This is the second show I’ve watched from creator Caryn K. Hayes, and by this point she is starting to develop a signature of sorts. The most obvious being her propensity for draaamaaa, particularly relationship drama – you know the “my boyfriend forgot our anniversary, and gave me venereal disease” type of drama. #Entangled is melodramatic but not to the point of being over the top unbelievable. The show manages instead to make light of the harshness of breakups and instead focus on the absurdities of different aspects of unhealthy relationships. At its core the show is more grounded in the healing abilities of healthy relationships with good friends – in this case these two new roommates.
The second thing is Caryn’s ability to put out a lot of content. Entangled With You is just under an hour long and it took just eight months from script to screen. Shooting wise, the entire show was shot in nine days, four of which were just half days. I’m not entirely sure how she managed it. Part of me thinks she is just getting lucky with her actors (or maybe she’s amazing at casting), as most scenes were only ran through two or three times, and they did just one night of rehearsals. Every actor’s performance was solid throughout as well.
There is a little downside to such a fast paced production. Most of the scenes have limited coverage that more than gets the job done but doesn’t quite deliver at the highest level. Caryn pointed to their one dolly set up as the biggest speed bump in the production process. They used it during the bonding sequence between the two main characters – an important sequence that got the extra touch. Still the show wasn’t able to take the time to really deliver visually in the way I’d like to see. There just isn’t time to play with lighting, block out rack focus shots, or shallow tracking shots, or much of anything that adds layers of complexity. Still it was quite a feat to run through 60 some odd pages of material in just about seven days – a requirement for keeping a budget super low.
The most noticeably striking thing about the show was the commercial break mid way through each episode. The first commercial was a trailer for ‘Breaking Point,’ Caryn Hayes’ previous show, that was covered on a past #WebSeriesWednesday. I was not completely sold on the idea for awhile. The first commercial caught me off guard and felt out of place, even though it was placed at an appropriate act break. The thing is, the web series format is not standardized like television. If we are viewing the show on television we all expect that commercial break. On the web we expect pre rolls and then occasionally an ad at the end. I know Blip and maybe some others have experimented with ad rolls in the middle of a video, but I have never seen one that didn’t upset me.
Caryn’s logic was sound, “if Youtube and Blip can advertise on my videos why can’t I?” The second time around, when I saw a different ‘Breaking Point’ trailer I started to change my mind a bit. By then I was expecting the commercial break, and since there was only one ad I watched it pretty closely and felt it did a great job of selling the show to me. The last commercial break was for another show, called Lenox Avenue. a show I had not previously heard of. That’s excellent cross promotion right there.
Whether or not the commercial break is worth it or not I cannot say, but it’s certainly an intriguing idea that deserves a deeper look. Cross promotion is an important part of the indie tv movement and embracing that is the way to go. It might also be important to note that Entangled runs commercial free on Blip, with the ad only appearing on the YouTube channel, where annotations are possible.
Entangled With You can be found on the Hardly Working TV YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/HardlyWorkingTV