Although they not be the “best” videos of the year, or even the most culturally significant, below are the videos [in no particular order] that I had the most fun watching and thinking/writing about for NewTeeVee in 2007.

Next to Heaven

Then: “I’ve watched about ten Next to Heaven episodes, and my favorite so far is probably episode 41, in which an ex-junkie describes replacing his addiction to heroin with an addiction to anti-drug education films –- particularly those narrated by Paul Newman.”

Now: In September, Rob Parrish’s series won the big prize at NewTeeVee’s NYC Pier Screening. That same month, Parrish wrapped up NtH’s first, year-long season, with the promise of new episodes in 2008.

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In 2007, a significant shift took place in the world of professional comedians as many of them started creating original content for the Internet. 2008 now stands poised to be the year in which the masses start to take notice — thanks in part to the writers’ strike.

The return of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert may forestall the revolution somewhat, but as shows like 30 Rock continue to run repeats, with no end in sight, frustrated channel surfers will likely be inspired to go hunting for alternatives online. This is old news to people like you and me, but for audiences previously accustomed to passively consuming whatever comedy is pumped into their living rooms by the networks, this would represent a sea change in both behavior and attitude. And ThunderAnt is the kind of project tailor-made for this kind of scavenging.

ThunderAnt is a collaboration between Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, singer/guitarist for the much-missed Sleater-Kinney. ThunderAnt’s hipster celeb credentials are impeccable, while the actual videos are both unassuming and highly conceptual. It’s an interesting bait-and-switch: The stars associated with the project will draw viewers who may not be web video-savvy, but the work itself is odder and far less accessible than the average viral video hit.

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Juntoons: the latest entry into the new frontier of semi-surreptitious online movie marketing, or legit fan fiction? Thrillingly weird mashup of sex ed and Adult Swim, or questionable propaganda designed to cover Fox Searchlight’s butt for releasing a film that implicitly condones unsafe teen sex?

I wish I knew the answers to those questions. After watching the eight Juntoons currently online, here’s what I can tell you: They’re a series of animated shorts produced for and distributed solely on YouTube and MySpace, incorporating recognizable characters, themes and narrative strands from the hugely hyped teen sex dramedy Juno. The Juntoons have been released into the world with no visible studio branding or direct link to the movie or distributor’s web site, but they seem way too slick to be the work of an actual fan of the film — especially considering that the movie has been in theaters for less than two weeks, and on less than 50 screens across a handful of cities.

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FunnyOrDie’s spoof of The Hills, starring James Franco and Mila Kunis as Justin Bobby and Audrina, respectively, is OK, but so much of the vacuous MTV reality show is ripe for parody that it’s almost surprising it isn’t better. Maybe I’m just bothered by the fact that Kunis’ mannerisms — the faux-meaningful, wide-eyed side glances, the heavily-loaded head-nod — are more an embodiment of the monumentally self-possessed L.C. than a mimicry of ultimate empty vessel Audrina. Or maybe I’ve just seen better — I mean, there are certainly no shortage of Hills spoofs on YouTube, and many of them are a lot weirder, a lot scrappier — and thus a lot more interesting.

By my count, there have been at least two episodes of the real Hills this season alone in which Lauren confronted nemesis/former best friend Heidi with the allegation that Heidi allegedly spread rumors about an alleged sex tape that Lauren allegedly made with ex-boyfriend Jason. Confrontations like these usually amount to about four or five lines of dialogue, but the Hills producers manage to stretch them out into four or five minutes of Meaningful Stare-padded drama, which is likely why these scenes seem to be spoofed more commonly than any other. Even Gawker spoofed of one of these big fights a couple of weeks back, “starring Gawker editor Joshua David Stein [and] his mustache.” Read more of this story

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke exclusively hosted Speechless, a series of short videos starring A-list talent that was produced and conceived by B-list talent and designed to promote United Hollywood’s position by dramatizing the impact of the writers’ strike on the art form.

“For the first time in the TV and movie industry, high-profile SAG actors are together taking their talents directly and exclusively to the Internet,” the press release boasted (somewhat erroneously — Speechless player Eva Longoria is one of many high-profile SAG actors who has previously taken her talents directly to FunnyorDie, just to name a single example).

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I’m not sure when the original 2 Girls 1 Cup video, which depicts two women enthusiastically eating what appears to be excrement, appeared online, but videos shot by viewers depicting their own reaction started flooding YouTube in mid-October and are still coming. This phenomenon is amazing, for a number of reasons. Primarily, and most obviously, it’s a user-generated meme that requires content creators to expose themselves to scat porn. But those brave content creators are also filtering something unspeakably vile for those of us too squeamish to directly interact with it.

