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. And her approach isn’t always just a sit-down-and-chat one; when she interviewed the creators of Coma, Period, for example, she combined conversations with supporting crew members with a tour of the production company’s office.

In fact, probably the strongest aspect of The Web Files is that Burtt and director/producer Sandra Payne are constantly changing the format and location of the interviews in an effort to mirror the show being talked about. Examples include speaking with Cabonauts creator Hayden Black inside one of the futuristic cabs from the series (complete with outer space greenscreening) or hanging out with porn star Demi Delia at her house to discuss Mommy XXX.

The choice of subjects so far is pretty limited to the L.A. web series scene (at least 10 of the people who have appeared on Web Files, in fact, are Tubefilter meetup regulars), but so far there’s been enough variation within that community to keep the series from feeling stale. (A major recent get for them: an interview with the executives at Fox TV’s 15 Gigs studios.)

The only problem is that it’s a bit hard to gauge who the exact audience is for Web Files. The aspiring creator looking for tips on breaking into the space? Those already engaged with the web community? Whatever the answer might be, the fact that Files is taking this medium and those working in it seriously is just another step in the web series world attaining greater credibility. So I’m a fan — unless, of course, they scoop us. (Just kidding.) (Not really.)

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. She said yes to him in person before typing her reply into Tumblr (screenshot here, if you don’t have a Tumblr account), and the two of them left their computers to pop some champagne and eat their dinner. When they returned online, they discovered that Nystrom’s reply hadn’t worked, and that she’d received over 100 Facebook messages telling her to “go check Tumblr and SAY YES!”

With technical glitches conquered, Johnson and Nystrom’s engagement dominated Tumblr for the rest of the day, the happy couple receiving congratulations and meme mash-ups from friends and strangers alike. The entire experience was extremely appropriate for a couple who originally met online via social-networking site Campus Hook — they mark their first phone conversation as their official anniversary, though didn’t meet in person until January 2004, when Johnson flew from San Francisco to Florida for a week. Footage he shot from that trip played a heavy role in the proposal video, a 1:38-minute look back at their relationship that features many candid moments of Nystrom, shot clearly through the eyes of someone who already loves her.

As one commenter on Gawker observed, it was lucky that Johnson had found a girl who was comfortable being filmed so much, “because I would punch my husband in the throat if he did that to me.” But for Johnson, constantly filming Nystrom was just an extension of his ongoing passion for video blogging, especially during the early days of their relationship, where they were separated by thousands of miles. “It was awesome to watch back when I really missed her, in those months apart, and I know she felt the same way. Remembering when we were together made it more than just a week-long fling, and then, as the years passed, it was so fun to go back and see the first days,” he said.

The two have rewatched a video Johnson made of their first week together “a zillion times,” because, in Johnson’s words, “A big reason I think we have a strong relationship, is that was can ‘time travel’ and go back to those moments when we first met, when it was so fresh and so new. This is stuff that we’ll show our grandchildren someday, and they’ll be able to see us as relatable young people.”

The decision to use Tumblr to propose, Johnson said, was a simple one: “Marissa LOVES Tumblr and is constantly, obsessively refreshing her dashboard,” he said, “So it was a mix of [Tumblr founder] David Karp being a friend, and it being something she was really into. Like if she was a huge Yankees fan and I happened to know Steinbrenner.” Of course, not everyone is a fan of the public proposal — definitely not Gabe at Videogum, for example.

But for Johnson, it worked: “All of our friends and contacts are on Tumblr, and I loved the idea of broadcasting it to everyone at once so they could share in our little moment. To me, being so used to posting everything online, it seemed like a very natural extension of how our relationship started, and how I’ve put it online in a way for all to see.” (It also spared him having to call everyone he knew and tell them.)

