“I’ve actually worked at quite a few call centers, including West Business, representing DHL, and that’s what the material is based on.”
So says 23-year-old Austin filmmaker Reagan Peterson, speaking about his 13-episode, Web-based series Call Center. It’s part of a movement that, depending on how you choose to look at it, is either sounding the death knell of the traditional televised situation comedy or ringing in a new age of serialized, online comedy.
Either way, the three-minute chunklets of ensemble comedy are top-drawer stuff, slickly produced, shot with an eye toward roping in specifically online viewers (read: anyone under 30), and wittily written with spot-on cubicle-based humor and a cast that clicks. Think of the dry yuks of The Office married to the everyday absurdist wit of Mike Judge, and you’re halfway there.
The classic sitcom format, encompassing everything from 1949’s pioneering The Goldbergs to Friends and beyond, has been in a rough state of late. YouTube videos of kids saying and doing what even television pioneer Art Linkletter would be hard-pressed to call “the darndest things” are racking up more page hits than any online episode of Gossip Girl, and even sites that feature their own Web series – Funny or Die, the Cartoon Network’s online Adult Swim offshoot – have done so sporadically and with questionable success.
So is this the beginning of the end for those of us who still, against all tech-pop odds, love Lucy?
“I think it’s a little bit the reverse, actually,” says Peterson. “I think the Internet is going to be the basis of future sitcoms with the ones that are most successful then going on to become TV shows. I don’t think we’re going to see the end of television anytime soon. If you really want to test a concept to see if it works, instead of investing millions on a pilot or a six-episode run, you can now use the Internet to invest a much smaller amount of money while testing a lot more ideas.
“With Call Center, I really wanted to show that here’s an idea that I believe really has legs insofar as becoming a TV show. The Office is one of my favorite shows, but we deliberately went out of our way to give it an entirely different tone and narrative style,” says Peterson of the show, which was co-developed by Galen Carter-Jeffrey and Barbara Clark. “I was really thinking of Peanuts, where you have a whole bunch of characters, but then you can pick and choose just one or two to tell individual comic stories within the larger framework.”
And whaddaya know? It works. Peterson’s reference to Charles Schulz’s comic page staple is both telling and almost metaphysically ironic: Call Center‘s creation comes just as World War I flying ace Snoopy’s print-media playspace is literally going to the dogs. The net’s obliterating influence on virtually every aspect of old-school entertainment, from NBC’s must-see TV to what your grandparents lovingly referred to as “the funnies,” has occurred with unprecedented speed and unfettered creativity. As yet however, precious few ideas on how to financially support content like Call Center have truly succeeded. While shot on a budget that would barely cover one day of craft services on a contemporary network sitcom, Call Center and similar webisodic series do indeed require a revenue stream to ensure their continued existence. But that hasn’t discouraged the Call Center cast, crew, or director one bit.
“It’s the strangest thing, how fast it’s evolving,” says Peterson. “Even two years ago when my partner Galen Carter-Jeffrey started this it felt like Web series were, at that point, somewhat beneath us and dominated by a lot of really lowbrow humor. But now it’s evolved into this very serious medium in which everybody seems to be trying to make it.”
Clearing the way forward for this new breed of online, short-attention-span sitcom may be even more of a challenge than generating ad revenue (or any revenue, come to think of it). YouTube’s gargantuan lock on all things stupid-funny, from goofball LOLcats mash-ups to cheap ‘n’ fast video footage of some knucklehead popping zits on his back (“That one racked up somewhere between a quarter-million and a million hits,” the Call Center director wryly notes), is the giant, pooping elephant in the room when it comes to sustaining smart online series.
“Storywise, all the big-budget Web series, for the most part, are just running through the numbers by giving viewers a product that might look good and may be entertaining, but is ultimately not that memorable. And,” Peterson continues, “I don’t know that [high, cinematic quality] is what the audience even wants. I just don’t see the Internet reaching that hifalutin level. The online audience for this is chiefly the Judd Apatow generation who haven’t seen anything [produced before] 1990. Which is kind of a shame and a travesty, because there’s a lot of really great stuff that came before that.”
You can watch all 13 episodes of Call Center at www.callcenterseries.com.
This article appears in February 12 • 2010.