The authenticity of many of the reaction videos is, of course, debatable. Though every video purports to be a real-time document of an actual, uncensored reaction to 2 Girls 1 Cup, and many feature the original clip’s music, I have yet to find a reaction clip that shows a viewer and the video in the same frame. It almost doesn’t matter; anybody making a reaction clip must have some idea of what they’re in for (even Raz0rsex’s almost heartbreaking naivete is undercut by her acknowledgment that she doesn’t want her dad to walk in while she’s watching the video. They grow up so fast!) Plus, the sheer presence of the webcam is sure to mediate every response.

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I’m probably just being reactionary, but the first thing that struck me as being a little off the mark about the first episode of quarterlife is the guiding assumption that videoblogging and writing are interchangeable, that speaking into a webcam is a natural extension of stringing words together on a page. Maybe that’s a more common conception than I realize, but I’ve always thought of vlogging in terms of performance. A writer wants an audience for her ideas; a performer wants an audience for herself.

quarterlife Part 1

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But then I wondered if maybe quarterlife creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick are suggesting that their protagonist — a frustrated, 20-something introvert named Dylan, who condescends to work at an apparently shallow women’s magazine but not-so-secretly dreams of doing something of pretension substance, and who we’re supposed to read as “nerdy” even though she looks like a supermodel — is not really a writer at all. If quarterlife is heading in the direction of videoblogging as catalyst for self-discovery — especially if “self-discovery” is going to be analogous to a self-styled, self-righteous scold realizing that she’s really a gossipy exhibitionist — then there might be something here.

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I love Midwest Teen Sex Show, the sassy and sharp-witted bimonthly sex education show produced by Britney Barber, Guy Clark and Nikol Hasler. In an era in which actual conversation about sex has been sanitized from both schools and Hollywood films, you’ve gotta love a video show that follows up a question like “Does anal play during masturbation mean you’re gay?” with the answer, “No, it means you have nerve endings.”

The first eight episodes largely blended dry yet funny lectures with illustrative skits, usually starring Barber, a raspy-voiced blonde whose versatility and fearlessness sets her apart from most Internet ingénues. But the most recent episode broke from that tradition. Released on Halloween, it’s an STD safety lesson in the form of a dead-on (no pun intended) spoof of the sexually-active-teens-in-peril horror genre. A teen couple meets at an empty house for a less-than-satisfying sexual encounter, only to end up having to fend off a hooded, chainsaw-wielding villain named Syphilis.

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Random House has shown surprising savvy in using online video to promote their recent book releases. First, they sponsored a seven-minute short video collaboration between filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein to promote the latter’s latest Random House release, The Shock Doctrine. The clip was played at both the Toronto and Venice film festivals last month and was then posted on YouTube, where it’s been viewed over 300,000 times. The publisher has now taken the experiment a step further, with an online video campaign to promote Douglas Coupland’s new novel, The Gum Thief.

The three sets of videos, one representing each of the novel’s two main characters and another bringing a text within the text to life, were produced by Canadian post house Crush Inc. Each clip is narrated by Coupland, who reads passages straight from his novel, and each set has a unique look and method of production. The Bethany character is a goth girl working at a Staples, and the stop-motion animation videos that introduce her drop her frustrated musings into a monochrome swirl of staples and Post-it notes. Her co-worker Roger is a middle-aged loser whose age and lack of accomplishment essentially render him invisible; his inner monologue is transposed seamlessly onto the office supply store’s signage.

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The 45th New York Film Festival wrapped up last week, and its month-long marathon of press conferences and screenings was memorialized in a series of short, experimental web videos, created by Jamie Stuart in partnership with FILMMAKER Magazine. This is the third NYFF that Stuart has documented via video; you can watch his previous work at his web site, MutinyCompany.com, and this year’s batch at FILMMAKER’s video page.

Stuart’s highly impressionistic NYFF videos are rarely about the festival itself, or even the films and filmmakers on display (although his one-sentence review of Marie Antoinette in one of last year’s clips is as insightful an analysis of that film as I’ve seen anywhere). Rather, they’re about Stuart’s experience — of traveling to the festival’s headquarters in Lincoln Center; of sitting in the front row of the press conferences, necessarily looking up at the filmmakers, barely six feet away from them but kept separate as if by an invisible forcefield; and of his process of going back to his apartment and putting the final video together.

This year, Stuart seems less interested than ever in the actual films, but the NYFF45 batch of clips are somehow simultaneously more conventionally about the festival, and more impressionistic and lyric in terms of visual language.

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