Chapter 9

Webisodes

When it comes to the web episode, you have to go back to its original trailblazer, Felicia Day and her seminal web series, The Guild. Created, written by and starring Day as Cyd Sherman (aka Codex), the The Guild premiered on YouTube in 2007 before concluding its long run in 2012. Day was, and continues to be, the dominant force in this digital space through Geek & Sundry, her branded YouTube channel and multimedia production company, funded through her overall deal with Legendary Pictures Television (see my interview with Day in Chapter 1: Gamechangers).

In 2009, the “webisode” became official: Merriam-Webster added the slang term to its dictionary. The new noun, which had first started being bandied about in the mid-‘90s, referred to an episode “especially of a TV show that may or may not have been telecast but can be viewed at a website.” What was new and exciting was that such webisodes could now directly reach their viewership through streaming, on-demand, bypassing the broadcast/cable stage. Often brief because of limited attention spans online and small budgets, the format works well for telling a story through a series of shorts, or for promotional purposes. Lengths vary, but 3 minutes is optimal, up to around 15 minutes (any more, and you often find yourself fidgeting).

Each short webisode has its own beginning, middle and end—but is usually intended to be part of a dramatic, serialized storyline; this is what distinguishes a web series from a Vine or YouTube cat video; in its most basic dramatic form, a web series is a continuous, episodic plotline that may or may not include contiguous episodes. For example, Awkward Black Girl, on YouTube and its I Am OTHER channel, features an ensemble cast surrounding a character simply known as J (Issa Rae), its self-professed “awkward and black” protagonist—who happens to be passive-aggressive. She works at a call center for Gutbusters, a weight-loss pill company alongside Nina, antagonistic co-worker. J’s love for 2 different guys, Fred and White Jay, complicates her life further. As a means of tension relief, J writes and performs rap, sometimes with buddy CeCe. (See my interview with Creator/Writer/Director/Showrunner/Star Issa Rae in Chapter 5.)

Some web series are more anthological and feature a new cast of characters involved in stories with a common theme and/or principal character, e.g. weed dealer Guy (Ben Sinclair) in comedy High Maintenance— which started on Vimeo and is migrating to HBO in 2016. My interview with the Creators/Showrunners/Stars of High Maintenance, Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair (as the Guy) follows in this chapter.

Another anthological, comedy web series, Drunk History (hosted by co-creator Derek Waters, directed by co-creator Jeremy Konner), features an inebriated narrator (played by a comedian). Our narrator, wasted, struggles to recount an event from US history, aided by a regular ensemble cast of re-enactors who lip-sync the dialog. The series premiered in 2007 on Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Funny or Die website, before migrating to Comedy Central in 2013. The series is more popular than ever in 2015, with an impressive list of guest stars, including Jack Black as Benjamin Franklin; Michael Cera as Alexander Hamilton; Danny McBride as George Washington; and Will Ferrell as Abraham Lincoln. Then there’s Maker Studios’ musical/comedy historical mash-up web series phenomenon, Epic Rap Battles of History (mostly known as ERB) created by Peter Shukoff (aka Nice Peter) and Lloyd Ahlquist (aka EpicLLOYD), also available on YouTube, which pits historical and pop culture figures against each other in very short form—under 5 minutes, because it’s the length of a song. Famous, historical figures battle one another—through the medium of rap. It could be anyone from history or present day: Darth Vader vs. Hitler is a battle; Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates; Justin Bieber vs. Beethoven; Moses vs. Santa Claus (in which Snoop Dogg did a cameo of Moses!); Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney. At press time, ERB is the 17th most subscribed channel on YouTube (12.4 million) and reportedly over 1.7 billion total video views. Episodes have featured guest appearances from YouTube stars (including Lisa Donovan, Rhett and Link, and Smosh), along with mainstream celebrities including Weird Al Yankovic and comedy duo Key & Peele. Its fifth season started airing in 2015.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of webisodes is their ability to create change in communities and groups. Amy Poehler’s digital series and online community, Smart Girls at the Party, launched in 2008, aims to give girls a voice and gain confidence in their talents and abilities. With over half a million fans, the reach of Smart Girls at the Party is wide and Legendary Entertainment acquired the project in October 2014, with the goal of Poehler plus collaborators Meredith Walker and Amy Miles to continue to create funny, inspirational material for girls everywhere.