Perhaps you have issues with the institution of marriage, especially given the fact that not every couple in love is afforded the same rights. And perhaps you don’t personally know Johnson and Nystrom and don’t see why you should care at all. But this is the world we now live in, the private increasingly public, and for once it’s nice that the message being spread is that “these two people are in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together.” This is a community of oversharing, but at least this time what’s being shared is a love 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.The opening of the second episode, for example, is a poorly paced attempt to imitate Battlestar Galactica in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. While the cinematography is a good match for the original series, it’s a pointless interlude that has no relation to the plot, and isn’t nearly as fun as the opening of the third episode, in which Mike and Stuart go back and forth over which is the more hacky impression — Sean Connery or Christopher Walken.

Length is a major issue, too, as the first and second episodes are both over 10 minutes long — while I’ve loosened up dramatically about my old five-minutes-or-less rule for web series episodes, the problem with Hurtling is that it’s just too drawn-out. The third episode, coming in at 10 minutes, is the tightest so far, but even then there are long pauses and overplayed jokes that could have been trimmed.

The cast, all drawn from the web series world, is solid overall, and the casual way in which references to Star Wars and Mad Max moments are dropped into ordinary dialogue keeps the series nerdy but not necessarily alienating. But the good jokes and original ideas are drowning in unnecessary spoofing and unfunny gags — a much harsher hand during both the writing and editing process is what was lacking here. I’d love to sit down and enjoy a beer and a Star Trek flick with Mike, Stuart and the gang. But I don’t know if I’d want to travel through space with them.

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.

In the years since the show’s pilot episode, all the way back in 2006, Temp Life has enjoyed a significant uptick in production quality. (Sorry, fans of cheesy editing transitions, but there are no clock wipes in the new season so far.)

However, while the cast is clearly having fun, there’s an overall awkwardness to the first two episodes, and the addition of Break a Leg creator Yuri Baranovsky as co-writer and Hayley Project creators Andrew Park and Jato Smith as directors hasn’t done much to up the comedy quotient. The principle problem comes down to concept, as the first two episodes focus mostly on former Commodity Staffing CEO Nick “Trouble” Chiapetta (Wilson Cleveland, who also co-writes the fourth season) coming back from an eight-month vacation to discover that he himself is now relegated to the temping world, which is populated by no shortage of wacky characters. But because Trouble himself is as strange and obnoxious as the people with whom he’s interacting, there’s no likable protagonist to get behind. The only exception to this is when Trouble confronts former employees Mark (Mark Jude) and Laura (Laura Kowalcyk) over their so-called betrayal, and that scene from the first episode is by far the strongest, simply because there is such a thing as too much wackiness.

However, that one scene is hardly the sole spot of funny here, as Temp Life found a fresh way to include some web-famous guest stars in this universe. Each set of episodes released on a weekly basis includes a “video resume” from figures like Taryn Southern, Sandeep Parikh, and Gold creator David Nett. Each creator was given free reign to create a character and write/direct his or her individual short, and Southern’s installment, released this week, is just the right mix of bizarre but human — her character, Oklahoman Nancy, is clueless, sweet and eccentric, and the piece is well-paced and edited, with some great bits of well-timed comedy. A brief sample of Parikh’s contribution was made available for review, and while the effort put into the piece isn’t quite on the level of Southern’s, it still showcases his talent for putting a fresh spin on stereotypes — in this case, the USC frat boy.

Despite some missteps, Temp Life still represents a strong combination of elements, and personally I look forward to a Tommy Westphall-esque chart being possible for the web series world. (Step 1: get Southern to reprise Nancy on another series. Step 2: Repeat.)

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. Conceived as Portugal’s rip-off of the classic cartoon Muppet Babies, this episode shows the “Fuppets” trying to become Internet millionaires — which (cue sarcastic voice) isn’t hard at all.

Plenty of Muppet Babies parodies have been done (being as it was popular during the 1980s, the formative years of Internet comedy’s current target audience). But in Portuguese? With the appropriately mis-translated subtitles? It’s a spin you couldn’t predict, and makes an otherwise stale concept pleasantly fresh.

