CBS taps Lonelygirl15 guys for smart Web fusion

CBS announced Wednesday that it had formed a partnership with EQAL, the new company of "Lonelygirl15" and "KateModern" creators Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried. The idea is that Beckett and Goodfried will run a clinic so that CBS writers can make their shows more online-friendly. CBS's writers will learn how to extend tentacles out from their main small-screen story so that it can unfold further online. That'll mean we can finally say bye-bye to "bonus content"--those story-free extras that only appealed to die-hard hyper-fans, and which passed for the networks' "web strategy" for an uncomfortably long time. 

So we're actually seeing a major TV studio hire, in essence, a YouTube production company to help it figure out how to make its shows work on the Web. This kind of old-new partnership has been unprecedented until now, and definitely scores CBS some serious with-it points. 

While not everything that's come out of the Lonelygirl15 and KateModern enterprises has been Oscar caliber (they did both get Webby nods, however), Goodfried and Beckett have shown a desire to draw outside the lines of traditional storytelling. With Lonelygirl, they brilliantly blurred reality and fiction, and experimented with variable-length episodes, viewer interaction and even funky kinds of brand integration. (As I've harped on before, they brazenly wrote a "Neutrogena scientist" into the plot of lonelygirl.)

But it's this rebellious capacity that's exactly what TV needs more of, so lets see if this transplant takes.

Comments

[Magesa]

This has great potential!!! lonelygirl15 and katemodern are both such awesome shows! And, they may have brazenly written a Neutrogena scientist into the show: but that scientist, Spencer, was one of the funniest, awesomist characters in the show. I definitely didn't mind!