Today, NewTeeVee gets to do something we don’t normally get to do — review the competition. OK, technically The Web Files isn’t competition for us — we’re just covering the same beat using different mediums. In this web series about the making of web series, Files host Kristyn Burtt interviews various players in the online video space every week about the trials and tribulations of creating content for the Internet.

While the opening sequence — shot film noir-style, with Burtt playing the role of detective — seems to imply investigative journalism, Burtt’s focus is on personalities and content, with minimal scoops in sight. The interview with MERRIme.com creators Kaily Smith and David Weidoff, for example, focuses more on their experiences at the NYTVF (where Smith won the best actress award) than on questions like how they were able to secure name cast members like Tony Hale and Tom Arnold, not to mention their $2,500-per-episode financing, though they do make an interesting point about the value of hiring a publicist.

But while the news component may be lacking, Burtt is still a capable host whose years of entertainment reporting make her very comfortable on camera — previously, she’d done hosting work with MSNBC and NBC, among other entities. Read more of this story

Justin Johnson, creative services lead at Next New Networks and one of the original writers for College Humor, was sitting at home yesterday with his girlfriend of six years, Marissa Nystrom. It was about 6:30 p.m. EST, their sixth anniversary as a couple, and a quiet night. They were making spaghetti for dinner, Nystrom was checking her Facebook and Tumblr accounts, and Johnson was nervous as hell.

About a month prior, Johnson had begun working with the team at Tumblr to create a wedding proposal that suited them as a couple — a big, splashy takeover of every Tumblr user’s dashboard, in which he’d pop the question in a post only Nystrom could respond to. That night, Johnson had just used a “secret link” to activate the proposal post, meaning that soon the entire Tumblr universe would be able to see it…except that his first attempt to activate it didn’t work.

Meanwhile, the ring box was on his desk, the accompanying proposal video was now live on Vimeo, and he was growing increasingly worried that the surprise was about to be blown. Finally, some urgent IMs to the Tumblr team got the proposal post working — just as Nystrom left the room to go check on the spaghetti. “There was no not-obvious way to be like, ‘HEY, WHY DONT YOU COME OVER AND CHECK TUMBLR!’” Johnson said via IM. “I was thinking of saying, ‘Oh man, so-and-so just put up this hilarious post,’ but that seemed sort of lame.”

Finally she returned to their office and refreshed her Tumblr page — giving Johnson just enough time to get down on one knee and get the ring ready. Read more of this story

If you were to judge the world of science fiction based on the number of male characters vs. females featured, with few exceptions you’d probably find that space is a man’s world, baby. And that’s essentially the premise of Hurtling Through Space At An Alarming Rate, Babelgum’s mash-up of sci-fi comedy and dude humor.

The series, marking a definite shift in tone from the team who created Streamy-nominated drama After Judgment, charts the adventures of Mike (Michael Davies) and Stuart (Stuart Paap), two beer-swilling dudes flying about through space in a ship that looks like a modern two-bedroom apartment. How does the apartment manage interstellar travel? What are these guys supposed to be doing aside from ridding space of “annoying creatures” (which makes them sound like the astronaut equivalent of exterminators)? No freaking clue. The main point of the show is to fling about sci-fi references, goof around with toy weapons, and talk about boobs, while facing foes like a monstrous pile of dirty laundry, a planet filled with oddly timed bombs, and Comicbook Orange’s Casey McKinnon in an upcoming guest appearance.

Unfortunately, while Hurtling means well, the series is uneven, specifically because the show is at its best when the guys are just being guys, and there’s no serious effort being made to spoof sci-fi franchises. Read more of this story

CJP’s The Temp Life is one of those on-the-nose sponsored series, being as it is a comedy about the abused life of the temporary employee, sponsored by actual staffing company Spherion. But as an early adopter in that world, the series has proven that you don’t need to drop the sponsor into every scene in order to spread the message. And its fourth season, which launched this week, ups the game in terms of guest stars, while also representing a big narrative evolution for the web series world in general.

For if you’re a true TV nerd, you might be aware of something known as the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, a theory which posits that the vast majority of network television from the past several decades takes place within the same universe, thanks to the multitude of crossovers and spinoffs that have occurred over the years. According to the Westphall hypothesis, Monica and Rachel from Friends live in the same fictional New York as the detectives on Law and Order and the Bunkers from All in the Family — plus, in their future lies the worlds of both Star Trek and Firefly. It’s a theory filled with contradictions and faults, but presents a fresh way of considering the various seemingly disconnected shows we all watch.

Despite the metatextual nature of new media, where stories are often being told in multiple formats across different platforms, no Westphall analog had really emerged in the web series world yet — until now. Two major crossovers come up in the fourth season of The Temp Life: First, struggling temp agency Commodity has been pushed out of its office space by a company owned by the hedge fund owned by the central company of Hedge Fund. (Fund creator/star Chris Murray makes a cameo in the first episode.) In addition, the central characters from the series Groupthink will guest-star in an upcoming episode. The result is an expanded universe that not only creates the sense that these shows, all created and produced independently, do not exist in a vacuum, but provides them an opportunity for greater exposure. Read more of this story

There are people whose brains go in one linear direction, whose ideas make sense and come from a decidedly logical place. Those people are rarely any good at comedy, especially the more absurdist humor that excels online. What I’m saying is that Scott Gairdner’s sketches don’t necessarily make a ton of sense, but that is why they are hilarious.