Commercials That Tell a Story

As SVOD becomes more and more popular, AVOD networks and Madison Avenue must continue to find new avenues to reach consumers, so it’s natural that early web series were often also commercials that not only sold a product, but told a story.

In 2007, Mini Cooper took the leap into online marketing to promote their new series of cars. The campaign consisted of six, 4-minute webisodes via YouTube. Hammer & Coop was an homage/spoof of Starsky and Hutch.

In 2008, L-Studio.com financed the web series Web Therapy, starring and co-written/executive produced by Lisa Kudrow, about a self-absorbed psychotherapist, Fiona Wallice, who offers her professional services to her patients in 3-minute cyber sessions via FaceTime. As a viewer, you could watch Web Therapy for free online—and learn that that the ‘L’ in L-Studio stands for Lexus (the web series’ official sponsor). This arrangement harkens back to the early years of broadcast television, when we had The Kraft Comedy Hour (to sell mayonnaise), and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (to sell insurance). Web Therapy became so popular online that its Co-Creator/Executive Producer, Dan Bucatinsky, Executive Producer/Co-Creator/Director, Don Roos and Kudrow were able to repackage the web series into a half-hour, scripted comedy series for Showtime. The series premiered on Showtime in 2011 and in 2014, Showtime renewed Web Therapy for its fourth season. You can access my interview with co-creators Dan Bucatinsky and Don Roos via www.routledge.com/cw/landau. To me, Lisa Kudrow is a comedic genius and the show is outrageous: smart, cringe-worthy, and laugh-out-loud funny.

As such, comedy tends to be the best genre for a web series, with each short episode setting up and building to a punch line or “aha” moment. Ferrell and McKay’s Funny Or Die began with a series of YouTube videos about an officious, beer-guzzling, trash-talking 2-year-old toddler/landlord. Trust me, when the rent check is due, she’ll go all full-tantrum on you. With Ferrell’s star power, The Landlord web series has generated over 80 million views, earning more than $50 million annually. In 2007, Ferrell and McKay received funding from venture capitalists Sequoia, and a year later they announced a partnership with HBO to distribute the online webisodes to its subscribers as the series Funny Or Die Presents, which premiered on HBO in 2010. Encouraging interaction with its audience, Funny Or Die presents the option to vote for their most and least favorite videos, literally as “Funny” or “Die”? If the video receives an 80% or greater “Funny” rating after 100,000 views, it gets an “Immortal” ranking; less than a 20% “Funny” rating after 1,000 views banishes it to a “Crypt” section of the site. Aside from occasional celebrity contributors, Funny Or Die has a regular staff of in-house writers, producers, and directors. In 2011, Funny Or Die expanded to include a television and film production company. Its notable web series include: Derek Waters LOL, Playground Politics, Designated Driver, Sleeping with Celebrities, Holdup, The Carpet Brothers, Just 3 Boyz, The Terrys by Tim and Eric, and the aforementioned, brazenly ingenious, anthological Drunk History.

Felicia Day’s pioneering endeavors helped spawn countless web series—but, unlike The Guild, most early attempts were amateurish, self-financed, money-losing propositions. Eventually, high quality, professionally written, directed and produced material emerged from the rubble—with much higher, but still relatively modest budgets than their predecessors, and like Day, name talent.

High Maintenance on Vimeo

Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair:
Creators/Executive Producers/Showrunners/
Director/Actor

As reported in the New York Daily News (12/1/14): “Like all good drug dealers, nobody knows his real name. Known simply as ‘The Guy,’ this plaid-wearing, bearded bicyclist [played by Sinclair] is the most famous weed delivery man in New York City.”

It certainly helps that his face is plastered on buses and billboards to advertise the new season of High Maintenance on Vimeo, with the provocative tagline: “The best TV show that’s not on TV.”

Sinclair co-created High Maintenance with his wife Katja Blichfeld, an Emmy Award winning casting director on the classic NBC sitcom, 30 Rock.

