Two years ago, I wrote an article about the New York Television Festival, the world of independent TV in general, and the direction it seemed to be headed. It prompted some consternation within that particular subculture, as well as from the NYTVF organizers themselves, who were quick to assure me that things were moving in the right direction. In 2010, the festival, which purports to gather the best independent TV pilots out there, was too filled with web videos awkwardly stitched together to fill 10 minutes of screen time. One of my favorite pilots that year—the sadly just-concluded Jack In A Box—was exactly that, but too many of the shows I screened that year were simply five-minute shorts padded out here and there. This is not to say that web videos are an irrelevant form, but they’re a far cry from even the sort of 11-minute shows in which Adult Swim traffics.
Just two years later, the difference in the air at the NYTVF is palpable. The pilots are put together better, many last 20 minutes or more, and the selection is far more competitive. There are some that are re-edited versions of web series, but in a few cases, that’s impossible to tell. Take, for instance, one of my favorites at this festival, the Chicago-produced Shrink. (Tales of psychiatrists and their patients are enormously popular at NYTVF for the simple reason that they’re cheap to shoot.) The story of a man who needs to complete more than 1,000 hours of psychiatric work or lose his license, Shrink has taken elements from the web series—which mostly consists of the sessions he conducts in his garage with patients he’s gathered from Craigslist and other unlikely places—and constructed other elements around them, giving the actual pilot a sense of momentum and direction moving forward. If the show were to become a series, that would be vital. It’s hard for a network to look at a web short and see a series; it’s easier to look at a full pilot.
To be sure, there are still clumsily re-edited web videos here, though some are quite enjoyable. And there are still more mediocre pilots than truly good ones, and even some of those good ones suggest themselves less as pilots for TV series than short films. (Bill Plympton had a short film that’s good, but it’s hard to see it pulling together as even an Adult Swim series. It’s fun, though!) Creating a good pilot is one of the toughest tasks out there, and if there’s anything holding the independent TV movement back from hitting the mainstream, it’s the fact that producing an effective pilot is so difficult and requires such a different toolkit from creating an effective independent film. But even in that regard, the selection here is improving, slowly but surely.
In many ways, the best thing that’s happened to the NYTVF—to the whole indie TV movement, really—is IFC picking up the fake game show Bunk. The pilot for that series, hosted by comedian Kurt Braunohler, debuted at the NYTVF in 2010, and IFC eventually brought it to series with minimal changes. It was, to a real degree, the first big success for a series out of one of the two competing independent TV festivals. (The other, ITVFest, takes place in Los Angeles in the summer.) It’s impossible to know if Bunk was a huge success for IFC—which did not pick it up for a second season—but that a full season of 10 episodes was produced at all is as good a result as any series has gotten out of a festival. Sure, since it was shot on one set, Bunk was a much more attractive financial proposition to buyers attending the festival than a more traditional scripted series (which would have to film over several locations and employ a regular cast), but Bunk’s success seems to have opened a door. Eighteen different buyers are attending the 2012 NYTVF to pursue 26 development deals, with at least four more deals joining the group next year, says festival director Terence Gray. The festival and the movement it hopes to highlight grow with every passing year.
The strongest argument for independent TV (whose definition I will broaden by incorporating more traditional web series) is also the greatest reason it has yet to break through beyond boutique cable channels. At its best, indie TV allows a platform for voices not often represented on TV. Similarly, it allows for more unconventional storytelling. The pilots at NYTVF and the most popular web series will often wander down weird paths and take oddball tangents. They might look like pilots and feel like pilots, but they’re also much more obviously products of a singular voice than more traditional, fussed-over network pilots. And while the world of indie TV is still dominated by the voices of straight white males, it’s not dominated as much as the world of traditional TV. There are pilots at NYTVF—great pilots—produced by minorities, women, and members of the GLBT community, and the web-series world is even more open to such voices. For example, one of the best currently running web series, Awkward Black Girl, has resulted in a deal for its creator, Issa Rae, to produce a pilot at ABC shepherded by Shonda Rhimes of Grey’s Anatomy. At the very least, independent TV and web series allow for a back door into the mainstream entertainment industry, one that’s opening increasingly wide.
As another example, take Husbands, currently the best web series running. Produced on a model that created a first season that ultimately added up to roughly the running time of a TV pilot, the show then moved to a Kickstarter funding model. A forthright defense of gay marriage based around a silly sitcom frame—two guys get drunk and get married and decide to see it through—the show blends good jokes with the sort of social-issues storytelling Norman Lear would have been proud of, and it does so much better than NBC’s similarly themed The New Normal, which too often treats its gay characters as curiosities, not human beings. Husbands would be a solid fit on just about any broadcast network, yet it remains on the web. This is not to say that it can’t be successful there, but the fact that it has yet to cross over suggests even more fully the ways that independent TV and web series represent a sort of present-day Wild West, where ideas networks might shy away from for whatever reason can take root, even as they might seem to point toward the future of TV itself.