Tubefilter News

Atom.com’s new series The Berry/Agee Experiment is an experiment indeed. Can an inside joke between two friends be enjoyable for other people? Can a funny song be expanded into a video mockumentary? Can this be kept up for several episodes? The answer is both yes and no.

Luckily, the two friends who share the inside joke are Matt Berry and Steve Agee, both very funny dudes with serious comedy street cred. Berry is a veteran of British TV comedies The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd, while Agee is best known for his role on The Sarah Silverman Program. They became friends when Berry came to LA to guest star in a Silverman episode and after he left town, they kept in touch by composing and recording songs that hilariously insulted each other and e-mailing them back and forth across the pond. And The Berry/Agee Experiment was created to turn their audio assaults on one another into a video web series.

The songs themselves are hysterical, as Berry and Agee verbally and musically spar in a tongue in cheek feud that quickly goes blue and somehow manages to get more and more inappropriately side-splitting as it continues. One song has Agee taking on the role of a robot sent back in time to warn the world that Berry has a strain of AIDS so potent it will one day threaten to wipe out mankind. Another has Berry complaining that he can no longer have sex now that Agee’s repulsive image is burned into his brain. These contemptuous compositions run the musical gamut, covering several genres. There’s the jangly country blues number “Dead Matt Walkin,” the psychadelic soundscape “Matt F**ks Hookers,” and “Super Steve” a parody set to the tune of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.”

While sharp writing and clever story structure are often the hallmarks of good comedy, one can’t overlook the impact of a fantastic comic performance. Is Caddyshack remembered for its plot? No, it’s become beloved because of the standout comic acting of Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight. Same goes for The Honeymooners or Married With Children, both standard family scenarios elevated by standout performances from Jackie Gleason and Ed O’Neill, respectively. Not to elevate it to the same status as these classics, but this is what I thought of when watching Atom’s new White Gorilla series.

White Gorilla is an original web series executive produced by comedy vet Jim Biederman (The Whitest Kids U Know, Michael & Michael Have Issues) and Chris Gillen < http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0318825>. It all begins when normal average everyman Steve (Trevor Dellecave) receives a mysterious wooden crate from Africa that contains a talking White Gorilla (Bert Kreischer) who invites himself to move in. In a somewhat by-the-numbers “fish out of water” scenario, White Gorilla doesn’t understand much about life in 21st century America. He talks about porn at the dinner table. He pees in the sink. He doesn’t understand what a hooker is even after he’s hired two of them.

Cheers took half a year to become the show we all remember and love. Seinfeld took an entire season to find its groove. New series often need your patience as they figure out what they are, and if you hang in there you might just be rewarded with truly unique programming. New TV shows these days tend to be cancelled before ever firing on all cylinders, but this is the web and we do things a little different here. My experience with The Fast Foodie is a great example.

The Fast Foodie is a comedy mockumentary starring Jerry Duppa (Hannes Phinney), “America’s preeminent fast food journalist.” Each episode follows Jerry, almost always from inside his trusty Volvo, as he scours the streets in search of fast food delicacies to write about on his blog. The series is the creation of writer-producer-director-editor-hyphenate Matthew Bardocz who shares the writing duties with Phinney, and is produced independently on what appears to be a shoestring budget.

I was excited when I first heard the concept. In a world filled with Yelps and Chowhounds, we all know “foodie” types who fetishize Korean BBQ and obsess over where to truly find the country’s best crab cakes, and this seemed like the perfect way to satirize them. But unfortunately the first four or five episodes disappointed me. Sure, Jerry ate lots of fast food, but I didn’t feel the foodie element. He just talked about how he enjoys a McRib (eww) or a Butter Burger (double eww), but not in that elitist nitpicky way in which real foodies boast about how only they know where to find the most authentic fish tacos in the Southwest.

When it comes to internet in-jokes, are you always one of the last to catch on? Do you not know the difference between Bubb Rubb and Rickroll? When friends have Lulz at your Fails, do you have no idea what that means? Fear not, internet noobs, your friends at the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies have sent help in the form of their web series Know Your Meme.

For the uninformed, Wikipedia defines an internet meme as “a phrase used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet.” This includes everything from Peanut Butter Jelly Time to Keyboard Cat to All Your Base Are Belong to Us.

While Know Your Meme certainly isn’t the only comprehensive list of internet memes on the web (also check out encyclopediadramatica.com and wiki.ytmnd.com), it is the only one to create a series of mini-documentary videos that both define specific memes and explore their origins and effects on online culture.

Each episode of Know Your Meme is hosted by Rocketboom correspondents, like Elspeth Rountree, Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie ‘Dubs’ Wilkinson and new Rocketboom NY host mememolly, in white coats on a laboratory set as if they are scientists who have painstakingly researched meme data and are presenting you with reports on their findings

We’ve all heard of the famously shady Hollywood accounting. You know, the kind that moves numbers and dollar signs around until even Titanic somehow fails to make a profit when it comes time to pay out the backend points. Low Budget, a new feature-film-turned-web-series on KoldCast TV from Canadian production company Capital j. Films, has a concept inspired by just such accounting practices.

The series revolves around actor/writer Jaye Wolfgang (Pat Thornton) and director/producer Jason Rosa (Neil Green). They run a fledgling Hollywood production company that’s never actually produced anything besides a stack of unpaid bills. They’re even startled when the phone rings, assuming it had been cut off. But luckily it wasn’t yet, because the voice on the other end of the line is a naïve Canadian producer who hires them site unseen to make a travel series of vacation hotspots in Canada.

There are two trends I’ve grown tired of in comedy. The first is a behind-the-scenes look at showbiz. The only people really interested in watching how Hollywood works are people who work in Hollywood and it just always feels self-indulgent. The second is stuff that only exists to make fun of something else. It’s easy to make jokes that say “that TV show is bad” or “that song is lame”, but it’s hard to come up with something original and funny own it’s own merits.

When I was assigned to review Son of a Pitch, a web series that combines both of my pet peeves, you can imagine I was well prepared to hate it. But guess what? I didn’t. In fact, I actually liked it a lot. Why? Because it’s very, very funny.

The concept is simple — two jackass producers pitch terrible movie ideas to a movie studio executive — but the execution is what makes the show work. It could’ve easily went off the rails too. As a friend once said of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s ill-fated TV spoof That’s My Bush, “Sometimes when you set out to satirize bad sitcoms, you just end up making a bad sitcom.” But series creator Andy Mogren has avoided that trap. Everything from the writing to the acting to the editing hits the same pitch-perfect tone.

Yadda yadda yadda,” “Shrinkage,” “They’re real – and they’re spectacular.”

Peter Mehlman, the writer-producer who penned those famous lines on the TV sitcom classic Seinfeld has moved beyond television and brought his unique sense of humor to the web. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” (Okay, that one was written by Larry Charles, but you get the point)

Peter Mehlman’s Narrow World of Sports is produced by BermanBraun, the production company run by former TV executives Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun. It can be found exclusively on YouTube and is sponsored by Palm, which receives one or two unobtrusive product placements in the intro and outro segments that wrap around each interview. In fact, they are usually pretty funny and play right into the style of the show.

Turning his attention from the realm of self-centered New Yorkers to the realm of sports, Mehlman’s first foray into cyberspace is the off-kilter and hilarious Peter Mehlman’s Narrow World of Sports. Each episode features Mehlman, as himself, interviewing big time sports celebrities like LA Lakers MVP Kobe Bryant, Boston Red Sox slugger Kevin Youkilis, Olympic champion Shawn Johnson, and Indy car speedster Danica Patrick. Sound pretty straight forward? I can assure you it is not.

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.”