Venice the Series: Season 1, Episode 1

[RoseVioletDaisy]

This whole Venice endeavor has been a bush league operation from the beginning.

The website has been unorganized and unprofessional.

The lack of a plan for content distribution until after the website crashed on the night of of the premiere is mind-boggling, especially now that it will delay the first episode that people have to pay for. They would've been far better off snagging a few solid advertisers and running on Hulu or Youtube, whose technical infrastructure is sound and proven, especially since they'll be able to convince the die-hard Otalia fans to buy this but nobody else will.

The tacky merchanising with Chappell prancing around in "Venice" panties to sell it is embarrassing. As is her phoning it in shamelessly on DOOL.

CC's conduct at the GL Las Vegas weekend, skipping the required evening event at the last minute in order to sit in a bar and get blasted with her Venice crew and their groupies, was disrespectful of GL and it's fans, people they'd hoped to rope into Venice. Perhaps she's starting to believe all the neverending hype about her that Nelson Branco puts out on nearly a daily basis.

But worst of all, the Venice first episode was painfully ordinary. It looked better than most scenes from GL's production model but most things do. The writing was puerile, simplistic, and riddled with cliches. In short, Venice was a 6 minute episode of Ellen Wheeler's NuCokeGL minus everyone except Otalia with a bad DOOL actor thrown into the mix and even worse crap music. It wasn't even entertaining in a "can you believe this train-wreck?" sort of way like Gotham, it was just pointless and boring. The one thing that really bugged me about the first episode was the first scene, the supposed Otalia-payoff. It was almost as lame as something Wheelie would've directed herself. They said they'd be going for realism here but CC & JL just dragged out their standard-issue daytime soap set cold and phony kisses and despite their characters supposedly being so hot for each other that they ripped each others clothes off and threw them on the floor so they could have sex RIGHT NOW, they woke up dressed! I'm pretty sure that's not how lesbians have sex, with at least a tank top and panties on at all times. I wasn't expecting or wanting porn but for all the talk from CC about Otalia not being able to kiss on GL, and I agreed with her on that, I was expecting something a little rawer, hotter, or at least more realistic than an ultra-fake PG-rated smooch that didn't even come close to CC's sex scene with GA on GL back in 2003. I know the Otalia fans loved it to death and think it'll cure cancer but yawn. Whatever. If it was free, I'd keep up with it just to see if it improves because I really do hope it does but there's no way I'm paying for to see more of what we saw in that first episode. A webshow needs to be 10 minutes at the absolute minimum. You can't do anything of substance in less time than that, especially if you're charging money for it.

[bellcurve]

+1 to EV-ERY-THIIIING here.

And did she really do that to GL fans in Vegas? That's pretty nasty and unprofessional!

[All My Shadows]

I thought the whole underwear thing was stank from day one. Just ew. And they didn't even look clean.

That's a shitty thing she did if that's true.

[Ann_SS]

I have heard mostly bad things about Venice. I'm not surprised. Web soaps are in their infancy. Until the technology gets cheaper, only big media companies like Sony will be able to produce watchable Web soaps.

[Vee]

She did what?

And yes - both Venice and Gotham follow the Ellen Wheeler model of plot and (shitty) style over character and organic story.

I would like to have a websoap be 10-15 mins minimum, but I do think you can do something at least 5-6. But that would have to be very carefully paced, spending the majority if not all of each episode introducing character after character, family after family, slowly and with attention to focusing a single scene (or at most, two) on giving a window into these new people. What would be particularly smart is using one 5-6 minute episode to introduce a single family in a group setting, then zero in on each person in turn in later episodes. Later, after a month or two of this (given the time limit per episode), you could begin to move the plot in accordance with the characters you have already carefully established and fleshed-out.

[DRW50]

You should be ashamed of that joke.

[All My Shadows]

Oh God, I think I have a problem with leaving my posts up to interpretation this week LOL The "shitty thing" comment was definitely about the GL Vegas thing. I don't want Otalialites to stuff me on a kebab skewer for that one!

[DRW50]

Sorry. I thought you were following up on the "they didn't look clean" part.

[baller]

LOL! They will come and hunt you down too in the blind devotion.

I find her interview with SOD Online very interesting. So basically she needed to charge for subscriptions to make season 2, but now there's enough to pay actors and make money off of the project. Why not have the first season free in order to actually build a fan base beyond the kool aid devotees that would do anything she said. Instead, she's willing to bilk this group of fans who stroke her ego so they can pretty much watch two straight women kiss.

I'm very curious to see how many subscriptions they have manged from people you wouldn't consider the Otalia devotees. Because for the average soap/internet web series fan, nothing in that first "episode" or the 12 word teaser makes you want to pony up the cash for it. Can she keep this going on?

[JaneAusten]

I get why Venice is getting so much attention. But I have to wonder why the BET Soap Buppies - well there has been no publicity. Well maybe there has on BET and non soap publications. There is no fee and it's 1000 times better than any web soap yet. Ann was the one I think who put a post out for this. Maybe viewers really don't care about African Americans or other minorities. It's kind of discouraging that they don't seem to be getting the same sort of attention the others are.

As for Venice, I wasn't impressed and that's all I'll say. But the press keeps talking about these soaps being in their infancy yet I see a product like Buppies get produced for the internet.

[DRW50]

I haven't been following the show but I did enjoy these reviews for the second episode, especially the HBS/Tina Sloan scene.

http://vwreck.wordpress.com/

[Vee]

Allow me to paste my typically negative comments from Television without Pity:

I thought episode 2 was pretty pathetic. OMG she said "fucktard." In no way did it date her or make her look like she was trying too hard! No one over 30 uses that word away from a keyboard. And the only reason I have any idea who ANYONE other than CC's character was is because I read some advance press. That is no way to write anything. It's not acceptable. Poor HBS and Tina Sloan. As usual, the production values are sub-GL. I don't know why Chappell, who was critical of that model, thinks this is okay. By contrast, Gotham actually improved.

[RoseVioletDaisy]

In my last post I lamented that the first episode of Venice wasn't entertaining in a "look at this trainwreck" so of way but was just boring. Well, they fixed that mighty quick. It's still plenty boring mind you but the second episode adds a healthy dose of "WTF kind of holy-mess is this?". I'm actually stunned at how bad episode 2 was. I mean Ellen Wheeler would've thrown it in the trash and started over. That's how bad it is. If I'd paid for that I'd be pissed. And I can't believe that Hillary B. Smith and Tina Sloane signed up for this. Ugh. CC and her little buddies need to sober up for 30 seconds and stop the bleeding or this is gonna get ugly fast.

[All My Shadows]

Geez! I almost want to pay to see the trainwreck now.

Why is HBS even doing this? I understand that in the past, OLTL might have been a little unreliable with her contract, but she's got some heavy story now.

[RoseVioletDaisy]

It might not be up for long and if it's inappropriate to post this I'm sure the mods will delete it, but episode 2 has been posted by somebody at Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYxZmoiTqb4