How a Horrible Doctor May Save Television
by Drew Kolar
Thanks to a crucial television event of the summer, the future of television may be changing as we know it-but its fate is luckily not too horrible.
Originally developed during the ever popular writers' strike, which curbed our television habit by taking many of our favorite shows off the air a year ago, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is an internet musical shown in three acts, produced by Joss Whedon (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame), his brothers Zack and Jed, and Jed's fiancé Maurissa Tancharoen. It stars Neil Patrick Harris as the "low-rent super villain" Dr. Horrible, Felicia Day as his love interest Penny, and Nathan Fillon as the Doctor's nemesis Captain Hammer, along with many of Joss's friends, family and co-workers filling in various roles.
The miniseries event premiered on July 15 on drhorrible.com and for sale on iTunes and very quickly became a hit, with a slew of fans crashing the website's server, as well as whedonesque.com, a Joss Whedon fan forum. It also hit the top ten TV shows on iTunes hours after it was posted. Many of the reviews of the musical since its debut seem to echo each other, praising the show for its originality and for Joss's ability to draw throngs of fans to anything he touches. But this is not a review, don't worry—I'll leave you to decide for yourself just how awesome Dr. Horrible really is. Regardless of your opinions, however, it is no doubt that the phenomenon marks a crucial first step into a new brand of television: television on the internet.
Sure, there are websites that feature theoretically less-than-legal means of watching your favorite prime time series, but it becomes a new story when a show is produced solely for the internet audience. Joss Whedon has taken this one step further, independently producing a show with a minimal budget and no corporate backing or advertising. Moreover, he presented Dr. Horrible for free between July 15 and 20 on the production's website. According to the "master plan" on the show's site, Joss wrote the musical during a time of frustration with the writers' strike, he rounded up "everyone [he] had worked with, was related to or had ever met" and "single-handedly created this unique little epic."
Though internet series have been done before, Dr. Horrible is unique in the amount of hype and the number of fans it has generated in so little time. Other online shows, such as USA's The Guild (also starring Felicia Day) or the ever-popular lonelygirl15 on YouTube, may have had a small following but not nearly the same obsessive backing that Joss Whedon productions garner. In truth, Dr. Horrible was created with this following in mind, though the uproar it has caused has grown much larger than anyone at Whedon's company Mutant Enemy could have dreamed.
Studio executives, according to Joss, were somewhat upset at the "free" idea, but the goal was to produce something for the fans and to show said executives "how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way." Of course, there will eventually be money in it for the team-the iTunes revenue is a good start, but there is also merchandising as well as plans for a future DVD release after the show has been taken offline. The free week, however, is definitely a treat to fans, especially with the moderately high-profile cast and crew and the high quality of production compared to other low budget internet series, which mostly use virtual unknowns and webcam-style videos.
But the main question remains: is this the future of television? This idea seems to have been bounced around a lot in recent years, but the overall production quality of most YouTube and MySpace-based shows is amateur at best. Internet viewers are also used to fast-paced, low-intelligence shorts rather than a full series or even a full episode. Most shows last an average of five or ten minutes an episode, and a season only spans eight or nine episodes at a time, and the plots are fairly ridiculous. Take God, Inc., for example, a comedy which portrays "God" as an office with different departments in control of Earth; or Chad Vader – Day Shift Manager, in which Darth Vader's younger brother, Chad, fights to control the day shift at his local supermarket.
Viral videos are yet another beast, gaining popularity out of a certain stupidity factor-someone doing something idiotic or ridiculous for a quick laugh. Internet viewers have, at one time or another, probably come across the "Star Wars Kid" or the "Numa Numa Song" or have been serenaded by Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain" or Samwell's "What What (In the Butt)." And of course, who could forget Chris Crocker's high-profile plea for us to "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!"?
So would a show like Dr. Horrible, which is high in comedy and drama as well as quality of acting actually survive a long run? Well, perhaps this is what Joss Whedon is trying to test with his 45-minute total musical piece. Though it is only three parts, each barely matching up to the time span of a regular half-hour series without commercials, it is already sold on iTunes with a "season pass," and fans seem to be wanting more. Such a short time is not really enough to develop any character fully, though it still seems to prove enthralling to viewers.
A full-out internet series may be a while away, and would probably not be free, but the Mutant Enemy crew seems to have helped to boost a trend. Perhaps more writers and directors need to test these waters, and push it even further. As for Joss, with the success his musical endeavors seem to have brought him so-far, there is only one logical next step: Broadway!
