‘So Awkward’ is a tale of fate. Fate, and whatever happens when you do your best to screw it up. The story follows a man and a woman both desperately in search of romance, extremely opinionated with regards to coffee, and exceptionally gifted at app development. They also happen to consistently run into each other. They first meet through a dating app, they end up living about ten feet away from each other, they get set up on a blind date from a mutual friend, and to top it off they are working together on the same project!
So where do they go wrong? The problem is that they are SOOOO AWWWKWARDDDD….. No joke, these two seriously lack general people skills. Small talk is no easy skill but you would be hard pressed to fail at it so badly.
In some ways this is where the logic of the story starts to break down a bit. It only seems reasonable to believe that two people with so much in common would find it quite easy to figure something to talk about. Their only really reasonable conversation is an argument!
The show’s episodes, for the most part, center their comedy around the awkwardness of the situation. There is a lot of dead air, letting the awkwardness take over. While it makes a lot of sense for the show, a couple of the more awkward episodes drag. It’s hard to point to a fix or something that could have worked better, its simply something that audiences are either going to run with or not.
Some of the funnier moments arise out of the times when the couple don’t quite cease to be awkward but rather cease to be awkwardly silent. It’s the stupid things they say or do, like quoting Notorious BIG…
Created over the span of just six weeks, and shot in six days, ‘So Awkward’ is an example of a series made at the speed of the web in a style other creators should consider.
The production is quite simple, with just a handful of people involved at a time on set. The story follows two characters who spend a large chunk of their time on screen together. The cast expands to a friend, a coworker, a couple of others – never too complex. The locations are generally nondescript. The coffee shop exterior that is prominently featured in the show is the backyard belonging to the actress who portrays the shows yoga instructor.
The main idea here is that that producers took inventory of the things they could easily control and they made it work for them. Most of us might look to rent out a coffee shop to film a scene, rather than fake it in someone’s backyard.
Constant quality content is how you build an audience, and in order to do such we as creators need to identify those methods for maximizing efficiency. In this regard ‘So Awkward’ is a great example to look at.
‘So Awkward’ is a well produced and efficiently made series, featuring a couple of fun, yet super awkward characters. The show often chooses the awkward silence over a joke, to earn your laugh, so audiences will probably divided on things.
You can find ‘So Awkward’ at http://soawkwardseries.com