How the web series is redefining TV

Instead of tight episodes with perfect arcs, web series create peculiar and extremely specific moods. They conjure up constellations of feeling.

Television looks to the web for inspiration.
(Image credit: Photo Illustration | Images courtesy iStock, Anne Marie Fox/HBO)

HBO is searching for its next Game of Thrones-style juggernaut — and Westworld looks like it might fit the bill. But at the same time, the prestige-oriented network has also been experimenting with something smaller: the web series.

Following a path forged by shows like Comedy Central's Broad City, HBO has been working with the creators of popular web series to explore how the extremely lo-fi format works when it's glossed and polished to an HBO shine. HBO's two major acquisitions in this particular genre are Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair's High Maintenance (which ends its first six-episode season this week), and Issa Rae's Insecure, an elegant descendant of Rae's YouTube series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl that started two weeks ago and deserves better than to be buried in the noise of this deafening election. Broadly speaking, one show is about being high, and the other is about being someone who would probably benefit from getting high.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.