Television comedy casts its net

With programmes that began life as web shorts being commissioned for full-length television series, the internet is becoming a prime source of new small-screen talent, writes SINÉAD GLEESON

WILL FERRELL AND his flatmate are shooting the breeze when there’s a knock at the door. “Who’s that?” asks the flatmate. “My landlord, Pearl. I’m late with my rent.” Uneasily, Ferrell opens the door – to a two-year-old girl, holding a bottle of beer, who harangues him about money. It’s bizarre, hilarious and one of the first offerings from

Funny or Die

, a show that started as a comedy website. It caught the attention of the US cable station HBO, which offered it a series.

Ferrell's involvement, as well as high-profile contributions from the actor James Franco and the director Judd Apatow, undoubtedly sealed the deal, but it showed that the overlap between television and the internet could extend to more than just Rude Tubeclip shows.

The same year that HBO and the Funny or Die site joined forces, a group named the Gregory Brothers were creating singing news reports, manipulating politicians’ voices. It was recently announced that their popular project, Auto-Tune the News, had been offered a behind-the-scenes pilot by Comedy Central.

Comedy, with its sketch format and one-liner pithiness, is a natural in terms of the web-to-TV leap. For commissioning editors and development executives constantly chasing elusive 18- to 24-year-olds, the web offers a stream of potential material.

The caveat is that reaching that happy TV-ratings ending involves kissing a lot of stand-up frogs to find a comedy prince. Last year RTÉ ran Project Ha-Ha, a pilot series that spawned The Savage Eyeand also featured Diet of Worms, a performance group who had previously aired much of their work online. This autumn RTÉ will screen Hardy Bucks, a comedy series born out of a web-drama competition, Storyland.

Established in October 2008, it invited applications for a drama series; the format saw participants make an episode, with a public vote after each round. For Eilish Kent, an RTÉ programme developer who came up with the idea, it was about finding new programme-makers as well as capturing the attention of a younger audience.

“Age-wise there’s a young, elusive audience who are not watching TV, so we wanted to encourage people making programmes online to engage with that audience. We encouraged directors to think in an episodic way. It wasn’t necessarily about looking for an online project that would work on TV; it was about finding that initial talent and seeing if it could be developed for television.”

Storyland was initially funded when the Shortcuts partnership between RTÉ and the Irish Film Board ended. Left with a reasonable budget, Kent and her colleagues in the drama department decided to use the money to foster new talent.

“In-house producers are always looking at what’s out there – they’re very aware of what’s going on – but RTÉ doesn’t have an online commissioning department,” says Kent. “With TV, trying to get work commissioned can seem intimidating and exclusive, but Storyland had an open-door policy and platform, so people from all around the country with varying levels of experience applied.”

DESPITE THE TIGHT filming schedules and basic budget, the first year attracted more than 130 applicants. These were whittled down to eight, with each given a budget of €8,000 per episode. Being outside of the traditional parameters of TV drama meant more fluidity for both sides. Working on an episodic basis meant content could be more timely, but there was a challenge in shooting on that basis.

Luke McManus, director of Psych Ward, a runner-up in the first Storyland competition, felt this first-hand. "It took crowd-sourcing to a logical conclusion, and we were all given so much creative control. It's unprecedented in commissioning, and it's an entirely different way of finding new programme-makers."

Storyland never specifically aimed to transfer what came out of the online competition directly to TV. It was more of starting point for work to be honed and developed (as with the upcoming Hardy Bucksseries). TV-internet crossover is still in its infancy, and there is also the ease with which the bigger medium can absorb the other.

Scott Gairdner, a writer and comedian, started out with the comedy site collegehumour.com before posting videos to his own site. Recently he has been recruited as a writer and director for Funny or Die. Bigger US TV shows have also blurred the lines, with series such as Heroesand Battlestar Galacticamaking "webisodes", short episodes to be screened online. (The latter were screened via the Sci-Fi Channel's website.)

In an extremely competitive televisual age, it’s easy to assume that making programmes online is more cost effective. Technology is certainly driving down the cost of making content – thanks to filming on inexpensive digital cameras, and even iPhones – but nobody wants quality to suffer.

“Drama is traditionally very expensive to make,” says Kent. “Money is often needed just to develop projects, but it’s not necessarily cheaper to do it for the web. It’s not about being able to just make something; it’s about how to get the attention of the audience. And you have to get that audience to think of online as something more than just an add-on to TV content that already exists. How we view things has changed, but for some it’s just a catch-up service.”

The RTÉ Player could be more than just that, though. With embedded advertising and features that disable scrolling through ads, it could produce revenue from made-for-web visual content, albeit not quite proportionate to that for television. In a downloading, iTunes-hopping, YouTube-watching culture, there is a demand for short-format content, which could suit the RTÉ Player.

“Shorter programming is more in keeping with age,” says Luke McManus. “There is scope to offer Player exclusives to an under-40s audience, and everything from comedy to drama to documentaries can suit the 10-minute format. It could be very exciting, and culturally programme commissioners are on the cusp of making up their minds about this. It’s difficult to adopt something new, but I do think we’ll see more of this content in the future. The jump from Storyland to a big TV drama is very wide, so it would be really interesting to see a middle ground.”

Storyland is currently seeking applications. See rte.ie/storyland

Short and sweet Three web-to-TV successes

Funny or DieIt has a huge archive online. Watch the Landlord or Good Cop, Baby Cop sketches. funnyordie.com.

LangerlandIrish comedy series that began life on langerland.com before being commissioned by RTÉ.

Chad Vader: Day Shift ManagerA short web series about Darth Vader's fictional brother Chad, who works in a supermarket. Started online and has done well on DVD.