The New York Egotist is running a highly readable interview with Justine Bateman, the actress who who played Mallory on Family Ties.
Today Bateman runs her own production and consulting company, Section 5, and she’s involved in several web-based projects, including Easy to Assemble, Project: Rant, and Wake Up and Get Real.
Bateman believes we’re in the midst of a Creative Renaissance, but she wants to see more and better content.
The people who have money behind programming (online) are behaving more conservatively than what you encounter in traditional. If you were to pitch Breaking Bad to Hulu or Google, it wouldn’t work. It’s so weird to me. There’s so much fervor and passion and anarchy in the Internet. A lot of the reason people are online is because they don’t want to do things in a conventional way, and yet the entertainment that is being created for us to consume (online) is, for the most part, very conservative. But there’s also some great stuff. There’s a show on Hulu that Vuguru did, called “The Booth At The End.” It’s one of the best series I’ve seen so far that is Internet distributed only. I think that should be the “normal” bar for the kind of innovative programming that can be distributed online. Maybe it’s just my opinion. I think people are getting too comfortable with junky material.
People on both sides of the screen (are getting too comfortable with junky material). Yes, that’s why cat videos are so much more popular than just about anything else on YouTube. Cat videos draw a mass audience, while original scripted material has to fight to be seen.
Here’s Bateman discussing some of the things one can do to come out of said fight a winner:
