Why web shows have trouble on TV

With In the Motherhood officially tanking on ABC, I think it’s time someone stood up and said the obvious: this whole “re-purposing web shows for television” thing doesn’t work. The networks looked at Motherhood and quarterlife, saw big-for-web audiences and professional production values and stars, and they interpreted that as free pre-show, buzz-building marketing. But in both cases those web numbers produced TV audiences of about the same size as the web ones (or, in quarterlife’s case, maybe even smaller) – paltry by broadcast TV standards. What’s getting lost in translation? Yeah, the web glows like TV, smells like TV, and sometimes can function as a TV, but it’s a lot more open and interactive than a TV. The more successful made-for-web shows take advantage of that. Web shows don’t work on TV because you can’t click around them.

Quarterlife, a show about friends connecting/fighting/dating/sighing/etc, made its home on MySpace, where people were doing the same thing. At the same time, I might add. I have no research to prove this (though I’m sure such research exists), but I don’t think many would argue that the average quarterlife viewer had the show playing in the background while surfing MySpace, occasionally focusing on the show when dramatic moments necessitated it. So the show kind of kept you company while you were surfing, and without that interaction around it, it’s not as interesting – you didn’t just watch the entire episode up there, did you? Yeah, no one watched it on TV either.

Production values have to change for the web, too, and web productions don’t necessarily translate to TV productions. When online, Motherhood was a commercial, plain and simple. You can see from the episode above, video quality was just OK (not HD), editing was acceptable (strange pacing for the lines), and performances worked well enough. That casual tone to its production values matched the casual way viewers were encouraged to engage with it – linked from the MSN homepage, surfing YouTube, playing the background while checking email and chatting with other stay-at-home moms. That doesn’t translate to sit-down-and-pay-attention-to-me-(and-especially-my-commercials) TV.

A web show that works on TV is coming in the near future. But said show would have to be comfortable in an interactive environment more like Hulu and less like MySpace.