Growing up is never easy, especially when you’re a kid trying to get used to new surroundings and new people. For Brian Russell, the young protagonist of the new family comedy/drama web series KID’S TOWN, trying to get acquainted with those surroundings has become an all too frequent occurrence due to the fact that his father Paul, a police officer, has constantly moved with him. While Paul, a single dad, seeks to maintain steady employment in law enforcement, he hopes to not only achieve a better quality of life for him and his son, but also to find people who he can trust, and to make a positive difference wherever they live. Their latest stop is the small, peaceful town of Bailey’s Path, but as they soon find out, not everything is as normal as it seems.

Created and written by Tomas Street, and produced by Jeff Knoll, KID’S TOWN debuted on August 22nd of this year exclusively on Vimeo Video On Demand. 6 episodes have already aired, with 6 more set to air through October (aka Season .5 as Knoll describes it). Those episodes are available individually for $1, or as a full package, complete with bonus extras and the remaining six episodes when posted, for $10. (More on Knoll’s decision to use Vimeo On Demand for distribution of KID’S TOWN later). Filming the second half of the show’s first season (aka Season 1) will commence later this Fall.

KID’S TOWN stars Jeff’s real life son and actor David Knoll as Brian Russell, son of police officer Paul (David Dodsley). Throughout the show’s first season, both father and son meet some of the town’s most interesting people, but they soon find themselves entangled in the complicated politics of Bailey’s Path, where no one can tell for certain who’s really in charge of the town – the Mayor, Travis Redshaw (Darrin Baker), the police chief, Charles Hart (Neil Whitely), or Jarvis Lightfoot (played by David Schaap), the owner of the town’s newspaper, The Daily Bailey (actually a weekly paper, one of the show’s many gags according to Knoll and Street). While Paul has his own share of difficulties with his superiors, including Mayor Redshaw and Chief Hart, Brian’s life becomes just as interesting – and sometimes complicated, because of the new friends and enemies he encounters.

Brian strikes up friendships with his quirky next door neighbor, Brian Junior (Richard Davis), and Keith Lightfoot (played by Jacob Ewaniuk), who delivers The Bailey Daily each morning  – and who is also the son of the paper’s owner. Unfortunately, Brian also makes an adversary: the mayor’s son, Jamie (Noah Ryan Scott). Much to Jamie’s chagrin, Brian ends up falling for his girlfriend, Vanessa (Jeni Ross), the daughter of the town librarian. All of them not only attend the same school, but as a result of their parents, they also manage to have a considerable level of influence both socially, and in the community itself. It’s a scenario that makes for both awkward and sometimes incredible moments.

In his college years at Ontario’s University of Windsor, Knoll studied film and television as part of a communications studies program, but even though his enthusiasm waned slightly as a result of the Canadian government’s cancelation of its film and TV credits program (he studied political science during that time as well), he continued to remain active as a filmmaker but on a much smaller scale, doing commercials, industrial films, and even shooting local high school and college football games for those schools. Unhappy with the kind of work he was doing, Knoll refocused. “I pursued my other career(s) which (were) movie theatre management (which I’m still in to this very day), and politics, which I enjoy, and it got to the point where I was an elected official.” Knoll currently serves as a municipal counselor in his hometown of Oakville, Ontario.

While Knoll was involved in other aspects of professional life, it wouldn’t be long before he would be bitten by the moviemaking bug – all thanks to the time he spent on set with his son, David. The opportunity to work with him on film projects, combined with today’s digital filmmaking technology and low cost equipment like RED and DSLR cameras, convinced the elder Knoll to rekindle his old passion. “I put together my own little short film last year. I got together with some of the people I worked with. I wanted to produce a short film to get my feet wet. We produced a little film called WHY WEAR A POPPY, which was basically a short movie based on a poem of the same title for Canada’s Remembrance Day (sort of like America’s Memorial Day). We had just a ton of fun doing it, and I realized at that point that I really wanted to be in this business. I had put it off long enough. I was 48 at the time, and I thought, if I put this off much longer, it’s just never going to happen. I thought it was a great thing to do, (and a great way) to do something with my kid.”

KID’S TOWN was developed by Street, who responded to an ad Knoll placed on the popular site Craigslist seeking potential script ideas for a new web series he wanted to create, one that Knoll felt would appeal to both kids and adults, along with approaching its subject matter in a smart, sophisticated way. Yet, he also wanted something that could be produced inexpensively, and that would last. Prior to Christmas in 2011, Knoll spent time with his wife and son David at Disney World, and it was there that an average day on the grounds of EPCOT would soon become a major turning point in the development of his web series. “I get an email (from Street), and the email has three pitches on it. One of them was this KID’S TOWN concept, and I literally fell in love with it right away. Part of the reason I fell in love with it was because to a large extent, he had written it based on who I am as an individual. I’m a municipal councillor; I’m an elected official in my town. I live in a relatively small town. I know everybody else in the town; my kid’s the kid of a prominent councillor in the community (Jeff Knoll), and the reason it was written was, I guess maybe he was trying to pander to me or he literally found the concepts interesting, as well as the opportunity I had for access to locations,” he says.

