Obama victory spins a web of tears

Magic Johnson went on Larry King last Wednesday evening. King asked him what he thought of the election.

“Oh man. Last night I cried like a baby, Larry.”

Magic? Crying? Is Mercury in retrograde or something?

Then Will Smith went on Oprah. “Did you cry?” Oprah asked. “Did you cry? Did you cry?” (She had cried in front of millions during President-elect Obama’s  election night speech, so presumably she wanted to know if Smith, an action hero, was in the Crybaby Club.)

He was.

And then there was Jesse Jackson. And Colin Powell. And Michael Salerno.

Who? Oh yeah, Salerno’s an IT manager out of Mahopac, N.Y. Barbecue enthusiast, avid reader, father of triplets. He wasn’t on TV like the other guys, and unlike the others,  he’s white — but you can still see a picture of him getting teary on election night, because he posted it on Flickr.

“I have never been more proud to be an American,” the caption says, and “yes, I’m crying.”

I found Salerno’s pic, along with dozens of other crying photos and videos, on Flickr and YouTube after several friends told me they’d cried on election night. Two of them were guys I’ve known for a decade without seeing them cry a single time.

In one YouTube video, a blue-eyed  guy named Sam with big tattoos and no shirt completely loses it, bawling wordlessly for seven minutes during Obama’s victory speech: a classic.

In another, a pretty 18-year-old girl named Whitney cries in a smiling way that looks almost like laughter. “I’m such a loser,” she says. “I’m so happy.”

“I cried too,” wrote four of the video’s 11 commenters, with one adding, “and I’m not even American.” That was it. The Obama Crying thing was, as far as I was concerned, a full-blown epidemic. One worth further study and explication. I did the only thing I knew how: I went to SurveyMonkey.com.

Survey Monkey lets you create free surveys and send them to people online. It’s easy. So I made a questionnaire: Did you cry on election night? If so, when was the last time you cried before that? And I asked respondents to specify their gender, age range and party affiliation.

Next, I took the hyperlink to my survey and posted it all over Facebook. Seeking parity, I posted it in a number of groups representing many distinct points along the ideological spectrum. I went from the famous group called “One Million Strong for Barack” to “1,000,000 Strong for McCain Palin” to “Reduce the Drinking Age to 18,” and to“weddings 2008.”

Another half-hour of this and Facebook decided I was a spammer and revoked all of my posting privileges, dealing a serious blow to my ability to disseminate the survey. So I turned to Twitter, where I “tweeted” a link to the survey to all 468 of the people who had, through the Web Scout blog, opted to follow my feed.

I popped open a bag of Fritos and let the results trickle in.

Some hours later, my survey had attracted 133 respondents. And are you ready for this? Fully 75% of them said they had cried or “sort of” cried on election night. (I’d included a box for people to say what “sort of” meant, and the consensus was that if you welled up but didn’t actually overflow, that’s “sort of” crying. Fair enough.)

More statistics: 33% of the criers/wellers were male. About half were between 15 and 25, a quarter 26 to 35, and another quarter were 36 to 45; 67% Democrats, 18% Republicans, 11% Independents. An impressive spread across all categories — perhaps this really was a phenomenon!

Among the written explanations were a few gems:

• “As the mother of a biracial child I have always been afraid that she would never be accepted by her peers. She wouldn’t be ‘white enough’ or ‘black enough.’ And seeing that an entire country can accept this biracial man as their leader, and also knowing how much the world as a whole supports him — gives me so much hope for my own daughter’s future.”
• “So proud that Americans elected a smart President! I also cried when I got a thank you text message from Barack Obama on my phone.”
• “I cried because I was so devastated that my country would choose someone who was going to destroy what America was founded on.”

I called Jack Glaser, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley who has written extensively on race, politics, emotion and the Internet. Quite possibly he could help me publish my findings in some obscure academic journal. When I asked him what he thought of my results, there was a pause. He then told me my methodology was completely flawed and my results scientifically meaningless.

I nearly cried.

“Whenever you have a survey where people voluntarily participate, you tend to overrepresent people who feel strongly one way or the other,“ Glaser said.

As a consolation prize, Glaser allowed that “it does look like there’s more expressed emotion after this election than there typically is. There’s a huge release on the partisan level,” he said, “And also a big exhilaration on the civil rights side. And the two sort of intertwine.”

So no science was had here today. Still, I count this as a victory, skewed and warped as it may be, for the social Web. It turns out that a few minutes on YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, plus a bit of survey monkeying, quickly revealed 100 people who had cried on election night. I don’t think you need science to see that there’s something happening there.

Special thanks to David A. Malbin

Probably the biggest knock on video games is that no matter how much time you devote to them, the skills you acquire while playing don’t much translate back to real life. It’s always a little sad to hear about the guy who won the Madden NFL challenge, earning the title of best video quarterback in the nation, or the kid who cannot be outflanked in the newest army game. Champion or otherwise, get them out on a real gridiron, or a live battlefield, and it would be game over before the end of the first scream. 

Lee Olson playing Rock Band drums. (Courtesy L. Olson)

That’s why it’s so strange and compelling to pull up a YouTube video of Lee Olson playing virtual drums on Rock Band, one of the class of smash-hit music games —  in which gamers play along to real songs with simplified instruments — that’s remaking gaming culture and giving a huge revenue boost to the music industry. His hands are a blur as the drumsticks flash around the pads to nail the beats, rolls and fills in perfect time. And equally difficult to see is the line between this virtual drumming and the real thing.

The idea of Rock Band is simple: The game delivers the notes of each song to the player in the form of a conveyor belt of colored dots. To keep up with the song, players must “strike” the note on their toy instrument at the moment it’s about to fall off the end of the belt.

Think about it a minute, and you realize how well drumming is suited to video game simulation. A Fender Stratocaster has six strings and 21 frets — that’s 126 individual notes and tens of thousands of chord combinations, a variety not quite represented by the Rock Band guitar’s five oversized buttons. A standard drum set, however, only has about eight surfaces. The Rock Band set has five. And unlike stringed instruments, horns or winds, you don’t need to learn complicated fingerings, or how to breathe, blow, bow, strum or pick. All you gotta do is bang.

Olson, 30, plays on the game’s expert setting, where the player has to hit most or all of the notes from the real song. In a metal rock cut like System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” that means hitting 1,232 notes in a little more than three minutes.

And that’s exactly what Olson does. Flawlessly nailing 100% of the notes in a Rock Band song is called an FC — for full combination — and in this game, that’s the badge of stardom. Olson, an experienced drummer in real life, has FC’d about half of the nearly 500 songs Rock Band has made available. Many of those performances are archived on YouTube, where Olson’s videos have been viewed close to 6 million times.

    The DrumRocker from Ion, built by real e-drum engineers.

“There are a lot of really great drummers online — famous drummers,” he said from his home in Virginia, referring to drummers who play “irl” — in real life. “But I’m getting a lot more views than most of them. And that’s just the weirdest thing.”

Yet it makes sense if you think about it, he said. “It’s a deadly combination. People love video games, and they love drums. Even people who don’t play are fascinated.”

Which about sums up the weird brilliance of Rock Band, a new form of entertainment that plugs into two major culture currents at once — video games and pop music — by giving people who’d never pick up an instrument the illusion of being a long-haired axmaster for a day. It’s air guitar turned up to 11.

But Rock Band drummers won’t let their instrument be dismissed with a rimshot.

“It’s easy for people to say it’s not real drumming — it’s just a plastic drums set. But it’s a lot more like drumming than most people like to think it is,” Olson said. “It really completes a lot of what you’d need to learn how to play for real.”

