NBCU Buys Another Digital Series
NBC has added another web series to add to its digital programming slate. According to the Hollywood Reporter, NBCU has acquired domestic rights to distribute Electric Farm Entertainment’s Gemini Division, an online only Sci-fi series featuring Rosario Dawson as well as the “zombie comedy” series Woke Up Dead.
Sony Pictures Television will co-produce the series and has acquired international distribution rights. Last year, Sony acquired rights to EFI’s original 130-episode series Afterworld which premiered on MySpace. The series was later turned into a MMO game by Sony Creative Software.
The EFI model is unique and ambitious in scale but it seems to be paying off. Afterworld creator Brent Friedman described it this way to the Wonderland blog last year:
We came up with this notion of an animated drama, told in bites, and our first season was going to be 130 episodes. We were told we were crazy and it would never work…We realized that we’d created modular entertainment: it was designed to be a daily delivery, mon-fri, for 6 months. What we thought is… we can distribute on mobile overseas… We can distribute over the internet, in conjunction with network play: take 5 episodes and smush them together, and you have a 15m episode, which can be used as interstitials.
And they have followed this model with their new series’, each available as 50 x 3 minute episodes or as 6 broadcast half hours and supported by mobile games, destination websites, character blogs “and other emerging forms of digital and interactive content.”
Look for the series on various NBC properties late this summer but the net cautioned they will not be following their Quarterlife misstep by sending it directly to air. “If there were to be a TV show, that would be a whole different show” said producer Stan Rogow.
Tags: Afterworld, Electric Farm Entertainment, Gemini Division, NBCU, SPTI, Woke Up Dead