A despicable Hollywood talent agent is warned by a psychic to change his ways or risk death.
Between Jupiter And Mars is a high concept storyline born out of the desire to force all those Hollywood talent agent pricks to turn into decent, upstanding human beings. It is also a comedy.
The show is marked by a high level of technical proficiency. Nothing too fancy or complex, just really professionally executed on all fronts. Where I often critique shows for poor audio the dialogue here was so clear, well recorded and full of depth. The visuals were marked by that nice, crisp Red Epic footage that’s making its way into the web series arena. Additionally the show features really slick intro and credit sequences, highlighted by a catchy theme song. These things may seem minor, and a lot of the shows I watch lack them completely, but the packaging you put around your show is just as important as the meat and potatoes. Your potential audience will care.
The real highlight of the show was the guest stars. “Patrick” a post op transsexual, and client of Benji (our protagonist super agent), played by Andy Pandini, has a memorable scene highlighted by his line “I got man parts so I can do man parts.” Sheer brilliance.
Stealing the show was Dr. Schlick, played by co-creator Rob Bruner’s acting coach Patrick Pankhurst. This character is so much fun. In the opening scene he is trying to tell Benji that he has cancer, but he doesn’t really want to talk about that, he wants to talk about bit torrent. It’s an on going theme with him. Let’s ignore the important subject at hand and talk about something else. Cancer? Oh ya you’ve got that, what do you think about my new 50” tv?
Let’s talk about distribution strategies for a second. I rarely talk about views on the shows I watch and review but I noticed a strange disparity between the first episode and the last episode. It’s typical to see significant drop offs, but BJ&M goes from more than ten thousand views on the first episode, to around three hundred on episode eight.
I’m sure other shows out there have similar disparities, and I’ve seen some odd differences between random episodes on other shows but this one really stuck out. So obviously I asked about it, and learned that BJ&M released all eight of its episodes at once. The focus of the promotion for the show was at its release, essentially all for episode one.
The benefit of the week to week strategy is that you continuously promote. Each episode gets a roughly equivalent amount of promotion time and in turn you’ll see a fairly even distribution among the views.
I’ve been a real proponent of the “all at once” release strategy, or variations of it and while this may appear to be a cautionary tale I’m still a fan. In the case of BJ&M I think we need to ask why so few people watched all the way through the series, and here it’s clear that the culprit is the first episode. The thing is, I can’t tell you what’s wrong with the first episode, it’s one of the better episodes in the series.
If I had to make a guess I would say that it all comes down to marketing, and specifically who you are selling your show to. Here I think it simply boils down to an audience that isn’t invested, and sadly just didn’t like it. This isn’t to say that the show is bad, but I think it speaks to a common method for promoting web series, and that is a focus on our own personal networks, our friends and families, rather than potential fans. Our friends and family will watch our work out of duty or intrigue, not as excited potential fans. While I didn’t get a chance to ask about marketing strategies with the creators beyond that little tidbit I’ve had this theory regarding web series promotion for awhile. Interestingly enough the team plans on releasing season two week to week.
Between Jupiter And Mars can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/BetJupiterandMars