Ian Drennan — gamer code name v1g1lance — is proof positive of that assertion. Drennan bought Rock Band last November and began playing at the medium difficulty setting. After two months of practice, he’d hit the expert level and decided he liked playing enough to buy a set of real electronic drums. (E-drums are the equivalent of an electric guitar or electric keyboard — same basic shape as the acoustic kind.)

“As much as I like to say I would’ve eventually bought a kit,” said Drennan from his home in Atlanta, where he’s a software designer, “I don’t believe I would have, had I not actually picked up the game and started playing it.” Rather than seeing the game as a substitute for the real thing, Drennan sees it more as a tool to speed up learning, and make it fun. “I don’t think learning drums in Rock Band will make someone a good drummer. But it’s a really good way to build that initial limb independence, timing and coordination that you need to become one.

“If you play a song in the game enough, you get the muscle memory down,” he said. “So when you take it upstairs to the real kit, you’re just changing what you’re hitting, you’re not changing when you’re hitting it.” The game’s elite drummers hasten to point out that Rock Band’s drums are still a simplified version of the genuine article. The small game kit — basically just four pads and a pedal for the kick drum — not only breaks often but is missing a few key parts, and doesn’t permit much nuance with volume or rhythm — the elements of what drummers call groove.

And not all drum teachers are on board with the game’s virtues, either. When I told my own instructor, Jonathan Brown, about how neat I thought the game was, his skepticism was clear.

“Kids today more often than not will take the easy way out on things,” he said. “To become half-decent at any instrument takes hours of weekly practice for years. But you can master Rock Band in a couple of weeks. You do the math.”

So I might skip the trip to Best Buy this time around. But even Brown’s  concerns might be addressed eventually. The limitations of the game drum sets are already vanishing. The digital instrument maker Alesis just built a kit for Rock Band that’s more or less indistinguishable from lower-end electronic percussion products the company has been selling for years.

Twenty-year-old Calin Scoggins of Dallas even figured out how to plug his $2,000 Roland electronic kit directly into the game. He’s taken advantage of the professional-quality kit’s fidelity to widen the gap between himself and the competition. Scoggins — alias Someguy913 — is ranked No.1 among the thousands of Rock Band expert drummers listed on Scorehero.com, the game’s de facto record-keeping site. Scoggins has the top score on nearly 80 different songs.

“You obviously want to have fun when you’re doing it,” Scoggins said. “Because if you don’t have fun you’re going to get burnt out really fast.”

See? He’s already starting to sound like a real rock star.

"Blah Girls," Ashton Kutcher's latest brainchild, is a modest project: a comical, animated celebrity gossip site. The site is built around a show featuring three celebrity-obsessed, sexually curious teenage cartoon girls who gossip about their idols — and try to meet them and date them, with disastrous results. (I did a mini-review here, and our Technology Blog interviewed Kutcher about it here).

There's South Park-style trash-talking, explosions, crashes and gross-out physical stuff. A new three-minute episode appears twice a week, and the girls — Tiffany, Krystle and Britney — also maintain a Perez-Hilton-like blog (along with their gay friend Stuart) that is updated pretty regularly. All in all, it's a nice twist on the increasingly surreal and cartoonish culture of celeb gossip.

But there's something less obvious going on too: These three cartoon characters are sexualized in a way we rarely—if ever—see teenage girls depicted. They're not sexed-up in an exploitive Bratz way, or in a judgmental cautionary-tale way. Instead the show gives us realistic teenage-girl sexuality as subject matter for lowbrow humor, the kind that can be seen as crass or as refreshingly honest, depending on your point of view.

The girls are trying to define their own fledging sexuality in the midst of our hypersexualized celebrity culture, and the embarrassment this usually leads to makes the show a gleeful satire of teenage girls' confused desires. Perhaps even more radically, the show doesn't have any impulse to protect its characters from the rest of the world's sometimes cruel or even menacing reaction to teenage girls' sexual curiosity. 

On TV, slapstick sexual humor is safe only for boys, as in, obviously, "South Park." (When "South Park" does turn its lens on girls' sexuality, as in the "Raisins" episode, where the boys visit a junior Hooters, the humor is in the boys' reaction to girls' sexuality -- it has nothing to do with what's going on inside the girls themselves.)

But consider a recent Blah Girls episode focused on the Jonas Brothers. Britney declares that if she could meet Kevin Jonas, she'd get down on her knees and — gasps from her friends — tie his shoes. The visual of her doing just that is mischievously ambiguous. That gag is followed by an "OMG!" from Tiffany, as she sends an e-mail to the JoBros saying she and her friends want to be their wives -- and gets a reply saying they'd be happy to marry the girls, and asking them to send pictures, which she does. The episode ends with a shot of a skeevy old guy looking at their pictures with a horny cackle.

That's risque stuff, and Kutcher knows it will draw some disapproval given the teenagers in the audience: He told Jessica Guynn in the interview I linked to above, "I don't think content should parent children. I think parents should parent children. This doesn't go too far."

"Blah girls" may not be going "too far," (wherever that line is nowadays), but it is going to a place that we haven't yet comfortably gone as a culture. When the screen pans out to the back of the pedophile's head as he ogles the Blah Girls' pictures, it's hard not to have a moment of visceral, involuntary fear and revulsion. (I know they're cartoon characters!)

Maybe it's a good thing, that all the vulnerability inherent in female sexuality is something we can joke about now. As far as I know, for example, nothing in the mainstream has yet mined the humor in the supposed Middle School oral sex epidemic, as this little episode does.

But I wonder whether the Blah Girls' humor is bumping up against some still-tenacious cultural taboos. I still can't picture that episode (in a longer version, obviously) on any imaginable TV network, even cable -- or even in a movie theater.

—Maria Russo

Thanks to YouTube, the below video of Batman's televised mayoral debate with the Penguin, from the "Dizzoner the Penguin" episode of Adam West's 1966  "Batman," is gaining new currency.

The clip, first uploaded in early 2007, has been picked up by several political commentators and compared to recent debates between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. 

Besides being an amusing clip on its own -- the great Burgess Meredith turns in a virtuoso performance as  the Bilious Bird -- viewers have noted some chuckle-worthy parallels between this fictional debate and the real thing. 

In last week's face-off, moderator Bob Schieffer asked the candidates about the smears and personal attacks that have become a significant part of the discourse as the campaign winds up. 

"I think the tone of this campaign could've been very different," said McCain at the time. "And the fact is it's gotten pretty tough, and I regret some of the negative aspects of both campaigns."

Likewise, the Penguin starts out humbly enough: "Friends and fellow citizens, I want to give you my solemn word that there will be no mudslinging in this campaign. ... I intend to stick to the issues." 

But with that disclaimer out of the way, the Penguin wastes no time in getting to his point. "Now what are the issues? There's only one issue: Batman!"

"I suggest that behind that mask, Batman is, in reality, a dangerous criminal. Why else does he wear a mask? Why else does he conceal his past? Would you think about that a moment, my friends? Whenever you've seen Batman, who's he with? Criminals, that's who!"

McCain makes a similar pivot, this time to the controversial subjects of Obama's association with former radical Bill Ayers, a founder of Weather Underground who McCain called a "washed up terrorist."

"Senator Obama chose to associate with a guy who in 2001 said he wished he'd bombed more." McCain then draws links between Obama and the community organization ACORN, which, he says, is "maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

It's probably a comment on the predictability of this presidential campaign that it was anticipated by a 40-year-old TV show populated by wacky caricatures. Same hack script, same hack channel.

