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

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

Media is starting to look like some weird fractal zoom pattern where every tiny eyelet contains another, smaller universe of even tinier eyelets.

Evidence Revision3 Beta, the new webisode sandbox that web TV network Revision3 is officially launching Monday, where new amateur-ish shows can ride Revision3's brand power in a race to win bigger audiences. 

Given that online TV is often considered the farm league for offline TV, this means we now have a farm league within a farm league. And since several of the Revision3 beta shows themselves graduated from the YouTube-like Viddler video platform, you could extend the metaphor and say this is a farm league, cubed.

Shows like HackCollege (how to get through college more quickly and "without Adderall"), and "Bottles, Blends and Brews" (lots of drink reviews) are, production-wise, a half-step down from Revision3's already inexpensive web shows, but a half-step up from the legions of YouTube shows that are made for free. See what I'm saying? Until now, who knew that such a half-step even existed?

Anyone can submit their episodic show to Beta -- which says it is not putting a limit on the number of programs it will host. If your show is accepted, Revision3 gives you a production deal. (For an idea of how much/little money this involves, refer to the previous paragraph's half-step conceit). Still, the exposure Revision3 can offer to a show -- for one thing, a reprieve from the anonymity of infinity that is YouTube -- is itself a considerable boon to web producers. 

The site's initial slate, which offers mostly commentary and how-to type shows on music, food, finance, tech, and sexy things, feature hosts that are, again, better than YouTube little leaguers but perhaps not ready for the pros. In terms of who might eventually be drafted to the majors, I'm a fan of Walt, the guy who teaches you the basics of music theory faster than you can say sousaphone.

— David Sarno

Illeana Douglas and Justine Bateman contemplate the swedish meatballs in the cafeteria of the Ikea where they now work in "Easy to Assemble"   (Credit:: Easy to Assemble)

For the last year or so, amid the angsty teenagers talking into their webcams and the skateboarding dogs, you could find professionally made Web series scattered around if you knew where to look, and when. But this month and next, there’s a critical mass approaching: Hollywood is bringing out what you might call the first “new season” of spiffy, corporate-backed Web series designed to be watched on your computer.

There’s now a clear line between amateur “user-generated content” and the new wave. On one side, you have the YouTube revolution in all its rough-edged glory. On the other are slick, premium productions coming from Web teams at Warner Bros., Sony and HBO, and from hopped-up bands of writers and directors who were motivated by the writers’ strike to land corporate sponsorship and create their own shows. Many can boast celebrity names on camera, behind the scenes or both.

The professionalism of the new Web series comes at a price — literally. Just like regular TV, you can’t escape the commercial element. Some are “branded entertainment,” in which the creators have struck a deal with a sponsor to integrate the product into the show. At this early stage of the business model, the debate among those involved with Web series is how to make that corporate presence feel “organic” to the show. It’s a raging debate for TV and movies, too, but on the Web the stakes are even higher — because annoy users, and clicking away from a site is even easier and more constantly tempting than changing the channel on a TV.

So what does a Web series look like? At this point, the main characteristic linking the various kinds of shows vying for your clicks — scripted and unscripted dramas and comedies, talk shows, news shows, animated shows — is brevity. The range, so far, seems to be from 1 1/2-minute bites to 10- or 11-minute snacks, with three minutes emerging as the length à la mode. Such blink-and-they’re-over shows rely on super-fast editing: short scenes, quick transitions (or no transitions). But some shows are already shrugging off that conventional wisdom about the automatic ADD of Web viewers and letting rip for eight to 10 minutes — and that gamble seems to be paying off.

Here’s a look at eight noteworthy, new Web series...

With the debut Tuesday of "The Groundlings," the Web series by the L.A. comedy troupe of the same name, the second season of Crackle.com's C-Spot lineup continues to gather momentum (info on the first season here). The series' first sketch, "Tapped," milks a glass of humor out of the eminently unhumorous possibility that government spooks are listening to regular people's phone conversations.

Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, hosts of "Tekzilla." (Photo credit: Dave Getzschman / For the Los Angeles Times.)

I've a feeling we’re not in Hollywood anymore.

But you might like it here too, Toto. This is Dogpatch, the bayside sliver of east San Francisco that’s home to the Internet TV start-up Revision3. Through the doors of this old brick warehouse and up the stairs, there’s a roomful of people who make a point of ignoring the old rules of the television business. Starting with the TV part. Revision3 is home to 19 original shows, 10 of which are filmed weekly in its on-site studio. But you won’t find any of them by flipping channels.

You see, here in Dogpatch, they’re setting television free — releasing the concept from its poison prison of glass and metal, so it can return to its native meaning: watching from anywhere.

And so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.