Tiny Fuppets’s crude animation and out-there comedy covers up a very real mocking of the idea of becoming wealthy thanks to the Internet. It’s a point that must strike home for Gairdner, whose videos regularly achieve viewcounts ranging in the five and six digits on YouTube, but has yet to be scooped up by any major entity. But after four years, he’s still producing web content — while he definitely counts as a talent I’d love to see break out into the mainstream, it’s nice to see that for now, at least, he’s still having fun here.

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. Some of the dialogue suffers from repetition, and scenes overall could be more tightly condensed. But the song lyrics are cleverly constructed, and the young cast is solid, including Tyce Green as Billy/Dr. Horrible. Perhaps ironically, however, Green is overshadowed by Jacob Buras, whose Nathan Fillion/Captain Hammer impression is, well, impressive — especially when it comes to delivering punchlines. And he throws himself into the musical numbers, including the standout of the film, I Am Handsome, an exuberant celebration of narcissism.

Turn is an entirely self-funded production that, once completed, was sent to Joss Whedon prior to its release. “He hinted at familiarity with it in an artfully Jossian manner during a recent interview, calling it ‘itsy kitsy goodsy’ as long as we didn’t try to sell it,” McClain told EW. (Whedon’s comment is a bit patronizing, but there might be a good reason — brother Jed has written a prequel of his own in comic book form, which will be released in stores Nov. 18.)

So while McClain and his partners have no chance of making back their investment on this one, hopefully Horrible Turn drums up some interest for the team’s future projects. Given the energy and creativity they’ve brought to someone else’s story, it’d definitely be interesting to see what they’d do with their own.

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.”

Higa said YouTube is currently his “number one priority,” and he pays close attention to his community and the feedback they give him when creating content. When he approaches issues of product placement, he’s definitely concerned about selling out; his Carl’s Jr. video came when he was doing a series of shorts spoofing commercials, so it fit in with his previous work and no one seemed to mind. He also shot down any rumors that there’s any hard feelings between rival YouTube stars: “We all know each other and like each other.”

Higa is currently a film student at the University Of Nevada-Las Vegas, and he eventually wants to transition into making films; if he could work with anyone living, his first choice would be Will Smith. To Higa, success means being both rich and famous. He does not think he is there yet.

Nov. 11 is not a good date for Current TV employees. For the second year in a row, the network/web site hybrid Al Gore built has announced layoffs on that day in the double digits. But while last year, the eliminated jobs were attributed to “a new cross-platform programming strategy,” the bulk of today’s 80 lost jobs are directly tied to the cancellation of Current Tonight, Current Takeover and Current Exposed.

The canceled shows were part of a change in strategy for Current following the hiring of new CEO Mark Rosenthal, according to COO Joanna Drake Earl. “We had a chance to step back to see what’s working and what’s not,” she said via phone, “which led to the decision to move away from an over-reliance on short-form content.”

The layoffs will allow the company to reinvest in programming, marketing and affiliate sales hiring, areas where Earl admitted Current is looking for “more experienced leadership,” as well as invest more in longer-form shows like Infomania and The Rotten Tomatoes Show, both of which she described as successes.

When it comes to finding ways to make the web and TV play nice together, Current has always been an innovator, whether being one of the first to incorporate Twitter updates on news broadcasts or what Earl described as Rotten Tomatoes‘ “low-bar audience participation format.” We’ll just have to see if the next reorganization comes on Nov. 11, 2010.

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.

The campaign theoretically celebrating the upcoming Droid let loose in October with an ad skewering the iPhone’s faults (mainly hardware issues like swappable batteries and the lack of a physical keyboard) while also mocking Apple’s minimalist style. It was so blatant an attack that BusinessWeek posited that Apple/Verizon talks regarding the iPhone had broken down — a theory Verizon CEO Ivan G. Seidenberg later refuted.

But AT&T and Verizon are most definitely not BFFs right now — the former has sued the latter over other Verizon ads attacking AT&T’s 3G coverage. Short version: AT&T is calling Verizon a liar, while Verizon encourages AT&T to read its footnotes a little better. AT&T is trying to have the ads pulled permanently, but so far, no success.

