That aside, I found the acting stilted, many characters mailing in their lines without much emotion, and the plot was so well hidden that it escaped the writing staff. If anything is going anywhere, they aren’t letting the audience in on the secret.

And… I would have assumed a webpage somewhere, maybe even a mySpace existence, but nobody told me about it for the time I could stomach watching the show.

Honestly, it was surprising how little show seemed to care about anything.

And then, lo and behold, after the 2nd act the cheese showed up all on its own…

I’m eager to see how the online component plays out both in and of itself, in relation to the broadcast component and, ultimately, in how either side feeds (or impedes) the other.

At first blush the characters are the usual quirky mix that attempt to cross a range of types and thereby attract a wider cross-section of the desired audience. How closely these characters - and what obsesses them - hew to their “target” I don’t really know. I’m a curmudgeonly 50 year old who has to concentrate when watching shows like this so as not to have his perceptions tainted with envy at the young - regardless of how facile their lives may seem.

Shows like this have, traditionally, “grown” as opposed to bursting on the scene as a complete audience phenomenon. They require time (an increasingly limited resource, it seems) to develop with their audience and find the richness of the characters and bond with the viewers. Perhaps the online aspects of this narrative will help speed up this process or dig a little deeper into the consciousness of the crowd. I don’t know.

I do know we can expect to see more and more of these kinds of “diary entry” narratives, where the self-expressive technologies that are increasingly pervasive in our day-to-day communicative lives get reflected (finally) in the dramatic discourse that passes for entertainment. Having it reflected within one format is one thing - seeing it broken apart and spread across formats, to truly use the “web” of communication we are clambering through (or caught up in), will be a true reflection of where we are as a culture.

In the meantime, I’m content to sit in the kudzu and watch it grow - before deciding to either water it or cut it down.

Cheers.

Zwick and Herskovitz are mining the same territory they always have, and I have to say the soil is all played out. Nothing can grow there except kudzu…