“What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”

Revision3 owes that approach to another pioneering enterprise of which it’s a genetic descendant. The now-defunct cable network TechTV built a loyal audience earlier in the decade and minted many of the technology world’s best-known stars. A half-dozen TechTV alumni, including Rose and Louderback, currently fill Revision3’s roster.

But even with the overlap and the similar programming philosophy, it’s a lot different this time, said Patrick Norton, who got his television start at TechTV and now co-hosts Revision3’s popular techno-variety show “Tekzilla.”

“It’s incredibly expensive to launch a new cable channel,” Norton said. “Even if you do spend an enormous amount of money these days, you’re probably going to end up in the nosebleed sections of digital cable. “Our studio cost nothing by comparison,” Norton said of Revision3’s state-of-the-art, high-definition setup. “And by being online, we can target anyone with a broadband connection, which gives us huge potential audience all across the United States without having to sign a single distribution deal.”

But Revision3’s biggest asset is its stable of Web personalities who — even if they’re not familiar to the general public — are ubiquitous in tech circles. Louderback points to a website called Twitterholic, which tracks the 100 most popular users on the messaging service Twitter.

The "Dr. Horrible" creators sent me some data about the number of views/streams for the three acts of "Dr. Horrible." Apparently, there is some lag in the way the Hulu streams are tabulated (the show streamed through the Hulu player), so these may not reflect the final totals. The show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run. The creators are deciding how and when to re-post the show. Numbers:

Act One*: 1,149,846 streams
Act Two: 625,552 streams
Act Three: 427,785 streams

*This total would probably be quite a bit higher if DrHorrible.com hadn't crashed for most of a day last week.  The above totals also exclude iTunes downloads; the "Dr. Horrible" episodes have been among iTunes' most downloaded TV shows since they premiered.

Two and a quarter million streams in five days -- or about 450,000 streams a day -- is a significant  number, especially for clips that are 15 minutes long. To compare, this week's most-viewed videos on YouTube:

1) "College" movie trailer -- 800,000 views in two days. (I watched this. Really?)
2) Fans raving about "Dark Knight" -- 600,000 views in five days (This too. Double really?)
3) Smosh's Food Battle trailer -- 550,000 views in four days (This three. Single really again.)

So that's a total of about 1.95 million views for the top three over five days, while Dr. Horrible scored closer to 2.2 million. This is not an exact comparison because the YouTube clips were not linked by a brand (though two of them were associated with movie advertising campaigns, one of which was among the biggest ever). Still, the viewership numbers paint a reasonable picture of how many views the Internet's most-watched videos can generate in an average week. 

Conclusion: "Dr. Horrible" was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending a dollar on paid promotion. It would've been nice to see how many more views the show could've racked up if it had stayed live, but the producers should be able to leverage the initial success to get some advertising for the second run.

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Photo: Amy Opoka

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

"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

Media is starting to look like some weird fractal zoom pattern where every tiny eyelet contains another, smaller universe of even tinier eyelets.

Evidence Revision3 Beta, the new webisode sandbox that web TV network Revision3 is officially launching Monday, where new amateur-ish shows can ride Revision3's brand power in a race to win bigger audiences. 

Given that online TV is often considered the farm league for offline TV, this means we now have a farm league within a farm league. And since several of the Revision3 beta shows themselves graduated from the YouTube-like Viddler video platform, you could extend the metaphor and say this is a farm league, cubed.

Shows like HackCollege (how to get through college more quickly and "without Adderall"), and "Bottles, Blends and Brews" (lots of drink reviews) are, production-wise, a half-step down from Revision3's already inexpensive web shows, but a half-step up from the legions of YouTube shows that are made for free. See what I'm saying? Until now, who knew that such a half-step even existed?

Anyone can submit their episodic show to Beta -- which says it is not putting a limit on the number of programs it will host. If your show is accepted, Revision3 gives you a production deal. (For an idea of how much/little money this involves, refer to the previous paragraph's half-step conceit). Still, the exposure Revision3 can offer to a show -- for one thing, a reprieve from the anonymity of infinity that is YouTube -- is itself a considerable boon to web producers. 

The site's initial slate, which offers mostly commentary and how-to type shows on music, food, finance, tech, and sexy things, feature hosts that are, again, better than YouTube little leaguers but perhaps not ready for the pros. In terms of who might eventually be drafted to the majors, I'm a fan of Walt, the guy who teaches you the basics of music theory faster than you can say sousaphone.

— David Sarno

Illeana Douglas and Justine Bateman contemplate the swedish meatballs in the cafeteria of the Ikea where they now work in "Easy to Assemble"   (Credit:: Easy to Assemble)

For the last year or so, amid the angsty teenagers talking into their webcams and the skateboarding dogs, you could find professionally made Web series scattered around if you knew where to look, and when. But this month and next, there’s a critical mass approaching: Hollywood is bringing out what you might call the first “new season” of spiffy, corporate-backed Web series designed to be watched on your computer.

