentary about it and there certainly is a wealth of material but it’s always fallen apart in the editing.”

The web series world so far has been relatively devoid of scandals. So when TMZ reported on a lawsuit surrounding former Fresh Price of Bel Air star (and R&B singer) Tatyana Ali’s upcoming web series Buppies, the story took a left turn. Now, after the lawsuit has been dropped in court and both sides are calling it a misunderstanding, the series is finally set for release after signing a deal with BET.com for a November 3 launch.

The series first popped up on our radar over a year ago when we talked to Ali and her sister Anastasia, who had just shot the project as the first original from their indie production co, HazraH Entertainment. The pair teamed up with writer-director Julian Breece, whom Tatyana had met while both were at Harvard, and crafted a series that feels like Sex and the City for a young black generation, as Breece puts it.

“We think it is something that can benefit the black narrative space,” said Breece who created the series. “On television, there’s nothing like this, and there hasn’t been since the 80′s with Frank’s Place.”

“We wanted to offer something sexy, hilarious and very heartfelt, making the uncensored web space perfect for a show like Buppies,” Ali told us in an earlier interview. “As an actor, Quinci Allen is the kind of dream role that doesn’t come around very often. She’s sexy, smart and very complicated.” Ali stars alongside a handful of rising actors—Ernest Waddell, Robin Thede, Preston Davis and Chante Frierson.

Rob Corddry’s popular comedy web series Childrens’ Hospital looks to be heading to cable network Adult Swim next year, according to remarks made by Warner Bros.’ CEO Barry Meyer today at Broadcasting & Cable/Multichannel News OnScreen Media Summit in New York.

The series was nominated for a multiple Streamy Awards back in March, including Best Comedy Web Series, Best Female Actor in a web series for Megan Mullally and Corddry for Best Male Actor.

After talks reportedly broke down between Warner Brothers and Comedy Central, Adult Swim, which shares channel space with Cartoon Network, made an offer to pick up the absurd comedy for the spring season.

Rob Corddry produced the series along with friends David Wain (star and creator of Wainy Days) and Jonathan Stern (producer of Horrible People, and Wainy Days).

It was a secret I was trying to keep, but I get all my comic book tutelage from A Comicbook Orange, and if you watch every episode you end up able to casually drop comic-cred names like Ben Templesmith, Chuck BB and Marc Guggenheim at parties.

Now on their fourth season, the prodigious creators Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan, have rolled out five episodes of the latest batch, many coming from their summer trip down to comics mecca Comic-Con. The latest episode (above) peaked our interest even more when Battlestar Galacitca writer Jane Espenson, who also writes on Joss Whedon’s Buffy Season 8 comic series from Dark Horse Comics, talks about her two Streamy Awards for the Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy web series. “They are on my bookshelves in a place of honor—I adore my Streamys,” says Espenson in the interview. “They are my dear, dear prizes.”

If for some reason you didn’t realize that The Broadroom is a Candace Bushnell production, whether by noticing her name right there below the title on the series’ website, or by way of the gestational buzz, well then she’s right there onscreen. The famous author introduces each episode, looking ever the quintessential confident Manhattan socialite, if a far more successful one than any of the characters she’s created.

Bushnell’s Sex and The City mega-franchise, love it or hate it, leaves behind a lot of baggage – a ‘guilty pleasure’ that for many overstayed its welcome (I’ll never be able to bring myself to watch the movie, and I’d like to think I’m not alone). The Broadroom’s first episode, ‘Husband Highjinks,’ is a messy affair, maybe Bushnell inadvertently working out some residual anger towards men and their perpetual shortcomings that didn’t make it onto HBO.

The series is written and created by Bushnell, and presumably produced with the budget of a medium-sized independent film. Maybelline’s project hosting is a bit like a one-off version of Lexus’ L Studio (home of Puppy Love and Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy), meaning it’s there, but it’s not intrusive in the programming (if you don’t count the tacky lipstick cursor). The actors aren’t drawing big box office numbers, but are more than recognizable, each taking on Bushnell’s modern woman archetypes. Along with Esposito, Balsam, McCann, and Bushnell, you have Jennie Garth of old school (and new school) Beverly Hills 90210 as the Natasha “The Breadwinner” and youngster Lauren Devereux as “The Millenial,” Brittney, presumably so younger viewers don’t write the show off.