Tubefilter News

Imagine yourself on a reality competition show. When you get cast, you see yourself winning challenges and coming home with the prize money, but the ‘reality’ of the situation is that there is only one winning person or team. The rest of the competitors are shed each week. From Survivor to Project Runway reality competition shows have one thing in common, voted off contestants can’t go home. Networks go to great lengths to protect the integrity and outcome of the game. Show results are guarded with confidentiality contracts. It’s true, who would watch a competition show, if they already knew who won.

So what happens to the cast offs? On Project Runway Kit Scarbo make it past the half way mark before her avant-garde dress sent her packing. She told Tubefilter she spent the rest of the competition sequestered in an apartment in a nearby building with the other designers.

This season on Amazing Race, racers have found themselves at the top of giant water slides and skiing indoors in Dubai. Jessica Stout and Garrett Paul came into the race ready to tackle all of these challenges. After surviving a license plate search, booking a flight to Tokyo, eating sake bomb on a Japanese game show, and digging in the mud in Vietnam, they had some back luck. Jessica was set up for the challenge to heard a giant pen of ducks, but the animals proved to be to unpredictable and uncooperative. When they arrived last at the next stop, they were eliminated. It was a blow for this team of seasoned world travelers. Stout, a travel writer and Paul, an engineer, were shocked to be out so early. Next stop for them was Elimination Station.

Some more CBS web series news today, this time out of CBS Interactive which is bowing two new original series for TV.com and CBSSports.com. Former Wallstrip host Julie Alexandria is coming back to the web as host of TV in a Flash , a new primetime TV recap series that will live on TV.com starting today.

The two-minute recap series is weekly, so it’s less about hitting the details of last night’s shows instead bouncing on the top hits of the week. With a Sportscenter-style sidebar ticker of what she’s covering, it’s easy to keep up despite fast talking Alexandria as she rolls through speedcaps of House, NCIS, Modern Family and others. Still the two minutes seem rushed, more suited for on-the-go mobile content than a late 2009 weekly web series.

That could be something to do with lead sponsor AT&T, which developed the series alongside CBS Interactive through its ad agency Mediaedge:cia. For now the series will live on TV.com with new episodes every Tuesday. And unfortunately, episodes of the show are not embeddable despite pre-roll ads and watermarked AT&T branding that would come along with the videos. No word yet of any plans for mobile distribution though we wouldn’t be surprised to see that coming.

Shooting has just wrapped for season 2 of IKEA-backed Easy to Assemble from creator-star Illeana Douglas. Word is that IKEA was quite happy with the show’s debut season and prompted a renewal for a second helping. The new season which launches this September, will add comedians Cheri Oteri, Ricki Lake and Tim Meadows to the already impressive cast.

Returning for the second go-round is of course Douglas herself along with web regulars Ed Begley Jr., Justine Bateman, Tom Arnold and Kevin Pollack. Where the first season was shot exclusively in the IKEA store, complete with hundreds of conveniently pre-made sets, the new season is said to be only half in-store. We’ll see the home live series regulars like Douglas and Bateman.

As long as there have been sports, there have been hecklers. By definition, heckling is interrupting with derisive comments or abuse. You know what I’m talking about— these salty lots can be found at any sporting event ripping on the referee, the opposing team, or even the opposing team’s family members. With Heckle U, CBS has taken this aspect of sports and created a hilarious new web series that follows the rise and fall of two ‘pro’ hecklers.

Starring comedians Owen Benjamin as Chance Stevens and Kirk Fox as Darrell Downing, the show traces the two hecklers on their path to glory. The first episode show’s their humble (and hilarious) beginnings as hecklers. I won’t say how they got their start, but I will offer this tidbit, it involves purple nurples. The show is presented like a documentary with different interviews with personalities including Heckler historians, newscasters, and athletes all connected to the heckler duo supreme.

Today kicked off the official start of new interactive thriller web series Harper’s Globe from the team at EQAL, creators of lonelygirl15 and KateModern. Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, the creative minds behind the series popularized highly interactive low-fi video blogging dramas, basically setting the bar for the genre.

The online series stars former lonelygirl15 regular Melanie Merkosky, as newcomer Robin Matthews to the sleepy vacation island who is tasked with digitizing old news archives from the local paper. Her mysterious past and penchant for video presumably make her the fitting conduit to get to the bottom what’s really going on around the island—that is, people getting killed off one by one.

The hospital spoof series looks to be holding nothing back creatively and promises “beautiful doctors with tragic flaws [that] struggle with charged emotional and sexual politics in the workplace.” That workplace of course is a working children’s hospital complete with the impressionable pre-adolescents to bear witness to these candid doctors’ affairs.

That was fast. After just five days on YouTube, Easy to Assemble has been picked up by CBS in a deal that will have new episodes of the show running exclusively on TV.com for a week after each release, starting Monday the 29th. The IKEA-backed show created by and starring Illeana Douglas racked up over [...]