Being a loving wife and mother is a joy, but it doesn’t come without its own share of responsibilities and concerns. With that being said, one can only wonder just what goes through the mind of such a woman throughout the course of a day. Along with the tasks of taking care of children and being a faithful spouse, every day delivers something new and unexpected. In the acclaimed comedy web series THE LOUISE LOG, that world is seen through the eyes and mind of a New Yorker who experiences both the mundane and the outrageous every day – and whose inner voice delivers a hilarious running commentary throughout.

Now entering its third season, THE LOUISE LOG will air new episodes on the last Thursday of each month on its official web site and Youtube page (see links below) with supplemental material airing on the other Thursdays. The first of these aired on January 30th, 2014, and can be viewed at the embedded link below.

Written, produced and directed by Anne Flournoy, THE LOUISE LOG debuted on December 31, 2007 and has achieved enormous popularity and acclaim while winning such notable fans as the late, legendary film critic Roger Ebert, and famed playwright Eve Ensler (THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES).

The series stars Morgan Hallett (taking over for Christine Cook who played the role in the first 2 seasons) as Louise, a harried former sculptor who gave up her dreams of an artistic career to take care of her husband, ex-musician turned music store shopkeeper Phineas (Joseph Franchini) and their two children. (Note: Although 17 episodes aired in each of the first two seasons, Flournoy says there’s no word on exactly how many will air this season.)

Making things even more complicated for them are Phineas’ oddball father Ethelred (Everett Quinton), and his ‘assistant’, Queen Elizabeth (Danusia Trevino), who proves to be just as wacky as Phineas is. Rounding out the cast is Jennifer Sklias-Gahan as Louise’s gorgeous, often narcissistic and extremely flirtatious sister Ava, a woman who not only gets around with men and women, but also takes full advantage of Louise and Phineas’ hospitality by taking up space in their home – and making both of their lives miserable in the process. All of this takes place as seen (and heard) from Louise’s perspective, which proves to be as funny as the awkward moments she experiences over the course of each episode.

Based on a somewhat exaggerated version of her life, Flournoy’s long journey toward bringing the hilarious story of THE LOUISE LOG to the screen grew out of her desires to create unique content and to keep working despite an early career setback. “I was at home with a one-year old when my first feature film played in competition at Sundance and failed to find a distributor. Undaunted, I launched into writing a second script and wrote and rewrote it for seventeen years until one day, I threw in the towel and decided to get back to what I love, filmmaking.  The idea was to make something every month, ideally short funny videos and upload them to YouTube. I was going for thigh-slappers. After five months, the first rough cut I came up with was hardly funny and long at 82 seconds,” she recalls.

Bringing THE LOUISE LOG to the web was only the beginning. From there, the long process of producing an ongoing web series became an even bigger challenge. “After five or six episodes, when I’d pretty much run out of ideas and realized that, to continue, I was going to have to take this script I’d labored over for so many years and gut it of its juicy scenes and throw them up on YouTube for free; this took the story through Season 1,” she adds.

With a cast made up primarily of New York theatre performers including Broadway veteran Hallett (LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, TRANSLATIONS), plus Quinton, Drama Desk nominee Franchini and some of her personal friends, Flournoy knew just where to look when it came to finding her talented ensemble. However, that task was momentarily complicated at the end of season 2 when actress Christine Cook announced she was leaving the series. “We knew last summer that the original Louise was not returning, that we’d have to recast and we did. But after one day of shooting with the ‘new’ Louise, it became clear that we needed to re-recast Louise – and on the double. Crew members had started booking other work and the production showed signs of crumbling. The next day Morgan Hallett walked in the door, a godsend – brilliant, beautiful, generous and wicked funny,” Flournoy says.

As the concept of THE LOUISE LOG evolved, Flournoy decided to utilize a reliable storytelling device that became the key to the show’s comedic effectiveness. “The idea of a voiceover seemed like a way to give it more oomph and the way (French filmmaker Jean-Luc) Godard had used a voiceover in (Godard’s 1967 film) TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER seemed like a great (and under-utilized) device. I was planning to do something totally different every month, live action ‘talking’ animals, puppets, etc but when people wrote back that they loved the actor, I decided to keep going with more of the same. I don’t know that I’d heard of a web series but it seemed like a better plan than trying to come up with a whole new world every month,” Flournoy says.

The series’ production style also evolved and improved from season to season, transitioning from a small scale production done on a next to nothing budget into a highly professional operation. “The first seventeen episodes were shot pretty much once a month for about four hours per episode. We had no budget at all, I was shooting picture and taking sound with a camcorder and one of my kids or any friend I could wrangle would help by holding a copy of the script and making sure we covered all the lines and action. There was so much criticism for the bad sound in Season 1 that for Season 2 and 3, we had a professional sound mixer. This meant that we had to shoot long days as sound mixers get paid their day rate if you need them for one hour or eight. So for these seasons we shot two or three times a week for a month. With a skeletal team, I find it’s possible to pull this off if the shoots are spread out and (ideally) never on consecutive days,” adds Flournoy.

A large part of that improved quality came as a result of its successful crowd funding campaign, which raised over $22,000 via the Seed & Spark fundraising platform. “Having the audience finance the production gave me a huge boost in confidence to go crazy with the script. Lucky for me, wizard co-writer Mordecai Green found a way to turn the crazy into stories. Add wildly talented actors and our only real problem was having to cut in the middle of takes because the cast was breaking up laughing,” Flournoy says. THE LOUISE LOG promises to bring viewers even more hilariously awkward moments in season 3; moments seen from the view of a woman who knows all too well an axiom that Flournoy says best describes the theme of her series: “People have issues.”

(Note: Although Flournoy says that the show’s early episodes are closed-captioned, she hopes to utilize that feature for season 3 of THE LOUISE LOG as well.)

ON THE WEB: www.thelouiselog.com

YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/user/anneflournoy

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/TheLouiseLog

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/TheLouiseLog