With New Media, we are watching history play out before our eyes. Every day, online outlets are breaking stories the establishment media won’t. Some of these sites (largely thought of as blogs) now have more traffic than mainstream media websites.
As we’ve charted on Big Hollywood on a near-daily basis, similar revolutions are going on in the entertainment industry. The days of bundled cable and appointment television are winding down. It’s all about streaming, i.e. it’s all about the Internet. Thus, it’s not surprising to see that serious, well-known actors are developing projects that are found exclusively online. Netflix is now producing original programming. MyDamnChannel has created an entire network of online television shows.
This makes perfect sense. The product the Hollywood studios are putting out is, more often than not, craptacular. It’s also expensive to make, subject to government regulation, and fits into cookie-cutter half-hour or hour-long formats that the public will eventually outgrow. As media consumers, we all know the best stuff on YouTube is much funnier than anything “Saturday Night Live” has put out in the last decade. And apparently, the talent is catching on as well.
One such project is a YouTube series called “The Daly Show,” not to be confused with the left-wing news show anchored by Jon Stewart. Filmmaker Ben Shelton’s comedic series follows former “Wings” star Tim Daly and his son Sam as they hilariously navigate their way through life. Seen exclusively on YouTube, the show has featured celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, Taye Diggs, Tom Bergeron, and Nathan Fillion of “Castle” in just the first eleven episodes.
The two-part finale of the inaugural season features one of Andrew Breitbart’s favorite Hollywood staples: Steven Weber. Though the former “Wings” star is most often seen writing far-left op-eds over at Huffington Post, he and my late boss were friends. Both men had irreverent senses of humor and were willing to mix it up with people with whom they disagreed, so they got along. In a touching obituary the day Breitbart died, Weber wrote at Huffington Post, “Andrew was a badass, defiant and audacious.” We agree, and we know the feeling was mutual.
In Breitbart’s life, he was a new media pioneer, helping to expedite the process of making the news industry online-centric. Weber, like Daly and Shelton, are doing their part to build Hollywood a second, much cheaper home: the vast, democratic Internet.
Check out a couple episodes of “The Daly Show” here:
I love that the episodes run only a few minutes long. They’re tailor-made for our ADD-adled culture and Internet obsession.