'Hooking Up': When YouTube stars get all cleaned up

HBOlab's "Hooking Up," the college campus comedy featuring a raft of YouTube stars, including sXe Phil DeFranco and Jessica Rose of lonelygirl15 fame, debuted Thursday (I wrote a preview here). On its second day on YouTube, it's gotten more than 450,000 views. It also has its own site with the predictable "extras" such as video blogs from the characters.

NewTeeVee has been tracking the evolving consensus on what makes an Internet video a hit, and the range of opinion is between 100,000 and a million views in a video's first week. So "Hooking Up" has a pretty strong start at least.

The plot of the first episode hinges on an IM exchange between Nick (sXe Phil) and Meg (JRose). It's basically an age-old Venus-and-Mars set-up, with Facebook and IMing to bring it into the modern era. Meg thinks that Nick is asking her out, and she is all discombobulated because she's had a crush on him all semester; he just wants to know the reading for "Perspectives" class. (But he does think she's "hot."  In fact, that's why he picked her to IM to find out the reading, so it's a little confusing that he refuses to IM flirt.)

That's a surprisingly familiar TV sitcom plot for a show with such free-form Web DNA. That and the show's fairly standard comedy pacing make it seem "professional," or at least conventional, like a shrunk-down episode of "Friends." There's also a radio-announcerish voice-over intro -- "The very first episode of 'Hooking Up' starts now!" -- that sounds right off a TV network, or an SNL parody of one. (Can the "very special" episode be far behind?) But the actors' timing is slightly off occasionally, and the set kind of looks like a real, semi-skanky college dorm, so the overall effect is jaggedy and unpretentious. In the end, there's something cute and almost winning about it, I think. Everyone seems to be having a good time. Still, Web Scout is now officially of the opinion that three-minute videos are never going to rock anyone's world.

Rose has some comedy chops, it turns out. She's pretty, of course, but also slightly unusual-looking, with her wide-set eyes and her tiny teeth. Even in what is basically the cliched college-girl mode of this show, she conveys an earthy realness. She's not a grasping, self-satisfied, overgroomed "Hills" clone like so many other girls who want our attention online these days.

DeFranco, whom in his "sXe Phil" YouTube career we've rarely seen more than five feet from his webcam, is revealed in "Hooking Up" as not cut from the usual young-TV-heartthrob cloth. It's more like he's cut from a pair of XL sweat pants. Which is fine, even refreshing, but it does make you wonder why Kevin Wu (KevJumba), who is just as popular as DeFranco on YouTube and is a nice-looking dude, has to play the tired role of the Asian friend who helps the white guy get the chicks.

A final thing: The comments on YouTube so far for "Hooking Up" -- there are more than a thousand at this point -- are full of what seems like more nasty nastiness than the usual video gets. The haters are out in force. It may be that by casting YouTube stars in this structured, scripted, ultimately conventional format, HBOlab opened them up for some extra-heavy hating. People who like the raucous, direct, outsider buffet of YouTube are not necessarily going to applaud their stars for getting all cleaned up for a sit-down dinner with the parents. Even if it's on the Web.

— Maria Russo

Comments

[FountainDew]

Couldn't agree with this article more. I've learned to ignore YouTube comments, even though I read through a good chunk of the first page before rating the video. I think its a funny show that deserves a little more credit.