The two 30-something Brooklynites (they currently reside in Ditmas Park) came up with the idea for High Maintenance a few years ago while cycling around the city.

Per their NY Daily News interview: “We have had many experiences with pot delivery guys and girls,” admits Blichfeld. “But the show is more about the reasons people smoke rather than the smoking.”

Vimeo initially charged $2 per episode of High Maintenance, or $8 for all 6. It’s not a lot of money compared to buying a movie online, but it’s a huge amount of money compared to the old price—free. Season 1 proved so successful that Vimeo offered Sinclair and Blichfeld an MG (Minimum Guarantee or “advance”) toward producing Season 2. The second season raised their views and profile to such an extent that Season 3 of High Maintenance has now been picked up by HBO.

Neil Landau: I love your show. It’s just great. I started watching it very early on and it’s been really exciting to see it grow and become more and more successful. And now you have your HBO deal! How cool is that?

Ben Sinclair: Yeah, we’re super stoked. We are at the HBO offices right now actually in mid-town Manhattan. It’s all very 1980s Working Girl, you know …?

Neil: Are you stoned right now?

Katja Blichfeld: We smoked earlier today, but now we’re clear and present. Just for you.

Neil: I’m flattered.

Ben: We’re also big fans of your movie, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.

Neil: I’m double-flattered. And by the way, that movie was financed by HBO. Now back to you: For HBO—are you going to expand the episodes into a 30-minute timeslot to fit it in with the rest of their programming? What’s their mandate?

Ben: That’s the first thing everyone asks us. The timeframe is a very sacred part of our show.

Neil: For good reason. Some of my favorite episodes have been less than 10 minutes; it’s really difficult to tell a satisfying story in such a short time—especially a 2-hander involving a penis submerged in milk [to relieve a chili burn incurred on an awkward second date—when a man is cooking with hot peppers and forgets to wash his hands before going to urinate].

Ben: The wonderful thing about this deal with HBO is that HBO is like, “We really love what you’re doing, and we want you to keep it the same. We love the varying length of each story. We love that there are a bunch of actors who we haven’t seen before doing these parts—we want to keep that going.” So our hope is to take a 20- to 30-minute timeslot and put several stories of varying length in that time slot.

Neil: Except every week.

Ben: Yeah, for 6 weeks.

Neil: So there’s a 6-week initial order?

Ben: We’ll probably write several short stories that we divide among 6 episodes.

Neil: Do you feel that you may return to or continue to follow the same cast of characters and serialize their arcs? Or will there always be new characters and weed customers? I believe the “Sabrina” episode was the first time that you started to develop The Guy’s character a bit more, and I wonder if you’ll be able to return and have ongoing story arcs with him over time?

Katja: I think we’re still interested in expanding the universe of the show. We have some characters that we’ve been developing for a while, and we just haven’t had the opportunity to put them out there, so we’re pretty excited about having more real estate to introduce a whole bunch of new characters, while also bringing back some people we have already met before and showing the viewer how those people are connected in the larger scheme of things and how they’re connected to other clients, that you’ll be meeting for the first time.

Ben: These people are referring one another to the service that The Guy provides, so these people know each other. There is a whole social web that underlies the whole universe that we have set up here, and we don’t know exactly how it all fits together yet.

Katja: We know a lot of it though.

Ben: But we are mapping it all out over here. It is really interesting to figure out the social subtext for who knows who, and why they know each other, and what these people’s jobs are, and it keeps on building. It’s only 1 guy, man; he works for himself.

Katja: Yeah, he can’t deal to any customers who aren’t “regulars” because we’ve established he is a 1-man operation, and he can only do so much, so that’s in our minds too. We are actually going to address that a little more explicitly in the upcoming episodes.

Neil: When you’re coming up with episode ideas, which are pretty much coming up with characters and how weed fits into their lives in one way or another, are there any internal rules that you guys have with the kind of characters you want to deal with or won’t or not quite yet?

Ben: One thing I would say is that we often discourage ourselves from saying something just to say something. One criticism that we received was for this episode, “Genghis,” which is probably one story in which we really took a character that we’ve seen in 3 other episodes before and brought him into the center of that episode. He is in a school, and it’s a shitty situation because it’s an underprivileged school, and some of the criticism that we got for that episode was that “Yeah, schools are shitty in America—what’s new? You said that thing, and that’s all you said.” I understand where that criticism comes from. We definitely don’t want to just say something for the point of having a point of view on something—just for saying-its sake. Does that make sense? This is complicated.

Neil: It does. It’s kind of the idea of not necessarily wanting to come up with an “issue” and having the character linked to the issue. The best stories come out of characters that do really relatable things. Like, I love the episode when the character finds that great apartment but it’s too far away from all their friends but they keep trying to convince themselves that, “It’s not too far, people will come. We’ll have a lot of space.” But then you get to explore their isolation, a very relatable issue in the micro-universe of Brooklyn. I love the specificity of your episodes because they feel like they could only take place in this one place. And I love that you guys know it so well and you live it and breathe it and that to me is one of the benchmarks of the show: its authenticity.

Ben: Thank you. I am very trusting of you writing this book. This is making us feel very good about this phone conversation. But I do think that we can say that what we veer towards, in terms of what we really respond to, are those very observational things, where Katja and I aren’t beating anyone over the head with some lesson or some moral. We like it to feel like a relatable observation.

Neil: To me, all the best TV series, from The Wire to High Maintenance, are so rooted in setting due to the specificity of language and subcultures. I feel that even if you remove the weed, just the people and this particular place make it super compelling because Brooklyn plays another character in each episode.

Ben: True, and I appreciate the compliment. But I do think that this show has legs to rear its head in other locations. As written, our characters could only be in Brooklyn, but the format of the show could be easily applied to many other cities worldwide. I think that it’s just a way to tell stories, and part of the success that we’ve had is putting all the weed, the legality, the arrests and the crime of it all in the background. There’s enough crime dramas in the world; there’s just not a lot of human interest, short story, Balzac, O’Henry storytelling in the mainstream.

Neil: And it also differentiates you in a good way from Weeds [on Showtime] where Nancy Botwin [Mary-Louise Parker] started as a suburban Southern California dealer and it became this much bigger thing.

Katja: Yeah, like digging tunnels to Mexico and running guns—it was all about the business of it and the crime behind it.

Ben: And painting themselves into a corner, story-wise.

Neil: I agree. I liked it better when it was small and localized. And weed dispensaries have become such an art now; they are like wine sommeliers. They’re picking different strains that have very specific properties and it’s become a gourmet kind of thing. Also, The Guy functions as a bartender in a way. He does have an impact on people’s lives—directly or indirectly—whether it’s just through the weed or his friendships with them. I can see that also extending the show and giving it legs for a really long time.

Ben: He is a witness, too. He functions as a surrogate witness for the audience. As long as there are people in New York, there will be story to tell via this character’s experience.

Neil: Weed is now legal in several states, so I’m wondering, as weed becomes more accessible, is that something that may play into your storylines or you don’t really have to deal with that yet?

Katja: We haven’t had to deal with it quite yet, but it’s definitely on our minds. My parents live in Washington State where it’s legal for recreational use. We just recently dipped our toe in that, and that was a really cool experience. It was interesting to see what that looks like—to walk into a store, and show an ID, and buy weed. And you don’t have to claim a medical condition or anything like that. It’s recognized that it’s for fun. Look, we’re hopeful that that is going to be the case here in New York because that’s our preference. However, we have thought about how that would affect The Guy, and we’ve concluded that—just based on what we’ve seen in these other states—it took quite a while for these stores to crop up in a meaningful way. For instance, my parents live in a semi-rural area, but still there’s a lot of commerce close by, and there’s very few dispensaries out there. I know that we are in New York, and there would probably be more, but I also know that there would be restrictions on how many can exist in a certain mile radius and that sort of thing. And I also know that there are also going to be people who are not going to want to publicly buy weed because of their profession or because of their cultural traditions. There are going to be cases where people are not going to want to go into a store and buy it, so we think it might just be that the demographics of The Guy’s clients may shift a little bit. So we’re just going to roll with it and see what it looks like when it happens—if we’re still doing this when that happens.