Unfortunately, Penguin's brilliant plan hits a snag. Afraid that his lead in the polls is shrinking, he kidnaps the Board of Elections so the vote cannot be certified. This scheme backfires, and Batman turns up to rescue the hostages ("Pengy, you said we associated with criminals.  So ... here we are." BOOM! POW! WHAMM!). 

Batman is elected but resigns to allow the current mayor to keep his position. But not before one of the major parties calls to offer him the presidential candidacy for 1968 -- exactly 40 Novembers ago. 

Exclaims Robin: "Bulging ballot boxes, Batman, that was some offer!"   

-- David Sarno

IBitePrettyHard is one of the best drummers around. I mean video game drummers. But check out this video of IBite playing the popular music simulation game Rock Band, which has taken Guitar Hero and added the option of playing drums and bass. Tell me the line that separates video drumming from the real thing isn't blurring out of existence:

You've just witnessed an "FC," or full combo, the Rock Band parlance for hitting every simulated note in perfect time, no errors. On the games' most difficult drum songs -- Rush's YYZ, for example -- that can mean thousands of stick movements and pedal kicks. 

The FC is the true currency of Rock Band and Guitar Hero mastery. Unless you can nail a song perfectly, you are not a true expert.

But it's drums, not guitar or bass, that are bridging the gap between fantasy video game versions of playing an instrument and the genuine article. The game's guitar is essentially a colorful game controller that operates nothing like its real-life counterpart. You can be the biggest Guitar Hero in the world, and still not be able to strum a "C." The complicated plucking, strumming and fretwork of playing guitar or bass is not well emulated by the five or six buttons boasted by the Rock Band guitar device.

But the Rock Band drum set is more or less a version of the kind of electronic drum kits that have been used by real drummers for years. Drumming is, in essence, banging sticks on surfaces, which is why real drummers are good at Rock Band and Rock Band drummers are, you know, real drummers.

IBite tells us in his YouTube profile that he's been playing real drums for 20 years, been in dozens of bands and played "around 1,000 gigs." A meter on his website shows that he has racked up 191 FCs on Rock Band's "Expert" level, at which the speed and number of notes are about the same as in the original songs.

You can see how illusory the real-fake division is in videos of DrumMania -- an arcade-style drum game from Asia in which players rip through songs at blazing speeds, following a video "note chart" that scrolls downward so fast it looks as though it exercises your eyes as much as it does your hands and feet.

— David Sarno

Watch your back, Bill O'Reilly, you've got a pretender to the throne of ire.  This newcomer is angrier, tougher and less scrupulous than you, and be worried: He's also much, much, much younger.

That's right, Little Bill is back.  Walking through the little door first flung open by child Web celeb Fred, the diminutive pundit has released his second video on FunnyorDie, this time featuring a brutal evisceration of liberal Congressman Barney Frank.  "You look like a Muppet," Little Bill yells at Frank before telling him that the economic crisis wouldn't have happened if Frank -- who is gay -- wasn't "busy hanging Tom Brady posters above his bed."

As Little Bill proved in the debut of the "Lil' O'Reilly Factor" -- a toxicogenic rant against hippie "pinhead" liberal gay anti-war left -- he is not to be toyed with.  "Your dirty sex makes God send hurricanes," he said.  "Go drive your electric cars into the ocean -- I hope you hit a whale on the way to France."  At the end Little Bill reprises a famed O'Reilly outtake, the one where the elder O'Reilly castigates a producer for some unclear teleprompter language:  "I can't read that!" yells Little Bill.   "We'll do it live!  We'll do it live!"

The cursing prevents us from linking to that original O'Reilly outtake (you can find it linked from Little Bill's page), but Big Bill's lively interview with Frank, now a mini-classic, is here.

UPDATE (4:00pm): Lil' Bill is the creation of the people at Fox's Spike Feresten's Talkshow, where he has made at least one "live" appearance. The Fox connection obviously raises the question of when Big Bill and Lil' Bill will go toe to toe.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

We're liking the cool new trend wherein big-time celebrities submit to informal, Web-based interviews, taking live questions directly from the virtual audience. The video site Seesmic has recently featured substantial interviews with John Cleese and Dennis Hopper. Though Cleese doesn't seem to understand the exact nature of the technology underlying the interview, he cheerfully submits to questions he's probably answered 10,000 times -- about how much of "Monty Python" was ad-libbed, whether he likes "Fawlty Towers" better, when or whether there will be a "Life of Brian" musical and, of course, the sum of 140 and 170.

In his interview with a French journalist, Hopper is somewhat less effusive -- evidenced by his trouble coming up with a joke on request ("I'm not a lot of laughs, you know?") -- but it's neat nonetheless to see him take a variety of questions from fans, sans the usual network TV quick-cut editing that leaves nothing but the best sound bites. Sometimes mediocre sound bites from interesting people are worth watching too.

--David Sarno

SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.

But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.

Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.

I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.

No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”

--Maria Russo

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

Drums: the realest Rock Band instrument

Probably the biggest knock on video games is that no matter how much time you devote to them, the skills you acquire while playing don’t much translate back to real life. It’s always a little sad to hear about the guy who won the Madden NFL challenge, earning the title of best video quarterback in the nation, or the kid who cannot be outflanked in the newest army game. Champion or otherwise, get them out on a real gridiron, or a live battlefield, and it would be game over before the end of the first scream. 

Lee Olson playing Rock Band drums. (Courtesy L. Olson)

That’s why it’s so strange and compelling to pull up a YouTube video of Lee Olson playing virtual drums on Rock Band, one of the class of smash-hit music games —  in which gamers play along to real songs with simplified instruments — that’s remaking gaming culture and giving a huge revenue boost to the music industry. His hands are a blur as the drumsticks flash around the pads to nail the beats, rolls and fills in perfect time. And equally difficult to see is the line between this virtual drumming and the real thing.

The idea of Rock Band is simple: The game delivers the notes of each song to the player in the form of a conveyor belt of colored dots. To keep up with the song, players must “strike” the note on their toy instrument at the moment it’s about to fall off the end of the belt.

Think about it a minute, and you realize how well drumming is suited to video game simulation. A Fender Stratocaster has six strings and 21 frets — that’s 126 individual notes and tens of thousands of chord combinations, a variety not quite represented by the Rock Band guitar’s five oversized buttons. A standard drum set, however, only has about eight surfaces. The Rock Band set has five. And unlike stringed instruments, horns or winds, you don’t need to learn complicated fingerings, or how to breathe, blow, bow, strum or pick. All you gotta do is bang.

Olson, 30, plays on the game’s expert setting, where the player has to hit most or all of the notes from the real song. In a metal rock cut like System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” that means hitting 1,232 notes in a little more than three minutes.

And that’s exactly what Olson does. Flawlessly nailing 100% of the notes in a Rock Band song is called an FC — for full combination — and in this game, that’s the badge of stardom. Olson, an experienced drummer in real life, has FC’d about half of the nearly 500 songs Rock Band has made available. Many of those performances are archived on YouTube, where Olson’s videos have been viewed close to 6 million times.

    The DrumRocker from Ion, built by real e-drum engineers.

“There are a lot of really great drummers online — famous drummers,” he said from his home in Virginia, referring to drummers who play “irl” — in real life. “But I’m getting a lot more views than most of them. And that’s just the weirdest thing.”

Yet it makes sense if you think about it, he said. “It’s a deadly combination. People love video games, and they love drums. Even people who don’t play are fascinated.”

Which about sums up the weird brilliance of Rock Band, a new form of entertainment that plugs into two major culture currents at once — video games and pop music — by giving people who’d never pick up an instrument the illusion of being a long-haired axmaster for a day. It’s air guitar turned up to 11.