There’s now a clear line between amateur “user-generated content” and the new wave. On one side, you have the YouTube revolution in all its rough-edged glory. On the other are slick, premium productions coming from Web teams at Warner Bros., Sony and HBO, and from hopped-up bands of writers and directors who were motivated by the writers’ strike to land corporate sponsorship and create their own shows. Many can boast celebrity names on camera, behind the scenes or both.

The professionalism of the new Web series comes at a price — literally. Just like regular TV, you can’t escape the commercial element. Some are “branded entertainment,” in which the creators have struck a deal with a sponsor to integrate the product into the show. At this early stage of the business model, the debate among those involved with Web series is how to make that corporate presence feel “organic” to the show. It’s a raging debate for TV and movies, too, but on the Web the stakes are even higher — because annoy users, and clicking away from a site is even easier and more constantly tempting than changing the channel on a TV.

So what does a Web series look like? At this point, the main characteristic linking the various kinds of shows vying for your clicks — scripted and unscripted dramas and comedies, talk shows, news shows, animated shows — is brevity. The range, so far, seems to be from 1 1/2-minute bites to 10- or 11-minute snacks, with three minutes emerging as the length à la mode. Such blink-and-they’re-over shows rely on super-fast editing: short scenes, quick transitions (or no transitions). But some shows are already shrugging off that conventional wisdom about the automatic ADD of Web viewers and letting rip for eight to 10 minutes — and that gamble seems to be paying off.

Here’s a look at eight noteworthy, new Web series...

With the debut Tuesday of "The Groundlings," the Web series by the L.A. comedy troupe of the same name, the second season of Crackle.com's C-Spot lineup continues to gather momentum (info on the first season here). The series' first sketch, "Tapped," milks a glass of humor out of the eminently unhumorous possibility that government spooks are listening to regular people's phone conversations.

Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, hosts of "Tekzilla." (Photo credit: Dave Getzschman / For the Los Angeles Times.)

I've a feeling we’re not in Hollywood anymore.

But you might like it here too, Toto. This is Dogpatch, the bayside sliver of east San Francisco that’s home to the Internet TV start-up Revision3. Through the doors of this old brick warehouse and up the stairs, there’s a roomful of people who make a point of ignoring the old rules of the television business. Starting with the TV part. Revision3 is home to 19 original shows, 10 of which are filmed weekly in its on-site studio. But you won’t find any of them by flipping channels.

You see, here in Dogpatch, they’re setting television free — releasing the concept from its poison prison of glass and metal, so it can return to its native meaning: watching from anywhere.

And so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.

“What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”

Revision3 owes that approach to another pioneering enterprise of which it’s a genetic descendant. The now-defunct cable network TechTV built a loyal audience earlier in the decade and minted many of the technology world’s best-known stars. A half-dozen TechTV alumni, including Rose and Louderback, currently fill Revision3’s roster.

But even with the overlap and the similar programming philosophy, it’s a lot different this time, said Patrick Norton, who got his television start at TechTV and now co-hosts Revision3’s popular techno-variety show “Tekzilla.”

“It’s incredibly expensive to launch a new cable channel,” Norton said. “Even if you do spend an enormous amount of money these days, you’re probably going to end up in the nosebleed sections of digital cable. “Our studio cost nothing by comparison,” Norton said of Revision3’s state-of-the-art, high-definition setup. “And by being online, we can target anyone with a broadband connection, which gives us huge potential audience all across the United States without having to sign a single distribution deal.”

But Revision3’s biggest asset is its stable of Web personalities who — even if they’re not familiar to the general public — are ubiquitous in tech circles. Louderback points to a website called Twitterholic, which tracks the 100 most popular users on the messaging service Twitter.

The "Dr. Horrible" creators sent me some data about the number of views/streams for the three acts of "Dr. Horrible." Apparently, there is some lag in the way the Hulu streams are tabulated (the show streamed through the Hulu player), so these may not reflect the final totals. The show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run. The creators are deciding how and when to re-post the show. Numbers:

Act One*: 1,149,846 streams
Act Two: 625,552 streams
Act Three: 427,785 streams

*This total would probably be quite a bit higher if DrHorrible.com hadn't crashed for most of a day last week.  The above totals also exclude iTunes downloads; the "Dr. Horrible" episodes have been among iTunes' most downloaded TV shows since they premiered.

Two and a quarter million streams in five days -- or about 450,000 streams a day -- is a significant  number, especially for clips that are 15 minutes long. To compare, this week's most-viewed videos on YouTube:

1) "College" movie trailer -- 800,000 views in two days. (I watched this. Really?)
2) Fans raving about "Dark Knight" -- 600,000 views in five days (This too. Double really?)
3) Smosh's Food Battle trailer -- 550,000 views in four days (This three. Single really again.)