Ben: I also can speak to the medical marijuana movement in NY. So far, medicinal use has been limited to only 5 dispensaries in the state.

Katja: In the whole state!

Ben: And also I know that Gov Cuomo had some issues with all medical marijuana being non-smoking marijuana—so edibles. I don’t know if he’s considered vaping. So if you have 5 dispensaries allowed statewide—and let’s say they have very restrictive rules—in order to buy weed, you have to have 2 types of cancer at the same time.

Neil: Seriously?

Ben: No. I am just being hyperbolic. And in terms of where the dispensaries are to be located, they probably wouldn’t be allowed to be near a school. I’m thinking of NYC. Where are you going to put something that is not within, like, 500 feet of a school? But weed delivery is still going to happen, and I don’t really think that affects the show—whether The Guy signs on for legal or not. I have to also tell you that a lot of people are not cool with the buying of weed on the regular market because it’s more expensive because of taxes. So there will remain a black market of weed for people who don’t want to be on the books and for people who don’t want to pay the extra taxes because it’s a plant.

Katja: Or if somebody is using it for medical reasons, or if they’re older and not as mobile, they may still want to call their guy. There’s a whole host of reasons why we don’t think it will affect our show too much, at least for quite a while.

Neil: Do you believe that weed connects us or divides us over time? Do you see it as a crutch or do you see it as something that has value in relationships and friendships in society?

Katja: I think it’s both, like a lot of things.

Ben: Contextual.

Katja: Yeah, it’s all about the context and the intention behind the use of it. I think there is potential for … I don’t think abuse is the correct word.

Ben: Habit.

Katja: A lot of things can be habit-forming. I don’t think it’s chemically habit-forming, but I believe that the action of it can be habit-forming.

Ben: Psychologically.

Katja: I know we both think that we have used it as a crutch sometimes. In the past, we’ve used it as something to escape from dealing with responsibility, negative emotions, or the responsibility of dealing with emotions. That’s something we’re always discussing, and it does require discussion because it isn’t just 1-sided. It does bring us closer together on an emotional and human level with each other, with our friends, sometimes even with family members. It does dissolve tension. It sometimes breaks down emotional barriers that we put up that prevent us from getting closer to people, and helps erode those, and brings people into meaningful discussion where people’s guards are let down.

So it’s really both. I have found that intention is the main thing to consider in usage. If we are just smoking it mindlessly, we are probably going to get too stoned. If we don’t have a plan of action for the immediate future, then we may not get much done. But if we smoke and have an explicit intention in mind like, “Ok we want to relax and turn off or we’re going to smoke right now and then we’re going to go for a walk and break a story,” it’s a much different experience.

Neil: So in terms of the writing process—how did it start off? Did you have your own personal pot dealer who delivers to you? Where did the idea come from and how did you decide to expand it and do your own web series?

Ben: When we started—we don’t know the exact moment or day of the impetus—it was us just batting around scenarios that were short, that could happen in real time and that we could easily construct with the resources available to us. And at some point, we hit this weed delivery idea, and it seemed to gel because it was open-jawed enough to allow us to showcase different actors. At first we thought that we were going to produce it and facilitate a bunch of writers and directors coming through in addition to the actors. And then, a couple of episodes in, we realized that it would be more potent if we kept it all under one tone, voice and authorship. And then we felt confident that we could direct and write ourselves and I could be in it as well.

Our original purpose for creating it was to create a calling card for Katja, for her casting and to show off her general taste for things outside of casting, whether it be fashion, music selection, story, authenticity, acting styles. And for me, I felt like I was a very competent editor, but I had never done narrative before, so it was for me to kind of jump into doing longer-than-2-minute narratives, which I was usually doing, and also to create a character I could play that wasn’t so angry and standoffish. I think some people get the impression that I am a really intense guy, which I can be, but I also have this very strong feminine side that is very open and welcoming, and Katja noticed that, and she felt that me playing this character could show another side of that personality that I have, so it was kind of for selfish need. But it certainly was not to get famous and certainly not to have it show on HBO. I think during the early days—when people did start to say, “Hey I’d like to watch another episode of this,” after we showed them the first episode that we were kind of working on and off over 10 months—we were like, “HBO—that is definitely the pie in the sky.” And we put that out of our minds, and we just worked on the project the rest of the time. In terms of process, when the faucet was on, we tried to catch the water in terms of ideas.

