The art of creating web content to tie in with an ongoing TV series is an ever-evolving process, with a recent awkward case revolving around Househusbands of Hollywood, an original series produced for cable channel Fox Reality. The series was a Real Housewives of Orange County-esque take on the world of Los Angeles-based men whose wives are the family breadwinners, interspersing semi-staged scenes of domestic drama with sequences of guy bonding time to portray a new kind of masculinity.
Proven viral comedy producers Team Tiger Awesome had previously produced a series of comedy shorts to go along with Fox Reality’s Sex Decoy: Love Stings series, and so last April the network approached them with the concept for a similar tie-in show for Househusbands. The network’s idea was for a scripted series in the unscripted style of Househusbands, featuring a sixth, fictional, cast member who had been “cut” from the show. TTA came up with the characters and story, and shot the 10-episode series last June. However, when Househusbands debuted in August, the TTA series’ launch was delayed…until today, a week after Househusband‘s first season finale reunion show aired.
Why? The reason, according to Fox Reality Channel’s David Crabtree, came down to concern over a conflict between the scripted and unscripted formats of the two shows. “We didn’t want to confuse the audience by putting out a scripted show and an on-air show at the same time,” Crabtree said via phone. “There aren’t any reality networks doing scripted content and attaching it to their unscripted brands, but because it’s an experiment, we decided that if we released it [after the first season of Househusbands concluded], we’d be able to say, ‘Check out this strange scripted beast we’ve created.'”
The web series, known as Ted Sampon: Househusband on Hulu, is definitely funny, with solid production values that are a pretty faithful recreation of the parent show’s style, right down to music, graphics, and the show’s gimmick of including on-screen definitions of the Househusband lexicon. The first two episodes, released today, only hint at some absurd turns yet to come in the 10-episode series, but the deeply buried animosity between failed actor Ted (Michael Truly) and his shrewish celebrity chef wife (Elle Newlands) remains constant. One special touch is the intercutting of scenes from Ted’s one big (fictional) success, described by the TTA blog as “one of those sh—y Sci-Fi Channel movies that comes on at 3 in the morning” — these scenes are a hilariously overwrought homage to those films, right down to the awful CGI dinosaur.
But the bulk of the show is simply setting up Ted in humiliating positions, and catching his increasingly bitter reactions. Ted Sampon never quite crosses the line into straight-up satirizing its parent show, but there’s definitely an edge of subversiveness to it that makes it an unusual companion piece.
While the Fox Reality network will soon shut down to become NatGeoWild this spring, Househusbands might find a home for a second season on another channel, as Crabtree credited the show as one of their best performers ever. He also said, however, that the series has performed better on traditional TV than online. “Our big performers on Hulu tend to be clip shows and dating shows — things easily digestible in a short-form viewing experience,” he said.
It’s great that Ted Sampon is finally getting out there, but the conflict that prevented it from getting an earlier release is one that came from the network, and indicates an underestimation of the Househusbands audience’s ability to differentiate between reality and fantasy. Which might seem like a stretch, until you consider the fact that most viewers of reality probably don’t understand the manipulation that occurs in the editing room of any officially unscripted reality series. Sometimes, it’s hard enough to watch those shows and remember that you’re being told a story.
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