If the best television shows today are like novels, with sustained narratives stretched out over seasons, then it would stand to reason that Web series are like short stories in glowing rectangles, drama and comedy distilled. The average Web short lasts between two and ten minutes, an easily digestible entertainment snack that doesn’t ask for too much attention in a space where a listicle can derail even the most focussed mind. The smartest Internet filmmakers understand the frenetic, lonely, jumpy browsing experience and just how much a surfer can bear when her eyes are always being pulled away. What a Web series can do, if it deploys itself correctly, is create a pause, a visual coffee break, a moment of communion in an open tab.
That may sound like an overstatement of the form, but consider this: if we are living through a golden age of television, then we are experiencing an almost golden age of Web-native series (and one that could quickly tip into glory days if a way to monetize them comes along, aside from them getting noticed and pulled up into the big leagues of studio-funded programming). What the medium has going for it is youth. It’s where the kids play. Because television has become so attractive to inventive filmmakers as a medium (Vince Gilligan currently has the nation holding its breath—it’s an intoxicating prospect for anyone who wants to tell visual stories), Web shows, with their serial nature and quick beats, have started to serve as the proving ground for future cable stylists. It’s like small-screen Sundance all the time if you know the right URLs.
The genre is not fully baked yet—for every success story like “The Outs,” a Kickstarter-funded Brooklyn soap that will get its own panel at the first-ever New York PaleyFest in October, alongside shows like “Orange Is the New Black” and “Boardwalk Empire,” several series are struggling to transcend their amateurism (welcome to the Internet)—but it’s getting close, and some creators are setting themselves apart. “Broad City,” a daffy comedy about twentysomthing femaledom in New York, staring Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, will become a bona-fide show on Comedy Central, produced by Amy Poehler. Issa Rae, whose series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” landed her production deals with Shonda Rhimes and HBO and a book deal at Simon & Schuster has become, as one magazine called her, “a poster child for DIY Internet success.” (Read Emily Nussbaum on Issa Rae and on Shonda Rimes.) The possibilities for finding quality in any given niche are seemingly endless: there’s the gender-bending comic drama “F to 7th,” the religion-tinted horror of “Divine,” the beautiful coastal gothic of “Ragged Isle,” the long-running gamer fantasy “The Guild,” the New York women looking for zenned-out L.A. bliss in "Be Here Nowish"; the deranged absurdist suburban-mom drag comedy “Gayle” (coming live to New York September 14th), and the new bohemian struggle-fest from the team behind “The Outs,” “Whatever This Is” (première party tonight!).
But of all the delights to be found in the Web-series galaxy, I’ve found myself most captivated by (and most tempted to re-watch over and over) the subtle comedy found in “High Maintenance,” the lovechild of the husband-and-wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. The couple’s pedigree lends itself to a powerful creative partnership—Sinclair, the series’s star, is a veteran actor and film editor, while Blichfeld is a casting director who worked on “30 Rock.” Armed with a rolodex of underdeployed and eager character actors, the pair peer into New York neuroses through the lens of a person who gets to see all different types of city kooks up close: the urban marijuana dealer. While the premise may sound goofy (not to mention potentially alienating for those who don’t partake), the execution is flawless.
When I spoke with Sinclair and Blichfeld recently, they were on the West Coast signing a script deal with a major network, newly on the path to converting “High Maintenance” into a full-length cable show. “I consider the show to be performance-based,” Blichfeld said. “By which I mean, we love actors. I love actors! I’m a casting director. Ben is an actor. And I got frustrated watching him not get the opportunities that I knew he deserved in more traditional platforms.”
“I kept getting cast as homeless guy, or guy with crazy eyes,” says Sinclair, whose soft-spoken dealer character is a joy to watch on screen, whether he is transfixed by a street performer playing a Casio keyboard or bonding with a rattled comedian over video games. “This all started as a way for me to get to play the kind of role that I want, which I would liken to Willy Wonka.” He explained why: “The thing about weed is, we didn’t want to use it as a punch line. Instead, it’s this substance that, like chocolate, causes people to expose their own foibles. People become so human in pursuit of this thing. And the interaction they have with the person bringing it is often tragic, because there are a lot of lonely people out there who order it and then that is their human interaction for the day.”
The idea of cosmopolitan loneliness, and of drug use as a way to curb it, is the deep theme of the show, even when it leads to comic results. Consider the episode “Heidi,” in which a man, besotted with a woman he met online, neglects to notice that she is actually homeless and using his apartment as a de facto crash pad.
There’s a story of a lesbian couple who cannot bring themselves to dispose of a mouse caught in a glue trap, because, as one woman puts it, they live in an apartment where “things do not come to die, they come to live. We do not torture in this apartment, and we do not kill.” Though, as her lover points out to the dealer, whom they have called in as backup in the situation, “To be fair, we already gassed it and it’s already covered in Pam.”
The episodes have a dark core—if they are short stories, then they are close to the kind written by Lorrie Moore, tap-dancing on the surface but crushed underneath. “We got braver as we kept making them,” Blichfeld said. “We started out with an episode called ‘Stevie,’ where a girl deals with a manic boss, and that was just dipping our toe into the water of these kind of sad New York stories we wanted to tell. We wanted this pot dealer to function as an emotional surrogate, for all these people. When we wrote ‘Brad Pitts,’ we knew that we were doing something really different than what’s out there for people to see on the Web, and it scared us a little.”
“Brad Pitts,” the story of a middle-aged woman diagnosed with cancer and her inability to eat, is not the kind of plotline that one might expect from a series that also includes bong jokes and young Brooklynites munching on space cake, but it shows the extent to which Sinclair and Blichfeld have a long-term vision for their work. Of their cable deal, Sinclair said, “There were no limits with the Web. We tackled molestation, shootings, asexuality, this one lonely man’s obsession that is so weird that it’ll make you cry, and we did it all because there was no FCC. That’s the liberating thing about the form. And when you have the actors good enough to push boundaries, then you are inspired to do it. I hope that when we transfer this thing to TV it stays the same.”
“But if not,” Blichfeld added, “there will always be our pure, unadulterated vision on the Web in those episodes for everyone to see. We wanted to make something we were really proud of, and there it is.” Sinclair and Blichfeld have already started planning a new dramatic series that they will debut in the spring. Regardless of any Hollywood deals, they intend to première it on the Web. “It’s our spiritual home,” Sinclair said. “The Internet allowed us the freedom to become filmmakers. We’re never really going to leave it.”
Photograph: Janky Clown Productions.