Verizon’s other holiday ad puts the snarky cherry on top of all this criticism. Recreating the Island of Misfit Toys from the classic stop-motion animated special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Spotted Elephant and the other discarded toys want to know why the iPhone has joined their ranks; the iPhone’s silent explanation is that same contentious picture of the AT&T 3G Network ad.

It’s the viral aspect of these ads that I find intriguing — Verizon seems to have stumbled upon a web-wide frustration that’s finally been given voice, and by providing the ads on a custom-designed YouTube account, that aggravation has translated into high view counts and cultural saturation. Combined with tech leaders like Blip.TV CEO Mike Hudack publicly breaking up with his iPhone and switching to a (free) Droid, a new form of Apple atheism is popping up. (It’s worth noting that our fearless leader Om Malik was ahead of the curve on this one.) The iPhone will always have its devotees, but the days of the jubilant iPhone musical are most decidedly done — which is for the best. After all, really, it’s just a phone.

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.

How It Should Have Ended is at its best when it’s actually pointing out inconsistencies in plot and overlooked ideas — such as with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which suffers from pacing problems but still gets in some well-aimed barbs about that film’s poorly constructed plot and characters. Or the Lord of the Rings spoof, which offers up with a much more efficient solution for destroying Sauron’s ring than walking around Mordor for nine hours of screen time.

Of course, the Terminator spoof has done very well on YouTube, racking up 1.2 million views over the last month, which is fortunate for the HISHE guys, as it was their first short following a year-long production hiatus (prior to said hiatus, their videos regularly received millions of views). After producing shorts on a sporadic basis since July 2005, they’ve recommitted to a monthly release schedule. The newest HISHE is a Transformers 2 spoof that isn’t quite as well-executed as previous episodes — the animation on Megan Fox’s running legs is pretty atrocious — but is at least closer to the tone of the original premise.

So, despite this uneven history, it’s probably worth continuing to check out this series. If only because 2012, the only major blockbuster coming out this month, begs to be mocked, and these guys might be just the ones to fix that film’s ending.

Many classic sitcoms — Cosby, Roseanne, Seinfeld — were built around a comedian’s standup routine. Today, though, Twitter is the new Chuckle Hut, thanks to CBS’s pick-up of the Twitter account S— My Dad Says (new TV-safe title TBD).

Adapting SMDS as a sitcom makes sense because what creator Justin Halpern does is use each Twitter update as a 140-character character portrait of his father, a man almost Archie Bunker-ish in his crassness — and exactly the sort of modern curmudgeon you can imagine building a sitcom around. The folks developing Texts From Last Night for Fox, meanwhile, have a much tougher gig on their hands, as that site is just a compilation of drunken mistakes. (Funny drunken mistakes, but whatever.)

It’s easy to look at something popular on the Internet and say “Hey, we should exploit that for TV.” But I’ll make my wager now that of these two ideas, it’s SMDS that will actually make it to broadcast — because no amount of Internet buzz can replace a good character and/or story.

Joe and Kris Swanberg’s Young American Bodies, a cult hit and one of the great early pioneers in web-distributed drama, has been peeking in on the lives of the young and sexually active since 2005, providing a semi-scripted take on the tangled romances of a group of 20-something Chicagoeans. The decidedly NSFW series, distributed originally through Nerve, launched its fourth season today exclusively on IFC.com; I spoke with Joe Swanberg via phone about his approach to sexuality, his “fantastic” deals with Nerve and IFC, the show’s future, and the increasingly inaccurate title. An edited transcript follows.

NewTeeVee: Young American Bodies has always been known for its frank inclusion of nudity and sexuality. How has the adult content been a part of the show’s evolution?

Joe Swanberg: When we pitched Nerve in 2005, the model we were working on was a show that had a lot of realistic sexual content and a lot of realistic exploration of issues with parents and friends and whatever else. And as it’s evolved [the sexual content]’s remained important to us just because everybody’s sex lives are changing too, with commitment coming into it, and people getting older and thinking about having kids and stuff like that. Your reasons for having sex are starting to change.