But Rock Band drummers won’t let their instrument be dismissed with a rimshot.

“It’s easy for people to say it’s not real drumming — it’s just a plastic drums set. But it’s a lot more like drumming than most people like to think it is,” Olson said. “It really completes a lot of what you’d need to learn how to play for real.”

Ian Drennan — gamer code name v1g1lance — is proof positive of that assertion. Drennan bought Rock Band last November and began playing at the medium difficulty setting. After two months of practice, he’d hit the expert level and decided he liked playing enough to buy a set of real electronic drums. (E-drums are the equivalent of an electric guitar or electric keyboard — same basic shape as the acoustic kind.)

“As much as I like to say I would’ve eventually bought a kit,” said Drennan from his home in Atlanta, where he’s a software designer, “I don’t believe I would have, had I not actually picked up the game and started playing it.” Rather than seeing the game as a substitute for the real thing, Drennan sees it more as a tool to speed up learning, and make it fun. “I don’t think learning drums in Rock Band will make someone a good drummer. But it’s a really good way to build that initial limb independence, timing and coordination that you need to become one.

“If you play a song in the game enough, you get the muscle memory down,” he said. “So when you take it upstairs to the real kit, you’re just changing what you’re hitting, you’re not changing when you’re hitting it.” The game’s elite drummers hasten to point out that Rock Band’s drums are still a simplified version of the genuine article. The small game kit — basically just four pads and a pedal for the kick drum — not only breaks often but is missing a few key parts, and doesn’t permit much nuance with volume or rhythm — the elements of what drummers call groove.

And not all drum teachers are on board with the game’s virtues, either. When I told my own instructor, Jonathan Brown, about how neat I thought the game was, his skepticism was clear.

“Kids today more often than not will take the easy way out on things,” he said. “To become half-decent at any instrument takes hours of weekly practice for years. But you can master Rock Band in a couple of weeks. You do the math.”

So I might skip the trip to Best Buy this time around. But even Brown’s  concerns might be addressed eventually. The limitations of the game drum sets are already vanishing. The digital instrument maker Alesis just built a kit for Rock Band that’s more or less indistinguishable from lower-end electronic percussion products the company has been selling for years.

Twenty-year-old Calin Scoggins of Dallas even figured out how to plug his $2,000 Roland electronic kit directly into the game. He’s taken advantage of the professional-quality kit’s fidelity to widen the gap between himself and the competition. Scoggins — alias Someguy913 — is ranked No.1 among the thousands of Rock Band expert drummers listed on Scorehero.com, the game’s de facto record-keeping site. Scoggins has the top score on nearly 80 different songs.

“You obviously want to have fun when you’re doing it,” Scoggins said. “Because if you don’t have fun you’re going to get burnt out really fast.”

See? He’s already starting to sound like a real rock star.

"Blah Girls," Ashton Kutcher's latest brainchild, is a modest project: a comical, animated celebrity gossip site. The site is built around a show featuring three celebrity-obsessed, sexually curious teenage cartoon girls who gossip about their idols — and try to meet them and date them, with disastrous results. (I did a mini-review here, and our Technology Blog interviewed Kutcher about it here).

There's South Park-style trash-talking, explosions, crashes and gross-out physical stuff. A new three-minute episode appears twice a week, and the girls — Tiffany, Krystle and Britney — also maintain a Perez-Hilton-like blog (along with their gay friend Stuart) that is updated pretty regularly. All in all, it's a nice twist on the increasingly surreal and cartoonish culture of celeb gossip.

But there's something less obvious going on too: These three cartoon characters are sexualized in a way we rarely—if ever—see teenage girls depicted. They're not sexed-up in an exploitive Bratz way, or in a judgmental cautionary-tale way. Instead the show gives us realistic teenage-girl sexuality as subject matter for lowbrow humor, the kind that can be seen as crass or as refreshingly honest, depending on your point of view.

The girls are trying to define their own fledging sexuality in the midst of our hypersexualized celebrity culture, and the embarrassment this usually leads to makes the show a gleeful satire of teenage girls' confused desires. Perhaps even more radically, the show doesn't have any impulse to protect its characters from the rest of the world's sometimes cruel or even menacing reaction to teenage girls' sexual curiosity. 

On TV, slapstick sexual humor is safe only for boys, as in, obviously, "South Park." (When "South Park" does turn its lens on girls' sexuality, as in the "Raisins" episode, where the boys visit a junior Hooters, the humor is in the boys' reaction to girls' sexuality -- it has nothing to do with what's going on inside the girls themselves.)

But consider a recent Blah Girls episode focused on the Jonas Brothers. Britney declares that if she could meet Kevin Jonas, she'd get down on her knees and — gasps from her friends — tie his shoes. The visual of her doing just that is mischievously ambiguous. That gag is followed by an "OMG!" from Tiffany, as she sends an e-mail to the JoBros saying she and her friends want to be their wives -- and gets a reply saying they'd be happy to marry the girls, and asking them to send pictures, which she does. The episode ends with a shot of a skeevy old guy looking at their pictures with a horny cackle.

That's risque stuff, and Kutcher knows it will draw some disapproval given the teenagers in the audience: He told Jessica Guynn in the interview I linked to above, "I don't think content should parent children. I think parents should parent children. This doesn't go too far."

"Blah girls" may not be going "too far," (wherever that line is nowadays), but it is going to a place that we haven't yet comfortably gone as a culture. When the screen pans out to the back of the pedophile's head as he ogles the Blah Girls' pictures, it's hard not to have a moment of visceral, involuntary fear and revulsion. (I know they're cartoon characters!)

Maybe it's a good thing, that all the vulnerability inherent in female sexuality is something we can joke about now. As far as I know, for example, nothing in the mainstream has yet mined the humor in the supposed Middle School oral sex epidemic, as this little episode does.

But I wonder whether the Blah Girls' humor is bumping up against some still-tenacious cultural taboos. I still can't picture that episode (in a longer version, obviously) on any imaginable TV network, even cable -- or even in a movie theater.

—Maria Russo

Thanks to YouTube, the below video of Batman's televised mayoral debate with the Penguin, from the "Dizzoner the Penguin" episode of Adam West's 1966  "Batman," is gaining new currency.

The clip, first uploaded in early 2007, has been picked up by several political commentators and compared to recent debates between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. 

Besides being an amusing clip on its own -- the great Burgess Meredith turns in a virtuoso performance as  the Bilious Bird -- viewers have noted some chuckle-worthy parallels between this fictional debate and the real thing. 

In last week's face-off, moderator Bob Schieffer asked the candidates about the smears and personal attacks that have become a significant part of the discourse as the campaign winds up. 

"I think the tone of this campaign could've been very different," said McCain at the time. "And the fact is it's gotten pretty tough, and I regret some of the negative aspects of both campaigns."

Likewise, the Penguin starts out humbly enough: "Friends and fellow citizens, I want to give you my solemn word that there will be no mudslinging in this campaign. ... I intend to stick to the issues." 

But with that disclaimer out of the way, the Penguin wastes no time in getting to his point. "Now what are the issues? There's only one issue: Batman!"

"I suggest that behind that mask, Batman is, in reality, a dangerous criminal. Why else does he wear a mask? Why else does he conceal his past? Would you think about that a moment, my friends? Whenever you've seen Batman, who's he with? Criminals, that's who!"

McCain makes a similar pivot, this time to the controversial subjects of Obama's association with former radical Bill Ayers, a founder of Weather Underground who McCain called a "washed up terrorist."