So that's a total of about 1.95 million views for the top three over five days, while Dr. Horrible scored closer to 2.2 million. This is not an exact comparison because the YouTube clips were not linked by a brand (though two of them were associated with movie advertising campaigns, one of which was among the biggest ever). Still, the viewership numbers paint a reasonable picture of how many views the Internet's most-watched videos can generate in an average week. 

Conclusion: "Dr. Horrible" was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending a dollar on paid promotion. It would've been nice to see how many more views the show could've racked up if it had stayed live, but the producers should be able to leverage the initial success to get some advertising for the second run.

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Photo: Amy Opoka

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Revision3 Beta, the minor league for webisodes

Media is starting to look like some weird fractal zoom pattern where every tiny eyelet contains another, smaller universe of even tinier eyelets.

Evidence Revision3 Beta, the new webisode sandbox that web TV network Revision3 is officially launching Monday, where new amateur-ish shows can ride Revision3's brand power in a race to win bigger audiences. 

Given that online TV is often considered the farm league for offline TV, this means we now have a farm league within a farm league. And since several of the Revision3 beta shows themselves graduated from the YouTube-like Viddler video platform, you could extend the metaphor and say this is a farm league, cubed.

Shows like HackCollege (how to get through college more quickly and "without Adderall"), and "Bottles, Blends and Brews" (lots of drink reviews) are, production-wise, a half-step down from Revision3's already inexpensive web shows, but a half-step up from the legions of YouTube shows that are made for free. See what I'm saying? Until now, who knew that such a half-step even existed?

Anyone can submit their episodic show to Beta -- which says it is not putting a limit on the number of programs it will host. If your show is accepted, Revision3 gives you a production deal. (For an idea of how much/little money this involves, refer to the previous paragraph's half-step conceit). Still, the exposure Revision3 can offer to a show -- for one thing, a reprieve from the anonymity of infinity that is YouTube -- is itself a considerable boon to web producers. 

The site's initial slate, which offers mostly commentary and how-to type shows on music, food, finance, tech, and sexy things, feature hosts that are, again, better than YouTube little leaguers but perhaps not ready for the pros. In terms of who might eventually be drafted to the majors, I'm a fan of Walt, the guy who teaches you the basics of music theory faster than you can say sousaphone.

— David Sarno

Illeana Douglas and Justine Bateman contemplate the swedish meatballs in the cafeteria of the Ikea where they now work in "Easy to Assemble"   (Credit:: Easy to Assemble)

For the last year or so, amid the angsty teenagers talking into their webcams and the skateboarding dogs, you could find professionally made Web series scattered around if you knew where to look, and when. But this month and next, there’s a critical mass approaching: Hollywood is bringing out what you might call the first “new season” of spiffy, corporate-backed Web series designed to be watched on your computer.

There’s now a clear line between amateur “user-generated content” and the new wave. On one side, you have the YouTube revolution in all its rough-edged glory. On the other are slick, premium productions coming from Web teams at Warner Bros., Sony and HBO, and from hopped-up bands of writers and directors who were motivated by the writers’ strike to land corporate sponsorship and create their own shows. Many can boast celebrity names on camera, behind the scenes or both.

The professionalism of the new Web series comes at a price — literally. Just like regular TV, you can’t escape the commercial element. Some are “branded entertainment,” in which the creators have struck a deal with a sponsor to integrate the product into the show. At this early stage of the business model, the debate among those involved with Web series is how to make that corporate presence feel “organic” to the show. It’s a raging debate for TV and movies, too, but on the Web the stakes are even higher — because annoy users, and clicking away from a site is even easier and more constantly tempting than changing the channel on a TV.

So what does a Web series look like? At this point, the main characteristic linking the various kinds of shows vying for your clicks — scripted and unscripted dramas and comedies, talk shows, news shows, animated shows — is brevity. The range, so far, seems to be from 1 1/2-minute bites to 10- or 11-minute snacks, with three minutes emerging as the length à la mode. Such blink-and-they’re-over shows rely on super-fast editing: short scenes, quick transitions (or no transitions). But some shows are already shrugging off that conventional wisdom about the automatic ADD of Web viewers and letting rip for eight to 10 minutes — and that gamble seems to be paying off.

Here’s a look at eight noteworthy, new Web series...

With the debut Tuesday of "The Groundlings," the Web series by the L.A. comedy troupe of the same name, the second season of Crackle.com's C-Spot lineup continues to gather momentum (info on the first season here). The series' first sketch, "Tapped," milks a glass of humor out of the eminently unhumorous possibility that government spooks are listening to regular people's phone conversations.

Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, hosts of "Tekzilla." (Photo credit: Dave Getzschman / For the Los Angeles Times.)

I've a feeling we’re not in Hollywood anymore.

