Tubefilter News

The sub-culture of kids’ sports is explored in Pee-Wee Football Press Conferences. In the first episode, “The Coach” must meet the press after a season opening blowout of the post-toddler team sponsored by TheFightingAccountants.com (Voted #1 All-Male accounting firm!).

“The Dinkens kid was wearing boat shoes again, a blatant equipment violation. Can we fine him this time?”
“Uh. He’s FIVE! What am I gonna fine him… a Pokemon card?”
“(disgust) Pokemon cards? Are you out of touch with today’s modern athlete?”

This seems like a one gag bit, better suited for a single Funny or Die short than a whole series. However, the filmmakers manage to build an interesting story arc as we follow the “Accountants” season. At first, there are just hardball questions on double safetys and poor offensive play calls. As the seasons progresses, the major media moguls such as “Pee-Wee Fantasy Blog” have lost interest and are replaced by angry parents. The tide turns to questions about the coaches inability to delegate a proper snack parent, his recently called off wedding ( “Is your head in the game?”) and his loathed “everyone gets to play” coaching philosophy. The footage is inter-cut with locker room and on-field interviews with the mini-gridiron not-so greats. .

The world of Pee-Wee sports is a comic gold mine. The show has ten, two minute episodes up and every show has some good chuckles. It can be a little uneven at times as the filmmakers decide on “The Coach’s” voice. He seesaws between incredulous everyman and seasoned football veteran. I would have liked to see the series take the gag a little further and explore this rich scenario deeper. That’s just my taste, whoever made this series has made a tight, funny show.

Did I just say “whoever?”

With most web series there is a strong emphasis on the credits. The industry standard seems to be that the end scroll should be almost as long as the episode. It takes a village and we all love to see our names in that 400×600 box that is glamorous YouTube fame.

These guys have gone the minimalist route. I have no idea who stars, directs or writes this series. The only hint we get is a double plug at the end of each episode. The first is for the site of “The Fighting Accounts,” a look at the “sponsors” of the team. The other is for Video Pollen. It leads you to a website that promotes Pee-Wee Football Press Conferences. Deeper in the site, we learn Video Pollen is a “New Media studio based in Los Angeles, CA “ and the principals are Dave and Brian Robel. Other than that there is no info on the series.

You really can’t script a better Super Bowl—two best-in-breed Pro Quarterbacks in Peyton Manning and Drew Brees marching their nearly-undefeated teams into the big game. Brees’ Saints are the scrappy first-timers to the dance, carrying the hopes of a wounded city galvanized by the unlikely success of this band of brothers. Then there’s the always calculating Manning, one of the only true player-coaches left in the game, himself a seasoned general on the field marching his Ring-sporting champs back into the stadium where they won it all in 2007.

But the latest episode (above) out from 12 Angry Mascots of their popular web series NFL Writers Room, thrashes all notions that this game is actually determined on the field. Atom.com picked up the latest episode, and probably the last of the season of the ESPN commissioned comedy, in a exclusive distribution deal for the Super Bowl edition. The New York based comedy crew delivers a three and half minute gem written and directed by Scott Rogowsky, who stars in the series alongside fellow mascots Emily Axford, Chris Chuang, Zach Lombardo, Tom McCaffrey, Zach Norton, Nicole Shabtai and Trevor Williams. (8 out of 12 isn’t bad for three minutes.)

Escape. The web isn’t clamoring with that many series that truly rip us out of our office chairs. Often we’re given mere momentary amusement. But I’m talking about the ones that suck us through our laptop screens and into a world so refreshingly different yet intimately familiar we actually feel transported.

Everyone has something that gives them this kind of escape. For me, it’s a show that propels me into the land of ski tracks in fresh powder, vertical drops and climbing 5.10’s. Pure adrenaline daydreaming. Luckily, I may have just found my new episodic winter escape.

Fitz Cahall is a natural storyteller, crafting 20 episodes of an NPR-worthy podcast of outdoor adventures called The Dirtbag Diaries. His real life human tales of triumph are This American Life for REI junkies. But now, Cahall is taking the leap into web series, with the upcoming premiere of The Season later this month. It’s 22 episodes of outdoor goodness, all shot in HD, following the unique stories of five individual dreamers from the Pacific Northwest. Guys like Paul Kuthe, a kayaker who overcame a difficult past and rock climber Matt Maddaloni who invented a new camera rigging system for filming climbs.

“The idea, or maybe the question, behind the series is this,” wrote Cahall in a recent blog post about the series. “Could we take compelling stories from our community, combine it with tightly crafted footage and create small installments that reveal a bigger story?”

Cahall and his producing partner Bryan Smith of Reel Water Productions managed to score high-end outdoor clothing line Arc’teryx along with microbrewer New Belgium Brewery to sponsor the series.

Irreverent, sports-related comedy programs don’t exist, at least not on television. While series like Fox’s Best Damn Sports Show Period or ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption can definitely be comical, they make quips about and poke fun at the wide world of sports with a measured amount of deference. The shows operate under the assumption that the subject is significant, that sports – and the people that play, coach, and watch them – are important.

Yes, you could try point to something like the Sklar Brothers’ defunct Cheap Seats as an exception, but nothing shows professional athletics less respect than the Onion Sports Network. It’s just the kind of program that television could use to bring some balance to the medium’s for-the-love-of-the-game love fest. That’s why I’m all jazz hands over the recent announcement from Comedy Central. The cable network has ordered a pilot from popular satirical newspaper The Onion for a 30-minute, scripted comedy series based on its sports section.

The press release promises the series, “will take on the whole universe of modern sports – teams, players, leagues, sycophantic fans, ridiculous products and over-hyped sports coverage – with an eye towards appealing to sports fanatics and more casual fans, as well as long-time followers of The Onion and The Onion News Network.” And Onion Sports Network director Will Graham warns you to, “Get ready for the most intense sports coverage humanity has yet witnessed.” I’d like to say the show’s going to be awesome, but Casey Stengel once told me “never make predictions, especially about the future,” and Chris reminds me about the profoundly not good The Onion movie.

Sometimes in sports, an event occurs that seems to be straight of a movie. A buzzer beater to win the championships, a walk off homerun for the series, or an impossible catch to keep a drive alive all qualify in this case. ESPN The Magazine has seized on the human and sometimes amazing drama of sports for their web series: NFL Writers Room.

Right from the kickoff, you must realize that this is a web series for football FANS, not just people who like one team, but people who are familiar with every game, player, coach, and throwback uniform design. You know the type: four different fantasy teams going at once, obsessively tracking player data to predict game winners, and knowing detailed data on every single major player. This is a web series for them.

Created by NY-based production team 12 Angry Mascots, the series is a behind the scenes look of the fictional NFL “writer’s room.” Each week before Sunday’s game the team previews upcoming games and the “dramatic ways” each of them could play out. For example, last Saturday’s episode featured the many different ways that the Minnesota-Green Bay game could have played, with a special focus on the Brett Favre story line. The writers debated how many touchdowns he should score and included a funny debate if Favre should go for a “Lambeau Leap”. In a funny twist, the writers also bicker about if the game’s storyline gels with the theme for the season: “despair & disparity.”

A couple weeks back we asked the rather obvious question, Where are all the fantasy football web series? We had found a few, some scripted, some not. It was right around then that we came across a fantasy football goldmine, Fantasy Football Live!, a weekly, hour-and-a-half live web show all about NFL for us armchair GMs.

It’s the latest of Asthon Kutcher’s web originals, and somehow has me way more hooked than KataylstHQ or the on-hiatus Blah Girls. In full disclosure, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a fantasy football nut and this show is right up my alley. But even if debating the likelihood of LT’s return to glory or the durability of Willie Parker’s turf toe isn’t your thing, you still have to appreciate the fact that this live show pulls in an average of 10,000 simultaneous viewers.

Now, it doesn’t hurt that @aplusk himself is on the show, and he tweets out weekly about the series to his 3.6 million followers. The series airs live on UStream and Facebook, under Kutcher’s channel and the live chatrooms and Twitter are a key part of the fan interaction. So if you’re trying to figure out why Willis Magahee is worth a start after he laid down a 0-pt stinker last week, you can tweet like this fan to @aplusk to (possibly) have it answered by the hosts. Speaking of hosts, Kutcher isn’t just there for vanity. He knows a thing or two about fantasy, holding his own with his resident FFB expert Nate Zegura.

Fellow Tubefilter contributor Gennefer Snowfield (@Gennefer) excitedly tweeted on the closing night of the NYTVF, “+1 for web series!,” in response to the Jeremy Readleaf’s pilot, Odd Jobs taking the coveted FOX/15 Gigs development deal. Really though, this accomplishment is a footnote in a festival that has already gone to the web. The floodgates have opened, and Web Television is firmly in place as the stop for independent television.

Of the pilots presented, whether or not they had expressly identified themselves as a web series, well over half have already been distributed on the web, or have plans for distributing over the web in the near future (many looking for distro deals with major content networks). Ironically coming off of Industry Day, where panelist Rick Rosen explained “we just can’t make money off the web!”, the epoch of all this Web TV fever was the jam packed Digital Day. A number of companies and content creators discussed all of the ways in which they have been successful and made money off the web. In fact, at one point, after seeing both MSN and EQAL pitch products, I thought to myself, “have we gone too commercial?”

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.