The Tragic End of The Burg
This is a little old, but Silicon Alley Insider’s look at The Burg‘s untimely demise is worthy of your attention. The Burg was a cutesy web-only semi-sitcom following a group of mostly well-meaning youngish people, all of them broad comic archetypes. It began as a very DIY exercise.
Actors and crew worked for free and Woodley and Grace spent about $300-$400 a 20-minute episode, mostly for web hosting, hard drives, food, beer and cab fares.
But then Motorola offered the creators a sponsorship deal. Hurray! But … wait.
The Screen Actors Guild, for instance, wanted Woodley and Grace to pay each of four SAG members $800 a day. The producers were able to get that down to $200 a piece, but costs still ballooned — to $1000 a minute.
That was fine while Motorola was paying the bills, but when that ran out, the producers had an expensive show and no sponsors. Woodley estimates an additional 12 15-minute episodes, plus requisite Web shorts, would run about $250,000, if done on the cheap. “It would have been prohibitively expensive for every sponsor we would want,” Woodley says.
Minor point: SAG needs to evolve.
Speaking of web-only, DIY comedy, Dorm Life is surprisingly good. This isn’t to say that it’s great or terribly innovative, but I actually think it beats Judd Apatow’s celebrated Undeclared in overall goodness levels. To be sure, Undeclared was a pale reflection of Freaks and Geeks, but it did feature the brilliant South Asian comedian Gerry Bednob as “Mr Burundi” in one particularly memorable episode. I’ve been thinking about changing my own name to “Mr Burundi,” or possibly “Mr Rwanda.” But I fear I would dishonor my ancestors in doing so.
I understand the point about SAG’s inflexibility, but it’s really hard to stomach the whole “oh, Michael Eisner and Motorola are financing us, but we still want you to do this for free.”
Isn’t this a conservative, pro-capitalism blog? I thought the whole point of free market capitalism was that you did a job out of economic self-interest, not out of the goodness of your heart. Would you have the same reaction to the bakery you like going out of business because its employees weren’t interested in baking for baking’s sake, and wanted to make money? Do you expect Michael Eisner or the CEO of Motorola to go in to the office day after day for free or a tiny pittance because you really enjoyed their work as executives? No.
Clearly there was a demand for a product. However, the makers of “The Burg” were unable to fulfill this demand in a profitable way, so they stopped making that product. And now they are working on a new product. That is capitalism. If you replaced the specifics of “that great web series The Burg” with “a product”, the cause of death would be market forces or creative destruction. But it is a specific product you like, so its death is caused by “greed” or “inflexibility”.
Finally, if the actors brought something unique and special enough to the show to merit a blog post in honor of the show, then don’t they deserve to be reimbursed for it?
— Robert Karol · Apr 23, 07:16 PM · #