But you might like it here too, Toto. This is Dogpatch, the bayside sliver of east San Francisco that’s home to the Internet TV start-up Revision3. Through the doors of this old brick warehouse and up the stairs, there’s a roomful of people who make a point of ignoring the old rules of the television business. Starting with the TV part. Revision3 is home to 19 original shows, 10 of which are filmed weekly in its on-site studio. But you won’t find any of them by flipping channels.

You see, here in Dogpatch, they’re setting television free — releasing the concept from its poison prison of glass and metal, so it can return to its native meaning: watching from anywhere.

And so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.

“What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”

Revision3 owes that approach to another pioneering enterprise of which it’s a genetic descendant. The now-defunct cable network TechTV built a loyal audience earlier in the decade and minted many of the technology world’s best-known stars. A half-dozen TechTV alumni, including Rose and Louderback, currently fill Revision3’s roster.

But even with the overlap and the similar programming philosophy, it’s a lot different this time, said Patrick Norton, who got his television start at TechTV and now co-hosts Revision3’s popular techno-variety show “Tekzilla.”

“It’s incredibly expensive to launch a new cable channel,” Norton said. “Even if you do spend an enormous amount of money these days, you’re probably going to end up in the nosebleed sections of digital cable. “Our studio cost nothing by comparison,” Norton said of Revision3’s state-of-the-art, high-definition setup. “And by being online, we can target anyone with a broadband connection, which gives us huge potential audience all across the United States without having to sign a single distribution deal.”

But Revision3’s biggest asset is its stable of Web personalities who — even if they’re not familiar to the general public — are ubiquitous in tech circles. Louderback points to a website called Twitterholic, which tracks the 100 most popular users on the messaging service Twitter.

The "Dr. Horrible" creators sent me some data about the number of views/streams for the three acts of "Dr. Horrible." Apparently, there is some lag in the way the Hulu streams are tabulated (the show streamed through the Hulu player), so these may not reflect the final totals. The show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run. The creators are deciding how and when to re-post the show. Numbers:

Act One*: 1,149,846 streams
Act Two: 625,552 streams
Act Three: 427,785 streams

*This total would probably be quite a bit higher if DrHorrible.com hadn't crashed for most of a day last week.  The above totals also exclude iTunes downloads; the "Dr. Horrible" episodes have been among iTunes' most downloaded TV shows since they premiered.

Two and a quarter million streams in five days -- or about 450,000 streams a day -- is a significant  number, especially for clips that are 15 minutes long. To compare, this week's most-viewed videos on YouTube:

1) "College" movie trailer -- 800,000 views in two days. (I watched this. Really?)
2) Fans raving about "Dark Knight" -- 600,000 views in five days (This too. Double really?)
3) Smosh's Food Battle trailer -- 550,000 views in four days (This three. Single really again.)

So that's a total of about 1.95 million views for the top three over five days, while Dr. Horrible scored closer to 2.2 million. This is not an exact comparison because the YouTube clips were not linked by a brand (though two of them were associated with movie advertising campaigns, one of which was among the biggest ever). Still, the viewership numbers paint a reasonable picture of how many views the Internet's most-watched videos can generate in an average week. 

Conclusion: "Dr. Horrible" was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending a dollar on paid promotion. It would've been nice to see how many more views the show could've racked up if it had stayed live, but the producers should be able to leverage the initial success to get some advertising for the second run.

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Photo: Amy Opoka

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

New "season" of web series is most mature yet

Illeana Douglas and Justine Bateman contemplate the swedish meatballs in the cafeteria of the Ikea where they now work in "Easy to Assemble"   (Credit:: Easy to Assemble)

For the last year or so, amid the angsty teenagers talking into their webcams and the skateboarding dogs, you could find professionally made Web series scattered around if you knew where to look, and when. But this month and next, there’s a critical mass approaching: Hollywood is bringing out what you might call the first “new season” of spiffy, corporate-backed Web series designed to be watched on your computer.

There’s now a clear line between amateur “user-generated content” and the new wave. On one side, you have the YouTube revolution in all its rough-edged glory. On the other are slick, premium productions coming from Web teams at Warner Bros., Sony and HBO, and from hopped-up bands of writers and directors who were motivated by the writers’ strike to land corporate sponsorship and create their own shows. Many can boast celebrity names on camera, behind the scenes or both.

The professionalism of the new Web series comes at a price — literally. Just like regular TV, you can’t escape the commercial element. Some are “branded entertainment,” in which the creators have struck a deal with a sponsor to integrate the product into the show. At this early stage of the business model, the debate among those involved with Web series is how to make that corporate presence feel “organic” to the show. It’s a raging debate for TV and movies, too, but on the Web the stakes are even higher — because annoy users, and clicking away from a site is even easier and more constantly tempting than changing the channel on a TV.