Katja: That’s a good way to put it.

Ben: It was very disorganized and very piecemeal.

Katja: Yeah, ideas came and got executed when there was time and we were moved to do so. And sometimes we procrastinated because we had other jobs. It was a little all over the place. I don’t think it was until we had the Vimeo deal that we had a real writing practice in place.

Ben: Because, in the past we would use what we had available to us and what was in our reach and write to that. As we’re doing it now, I think we would like to combine what we did at Vimeo—where we wrote a lot of stories and cast them and found locations—and what we did with the first 13 episodes, where we were kind of inventorying what we had available to us and writing the story around that.

Katja: Yeah, from the location to the actors, we would see what we had and write around that, so this is a much different experience.

Ben: Yes. And in this incarnation, it’s not necessary because a lot of people are willing to work with us because of the HBO prestige, so we are way less limited in our resources. But I think we are going about this in such a way that maybe we will write our outlines and write our bones stories, and maybe then we’ll write the scripts so that it feels a little more tailor-made to those actors as it did in the first 13. Or maybe we’re going to find a way to synthesize the more organized traditional way of producing our show because we are going to produce these 12 episodes all at the same time, these 12 short stories. We’re going to try to synthesize our process and put constraints on ourselves so that the work is formed by us having to engage with our constraints in a positive way that actually creates a new idea that we wouldn’t have thought about if we didn’t have that constraint in the first place.

Neil: Was Vimeo the first place that you posted them?

Katja: Yeah. We chose to host them there because we wanted the viewer to have an ad-free experience. I also think, like Ben said, we weren’t really imagining that there would be a huge audience for these. I think we really thought it would be mostly industry people that we were personally connected to and Vimeo users. We sort of knew that Vimeo was the platform that our colleagues in the industry used as video-sharing rights, so really it came down to just aesthetics and our preference with regard to aesthetics. And, like you said, we got “staff picked” in our second cycle, and we got staff picked a couple more times. But the money people at Vimeo—I’m not sure they were aware of us for a while. The curatorial staff that do the staff picks—that’s sort of a separate entity, so, when people say that we’re that popular, I guess we are. It’s tough to say. We try not to get wrapped up in analytics. If you look at things that are popular on YouTube, they do have a lot more views.

Ben: We have a cult. We are a cult phenomenon.

Katja: Exactly. We’ve been OK with that.

Neil: About the O’Henry endings: when you’re coming up with stories, how important is it to you before you even start writing going, “Alright, I know we have a great concept, but what’s going to be the twist?” Most of them have that twist—some more than others. Is that going to continue or will there be endings that are just, I don’t know, the opposite of the O’Henry ending? It will just sort of … end? Maybe that will be the O’Henry ending.

Ben: We certainly have perpetuated a pattern of the unexpected. But I think we worry that we have painted ourselves into a corner with having to do this every time, like it is against expectation for there to be no twist, but also there’s our favorite kind of twist—like the twist in the episode “Rachel.” The twist happens within the viewer, based on the viewer’s preconception, and the story was just going on like a regular story. It’s the viewer’s preconception that something like cross-dressing is going to get you in trouble with your spouse, but then we show that cross-dressing is a normalized thing. We like it when normalization is the twist. And we live in a world now that you didn’t know we lived in, where people can believe all sorts of things, and it’s not that big of a deal.

Katja: That being said, as much as we love to do those twist endings, it is sort of painting us into a corner by having to perpetuate that sort of twist every time, and I don’t think we will. I mean, even today we were working on a story where the ending gracefully falls into this place but there’s no big revelation.

Ben: It does have a twist.

Katja: I guess it does have a twist!

Ben: I’m finding when I’m writing these, every story has a moment when it’s like “Oh shit this can go down 1 of 2 ways,” and then we send it down a third way that was not ever presented. Does that make sense?

