As Hollywood has brought nerd culture to the mainstream with close to a decade’s worth of superhero blockbusters, it’s become slightly harder to spot the difference between a real nerd and the casual viewer. But trust me when I say that Matt Campagna and Anastasia Tubanos, the hosts of Your Geek News, are genuine nerdcore.

Individually, Matt and Nat, as they’re known on the show, are savvy web video professionals — Tubanos produces a number of web series, including BSGcast, Your Greek News, and Naked Wine Show, while Campagna is a digital filmmaker who’s made two indie features. (He appeared along with Galacticast’s Rudy Jahchan and Indy Mogul’s Erik Beck on the SXSW 2009 panel Soapbox Spielbergs.) But paired together for a news-desk-style debate show on upcoming films, the pair can sling some fast and furious nerd talk that betrays their roots. Campagna comes from a comics and action-figures-loving background, while Tubanos’ loves include Battlestar Galactica and the Twilight novels. I mean, Campagna grew mutton chops in support of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. They’re not kidding around.

Your Geek News isn’t just two fans in a basement, though — the show sports a slick CGI set and solid production values, and today launched a partnership with Babelgum for web and mobile distribution. Read more of this story

I love you, NewTeeVee Station readers, but sometimes I suspect that you aren’t listening to me when I tell you that a show is AWESOME. So, in honor of our humble Station’s 1-year anniversary (betcha didn’t realize it’d been a whole year, did you?) I went through our 4-star and 5-star reviews to put together a collection of some of my favorite shows that remain slightly obscure.

Sean and Jilly Move In
This fauxumentary about a dysfunctional couple forced to move in together is full of sly, Office-esque awkward comedy. Here’s the happy couple looking for a new place to live.

What I said then: They’re that couple who don’t really enjoy being together, but are never truly unhappy enough to break up, a caricature pushed to the extreme but easily recognizable nonetheless. Read more of this story

Sometimes you watch the pilot of a series and know exactly where it’s going to go. Other times, you watch the pilot and have no clue how the series will shape up over the course of its run. And that is when the wise reviewer of online video decides to refrain from reviewing said show until she’s seen more than just the pilot, because while a cleverly constructed character will go a long way towards anchoring a series, it’s hard to know how well the premise will hold up, if at all.

Atom.com’s The Shaman is a quasi-Odd Couple featuring a Los Angeles schlub named Matt (played by Matt Price) and his new roommate, the Shaman (played by Jason Nash). The Shaman is more Jim-Morrison-as-portrayed-by-Val-Kilmer-in-The Doors than he is Jim Morrison, living in a magical dreamworld that to the rest of us resembles contemporary L.A. and completely incapable of putting on a shirt. (The camera lingers lovingly and often over Nash’s “Will Ferrell-esque physique.”) When the show premiered a couple of weeks ago, I watched and liked the first episode, but decided to wait on reviewing it until a few more episodes were available. It’s a decision that paid off, as the series, now on Episode 3, has managed to keep the concept fresh and entertaining. Read more of this story

Hollywood is full of stories about legendary comebacks — Robert Downey Jr. surviving drugs, John Travolta surviving Look Who’s Talking II — so who’s to say that a web series about the industry shouldn’t get a second chance? That’s what Showbizzle has its eye on. The indie web series produced by Charles Rosin (a producer on the original Beverly Hills 90210) relaunched a few weeks ago after falling flat last fall.

How flat did it fall? Steve Bryant, in our initial NewTeeVee Station review on Sept. 26, 2008, gave it two stars, writing that “the site is confusing, the mission statement unclear, and the promise — personal webcam-ish confessions and storytelling that’s ‘different from virtually everything else that you can currently find in the world wide web’ — laughable.” Composed then of individual two-minute monologues relayed to an unseen and unheard aspiring screenwriter named Janey, Showbizzle was more like watching scenes from an acting class than a narrative. And the site was focused on getting people to sign up for a poorly constructed and irrelevant social network, in theory hoping to connect aspiring whatevers in their quest for Hollywood fame and fortune. “Everything was rushed, and we made some tactical errors, we made some technical errors, and by the time we started up we were already in the hole,” Rosin said via phone. “But we were able to evaluate what went wrong, and what we could do better.”

Today, though, the Showbizzle site has a clean look that showcases the series properly, and perhaps thanks to the advice Rosin received from a Silicon Valley consultant — “you either have to be a web series or a social network, not both” — that element of the site has been dramatically toned down, instead focusing on the actual content.

And that content has been dramatically changed. Read more of this story

Did you know that Freddy Krueger watches lonelygirl15? Well, not Freddy Krueger — but Robert Englund, who starred in the Nightmare on Elm Street films as Freddy, has seen a few episodes. It wasn’t until the Comcast-owned FEARnet approached the horror icon with the script for Fear Clinic, however, that Englund was inspired to join the web series world.

