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

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

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

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. Read more of this story

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.” Read more of this story

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. Read more of this story

The YouTube-hosted Elevator, launched in May 2007, has survived a 2009 production company changeover (from HBOlab to Break) to produce over 200 episodes of short, wry comedy shot in a single location. And that longevity has paid off, thanks in part to a wide range of guest stars, including YouTube elite like Charles Trippy and Ryan Higa, Garfunkle and Oates‘ Kate Micucci, and Canadian sketch comedy team Loading Ready Run, who have helped the series achieve millions of views and nearly 80,000 YouTube subscribers. Via chat, we talked with series creator Woody Tondorf about Elevator’s origins, the difference between his past and present corporate masters, and if an end is in sight for the series. An edited transcript follows.

NewTeeVee: So, where did the initial inspiration for Elevator come from?

Tondorf: When we were at HBOlab, our boss said, “We need a series that we can mass produce for cheap. Make that happen.” I was really inspired by the old “Far Side” comic strip, where you only needed a single picture and a single line to tell the joke. So I threw that out there in our next meeting, and it stuck. Luckily, we had a dead end at the end of our hallway that was plain white. We put a camera up on a table and eureka!

NewTeeVee: So it’s not actually an elevator!

Tondorf: People are still shocked about this! Everything on the Internet is fake! It’s just three walls. They’re also the longest elevator rides ever. No one is in an elevator longer than 30 seconds. Read more of this story