So what does a Web series look like? At this point, the main characteristic linking the various kinds of shows vying for your clicks — scripted and unscripted dramas and comedies, talk shows, news shows, animated shows — is brevity. The range, so far, seems to be from 1 1/2-minute bites to 10- or 11-minute snacks, with three minutes emerging as the length à la mode. Such blink-and-they’re-over shows rely on super-fast editing: short scenes, quick transitions (or no transitions). But some shows are already shrugging off that conventional wisdom about the automatic ADD of Web viewers and letting rip for eight to 10 minutes — and that gamble seems to be paying off.

Here’s a look at eight noteworthy, new Web series...

With the debut Tuesday of "The Groundlings," the Web series by the L.A. comedy troupe of the same name, the second season of Crackle.com's C-Spot lineup continues to gather momentum (info on the first season here). The series' first sketch, "Tapped," milks a glass of humor out of the eminently unhumorous possibility that government spooks are listening to regular people's phone conversations.

Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, hosts of "Tekzilla." (Photo credit: Dave Getzschman / For the Los Angeles Times.)

I've a feeling we’re not in Hollywood anymore.

But you might like it here too, Toto. This is Dogpatch, the bayside sliver of east San Francisco that’s home to the Internet TV start-up Revision3. Through the doors of this old brick warehouse and up the stairs, there’s a roomful of people who make a point of ignoring the old rules of the television business. Starting with the TV part. Revision3 is home to 19 original shows, 10 of which are filmed weekly in its on-site studio. But you won’t find any of them by flipping channels.

You see, here in Dogpatch, they’re setting television free — releasing the concept from its poison prison of glass and metal, so it can return to its native meaning: watching from anywhere.

And so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.

“What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”

Revision3 owes that approach to another pioneering enterprise of which it’s a genetic descendant. The now-defunct cable network TechTV built a loyal audience earlier in the decade and minted many of the technology world’s best-known stars. A half-dozen TechTV alumni, including Rose and Louderback, currently fill Revision3’s roster.

But even with the overlap and the similar programming philosophy, it’s a lot different this time, said Patrick Norton, who got his television start at TechTV and now co-hosts Revision3’s popular techno-variety show “Tekzilla.”

“It’s incredibly expensive to launch a new cable channel,” Norton said. “Even if you do spend an enormous amount of money these days, you’re probably going to end up in the nosebleed sections of digital cable. “Our studio cost nothing by comparison,” Norton said of Revision3’s state-of-the-art, high-definition setup. “And by being online, we can target anyone with a broadband connection, which gives us huge potential audience all across the United States without having to sign a single distribution deal.”

But Revision3’s biggest asset is its stable of Web personalities who — even if they’re not familiar to the general public — are ubiquitous in tech circles. Louderback points to a website called Twitterholic, which tracks the 100 most popular users on the messaging service Twitter.

The "Dr. Horrible" creators sent me some data about the number of views/streams for the three acts of "Dr. Horrible." Apparently, there is some lag in the way the Hulu streams are tabulated (the show streamed through the Hulu player), so these may not reflect the final totals. The show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run. The creators are deciding how and when to re-post the show. Numbers:

Act One*: 1,149,846 streams
Act Two: 625,552 streams
Act Three: 427,785 streams

*This total would probably be quite a bit higher if DrHorrible.com hadn't crashed for most of a day last week.  The above totals also exclude iTunes downloads; the "Dr. Horrible" episodes have been among iTunes' most downloaded TV shows since they premiered.

Two and a quarter million streams in five days -- or about 450,000 streams a day -- is a significant  number, especially for clips that are 15 minutes long. To compare, this week's most-viewed videos on YouTube:

1) "College" movie trailer -- 800,000 views in two days. (I watched this. Really?)
2) Fans raving about "Dark Knight" -- 600,000 views in five days (This too. Double really?)
3) Smosh's Food Battle trailer -- 550,000 views in four days (This three. Single really again.)

So that's a total of about 1.95 million views for the top three over five days, while Dr. Horrible scored closer to 2.2 million. This is not an exact comparison because the YouTube clips were not linked by a brand (though two of them were associated with movie advertising campaigns, one of which was among the biggest ever). Still, the viewership numbers paint a reasonable picture of how many views the Internet's most-watched videos can generate in an average week. 

Conclusion: "Dr. Horrible" was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending a dollar on paid promotion. It would've been nice to see how many more views the show could've racked up if it had stayed live, but the producers should be able to leverage the initial success to get some advertising for the second run.

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Photo: Amy Opoka

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

'Groundlings' Web show lands well

With the debut Tuesday of "The Groundlings," the Web series by the L.A. comedy troupe of the same name, the second season of Crackle.com's C-Spot lineup continues to gather momentum (info on the first season here). The series' first sketch, "Tapped," milks a glass of humor out of the eminently unhumorous possibility that government spooks are listening to regular people's phone conversations.

Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, hosts of "Tekzilla." (Photo credit: Dave Getzschman / For the Los Angeles Times.)

I've a feeling we’re not in Hollywood anymore.

But you might like it here too, Toto. This is Dogpatch, the bayside sliver of east San Francisco that’s home to the Internet TV start-up Revision3. Through the doors of this old brick warehouse and up the stairs, there’s a roomful of people who make a point of ignoring the old rules of the television business. Starting with the TV part. Revision3 is home to 19 original shows, 10 of which are filmed weekly in its on-site studio. But you won’t find any of them by flipping channels.

You see, here in Dogpatch, they’re setting television free — releasing the concept from its poison prison of glass and metal, so it can return to its native meaning: watching from anywhere.

And so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.

“What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”

Revision3 owes that approach to another pioneering enterprise of which it’s a genetic descendant. The now-defunct cable network TechTV built a loyal audience earlier in the decade and minted many of the technology world’s best-known stars. A half-dozen TechTV alumni, including Rose and Louderback, currently fill Revision3’s roster.

But even with the overlap and the similar programming philosophy, it’s a lot different this time, said Patrick Norton, who got his television start at TechTV and now co-hosts Revision3’s popular techno-variety show “Tekzilla.”

“It’s incredibly expensive to launch a new cable channel,” Norton said. “Even if you do spend an enormous amount of money these days, you’re probably going to end up in the nosebleed sections of digital cable. “Our studio cost nothing by comparison,” Norton said of Revision3’s state-of-the-art, high-definition setup. “And by being online, we can target anyone with a broadband connection, which gives us huge potential audience all across the United States without having to sign a single distribution deal.”

But Revision3’s biggest asset is its stable of Web personalities who — even if they’re not familiar to the general public — are ubiquitous in tech circles. Louderback points to a website called Twitterholic, which tracks the 100 most popular users on the messaging service Twitter.

The "Dr. Horrible" creators sent me some data about the number of views/streams for the three acts of "Dr. Horrible." Apparently, there is some lag in the way the Hulu streams are tabulated (the show streamed through the Hulu player), so these may not reflect the final totals. The show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run. The creators are deciding how and when to re-post the show. Numbers:

Act One*: 1,149,846 streams
Act Two: 625,552 streams
Act Three: 427,785 streams

*This total would probably be quite a bit higher if DrHorrible.com hadn't crashed for most of a day last week.  The above totals also exclude iTunes downloads; the "Dr. Horrible" episodes have been among iTunes' most downloaded TV shows since they premiered.

Two and a quarter million streams in five days -- or about 450,000 streams a day -- is a significant  number, especially for clips that are 15 minutes long. To compare, this week's most-viewed videos on YouTube:

1) "College" movie trailer -- 800,000 views in two days. (I watched this. Really?)
2) Fans raving about "Dark Knight" -- 600,000 views in five days (This too. Double really?)
3) Smosh's Food Battle trailer -- 550,000 views in four days (This three. Single really again.)

So that's a total of about 1.95 million views for the top three over five days, while Dr. Horrible scored closer to 2.2 million. This is not an exact comparison because the YouTube clips were not linked by a brand (though two of them were associated with movie advertising campaigns, one of which was among the biggest ever). Still, the viewership numbers paint a reasonable picture of how many views the Internet's most-watched videos can generate in an average week. 

Conclusion: "Dr. Horrible" was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending a dollar on paid promotion. It would've been nice to see how many more views the show could've racked up if it had stayed live, but the producers should be able to leverage the initial success to get some advertising for the second run.

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Photo: Amy Opoka

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Revision3's web TV runs on star power

Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, hosts of "Tekzilla." (Photo credit: Dave Getzschman / For the Los Angeles Times.)

I've a feeling we’re not in Hollywood anymore.

But you might like it here too, Toto. This is Dogpatch, the bayside sliver of east San Francisco that’s home to the Internet TV start-up Revision3. Through the doors of this old brick warehouse and up the stairs, there’s a roomful of people who make a point of ignoring the old rules of the television business. Starting with the TV part. Revision3 is home to 19 original shows, 10 of which are filmed weekly in its on-site studio. But you won’t find any of them by flipping channels.

You see, here in Dogpatch, they’re setting television free — releasing the concept from its poison prison of glass and metal, so it can return to its native meaning: watching from anywhere.

And so far, people are. Revision3 was started in 2005 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the guys behind Digg.com, the popular site where users vote on the best news stories of the day. Rose co-hosts the show “Diggnation,” a weekly rundown of the site’s top stories, which Revision3 beams out to about 200,000 viewers per 40-minute episode. He has become a model for the kind of smart celebrity the technology scene loves — people who are entertaining while the camera’s rolling, and enterprising when it isn’t.

“What’s working are these host-driven shows,” said Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback. “The ones where you’ve got an engaging host with a proven ability to aggregate social networks around them online, and who are great at talking about their passions.”