Gairdner, named the “King of Dot Comedy” by G4’s Attack of the Show, is a solo act who’s been creating web comedy since 2006. After his first spoof shorts went viral, Collegehumor began commissioning pieces; his stuff has also been featured by YouTube and FunnyOrDie. It’s deserved attention, as his work represents some of the best in pop-culture parody (with a heavy emphasis on video games), enabled not just by Gairdner’s solid acting and directing chops, but technical skill as an editor and effects artist, which helps him to nimbly parody MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 and imagine CNN’s hologram technology getting disturbing real-world applications.

But it’s Gairdner’s unique POV that helps his shorts stand out in an admittedly oversaturated marketplace for sketch comedy. Today, for example, he released one of the most perfectly bizarre shorts to grace the web recently, a third installment of Tiny Fuppets. Read more of this story

When web video juggernaut Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog debuted last year, it inspired fan-made contributions to the world of the series almost immediately — something the Whedon family encouraged by soliciting supervillain applications to be included on the official DVD. But more than a year later, a group of Houston-based fans has taken things to a whole new level.

Horrible Turn, a fan-made prequel to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog, is a full hour of music, comedy and supervillain angst. Set in the early 1990s — allowing for plenty of Compuserve and giant cellular telephone jokes — Turn teases the early origins of the Evil League of Evil, including the first reported attack of Bad Horse, while also introducing the characters of Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer as pre-super adolescents whose fates are not yet determined. I mean, they don’t like each other very much, but young Dr. Horrible/Billy Buddy is more focused on making it happen with his Australian dream girl (a deliberate reference to the Dr. Horrible lyric “But her tears will dry/As I hand her the keys/To her shiny new Australia”) and releasing a potion that will make all the people of the world love each other.

What’s interesting is that in both versions Dr. Horrible is coming from the same Nietzschean-ubermensch place, believing that “the world is broken and he just needs to fix it.” How he lost his faith in love and turned instead to power as a solution is the film’s arc, which ends on a note that could potentially allow for sequels (though what do we call a prequel-sequel? Prequel Part 2?).

When evaluated as an independent production, not a fan film, Turn is competently directed and written, with traditional musical numbers smoothly integrated into the narrative and a cinematic look, enabled by a 35mm lens adapter according to director Chance McClain. Read more of this story

Those who thought the secret to fame and fortune was being big on YouTube might have to reconsider that position, given Ryan Higa’s comments during this morning’s fireside chat with Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee Live.

Creator of the now No. 1 most-subscribed channel on YouTube, Higa still shoots his videos, some of which stretch to 25 minutes, on a small unfancy Flip camera — when asked if he was saving the money for college, he admitted that he was “just saving the money.” Higa downplayed his earnings via YouTube ads and product placement deals as “better than a part-time job… definitely not enough for my mom to quit her job.”

Read more of this story

I’ve never had an iPhone. When I was in college, I got a deal on a free cell phone through Sprint, and since then I’ve stayed with that carrier. And not out of blind loyalty: Its service was reliable overall, its rates reasonable, and I go to a lot of tech conferences. Why is that important? Well, because I’ll stand outside a conference hall, phone in hand, and watch the 10 people near me poke at their iPhones impatiently, hoping to retrieve the calls dropped by AT&T. As spiffy as some iPhone apps are, it was little incentive to change.

But a recent spurt of ads from Verizon have been kicking the iPhone where it hurts, attacking AT&T’s service, the lack of open development, and other consumer complaints. And those ads have gone viral. After two years of Apple’s dominance, it appears that the rival service provider finally feels safe enough to throw some punches.

I still remember the halcyon days of the iPhone, where any video even mentioning the sacred device would go viral instantly, commanding millions of views. This would be June 2007, when it was just about to launch and, to paraphrase the mood back then, “change the way we did everything.” We as a community will probably never experience such a juggernaut of hype again — which is why this new backlash feels ever so slightly blasphemous. Read more of this story

I apologize in advance if the tone of this review comes off as frustrated, but here’s the deal: I should love How It Should Have Ended, a recently relaunched series of movie satires produced by Starz Digital. Targeting major blockbusters, the series purports to offer “new” endings for big movies like Terminator and Braveheart. Using relatively well-executed Flash animation to recreate the films, it also mocks them: The director of The Blair Witch Project yelling at his heroine for dropping the camera, for example, or the eponymous Borat thanking America for giving him a dump truck of money. That sort of thing. It’s the kind of satire that usually hits the sweet spot for pop culture nerds like myself. However, as good an idea as it is and as solid as the execution might be, there’s something slightly off about these shorts.

Part of it comes down to the fact that they typically fail to live up to their premise. Take, for example, the Terminator short, which finds some clever gags in splicing together the entire Terminator franchise with Back to the Future (setting the Terminator loose in the world of 1955 Hill Valley being the source of most of them). But even looking past the fact that it structures itself as a trailer and not a traditional “final scene,” it’s still just a bit too long and a bit too ham-fisted in its humor. And it fails to really mock what’s actually dumb about the latest Terminator installment — which, speaking as someone who paid money to see it opening night, is a huge disappointment. Read more of this story