John August is right about web content length

February 02, 2009 | David

John August's anticipated "Remnants" is out, along with a Tubefilter interview.

You can find the show, a comedy about the survivors of a zombie/alien/nanotech apocalypse, and the interview here.

The show is very good—simultaneously funny and tense, very smart, with great acting, writing and production (because of John August’s high profile, there are a lot of name or at least recognizable actors here, along with a couple of great unknowns). I’m trying not to review other shows on the GOLD blog, for many obvious reasons, but this is maybe my favorite webTV offering so far, though there won’t be any more episodes unless the series gets funding. But the highlight, for me, is this segment of the Tubefilter interview:

TUBEFILTER:"The episode is 11 minutes long. Some would argue that’s too long for a web series episode. What do you say to that?”

JOHN AUGUST: “And The Office is half an hour, except when it’s super-sized to 40 minutes. Things fit what they’re supposed to fit. The reason most web shows are short is probably more a function of YouTube’s restrictions than human attention span. People watch movies on their computers. They watch shows on Hulu. The idea that there’s a perfect length for any show is ridiculous. But sure, we can cut the show in half. Or in thirds. It doesn’t make it better. It just makes it clumpier.”

Thank you, John August. In addition to being a contributor of great content to the webTV canon (not to mention your film work), you are a man of courage and sense.

It is infuriating to have meeting after meeting with people who say, “10 minutes? That’s too long. Why not 3?” I always want to say, “because the story I’m telling takes 10.” And, while GOLD has gotten consistantly good reviews in every outlet in which it has been covered, the length of the episodes (10 minutes, give or take) is almost always mentioned as a negative. As John says, you can always chop the episode up, but, unless there are technical limitations, why?

Why not instead focus on increasing bandwidth and streaming efficiency, and treat the internet like what it is: a delivery mechanism for entertainment, like Network TV or Cable or Satellite or Pay Per View or DVD or movie theaters? “Internet” and “Web Television” are not genres. They are delivery systems. Some content should be 3 minutes. Some should be 23. The flexibility of the web is beautiful—why do we feel the need to create stifling rules for a delivery system whose fundamental beauty is that the old rulemakers do not control it?

That said, it’d be nice to figure out a way to make money, too. Not Tom Cruise money, but enough so that I could quit my day job ;-)