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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.
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.
So what happens to the web series when it ends up getting reprocessed and repackaged on one of television's fanciest, most ambitious networks?
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Both series were good enough in their pre-HBO days that the high production values enhance more than they transform. That said, High Maintenance stays closer to its roots than Insecure. The picaresque series of compact, sometimes dreamy slice-of-life scenes in New York is threaded together by an amiable weed dealer played by Sinclair, and it's so close to its Vimeo roots that several episodes of the HBO version — which hold up perfectly well on their own — will be legible to longtime fans as sequels to the web series.
Insecure is a little different. While it shares a lot of concerns that will be recognizable to the Awkward Girl fan base, it's also breaking new ground. The new show certainly rhymes with its ancestor: It remains interested in constraints, and Rae still plays the "awkward black girl" who raps her excessive feelings, hates her job, and processes issues with a close friend (Yvonne Orji). But there's less levity to this version; its edges are harder and so is its sense of place. The Los Angeles that Rae captures in Insecure is the opposite of High Maintenance's New York. If the latter features a stoner everyman blithely biking around the entire city to relieve people of their anxiety, Insecure is about LA traffic and the near-impossibility of getting a bus full of kids from Inglewood to the beach. Ease is less available and frankly less desirable in Insecure. And while it isn't incidental that one protagonist is a white man and the other is a black woman, neither is that the point.
Here's what both these series do well: Instead of tight episodes with perfect arcs, they create peculiar and extremely specific moods. They conjure up constellations of feeling.
That is not universally hailed as a good thing. FILM CRIT HULK, the talented pseudonymous all-caps film and TV critic at Birth.Movies.Death, recently argued that the Netflix and Amazon revolution has given creators license to produce unnecessarily baggy, poorly paced series. Television got flabby absent constraints like ads and act breaks and time slots. This has led to what he calls "the death of episodic TV": "WE REALLY DO SEEM TO LAVISH OUR ATTENTION ON A DRAMATICALLY INERT WHEEL-SPINNERS THAT HAPPEN TO HIT OUR PRIME INTEREST ZONES," he says, and generalizes this beyond "dramedies" and pulp shows to include even the blockbuster equivalents of television: "HECK, GAME OF THRONES BASICALLY HAS ONE SCENE PER CHARACTER EACH WEEK," he writes:
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IT'S USUALLY JUST A "CHECK IN" UNTIL THE BIG STUFF GOES DOWN LATER IN THE SEASON. SO INSTEAD OF FINDING CONFLICTS WITHIN CONFLICTS, WE'VE GOTTEN USED TO EXPECTING "THE DELAY." WE'LL WATCH MICRO VERSIONS OF CONFRONTATIONS BEFORE THE BIG ONE GOES DOWN AND THERE SEEMS TO BE NO OTHER REASON THEY FINALLY HAPPEN THAN "IT'S THAT TIME IN THE SHOW TO DO IT." [Birth.Movies.Death]
What FILM CRIT HULK resents, in other words, is both the lack of a clear arc within the episode and the lazy tyranny of the structure outside it — the "it's that time in the show to do it" principle.
I agree with most of his objections, but I was struck, reading them, by how successfully the web series survives his critique. It's a special case, I think: a genre whose baked-in sloppiness is more a feature of what less formal formats permit than a symptom of what they allow.
Take a musical analogy: It used to be that most symphonies (and sonatas) took a shape determined by "sonata form." To radically oversimplify, there's an introduction, exposition, development, and a recapitulation. (You can see how this describes a lot of episodic television too.) As happens with any useful and popular principle of composition, it started getting pushed around and distorted and experimented with (see Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). Eventually those experiments produced a kind of breakage with the form. By the late 19th century, Liszt and many others were inventing "symphonic poems" and other less structured genres — formats that broke with sonata form in the service of being open-ended and evocative.
We're seeing a similar splay in the definition of the "television episode." Web series live in a funny intermediary space between the "sketch" — which is short, quick, and punchy — and the "episode," a fully-fledged format that neither Insecure nor High Maintenance find especially interesting. A web series is more thoughtful than a sketch and less polished than an episode.
In fact, the web series aesthetic — even adapted to HBO — retains a recognizable looseness, a hint that its DNA developed online. Both Insecure and High Maintenance remain closer to "slice of life" narratives than to aggressively plotted programming. Like Liszt's symphonic poems (which were generally supposed to evoke a literary or artistic work), both shows are more invested in thematic echoes than in resolution or catharsis. High Maintenance wraps up unexpectedly just when you were getting used to a particular character or tone or perspective. Insecure might slam you with a gorgeous meditation on memory and relationships via a couch, or twist reality when Issa raps and fantasizes in front of the mirror, but it never for a second lets you believed you're in the whimsical thinscape of Ally McBeal. Even their differences somehow express their shared online ancestry: While High Maintenance roves wildly between different mentalities and experiences and subjectivities, Insecure sticks to the problem of living in the world as one very particular person. But for both shows, evoking an emotion or a particular state of mind trumps other more familiar narrative priorities.
The result, in either case, is successful — and successful on its own terms. It may be that "episode" isn't the right word for whatever these series are doing; but it's exciting to see television chasing down a format that exists so vibrantly online.
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.