In Fear Clinic, directed by legendary make-up and visual effects artist Robert Hall, Englund stars as the morally ambiguous Dr. Andover, who has a radical treatment for phobias — especially those experienced by attractive young people. In Englund’s words: “It’s a dark Twilight Zone wrapped up in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted.” He’s assisted in administering these treatments by Kane Hodder, an actor and stuntman best known for playing Jason in several of the Friday the 13th films. That’s right, it’s Freddy and Jason, working together, alongside Lisa Wilcox (Nightmare on Elm Street 4), Danielle Harris (Halloween), and a whole bunch of hot teen victims.

I met up with Englund and Hodder on set at the Linda Vista Hospital in Boyle Heights, Calif., which has been used as a film location since 1990 and is creepy even at 9 a.m. An edited transcript follows.

Read more of this story

Every chef has his or her own personal style, and the best cooks imprint that point of view on their cuisine. But this means that we amateurs are left guessing as to whose advice to follow. Am I an Emeril? A Rachel Ray? A lesser-known but actually talented chef? How do you figure out whose advice matches best with your taste?

Well, you can either watch Food Network all day, or you can check out Good Bite, a new food site and cooking show from DECA. Rather than specializing on one particular genre or flavor, Good Bite works similarly to other DECA properties such as Momversation, focusing on roundtable discussions and recipe demos assembled by a group of food bloggers representing a wide range of styles and cuisines. The site’s motto? “Delicious made easy.”

The How To recipes are contributed by bloggers but so far are mostly demonstrated by Tracy Metro, who is not a food blogger but instead an actress and host-for-hire. As previously established, I’m not much of a cook, so I like that they acknowledge how a task like cubing fresh watermelon might seem simple to a professional chef, but doesn’t come naturally to all of us. However, a three-minute video to demonstrate the making of a dish that consists of feta cheese and watermelon cubes on a stick might be a little too simplistic, even for me. Read more of this story

It’s been five days since Michael Jackson’s death, and his passing won’t be quickly forgotten. Even when you leave aside questions regarding the circumstances of his death, it’s now clear in a way that wasn’t last week what an impact the man had on not just pop music, but pop culture.

It’s a legacy that stretches internationally. This weekend the inmates at Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, who broke out as a viral phenomenon two years ago with their en masse recreation of the Thriller dance, paid tribute to Jackson’s passing with a three-song medley. The 10-minute video encapsulates Ben, I’ll Be There, and We Are the World, and while the dance moves lack the spice of the Thriller choreography created by Michael Peters and Jackson, it’s a too-long but still touching tribute to the King of Pop’s softer side.

Byron F. Garcia, the prison security consultant whose YouTube account is host to the videos, has definitely upgraded his production values since 2007 — the picture quality is crisp, the camera moves much more fluid. As Craig Rubens wrote when their Thriller piece debuted, there are serious questions regarding the exploitation of these prisoners that have not yet been answered, though that hasn’t stopped the tribute from acquiring almost 2 million views in two days. Read more of this story

Totally Sketch, a weekly series of comedy videos running on YouTube, lives by one creed: making comedy that’s funny. Which honestly is a tall order for a series producing a new sketch weekly — after all, it’s hard enough to make one good sketch, let alone one good sketch every seven days. But executive producer and Mahalo Daily alumni Michael Gallagher may have struck the winning combination, consistently hitting that sweet spot of topical relevance, professional execution and borderline offensiveness with each piece.

While there’s no real unifying element to each video (even the cast features a lot of turnover), the bulk of their product is tightly edited and perfectly targeted to appeal to online viewers. Sometimes this is because the series focuses on Internet memes like Keyboard Cat, and sometimes this is because the series makes crude jokes about abortion. Many of these sketches aren’t exactly ground-breaking in their originality (they’ve done the often-used retro 50s sketch, not to mention mocking the perhaps over-mocked Sham-Wow infomercial. But their takes on these concepts are fresh, and executed perfectly for web audiences.

They’ve even branched out into creating interactive games using YouTube’s annotations feature — including an an Interactive Dad piece intended for orphans on Father’s Day, which is well-executed and pretty funny…until, that is, you think about what it’s actually like to be without a father on Father’s Day. And let’s not mention the fact that as clever as the E! True Hollywood Story take on Keyboard Cat is, it takes on a tragic dimension when you consider that Fatso, the kitty merrily tickling the ivories, did actually pass away recently. DON’T YOU HAVE ANY FEELINGS, TOTALLY SKETCH? OR IS THERE ONLY A GOOGLE TEXT AD WHERE YOUR HEART SHOULD BE? Read more of this story