Oldteevee just got a little more like newteevee as cable network TNT announced Blank Slate, a new “microseries” that will debut in September. Variety reports that the 80-minute crime thriller will be chopped up into twenty, four-minute minisodes that will air during primetime.
Blank Slate is about an amnesiac who gets implanted with memories of the recently dead; it’s produced by Dean Devlin (Independence Day) and will star Eric Stoltz. Acura has signed on as a sponsor and will have its cars featured prominently in the minisodes (to get those sneaky commercial fast forwarders).
The show will have an overly-complicated release schedule on the network: It will be spread out over five back-to-back hours of Law & Order over two days, across two consecutive weeks (I know, it’s confusing). But Slate will also be available on TNT.tv and on Acura’s site, where the “microseries” will become a web series.
Other than Acura getting primetime ad time, it’s difficult to see why the show is being released this way. To get the full story, you need to watch the series in order, but who wants to sit (or sift) through hours and hours of Law & Order? It’d be much easier just to watch it online, where you could plow through them all as quickly or leisurely as you like.
This is, however, the latest move by a Turner network to be more like the web. During its upfronts, the company announced that TNT, TBS and TruTV will feature TVinContext ads, which provide relevant ad targeting based on the content of a show.
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