Revision3 owes that approach to another pioneering enterprise of which it’s a genetic descendant. The now-defunct cable network TechTV built a loyal audience earlier in the decade and minted many of the technology world’s best-known stars. A half-dozen TechTV alumni, including Rose and Louderback, currently fill Revision3’s roster.

But even with the overlap and the similar programming philosophy, it’s a lot different this time, said Patrick Norton, who got his television start at TechTV and now co-hosts Revision3’s popular techno-variety show “Tekzilla.”

“It’s incredibly expensive to launch a new cable channel,” Norton said. “Even if you do spend an enormous amount of money these days, you’re probably going to end up in the nosebleed sections of digital cable. “Our studio cost nothing by comparison,” Norton said of Revision3’s state-of-the-art, high-definition setup. “And by being online, we can target anyone with a broadband connection, which gives us huge potential audience all across the United States without having to sign a single distribution deal.”

But Revision3’s biggest asset is its stable of Web personalities who — even if they’re not familiar to the general public — are ubiquitous in tech circles. Louderback points to a website called Twitterholic, which tracks the 100 most popular users on the messaging service Twitter.

The "Dr. Horrible" creators sent me some data about the number of views/streams for the three acts of "Dr. Horrible." Apparently, there is some lag in the way the Hulu streams are tabulated (the show streamed through the Hulu player), so these may not reflect the final totals. The show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run. The creators are deciding how and when to re-post the show. Numbers:

Act One*: 1,149,846 streams
Act Two: 625,552 streams
Act Three: 427,785 streams

*This total would probably be quite a bit higher if DrHorrible.com hadn't crashed for most of a day last week.  The above totals also exclude iTunes downloads; the "Dr. Horrible" episodes have been among iTunes' most downloaded TV shows since they premiered.

Two and a quarter million streams in five days -- or about 450,000 streams a day -- is a significant  number, especially for clips that are 15 minutes long. To compare, this week's most-viewed videos on YouTube:

1) "College" movie trailer -- 800,000 views in two days. (I watched this. Really?)
2) Fans raving about "Dark Knight" -- 600,000 views in five days (This too. Double really?)
3) Smosh's Food Battle trailer -- 550,000 views in four days (This three. Single really again.)

So that's a total of about 1.95 million views for the top three over five days, while Dr. Horrible scored closer to 2.2 million. This is not an exact comparison because the YouTube clips were not linked by a brand (though two of them were associated with movie advertising campaigns, one of which was among the biggest ever). Still, the viewership numbers paint a reasonable picture of how many views the Internet's most-watched videos can generate in an average week. 

Conclusion: "Dr. Horrible" was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending a dollar on paid promotion. It would've been nice to see how many more views the show could've racked up if it had stayed live, but the producers should be able to leverage the initial success to get some advertising for the second run.

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Photo: Amy Opoka

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Initial traffic numbers for 'Dr. Horrible'

The "Dr. Horrible" creators sent me some data about the number of views/streams for the three acts of "Dr. Horrible." Apparently, there is some lag in the way the Hulu streams are tabulated (the show streamed through the Hulu player), so these may not reflect the final totals. The show was taken down Sunday night after a one-week run. The creators are deciding how and when to re-post the show. Numbers:

Act One*: 1,149,846 streams
Act Two: 625,552 streams
Act Three: 427,785 streams

*This total would probably be quite a bit higher if DrHorrible.com hadn't crashed for most of a day last week.  The above totals also exclude iTunes downloads; the "Dr. Horrible" episodes have been among iTunes' most downloaded TV shows since they premiered.

Two and a quarter million streams in five days -- or about 450,000 streams a day -- is a significant  number, especially for clips that are 15 minutes long. To compare, this week's most-viewed videos on YouTube:

1) "College" movie trailer -- 800,000 views in two days. (I watched this. Really?)
2) Fans raving about "Dark Knight" -- 600,000 views in five days (This too. Double really?)
3) Smosh's Food Battle trailer -- 550,000 views in four days (This three. Single really again.)

So that's a total of about 1.95 million views for the top three over five days, while Dr. Horrible scored closer to 2.2 million. This is not an exact comparison because the YouTube clips were not linked by a brand (though two of them were associated with movie advertising campaigns, one of which was among the biggest ever). Still, the viewership numbers paint a reasonable picture of how many views the Internet's most-watched videos can generate in an average week. 

Conclusion: "Dr. Horrible" was able to get YouTube-topping numbers without spending a dollar on paid promotion. It would've been nice to see how many more views the show could've racked up if it had stayed live, but the producers should be able to leverage the initial success to get some advertising for the second run.

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Photo: Amy Opoka

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

'Dr. Horrible' crashed after 'insanely huge' traffic

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' trailer hits the net

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.