"Senator Obama chose to associate with a guy who in 2001 said he wished he'd bombed more." McCain then draws links between Obama and the community organization ACORN, which, he says, is "maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

It's probably a comment on the predictability of this presidential campaign that it was anticipated by a 40-year-old TV show populated by wacky caricatures. Same hack script, same hack channel.

Unfortunately, Penguin's brilliant plan hits a snag. Afraid that his lead in the polls is shrinking, he kidnaps the Board of Elections so the vote cannot be certified. This scheme backfires, and Batman turns up to rescue the hostages ("Pengy, you said we associated with criminals.  So ... here we are." BOOM! POW! WHAMM!). 

Batman is elected but resigns to allow the current mayor to keep his position. But not before one of the major parties calls to offer him the presidential candidacy for 1968 -- exactly 40 Novembers ago. 

Exclaims Robin: "Bulging ballot boxes, Batman, that was some offer!"   

-- David Sarno

IBitePrettyHard is one of the best drummers around. I mean video game drummers. But check out this video of IBite playing the popular music simulation game Rock Band, which has taken Guitar Hero and added the option of playing drums and bass. Tell me the line that separates video drumming from the real thing isn't blurring out of existence:

You've just witnessed an "FC," or full combo, the Rock Band parlance for hitting every simulated note in perfect time, no errors. On the games' most difficult drum songs -- Rush's YYZ, for example -- that can mean thousands of stick movements and pedal kicks. 

The FC is the true currency of Rock Band and Guitar Hero mastery. Unless you can nail a song perfectly, you are not a true expert.

But it's drums, not guitar or bass, that are bridging the gap between fantasy video game versions of playing an instrument and the genuine article. The game's guitar is essentially a colorful game controller that operates nothing like its real-life counterpart. You can be the biggest Guitar Hero in the world, and still not be able to strum a "C." The complicated plucking, strumming and fretwork of playing guitar or bass is not well emulated by the five or six buttons boasted by the Rock Band guitar device.

But the Rock Band drum set is more or less a version of the kind of electronic drum kits that have been used by real drummers for years. Drumming is, in essence, banging sticks on surfaces, which is why real drummers are good at Rock Band and Rock Band drummers are, you know, real drummers.

IBite tells us in his YouTube profile that he's been playing real drums for 20 years, been in dozens of bands and played "around 1,000 gigs." A meter on his website shows that he has racked up 191 FCs on Rock Band's "Expert" level, at which the speed and number of notes are about the same as in the original songs.

You can see how illusory the real-fake division is in videos of DrumMania -- an arcade-style drum game from Asia in which players rip through songs at blazing speeds, following a video "note chart" that scrolls downward so fast it looks as though it exercises your eyes as much as it does your hands and feet.

— David Sarno

Watch your back, Bill O'Reilly, you've got a pretender to the throne of ire.  This newcomer is angrier, tougher and less scrupulous than you, and be worried: He's also much, much, much younger.

That's right, Little Bill is back.  Walking through the little door first flung open by child Web celeb Fred, the diminutive pundit has released his second video on FunnyorDie, this time featuring a brutal evisceration of liberal Congressman Barney Frank.  "You look like a Muppet," Little Bill yells at Frank before telling him that the economic crisis wouldn't have happened if Frank -- who is gay -- wasn't "busy hanging Tom Brady posters above his bed."

As Little Bill proved in the debut of the "Lil' O'Reilly Factor" -- a toxicogenic rant against hippie "pinhead" liberal gay anti-war left -- he is not to be toyed with.  "Your dirty sex makes God send hurricanes," he said.  "Go drive your electric cars into the ocean -- I hope you hit a whale on the way to France."  At the end Little Bill reprises a famed O'Reilly outtake, the one where the elder O'Reilly castigates a producer for some unclear teleprompter language:  "I can't read that!" yells Little Bill.   "We'll do it live!  We'll do it live!"

The cursing prevents us from linking to that original O'Reilly outtake (you can find it linked from Little Bill's page), but Big Bill's lively interview with Frank, now a mini-classic, is here.

UPDATE (4:00pm): Lil' Bill is the creation of the people at Fox's Spike Feresten's Talkshow, where he has made at least one "live" appearance. The Fox connection obviously raises the question of when Big Bill and Lil' Bill will go toe to toe.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

We're liking the cool new trend wherein big-time celebrities submit to informal, Web-based interviews, taking live questions directly from the virtual audience. The video site Seesmic has recently featured substantial interviews with John Cleese and Dennis Hopper. Though Cleese doesn't seem to understand the exact nature of the technology underlying the interview, he cheerfully submits to questions he's probably answered 10,000 times -- about how much of "Monty Python" was ad-libbed, whether he likes "Fawlty Towers" better, when or whether there will be a "Life of Brian" musical and, of course, the sum of 140 and 170.

In his interview with a French journalist, Hopper is somewhat less effusive -- evidenced by his trouble coming up with a joke on request ("I'm not a lot of laughs, you know?") -- but it's neat nonetheless to see him take a variety of questions from fans, sans the usual network TV quick-cut editing that leaves nothing but the best sound bites. Sometimes mediocre sound bites from interesting people are worth watching too.

--David Sarno

SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.

But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.

Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.

I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.

No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”

--Maria Russo

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

The radical thing about Ashton Kutcher's "Blah Girls"

"Blah Girls," Ashton Kutcher's latest brainchild, is a modest project: a comical, animated celebrity gossip site. The site is built around a show featuring three celebrity-obsessed, sexually curious teenage cartoon girls who gossip about their idols — and try to meet them and date them, with disastrous results. (I did a mini-review here, and our Technology Blog interviewed Kutcher about it here).

There's South Park-style trash-talking, explosions, crashes and gross-out physical stuff. A new three-minute episode appears twice a week, and the girls — Tiffany, Krystle and Britney — also maintain a Perez-Hilton-like blog (along with their gay friend Stuart) that is updated pretty regularly. All in all, it's a nice twist on the increasingly surreal and cartoonish culture of celeb gossip.

But there's something less obvious going on too: These three cartoon characters are sexualized in a way we rarely—if ever—see teenage girls depicted. They're not sexed-up in an exploitive Bratz way, or in a judgmental cautionary-tale way. Instead the show gives us realistic teenage-girl sexuality as subject matter for lowbrow humor, the kind that can be seen as crass or as refreshingly honest, depending on your point of view.

The girls are trying to define their own fledging sexuality in the midst of our hypersexualized celebrity culture, and the embarrassment this usually leads to makes the show a gleeful satire of teenage girls' confused desires. Perhaps even more radically, the show doesn't have any impulse to protect its characters from the rest of the world's sometimes cruel or even menacing reaction to teenage girls' sexual curiosity. 

On TV, slapstick sexual humor is safe only for boys, as in, obviously, "South Park." (When "South Park" does turn its lens on girls' sexuality, as in the "Raisins" episode, where the boys visit a junior Hooters, the humor is in the boys' reaction to girls' sexuality -- it has nothing to do with what's going on inside the girls themselves.)

But consider a recent Blah Girls episode focused on the Jonas Brothers. Britney declares that if she could meet Kevin Jonas, she'd get down on her knees and — gasps from her friends — tie his shoes. The visual of her doing just that is mischievously ambiguous. That gag is followed by an "OMG!" from Tiffany, as she sends an e-mail to the JoBros saying she and her friends want to be their wives -- and gets a reply saying they'd be happy to marry the girls, and asking them to send pictures, which she does. The episode ends with a shot of a skeevy old guy looking at their pictures with a horny cackle.