There was an HBO show called Tell Me You Love Me that was kind of like this, but it was so bleak. I think that’s generally the way sex has been treated on TV. Like, if you’re going to portray sex realistically, you have to take it super-seriously. So the thing that separates Young American Bodies from like pornography on one side and Tell Me You Love Me on the other side is that it’s not always really serious. It’s able to be really serious or funny or awkward or stupid, all those shades in between that I don’t think TV wants to deal with.

We’ve been lucky in a sense, because we fit perfectly with Nerve and what they were doing then, and then it was great that IFC was bold enough to take us on and get the show out to a much bigger audience than Nerve did.

NewTeeVee: How did the switch from Nerve to IFC happen?

Swanberg: I think Nerve and IFC have always had some sort of relationship or advertising partnership; they seemed really familiar with each other. So the first two seasons were exclusively on Nerve, and then for the third season IFC came in and co-produced it. They basically paid for the third season, but kind of in a roundabout way through Nerve, so [new episodes would] premiere on IFC first and then on Nerve the next day.

Nerve is great, but there’s a much different staff there now than there was when we first started. So with this fourth season I just went straight to the people at IFC and was like, look, I don’t even know who the people at Nerve are anymore, so let’s just keep this relationship going.

NewTeeVee: Have there ever been any product placement or sponsorship issues you’ve had to contend with?

Swanberg: No, never. We got money from Nerve and we made the show with that; now we get money from IFC and we make the show with that. There’s never been any internal sponsorship. IFC does put commercials before the shows, but we’ve always thankfully been left out of that side of it. The show has a lot of sexual content but it’s not extreme about it; I think that would be where we would run into issues, if we tried to put some crazy sex stuff into the show.

So the sponsorship thing is their deal and the making the show thing is our deal. And that’s fantastic. That’s how it should be. We just get money from them and are left to our own devices. We give them rough cuts and there are notes, but we’ve never been strong-armed to do anything. Nerve was even more hands-off; they would just let us do whatever we want. But they were giving us less money, so I think they could afford to be more hands-off.

IFC has been really great about getting YAB out to a wide audience. I mean, the thing about Nerve is that it’s a sex site — a smart, interesting sex site, but still a sex site. But IFC is the Independent Film Channel; it’s a destination for anyone who’s interested in independent or alternative things. I think that’s brought in a lot of casual viewers who might not have been interested in Nerve content.

NewTeeVee: Can you comment publicly on what your budget is like?

Swanberg: At this point with IFC, it’s like a couple thousand bucks an episode.

NewTeeVee: What’s it been like juggling the web series with your work in features?

Swanberg: It’s been good — basically the web series serves as a project I can fit in between the features. It keeps a camera in my hands and keeps me active. For me and Kris it’s also one of our main sources of income. Often the money from YAB goes directly into the features. But I consider YAB just as important a part of my body of work as the features.

NewTeeVee: Previous seasons of YAB have run eight to 12 episodes — what’s behind the decision to do a slightly shorter season this time?

Swanberg: Our feeling is we’d rather do six episodes and then do another six in a few months, rather than do 12 and have a year-long gap between them. When we’ve done 12 we’ve been so exhausted by the end of it that we’re always like, “Never again.” This is the first time when I’ve finished a season and feel like we have more stories to tell and more interesting things to shoot.

NewTeeVee: Do you have a target release date for the next six?

Swanberg: We’ll probably start working on them next spring, so probably sometime next summer. My perfect schedule would be six episodes every six months.

NewTeeVee: Given how long the series has lasted already, it definitely seems like it has that kind of longevity.

Swanberg: Yeah, we’re up for doing it as long as people are interested in watching it. I think the title Young American Bodies is gonna be a little silly if we’re well into our 30s, but that’s one of the nice things about the episodic format vs. feature films, is the ability to follow characters for a really long time. It’s one of my favorite things about television, feeling like you’re growing up alongside characters — your life is changing as their lives are changing.

