It wouldn’t take a doctor to diagnose that the internet’s impact on the future of television caused the recent Hollywood writers’ strike. But it did take a doctor to usher that future in… a Dr. Horrible. Mwa-ha-ha!

Until now, online hits like Will Ferrell’s “The Landlord” sketch (with a foul-mouthed toddler) or Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel’s slightly prophetic mock-breakup vids (with a foul-mouthed Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) have been primarily cred-boosting promotional tools. Well, not no more.

“It is time for us to change the face of Show Business as we know it,” blogged geek-hero (and Buffy creator) Joss Whedon. “You know the old adage, ‘It’s Show Business — not Show Friends’? Well now it’s Show Friends. We did that. To Show Business. To show Show Business we mean business.”

Conceived by Whedon while he was on the picket lines, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a genre-mashing, convention-upending, web-only musical comedy about a lovelorn supervillain torn between his desire for laundromat crush Penny (Felicia Day) and his desire to take over the world.

Dr. Horrible has a sucker-punch ending that is surprisingly tragic but, in hindsight, how could a supervillain-origin story not end in darkness? Besides, no other web series has engendered this much emotional investment. Produced in six days for a low six figures, Whedon wrote the Sondheim-esque three-act musical with his brothers Zack and Jed. He cast his Tony Award–winning, sitcom-star buddy Neil Patrick Harris as the singing villain and his former Firefly captain Nathan Fillion as hubristic superhero Captain Hammer.

Within hours of the first webisode being posted July 15, Whedon sent his cohorts an email: “Gang, we broke the Internet.” Servers had crashed due to overwhelming traffic, which barely let up during a five-day freebie period. There were about 2.25 million streams and it dominated iTunes downloads in Canada and the US. Whedon stands to make a few million dollars, a DVD and soundtrack are en route and a sequel is inevitable. The bad doctor may even make it to Broadway.

“This really was designed to be a model for a new way to put out media,” Whedon crowed as the Horrible cast held court at Comic-Con in LA last weekend, “a new form of artistic community that involves all of you guys and all of us and maybe not so much some other people.”

While Whedon took the indie route to bypass the restrictive studio system, Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane brokered a lucrative, unprecedented deal with Google for his Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. Beginning in September, 50 two-minute webisodes (made on a multimillion dollar budget) will be seeded across the internet via YouTube and thousands of other sites thanks to Google’s AdSense technology. With ads surrounding the shorts, MacFarlane gets creative freedom and a three-piece suit made of $100 bills.

The two pop-cult icons have taken vastly different approaches to their online experiments, but their successes will help web TV evolve into something worth striking over.

Back in Black
When not spitting at the camera during his irregular Daily Show rants, apoplectic comic Lewis Black judges pop-cult crimes on The Root of All Evil.

Our, ahem, jury was out on the first season — Black’s trademark livid exasperation was somewhat sidelined in favour of uneven stand-ups turned prosecutors arguing the evilness of YouTube, Paris Hilton and Las Vegas. But season two bodes better with the return of awesome alt-comic Patton Oswald — of whom we’ll always rule in favour — and an episode debating: “Which is worse, Disney or Scientology?” Hmmm…

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1