Katja: I will say we are very wary of just writing for an ending because sometimes we do come up with the climax or the twist first before we come up with a lot of the other stuff, and those are the instances when we have to make sure our story is more than just getting to some joke.

Ben: We’re having this situation now actually. There’s a story where we found what we feel like is a fun twist at the end, like a joke that would close out an episode very well, and we have an experience from one of our pasts that we also want to tell a story about, and we are just trying to weld those two things together in a way that feels authentic and not like we are just placing those things next to each other. To get from Point A to Point B in a plausible way that is also fresh is always the tricky part.

Katja: And our constant challenge to ourselves.

Aim High on Crackle

Heath Corson and Richie Keen:
Writers/Creators

Aim High, produced by Warner Premiere Digital and Dolphin Entertainment, is an action web series starring Jackson Rathbone (The Twilight Saga, The Last Airbender) as Nick Green, a high school junior who’s just starting a new school year as 1 of the country’s 64 highly trained teenage operatives. Nick’s love interest, Amanda Miles (Friday Night Light’s Aimee Teegarden), is unaware of his double life as a spy. But his buddy Marcus, Johnny Pemberton (21 Jump Street, The Watch) knows everything and functions as Nick’s confidante and sidekick. Aim High premiered in October 2011, on Facebook (touted as the first “social series” ever created). Seasons 1 and 2 can be watched on Sony’s Crackle network. In 2012, series creators Heath Corson and Richie Keen won a Writers Guild Award for Achievement in Writing Original New Media.

Currently, Heath Corson is a writer and producer best known for Justice League: War (2014); Batman: Assault on Arkham (2014); and Justice League: Throne of Atlantis (2015). He’s currently developing TV shows with Mark Gordon and Michele Fazekas & Tara Butters (Agent Carter, Dollhouse, Reaper) as well as writing Bizarro for DC Comics.

Richie Keen is a director and actor, best known for directing episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Shameless, Sirens, Hooked, and Blake Shelton’s Not So Family Christmas. He’s currently directing the feature film, Fist Fight, starring Ice Cube and Charlie Day, for New Line Pictures.

Heath and Richie grew up in Chicago and went to Northwestern University together. They were both aspiring actors. Heath was doing theater. Richie was doing standup comedy. But they were restless to get into TV and movies, so they moved to Los Angeles to make a go of it. Richie became an acting coach; Heath started writing, but neither was gaining any traction in Hollywood. Being proactive, they decided to write their own ticket by creating their own short content.

Their first, self-produced project centered on a fictional accountant from Price-Waterhouse (the one who carries the briefcase with the secret envelopes at the Academy Awards telecast). The idea was—what if that guy got 2 tickets to the Oscars and someone in the office took them? Richie directed their script, leveraging talent and favors via Richie’s gig as an acting coach. The project became Heath and Richie’s first TV pilot—kind of. This was back in 2006—pre-Funny or Die. YouTube was still brand new, and links weren’t a thing yet. So the enterprising guys held a screening at a theater adjacent to CBS Television City and invited everyone they knew—who, at the time, were all assistants. Meanwhile, the DVD was getting passed around. Lo and behold, they landed a development deal at a division of Fox, and got paid to write a new pilot. It didn’t go, though they managed to get another pilot deal at Fox. It was low budget, and Richie directed, but ultimately, it didn’t go to series.

Frustrated by the studio development process, they decided to take a chance and write a new script on spec with one goal: pleasing themselves. As they explained to me over lunch in Studio City, “Even if no one wanted to buy it, at least we’d know that we pushed the envelope and totally went for it.” And that’s how Aim High was born. How it turned out, is another story.

See also my interview about Aim High with Heath Corson and Richie Keen: Creators/Executive Producers at www.routledge.com/cw/landau

Ultimately, web series have generally tended to be more valuable as an inexpensive, lower-risk proof-of-concept, than as profit generators in their own right. As Michael Wolff boldly and shrewdly states in his recent book, Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age: If you’re an advertiser, TV commercials, not Internet banner ads, are still the best way to reach consumers. It seems that web surfers just skip right past those ads and ride straight to the content. And the worst word in the world to an advertiser is “invisibility.”