Impressed by Street’s concept of a web series about a father and son who try to make the most of their new lives in a small town, Knoll immediately got the pre-production process going. “I wrote back to him, standing at the fountains of EPCOT and said, ‘get me a script as soon as you can’, and within a couple of days (I’m still down there vacationing), I get the first episode script. I literally was just enthralled, and said (to Street) ‘we’re going to do this when I get back. Let’s meet.’ We met in early January, and the rest is history. We basically worked hard from January until our first shooting in March, and we wrapped our twelfth episode on June 30th, literally six months from concept to final wrap.”

Knoll also wanted to use the show as a vehicle to keep his son, David, interested and involved in the acting profession. Yet, there was just one problem: he was a member of ACTRA, the Canadian equivalent of the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) union in the United States. “When I contacted them, and said I’m making this show with my son, they said, if you want to hire your son, you have to be a signatory to the Independent Production Agreement. You have to pay him. I said ‘oh, geez, I can’t even do something with my son without having to go through the union?’ Sure enough, I approached Tomas and some others and said if we’re going to do this, it’ll be all union or none at all. After having started this (his web series) with my son, I’m not going to not include him.” As a result, the entire series is produced with ACTRA performers, including Knoll’s son.

Filming the show’s first 12 episodes also had their own unique set of challenges, primarily due to its large ensemble cast and production crew, one mixed with seasoned veterans and newcomers. Eventually, though, their teamwork and dedication to producing a quality web series would come to the fore. “I’m literally dealing with a production crew who has experience, but many of them don’t have experience at a level at which I’ve put them in. There are some students, mostly students who have graduated the past four to eight years. They were working in the industry, but maybe not at the level which I was bringing them on board. There were a lot of growing pains and trying to understand the new rules, but they did a fabulous job.”

The show’s overall production scope often proved to be just as overwhelming as the production itself, but once again, the cast and crew’s talent and determination would come through. “There were a lot of moments where I and others said, ‘oh my gosh, what have we gotten ourselves into? This is much bigger than we can handle!’, because we literally skilled this thing to a point where we had 26 cast members at the max, and our crew was now bulging at about 44-50 people. Just the very act of having to feed that many people on a daily basis over the shooting blocks was a massive undertaking by itself. We managed through it, it was exhilarating, it was fun, we learned a lot. The result is fantastic, though. The actors performed brilliantly.”

KID’S TOWN is also unique in its distribution and monetization methods, with all episodes of the first season airing exclusively on the paid service Vimeo Video On Demand. While Knoll says that agreements with other paid sites to air his show are currently being finalized, the reasons why he chose the subscription-based business model are simple. One was the desire to maintain the show’s significant fan base through Facebook and Twitter (just over 3,500 fans and 700 Twitter followers, as of this writing) after production of the first few episodes wrapped in June, by providing instant access to the show’s episodes through Vimeo as soon as they were ready to air, thus avoiding the risk of losing those fans who had followed the show’s production progress from the beginning.

The other, as Knoll explains, was purely a matter of dollars and cents. “The ad supported model does not seem to be financially sustainable, and we’re producing a show with some pretty heavy duty production values. For the first 12 episodes, we spent about $200,000 and we need to find a way to monetize that back. By the time we’re done with our current round of negotiations, we should be on most paid streaming networks that most people are familiar with, and that will start taking place over the course of the Fall. We’ve had some pretty good interest so far from the internet streaming side, and we’re also trying to sell a repackaged version for broadcast, as well, but that’ll probably be further down the road,” he says.

KID’S TOWN is a show that has appeal for both kids and their parents alike. It’s a show that not only entertains, but does so in a unique fashion that takes it above the level of TV programming once viewed and then forgotten. “When I’m at the various fairs and shows where (I) talk to parents and kids, my opening line is, ‘this is a new kid’s program that’s safe for both of you.’ It’s safe for the kids because it has the themes and the stories, and everything is clean, PG or less, and it’s safe for the adults because they can sit on the other end of the couch with their respective child without having to brain melt watching something inane like they would be typically watching on kids’ television. There’s something for everybody in the show,” Knoll says.

Even more so, KID’S TOWN is a web series that portrays both children and adults equally in an intelligent light, through the story of a father and son who find themselves in situations as unique and as unpredictable as the town they call home. “(It’s) a whole range of interesting experiences interweaved with this civics undertone of ‘who’s in charge, who’s really running the town’? Is it the officials, is it their kids, is it the combination of the two, is it public opinion? There’s a whole range of underlying questions and themes that interplay with these kids trying to make friends and grow up in this community.”

ON THE WEB: www.kidstown.tv

VIMEO ON DEMAND: http://vod.kidstown.tv

FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/kidstowntv

TWITTER: @KidsTownTV

INSTAGRAM: @KidsTownTV