I would love to do it for another 10 years. As long as all of our schedules permit and as long as everyone remains interested, we’ll keep going with it. The only threat is that as our actors start getting married and having kids, no one’s going to want to keep on doing a web series where they have fake sex with other people. That will be ultimately what spells the demise of the show — everyone feeling like “enough of this.”

NewTeeVee: What do you think has been the key to making YAB successful and sustainable?

Swanberg: I think people are interested in seeing other people going through the same problems that they have. Hopefully there are moments where people keep tuning in because they recognize themselves in them. The show is not for everybody. But the people who have liked it and are still tuning in have identified themselves with one of these characters, and have found someone else who sees the world the way they do.

I’ve mentioned previously that I’m a movie trailer junkie, and because I don’t get out to the movies that often, most of the time I’m watching trailers online on sites like joblo.com). Will I see either of these? Honestly, probably not — the trailers were enough to get the taste, for good or for bad. But the trailers, they are so good!

When you think “dark, dystopian sci-fi romance,” would you necessarily think of the title Boogie Town? Well, I guess I didn’t mention the part where it’s also a dance movie. Watching all of those elements get smashed together into one trailer…well, it’s special, I’ll give you that. Summer 2009 can’t get here fast enough! (The film is now set for a 2010 release.)

Meanwhile, I’ll be upfront about this and say that the reason the trailer for The Fourth Kind is awesome isn’t because Milla Jovovich tells us how to properly pronounce her name; it’s because by doing so, she breaks the fourth wall and sets up this alien abduction thriller as the most terrifying kind of truth.

Are there other awesome or awful trailers you’ve seen recently? Tell us in the comments!

When you sit down and think about it, it seems clear that there should be more game show web series than there are at present. After all, many companies prefer nonfiction to scripted programming, and the opportunities for branding and product placement are baked right into the structure via prizes and giveaways. The only factor possibly getting in the way of the genre’s success is that it has never really had much of a young vibe, being more “what you watch when visiting your Grandma.”

MySpace’s solution to overcoming that problem? College Humor’s Jake Hurwitz, the snarky, self-effacing 24-year-old host of BFF, a weekly series challenging self-declared best friends to prove just how friendly they are. The show’s BFFs are judged not by their history as friends, but their knowledge of trivia and how well they know each other — it’s not even an attempt to update The Newlywed Game. But the game changes when it’s between friends, not spouses, since, after all, friendship is a much different beast than a relationship.

While Married on Myspace definitely had elements of game-show-ery, BFF’s style is much less reality and much more straight-up “answer questions and win stuff.”

The production values are pretty solid, though the sound quality fluctuates dramatically from the studio set to the backstage scenes. And while Alex Trebek doesn’t have anything to worry about, Hurwitz is confident and engaging in his role as host, having fun with the contestants while slipping in the necessary plugs. (Approximately four to five prizes/sponsors get mentioned in every 5-minute episode, not to mention the integration of the Myspace BFF application.)

There’s something telling about the fact that the show’s target audience — as well as the bulk of its contestants — is made up of teens and early 20-somethings, because sure, I could have told you in high school or college who my best friend was in a heartbeat. But as I slowly but surely drift out of MTV’s target demographic and into VH1’s, the answer isn’t nearly so simple. That’s part of getting older — people move in and out of your life — however, a true friendship never dies. So perhaps I wouldn’t bet a free printer on whether or not my closest friends can name the newest Britney Spears album. But that doesn’t mean the concept of best-friends-forever isn’t a real one.

In 2008, we all got pretty excited about Blood Cell, an intriguing psychological thriller produced by 60 Frames, directed by indie film director Eduardo Rodriguez, and starring lonelygirl15 herself, Jessica Rose. And we weren’t the only ones, judging by the fact that the Blood Cell trailer has racked up nearly 7 million views since being uploaded in April 2008.

But then…nothing happened until March 2009, when TheWB.com acquired the series for future distribution; the deal wasn’t enough to save 60Frames, though, which shut down operations two months later. And that brings us to now, as TheWB has finally launched the entire series, making all 18 episodes available at once online.

