Travis Richey, creator of The Inspector, one of our favorite TV series-within-a-TV series creations (You’ve seen the show on Community, kids, remember?), brings us up to date on the deliciousness of his world:
Greetings, Inspectators!
EDITOR’S NOTE: Toldja TVWriter™ would have more from Laura Conway. Welcome to the first in Laura’s series on the making of her very, very, very popular interweb series hit.
I’m not a professional writer. I never went to film school. And I write and produce my own web series, The Vamps Next Door. Guess you could say I’m a perpetual amateur running amok with a camera. It’s my strange kind of hobby and, for a raving writer like myself, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. If you’re a new writer and it’s your first time producing your own script, all these words are for you.
I’ve been writing stories ever since I could write and I write comedy because I love making people laugh. But seven pilots and six screenplays later, sure all that writing was fun, but something was always missing. There was no audience laughing. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Our favorite web series site, Stareable, scores again with this very informative column by Alex LeMay. Presented as a homage to the ever-present showbiz reality known as “No mater what your job title, you’re a salesperson!” >sigh<
A lot of you ask me how you get in the room with buyers, so I’ve created a sort of checklist for you to follow. These are things I do every day and it has become a matter-of-course whenever I want to to get my work in front of a busy studio exec or acquisition & development person (the person in a studio who looks for and buys content)
In celebration of Brains getting picked up by SeekaTV, I decided to do something totally unexpected and write about Brains on my blog! I contain multitudes. This is a blog about why, specifically, I’m bummed about not getting more seasons. Warning: spoilers, obviously, so if you haven’t watched Brains yet (or you’re due for a rewatch), why not give it a go, right now, on Seeka?
A few months ago, a Twitter…. friend?… of mine wrote a rather critical review of Brains entitled “Brains: Great Concept, Not Enough Character.” This blog isn’t exactly a response to that critique, because I’m above that (I’m not above that), but it will reference the critique occasionally because one of its major issues with my show (“not enough character”) is kind of the topic of this post. I have the utmost respect for Nick (the reviewer) and his opinion, but I also have to point out that in a lot of cases, the lack of characterization for characters other than Alison was kind of the point, particularly of the first two seasons.
“Most of the characters in Brains are, pardon the pun, lifeless zombies. Almost none of them seem to have much of a personality outside of their role in the story…”
The biggest news we’ve heard from CBS in quite awhile (yes, even bigger than that Star Trek thing they’re streaming in terms of what it means to new writers) is that I Mom So Hard, a web series presided over by Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedly has been picked up as a multi camera comedy series on real CBS TV. The big Eye itself.
The web series is about a couple of moms – Hensley and Smedly – learning the hard way about what being a mother entails. Here’s a sample:
We’re excited as all hell to see any web series go from YouTube to what used to be called the Boob Tube until “boob” became a politically charged word. The only negative here is that – yeah, you guessed it – some actual CBS TV type people will be involved. Talking about you, Michelle Nader and Rob Thomas. Don’t screw this up!