PunPun was one of the shows we experimented with in the Ripost beta. I produced on it, and the first thing I had to give up was everything television had taught me about what a show is.
Television gives you a container, and the container lies
A TV show has a slot. Twenty-six minutes, or forty-four, and the slot exists because of the schedule and the ad breaks, not because the idea is that long. So you fill it. You stretch a good six minutes into a mediocre twenty-six, and everyone in the industry agrees to pretend that is normal.
On the internet there is no slot. Nothing needs to be filled. The episode is as long as the funny part, and when the funny part stops, the episode stops.
That sounds freeing. In practice it is uncomfortable, because you can no longer hide behind format. If a segment does not work, there is no filler around it to carry it, and no lead-in show to inherit an audience from. Every piece has to start from zero attention and earn the next ten seconds.
The first ten seconds are the whole business
On TV, the viewer is already there. On a feed, the viewer is leaving. They are leaving right now, in fact, while your title card animates.
So the production order inverts. No cold logo sequence. No host explaining what the show is going to be about before doing it. Start in the middle, get to the reason someone should stay before they have finished deciding, and put the identity somewhere it can be absorbed without costing anything.
It also means sound is optional. A large share of the audience was watching with sound off, in public, out of habit. If the joke lives entirely in the audio, most people never receive it.
Producing when the pipeline is short
The advantage of a small team inside a platform like Ripost was speed. Something happens, and the show can respond while people still care. That only holds if the chain from idea to published is short, so we kept it short on purpose. Few approvals. Few handoffs. Decisions made by people who were in the room.
The cost is that the quality floor is yours to hold. Nobody downstream is going to catch a weak segment, because there is no downstream. You either kill it yourself or it goes out.
The part I did not expect
A show on the internet does not end when it publishes. It keeps moving. Clips get pulled, re-uploaded, screenshotted, quoted. At Ripost that was the intention, not the accident, so we cut with it in mind: segments that stand alone, moments that survive being lifted out.
The clip travels further than the episode. Once you accept that, you stop producing episodes that contain good clips and start producing clips that happen to arrive together.
Write a comment