That's risque stuff, and Kutcher knows it will draw some disapproval given the teenagers in the audience: He told Jessica Guynn in the interview I linked to above, "I don't think content should parent children. I think parents should parent children. This doesn't go too far."

"Blah girls" may not be going "too far," (wherever that line is nowadays), but it is going to a place that we haven't yet comfortably gone as a culture. When the screen pans out to the back of the pedophile's head as he ogles the Blah Girls' pictures, it's hard not to have a moment of visceral, involuntary fear and revulsion. (I know they're cartoon characters!)

Maybe it's a good thing, that all the vulnerability inherent in female sexuality is something we can joke about now. As far as I know, for example, nothing in the mainstream has yet mined the humor in the supposed Middle School oral sex epidemic, as this little episode does.

But I wonder whether the Blah Girls' humor is bumping up against some still-tenacious cultural taboos. I still can't picture that episode (in a longer version, obviously) on any imaginable TV network, even cable -- or even in a movie theater.

—Maria Russo

Thanks to YouTube, the below video of Batman's televised mayoral debate with the Penguin, from the "Dizzoner the Penguin" episode of Adam West's 1966  "Batman," is gaining new currency.

The clip, first uploaded in early 2007, has been picked up by several political commentators and compared to recent debates between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. 

Besides being an amusing clip on its own -- the great Burgess Meredith turns in a virtuoso performance as  the Bilious Bird -- viewers have noted some chuckle-worthy parallels between this fictional debate and the real thing. 

In last week's face-off, moderator Bob Schieffer asked the candidates about the smears and personal attacks that have become a significant part of the discourse as the campaign winds up. 

"I think the tone of this campaign could've been very different," said McCain at the time. "And the fact is it's gotten pretty tough, and I regret some of the negative aspects of both campaigns."

Likewise, the Penguin starts out humbly enough: "Friends and fellow citizens, I want to give you my solemn word that there will be no mudslinging in this campaign. ... I intend to stick to the issues." 

But with that disclaimer out of the way, the Penguin wastes no time in getting to his point. "Now what are the issues? There's only one issue: Batman!"

"I suggest that behind that mask, Batman is, in reality, a dangerous criminal. Why else does he wear a mask? Why else does he conceal his past? Would you think about that a moment, my friends? Whenever you've seen Batman, who's he with? Criminals, that's who!"

McCain makes a similar pivot, this time to the controversial subjects of Obama's association with former radical Bill Ayers, a founder of Weather Underground who McCain called a "washed up terrorist."

"Senator Obama chose to associate with a guy who in 2001 said he wished he'd bombed more." McCain then draws links between Obama and the community organization ACORN, which, he says, is "maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

It's probably a comment on the predictability of this presidential campaign that it was anticipated by a 40-year-old TV show populated by wacky caricatures. Same hack script, same hack channel.

Unfortunately, Penguin's brilliant plan hits a snag. Afraid that his lead in the polls is shrinking, he kidnaps the Board of Elections so the vote cannot be certified. This scheme backfires, and Batman turns up to rescue the hostages ("Pengy, you said we associated with criminals.  So ... here we are." BOOM! POW! WHAMM!). 

Batman is elected but resigns to allow the current mayor to keep his position. But not before one of the major parties calls to offer him the presidential candidacy for 1968 -- exactly 40 Novembers ago. 

Exclaims Robin: "Bulging ballot boxes, Batman, that was some offer!"   

-- David Sarno

IBitePrettyHard is one of the best drummers around. I mean video game drummers. But check out this video of IBite playing the popular music simulation game Rock Band, which has taken Guitar Hero and added the option of playing drums and bass. Tell me the line that separates video drumming from the real thing isn't blurring out of existence:

You've just witnessed an "FC," or full combo, the Rock Band parlance for hitting every simulated note in perfect time, no errors. On the games' most difficult drum songs -- Rush's YYZ, for example -- that can mean thousands of stick movements and pedal kicks. 

The FC is the true currency of Rock Band and Guitar Hero mastery. Unless you can nail a song perfectly, you are not a true expert.

But it's drums, not guitar or bass, that are bridging the gap between fantasy video game versions of playing an instrument and the genuine article. The game's guitar is essentially a colorful game controller that operates nothing like its real-life counterpart. You can be the biggest Guitar Hero in the world, and still not be able to strum a "C." The complicated plucking, strumming and fretwork of playing guitar or bass is not well emulated by the five or six buttons boasted by the Rock Band guitar device.

But the Rock Band drum set is more or less a version of the kind of electronic drum kits that have been used by real drummers for years. Drumming is, in essence, banging sticks on surfaces, which is why real drummers are good at Rock Band and Rock Band drummers are, you know, real drummers.

IBite tells us in his YouTube profile that he's been playing real drums for 20 years, been in dozens of bands and played "around 1,000 gigs." A meter on his website shows that he has racked up 191 FCs on Rock Band's "Expert" level, at which the speed and number of notes are about the same as in the original songs.

You can see how illusory the real-fake division is in videos of DrumMania -- an arcade-style drum game from Asia in which players rip through songs at blazing speeds, following a video "note chart" that scrolls downward so fast it looks as though it exercises your eyes as much as it does your hands and feet.

— David Sarno

Watch your back, Bill O'Reilly, you've got a pretender to the throne of ire.  This newcomer is angrier, tougher and less scrupulous than you, and be worried: He's also much, much, much younger.

That's right, Little Bill is back.  Walking through the little door first flung open by child Web celeb Fred, the diminutive pundit has released his second video on FunnyorDie, this time featuring a brutal evisceration of liberal Congressman Barney Frank.  "You look like a Muppet," Little Bill yells at Frank before telling him that the economic crisis wouldn't have happened if Frank -- who is gay -- wasn't "busy hanging Tom Brady posters above his bed."

As Little Bill proved in the debut of the "Lil' O'Reilly Factor" -- a toxicogenic rant against hippie "pinhead" liberal gay anti-war left -- he is not to be toyed with.  "Your dirty sex makes God send hurricanes," he said.  "Go drive your electric cars into the ocean -- I hope you hit a whale on the way to France."  At the end Little Bill reprises a famed O'Reilly outtake, the one where the elder O'Reilly castigates a producer for some unclear teleprompter language:  "I can't read that!" yells Little Bill.   "We'll do it live!  We'll do it live!"

The cursing prevents us from linking to that original O'Reilly outtake (you can find it linked from Little Bill's page), but Big Bill's lively interview with Frank, now a mini-classic, is here.

UPDATE (4:00pm): Lil' Bill is the creation of the people at Fox's Spike Feresten's Talkshow, where he has made at least one "live" appearance. The Fox connection obviously raises the question of when Big Bill and Lil' Bill will go toe to toe.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

We're liking the cool new trend wherein big-time celebrities submit to informal, Web-based interviews, taking live questions directly from the virtual audience. The video site Seesmic has recently featured substantial interviews with John Cleese and Dennis Hopper. Though Cleese doesn't seem to understand the exact nature of the technology underlying the interview, he cheerfully submits to questions he's probably answered 10,000 times -- about how much of "Monty Python" was ad-libbed, whether he likes "Fawlty Towers" better, when or whether there will be a "Life of Brian" musical and, of course, the sum of 140 and 170.

In his interview with a French journalist, Hopper is somewhat less effusive -- evidenced by his trouble coming up with a joke on request ("I'm not a lot of laughs, you know?") -- but it's neat nonetheless to see him take a variety of questions from fans, sans the usual network TV quick-cut editing that leaves nothing but the best sound bites. Sometimes mediocre sound bites from interesting people are worth watching too.

--David Sarno

SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.

But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.

Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.

I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.

No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”

--Maria Russo

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

Prescient "Batman" episode nails the Obama-McCain race

Thanks to YouTube, the below video of Batman's televised mayoral debate with the Penguin, from the "Dizzoner the Penguin" episode of Adam West's 1966  "Batman," is gaining new currency.

The clip, first uploaded in early 2007, has been picked up by several political commentators and compared to recent debates between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. 

Besides being an amusing clip on its own -- the great Burgess Meredith turns in a virtuoso performance as  the Bilious Bird -- viewers have noted some chuckle-worthy parallels between this fictional debate and the real thing. 

In last week's face-off, moderator Bob Schieffer asked the candidates about the smears and personal attacks that have become a significant part of the discourse as the campaign winds up. 

"I think the tone of this campaign could've been very different," said McCain at the time. "And the fact is it's gotten pretty tough, and I regret some of the negative aspects of both campaigns."

Likewise, the Penguin starts out humbly enough: "Friends and fellow citizens, I want to give you my solemn word that there will be no mudslinging in this campaign. ... I intend to stick to the issues." 

But with that disclaimer out of the way, the Penguin wastes no time in getting to his point. "Now what are the issues? There's only one issue: Batman!"

"I suggest that behind that mask, Batman is, in reality, a dangerous criminal. Why else does he wear a mask? Why else does he conceal his past? Would you think about that a moment, my friends? Whenever you've seen Batman, who's he with? Criminals, that's who!"

McCain makes a similar pivot, this time to the controversial subjects of Obama's association with former radical Bill Ayers, a founder of Weather Underground who McCain called a "washed up terrorist."

"Senator Obama chose to associate with a guy who in 2001 said he wished he'd bombed more." McCain then draws links between Obama and the community organization ACORN, which, he says, is "maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

It's probably a comment on the predictability of this presidential campaign that it was anticipated by a 40-year-old TV show populated by wacky caricatures. Same hack script, same hack channel.

Unfortunately, Penguin's brilliant plan hits a snag. Afraid that his lead in the polls is shrinking, he kidnaps the Board of Elections so the vote cannot be certified. This scheme backfires, and Batman turns up to rescue the hostages ("Pengy, you said we associated with criminals.  So ... here we are." BOOM! POW! WHAMM!). 

Batman is elected but resigns to allow the current mayor to keep his position. But not before one of the major parties calls to offer him the presidential candidacy for 1968 -- exactly 40 Novembers ago. 

Exclaims Robin: "Bulging ballot boxes, Batman, that was some offer!"   

-- David Sarno

IBitePrettyHard is one of the best drummers around. I mean video game drummers. But check out this video of IBite playing the popular music simulation game Rock Band, which has taken Guitar Hero and added the option of playing drums and bass. Tell me the line that separates video drumming from the real thing isn't blurring out of existence:

You've just witnessed an "FC," or full combo, the Rock Band parlance for hitting every simulated note in perfect time, no errors. On the games' most difficult drum songs -- Rush's YYZ, for example -- that can mean thousands of stick movements and pedal kicks. 

The FC is the true currency of Rock Band and Guitar Hero mastery. Unless you can nail a song perfectly, you are not a true expert.

But it's drums, not guitar or bass, that are bridging the gap between fantasy video game versions of playing an instrument and the genuine article. The game's guitar is essentially a colorful game controller that operates nothing like its real-life counterpart. You can be the biggest Guitar Hero in the world, and still not be able to strum a "C." The complicated plucking, strumming and fretwork of playing guitar or bass is not well emulated by the five or six buttons boasted by the Rock Band guitar device.

But the Rock Band drum set is more or less a version of the kind of electronic drum kits that have been used by real drummers for years. Drumming is, in essence, banging sticks on surfaces, which is why real drummers are good at Rock Band and Rock Band drummers are, you know, real drummers.

IBite tells us in his YouTube profile that he's been playing real drums for 20 years, been in dozens of bands and played "around 1,000 gigs." A meter on his website shows that he has racked up 191 FCs on Rock Band's "Expert" level, at which the speed and number of notes are about the same as in the original songs.

You can see how illusory the real-fake division is in videos of DrumMania -- an arcade-style drum game from Asia in which players rip through songs at blazing speeds, following a video "note chart" that scrolls downward so fast it looks as though it exercises your eyes as much as it does your hands and feet.

— David Sarno

Watch your back, Bill O'Reilly, you've got a pretender to the throne of ire.  This newcomer is angrier, tougher and less scrupulous than you, and be worried: He's also much, much, much younger.

That's right, Little Bill is back.  Walking through the little door first flung open by child Web celeb Fred, the diminutive pundit has released his second video on FunnyorDie, this time featuring a brutal evisceration of liberal Congressman Barney Frank.  "You look like a Muppet," Little Bill yells at Frank before telling him that the economic crisis wouldn't have happened if Frank -- who is gay -- wasn't "busy hanging Tom Brady posters above his bed."

As Little Bill proved in the debut of the "Lil' O'Reilly Factor" -- a toxicogenic rant against hippie "pinhead" liberal gay anti-war left -- he is not to be toyed with.  "Your dirty sex makes God send hurricanes," he said.  "Go drive your electric cars into the ocean -- I hope you hit a whale on the way to France."  At the end Little Bill reprises a famed O'Reilly outtake, the one where the elder O'Reilly castigates a producer for some unclear teleprompter language:  "I can't read that!" yells Little Bill.   "We'll do it live!  We'll do it live!"

The cursing prevents us from linking to that original O'Reilly outtake (you can find it linked from Little Bill's page), but Big Bill's lively interview with Frank, now a mini-classic, is here.

UPDATE (4:00pm): Lil' Bill is the creation of the people at Fox's Spike Feresten's Talkshow, where he has made at least one "live" appearance. The Fox connection obviously raises the question of when Big Bill and Lil' Bill will go toe to toe.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

We're liking the cool new trend wherein big-time celebrities submit to informal, Web-based interviews, taking live questions directly from the virtual audience. The video site Seesmic has recently featured substantial interviews with John Cleese and Dennis Hopper. Though Cleese doesn't seem to understand the exact nature of the technology underlying the interview, he cheerfully submits to questions he's probably answered 10,000 times -- about how much of "Monty Python" was ad-libbed, whether he likes "Fawlty Towers" better, when or whether there will be a "Life of Brian" musical and, of course, the sum of 140 and 170.

In his interview with a French journalist, Hopper is somewhat less effusive -- evidenced by his trouble coming up with a joke on request ("I'm not a lot of laughs, you know?") -- but it's neat nonetheless to see him take a variety of questions from fans, sans the usual network TV quick-cut editing that leaves nothing but the best sound bites. Sometimes mediocre sound bites from interesting people are worth watching too.

--David Sarno

SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.

But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.

Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.

I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.

No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”

--Maria Russo

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

YouTube's Rock Band drum masters

IBitePrettyHard is one of the best drummers around. I mean video game drummers. But check out this video of IBite playing the popular music simulation game Rock Band, which has taken Guitar Hero and added the option of playing drums and bass. Tell me the line that separates video drumming from the real thing isn't blurring out of existence:

You've just witnessed an "FC," or full combo, the Rock Band parlance for hitting every simulated note in perfect time, no errors. On the games' most difficult drum songs -- Rush's YYZ, for example -- that can mean thousands of stick movements and pedal kicks. 

The FC is the true currency of Rock Band and Guitar Hero mastery. Unless you can nail a song perfectly, you are not a true expert.

But it's drums, not guitar or bass, that are bridging the gap between fantasy video game versions of playing an instrument and the genuine article. The game's guitar is essentially a colorful game controller that operates nothing like its real-life counterpart. You can be the biggest Guitar Hero in the world, and still not be able to strum a "C." The complicated plucking, strumming and fretwork of playing guitar or bass is not well emulated by the five or six buttons boasted by the Rock Band guitar device.

But the Rock Band drum set is more or less a version of the kind of electronic drum kits that have been used by real drummers for years. Drumming is, in essence, banging sticks on surfaces, which is why real drummers are good at Rock Band and Rock Band drummers are, you know, real drummers.

IBite tells us in his YouTube profile that he's been playing real drums for 20 years, been in dozens of bands and played "around 1,000 gigs." A meter on his website shows that he has racked up 191 FCs on Rock Band's "Expert" level, at which the speed and number of notes are about the same as in the original songs.

You can see how illusory the real-fake division is in videos of DrumMania -- an arcade-style drum game from Asia in which players rip through songs at blazing speeds, following a video "note chart" that scrolls downward so fast it looks as though it exercises your eyes as much as it does your hands and feet.

— David Sarno

Watch your back, Bill O'Reilly, you've got a pretender to the throne of ire.  This newcomer is angrier, tougher and less scrupulous than you, and be worried: He's also much, much, much younger.

That's right, Little Bill is back.  Walking through the little door first flung open by child Web celeb Fred, the diminutive pundit has released his second video on FunnyorDie, this time featuring a brutal evisceration of liberal Congressman Barney Frank.  "You look like a Muppet," Little Bill yells at Frank before telling him that the economic crisis wouldn't have happened if Frank -- who is gay -- wasn't "busy hanging Tom Brady posters above his bed."

As Little Bill proved in the debut of the "Lil' O'Reilly Factor" -- a toxicogenic rant against hippie "pinhead" liberal gay anti-war left -- he is not to be toyed with.  "Your dirty sex makes God send hurricanes," he said.  "Go drive your electric cars into the ocean -- I hope you hit a whale on the way to France."  At the end Little Bill reprises a famed O'Reilly outtake, the one where the elder O'Reilly castigates a producer for some unclear teleprompter language:  "I can't read that!" yells Little Bill.   "We'll do it live!  We'll do it live!"

The cursing prevents us from linking to that original O'Reilly outtake (you can find it linked from Little Bill's page), but Big Bill's lively interview with Frank, now a mini-classic, is here.

UPDATE (4:00pm): Lil' Bill is the creation of the people at Fox's Spike Feresten's Talkshow, where he has made at least one "live" appearance. The Fox connection obviously raises the question of when Big Bill and Lil' Bill will go toe to toe.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

We're liking the cool new trend wherein big-time celebrities submit to informal, Web-based interviews, taking live questions directly from the virtual audience. The video site Seesmic has recently featured substantial interviews with John Cleese and Dennis Hopper. Though Cleese doesn't seem to understand the exact nature of the technology underlying the interview, he cheerfully submits to questions he's probably answered 10,000 times -- about how much of "Monty Python" was ad-libbed, whether he likes "Fawlty Towers" better, when or whether there will be a "Life of Brian" musical and, of course, the sum of 140 and 170.

In his interview with a French journalist, Hopper is somewhat less effusive -- evidenced by his trouble coming up with a joke on request ("I'm not a lot of laughs, you know?") -- but it's neat nonetheless to see him take a variety of questions from fans, sans the usual network TV quick-cut editing that leaves nothing but the best sound bites. Sometimes mediocre sound bites from interesting people are worth watching too.

--David Sarno

SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.

But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.

Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.

I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.

No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”

--Maria Russo

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

Little Bill O'Reilly, prince of puny pundits

Watch your back, Bill O'Reilly, you've got a pretender to the throne of ire.  This newcomer is angrier, tougher and less scrupulous than you, and be worried: He's also much, much, much younger.

That's right, Little Bill is back.  Walking through the little door first flung open by child Web celeb Fred, the diminutive pundit has released his second video on FunnyorDie, this time featuring a brutal evisceration of liberal Congressman Barney Frank.  "You look like a Muppet," Little Bill yells at Frank before telling him that the economic crisis wouldn't have happened if Frank -- who is gay -- wasn't "busy hanging Tom Brady posters above his bed."

As Little Bill proved in the debut of the "Lil' O'Reilly Factor" -- a toxicogenic rant against hippie "pinhead" liberal gay anti-war left -- he is not to be toyed with.  "Your dirty sex makes God send hurricanes," he said.  "Go drive your electric cars into the ocean -- I hope you hit a whale on the way to France."  At the end Little Bill reprises a famed O'Reilly outtake, the one where the elder O'Reilly castigates a producer for some unclear teleprompter language:  "I can't read that!" yells Little Bill.   "We'll do it live!  We'll do it live!"

The cursing prevents us from linking to that original O'Reilly outtake (you can find it linked from Little Bill's page), but Big Bill's lively interview with Frank, now a mini-classic, is here.

UPDATE (4:00pm): Lil' Bill is the creation of the people at Fox's Spike Feresten's Talkshow, where he has made at least one "live" appearance. The Fox connection obviously raises the question of when Big Bill and Lil' Bill will go toe to toe.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

We're liking the cool new trend wherein big-time celebrities submit to informal, Web-based interviews, taking live questions directly from the virtual audience. The video site Seesmic has recently featured substantial interviews with John Cleese and Dennis Hopper. Though Cleese doesn't seem to understand the exact nature of the technology underlying the interview, he cheerfully submits to questions he's probably answered 10,000 times -- about how much of "Monty Python" was ad-libbed, whether he likes "Fawlty Towers" better, when or whether there will be a "Life of Brian" musical and, of course, the sum of 140 and 170.

In his interview with a French journalist, Hopper is somewhat less effusive -- evidenced by his trouble coming up with a joke on request ("I'm not a lot of laughs, you know?") -- but it's neat nonetheless to see him take a variety of questions from fans, sans the usual network TV quick-cut editing that leaves nothing but the best sound bites. Sometimes mediocre sound bites from interesting people are worth watching too.

--David Sarno

SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.

But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.

Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.

I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.

No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”

--Maria Russo

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

John Cleese gives good Seesmic, Dennis Hopper too

We're liking the cool new trend wherein big-time celebrities submit to informal, Web-based interviews, taking live questions directly from the virtual audience. The video site Seesmic has recently featured substantial interviews with John Cleese and Dennis Hopper. Though Cleese doesn't seem to understand the exact nature of the technology underlying the interview, he cheerfully submits to questions he's probably answered 10,000 times -- about how much of "Monty Python" was ad-libbed, whether he likes "Fawlty Towers" better, when or whether there will be a "Life of Brian" musical and, of course, the sum of 140 and 170.

In his interview with a French journalist, Hopper is somewhat less effusive -- evidenced by his trouble coming up with a joke on request ("I'm not a lot of laughs, you know?") -- but it's neat nonetheless to see him take a variety of questions from fans, sans the usual network TV quick-cut editing that leaves nothing but the best sound bites. Sometimes mediocre sound bites from interesting people are worth watching too.

--David Sarno

SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.

But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.

Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.

I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.

No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”

--Maria Russo

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

LisaNova gives Tina Fey and SNL some competition

SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.

But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.

Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.

I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.

No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”

--Maria Russo

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

Brave New Films sues Michael Savage over YouTube takedown

Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.

The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you." 

Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.

The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.

According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report."  Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.

Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.

Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.

Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."

"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.

The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."

In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use. 

Related:

Why Obama and Clinton are YouTube stars

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

"Topps," "TMI": When three minutes is not enough/too much

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo