Tubefilter News

Web series and web video bits worth clicking today:
Julia Allison, host of NonSociety’s TMIWeekly, gives dating and sexual courtship advice on College Humor’s The Crucial Man series (above) to scruffy host Jon Gabrus, who is trying to figure out how to be a gentleman. [College Humor]

Grass Roots, the political comedy on KoldCast TV (below) has scored a distribution deal with The Huffington Post. The site has featured a few political series before like Get Your War On and Swift Kids For Truth. “It sparked our interest because it’s both funny and political, which is the goal of our comedy page,” said Alex Leo Sr. Editor at HuffPo. [Huffington Post]

Babelgum announced they have added another comic strip series, Over the Hedge, has joined its comedy channel adding to other exclusive series like Dilbert and The New Yorker cartoons, also from animation distributor RingTales. Four brief (30-second) episodes of the strip that spawned a Dreamworks film of the same name, are up now on the site. [Babelgum]

Indy Mogul’s The Reel Good Show host Bobby Miller proves he isn’t just a snarky film buff, but also a credible indie filmmaker as his film Tub was picked as an official selection for this winter’s Sundance Film Festival. Also on the list is Tubefilter writer Lindsay Stidham’s film Douchebag, which she penned. [Sundance press release, NextNewNetworks]

Casey McKinnon, host of A Comicbook Orange, guest stars as evil nemesis ‘Kalm’ in episode 6—the season finale— of sci-fi comedy Hurtling Through Space at an Alarming Rate (aka much easier to say, HTSAAAR) today on Babelgum (below). [Babelgum]

Web drama Anyone But Me, from creators Susan Miller and Tina Cesa Ward is prepping for its December 15th premiere of its sophomore season. The series hosted a premiere screening of the new season last night in New York and is rolling out promo videos like Gilmore Girls’ bad girl Liza Weil jonesing for more ABM, and Heroes’ Zacahry Quinto who calls the show “an addiction.” [Emailed]

The title Hurtling through Space at an Alarming Rate is slightly misleading. Oh, there’s certainly a great deal of hurtling through space. The shared apartment of our overgrown fratboy protagonists goes warping through the universe, periodically marooning said overgrown fratboys on strange new worlds. But an alarming rate? Nothing seems to alarm or even rouse the main characters, Mike and Stuart (played by Michael Davies and Stuart Paap, who are presumably channeling some version of themselves).

HTSAAAR is one of the more deliberately laid-back web comedies out there, and much of the humor comes from the characters bemused unflappability in the face of space monsters, explosive devices, and female-types (this being a dude-centric webshow, semi-ironic sexism abounds).

Web TV aficionados will know Davies from his role as writer/director of the sleek post-apocalyptic webseries After Judgment and his influence on the production values of HTSAAAR is clear. The series looks good. The outer space CG and green-screened “hurtling effects” are a little campy, but no more so than those found in mainstream television space comedies like Doctor Who or Red Dwarf (which the series clearly takes after in tone).

HTSAAAR’s success in achieving a quality average-joes-in-space kinda vibe generally errs more on the side of hit than miss. Still, it’s all a little less clever and a lot more winkingly bro-tastic when compared to classics of the genre. On the plus side, each episode contains a handful of great back-and-forth riff sessions between Mike and Stuart. During the arguments, their amusingly deranged wordplay is pleasantly reminiscent of more irreverent programs like Strangers with Candy. While these moments rarely have anything to do with the storyline, it’s in these exchanges that the writing and chemistry between the leads comes together. The show stops feeling like a low-brow Hitchhikers Guide and starts to gain a distinctive sense of self.

Babelgum has been on a web series roundup of late, and these guys are moving fast. With news coming just two weeks ago of indie sci-fi series The Crew jumping ship to the online network as its news home for season 2, a fresh new batch of sci-fi series have followed suit. Today Babelgum announced three new original series, several of which are helmed by some web series notables, to make up the bulk of the sci-fi/horror comedy channel.

Launching today is a new series from Goodnight Burbank creator Hayden Black—no not The Cabonauts, which we’re still waiting on—but a hastily assembled paranormal comedy The Occulterers. The “interactive comedy and horror series” stars Black as one of his inventive characters, Hervé Villechez, this time part of a four-person Transylvanian ghost hunting crew.

Black’s new series took just two weeks from concept to production, and that includes inking the deal with Babelgum. “It’s been an exhilarating experience; from pitching it on a Monday, writing it over 2 days, to shooting it the next week,” said Black over email. “I still think it’s far better than it has any right to be.”

For casting, Black tapped a pair of Buffy vets in James C. Leary (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and indie web series Lost Angeles) and Camden Toy. Also on board on the hunt are Ellen Sandweiss (Strike.TV’s Dangerous Women, The Evil Dead) and Amy Kline (I <3 Vampires).

Michael Davies, the Streamy-nominted director of After Judgment, has a series of his own in the lineup. Hurtling Through Space at an Alarming Rate! stars Davies alongside TheStream.tv’s Live from the Future host Stuart Paap. The “golf and game-obsessed, popculture buffs” are literally hurtling through space, in their apartment, in an absurd comedy somewhere between Hitchhiker’s Guide and Up. The Captain Films team just wrapped shooting up in Vancouver and the series is set for November 2 online debut.