Given the fact that the series was produced over a year ago, there’s a question of how it might fit in with current web trends, but the answer is “not that badly at all.” In fact, the only element that feels dated is the fact that Alex (Sara Sanderson) unironically wears an Ed Hardy T-shirt for the duration of the series.

That’s not to say the stock thriller storyline — a kidnapped girl reaches out to her best friend Julia (Rose) for help, who only has the cell phone messages sent by a deranged Bad Man as clues — is perfect. While the 3- to 5-minute episode structure keeps the pace moving forward, some sequences are far more light on plot than others; the entirety of episode 2, for example, can be boiled down to “Julia opens a box and finds some cell phone batteries inside it,” which is hardly the most edge-of-your-seat content.

But each episode does end with a deliberate, often shocking cliffhanger — even when you watch the whole series in one sitting, there’s no sense that you’re just consuming a feature film in 5-minute gulps; the structure is decidedly episodic.

And anyone who might have thought Rose’s ascent to stardom thanks to lonelygirl15 was just a lucky break should probably bite their tongue. Despite playing a fairly conventional and underdeveloped role as the girl-next-door who’s in over her head, Rose quickly shows her mettle as a confident lead who immediately enlists the audience’s sympathy.

Every episode being available at once means that if you’re the type of person to skip to the end of a mystery novel, you’re in luck. And there are some genuine chills in that final conclusion. The question is, is that conclusion worth the approximately 72-minute runtime, not to mention a year and a half delay? For me, the answer is probably not — the execution is great, but the final twist proves underwhelming. But that doesn’t change the fact that Blood Cell’s journey, off- and on-screen, is definitely an interesting one.

Here’s the blunt truth of it: Even a major prude could probably derive enjoyment from Blue Movies, a well-produced little comedy series about the behind-the-scenes world of pornography, and as I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m no puritan.

Blue Movies, which is well-produced, tightly written, and occasionally (though not always) hilarious, depicts the world of Pornamount Pictures, a studio that specializes in adult adaptations of films like Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption and The Dark Knight (the porn version of that film being titled The Dark Night Full of Smokin’ Hot Orgies — “Let’s make Christopher Nolan proud!” shouts the director). The show, told from the point of view of new intern Tom (Beck Bennett), who bumbled onto the set believing that he was actually starting an internship at Paramount, is seemingly focused around these XXX-rated satires of Oscar winners (trailers for which are available separately), but is at its best during the behind-the-scenes sequences, which are just like any Hollywood satire, except with more naked people.

However, while dealing with mature subject matter, Blue Movies is surprisingly clean, and the more explicit material tends to be of a verbal, not visual, nature. And while the female characters could all too easily have fallen into awful stereotypes, they’re actually not that bad. One of them even keeps her clothes on! (That’d be Sascha Alexander as the tough and funny Anna, who plays an important role as mentor to Tom and assistant to Max.) The only weak link of the series is Jareb Dauplaise as Max, who’s a committed performer but simply isn’t that believable as a porn kingpin — mainly because he looks like he’s about 22 years old.

A personal disclaimer: I once spent a few hours on the set of an adult film shoot (which was a helluva education, let me tell you), and while I’m not going to demand any sort of accuracy from a comedy satire, it does seem important to me to point out that quite a bit of pornography isn’t shot in a studio, bur rather in so-called “porn houses,” which are either private residences or specially held properties owned by location companies and leased to productions. And the crew on a porn set covers a wide range of ages and experiences, many of whom, like bumbling intern Tom, aspire to work in mainstream entertainment and are using porn as a stepping stone to a legit career — a career arc that has precedent. Omitting that latter fact feels like a major oversight, though plays well with the series’ tongue-in-cheek celebration of pornography as an art form.

You could perhaps draw a parallel between Max’s efforts to elevate the medium to that of the web series world, struggling to be taken seriously on a creative level while also achieving financial success — except that Max has sex on his side. He has it much easier.