On April 22, the people who hand out the Emmys awarded one in a new category they dubbed "Original Programming Created for Non-Traditional Delivery Platforms"—that is, TV shows that don't air on TV. This is content created for and brought to audiences via cell phones, websites or portable video players. The six nominees included some recognizable names, like Fox's 24 (for the supplementary cell phone series 24: Conspiracy), AOL (for its online coverage of the Live 8 concerts) and MTV (for the series Stand-In, which airs on the website of the network's university channel, mtvU), but the other nominees are a little more obscure.
Obviously things are changing, but should we take for granted that the future of TV is online? Who really wants to watch a TV show, even one that's only a minute or two long, on their cell phone? While the shows that you can download on iTunes are regular programs repurposed for your computer, the nominees for the Emmys' new category are all created specifically for other platforms. I watched as many as possible (AOL's Live 8 coverage, which won the award, is no longer available, and 24: Conspiracy requires a specific cell phone plan) to see if the content lives up to the hype.
The first thing you notice about the award is that while all of the programming is lumped into one category, the shows really have nothing in common. It's as if the regular Emmys just had a single award, for Best TV Show. Thus the award-winning Live 8 coverage, with its hours of concert footage, is pitted against something like It's Jerrytime! (www.itsjerrytime.com), a video blog by a schlubby resident of Buffalo, New York. Jerry recounts such mundane events as getting his plumbing fixed, receiving poor service at a restaurant and attempting to kill moths in his apartment. It's all depicted in a photo-collage animation style, with Jerry's nasal voice narrating. At times Jerry's dry humor is reminiscent of another Jerry—Seinfeld—but more often he just rambles for a few minutes and lets the animation do all the work.
Other nominees include Sophie Chase (www.sophiechase.com), an action-adventure featuring genuine professional actors, writers and producers, and an installment of Stranger Adventures (www.strangeradventures.com), an interactive online mystery. Sophie Chase, while it's got high production values, barely even qualifies as a show, with only the opening credits sequence available on the site. A short episode can be found by searching YouTube, but even that offers only a glimpse of the show's potential (which, to be fair, looks to be large).
Stranger Adventures includes video as only part of its content, so it's puzzling how it could be nominated for an Emmy, since it's tough to get the whole story without delving into the other elements (e-mails, documents) that are part of the site's week-long mysteries. Each mystery begins with a video message and provides users with clues via various methods, with the goal of putting together a string of numbers and winning a cash prize. The videos themselves range from competent to amateurish, and their function as exposition-delivery systems are always transparent. Stranger Adventures may be fun to play, but it's not a very entertaining TV show.
The most professional of the nominees I was able to watch was mtvU's Stand-In. In episodes that last 3-5 minutes, the show features various celebrities showing up as guest lecturers in college classes. Luckily, producers seem to understand how not to turn this into an exercise in laughing at celebrity hubris, as the guests are generally invited to speak on subjects about which they actually possess some knowledge. Cameron Diaz may give a talk on sustainable architecture, for example, but at least she brings along a genuine expert to back her up.
None of these shows is exactly brilliant, but that doesn't mean that we should despair for the future of online TV. After all, the Emmys often overlook the best material on old-fashioned TV, as well. But there is still a leap in quality that online shows have yet to make; all you have to do is download an episode of any network program from iTunes to see that. It may only be a matter of time and bigger budgets before these shows start to compete with what's on broadcast and cable, but for now traditional networks have nothing to worry about.