promqueen.tv
This is the worst of both worlds. A low budget series that gets the Hollywood treatment.
All the effort was put into the high-concept genre pitch that practically sells itself. But unlike Stranger Things, the people writing and working on it don't particularly care about the series. It's just a (small) paycheck. And they're just going through the motions.
It's shot well enough (although the pilot is annoyingly interlaced). They have believable production value / locations. But they have WAAY too many characters, all of them the kind of obnoxious clichés that studio execs consider to be high school archetypes. Including a British exchange student that makes a deliberate point of saying stuff like "he is such a WANKER."
So far the forums seem to mainly be populated with paid administrators.
The peculiarity here is that Michael Eisner is behind this thing, and it's a decently-budgeted project. But nothing about it makes me want to come back. Not the paper cut out characters, not the acting, not the uninspired writing. Maybe (like a lot of work in this genre) it'll get good when the teenagers start dying.
It's a shame that when Hollywood puts stuff on the internet it's only their C and D material. Later, if/when web bubble 2.0 pops, they'll point to stuff like this and say the audience just isn't there.
They're using the old media business model with sponsorship paying the bills (at first it's a lot Hairspray the movie commercials).
The strange part is that they've broken up the film into 80 x 90 second clips that come out each day. It's like watching a feature film a scene at a time. Boring. Especially during character development. The second or third episode introduces us to 300 inconsequential characters in 90 seconds.
It amounts to a fun teenage soap opera a la Swan's Crossing with horror elements.
If you want to see something good by Michael Eisner, watch his Conversations with Michael Eisner series. His interviewing style is clumsy but his guests are the most brilliant high-powered names in entertainment. Unfortunately, you can never watch two episodes in the same place for some reason. I’ve caught three episodes by digging around.
3 comments:
the PQ forums are filled with shills? not that i've seen, its not even that busy yet there. the show isn't shakespeare, of course, its an interesting experiment though.
Milowent is actually my prime candidate for being one of those shills.
Somehow, he found this blog, which has three posts on it, hours within my posting this Prom Queen story. And he posted a defense.
If he isn't being paid for what he says, he needs to get a job and stop googling / technorating PromQueen.
In any case, milowent... Do you have any recommendations for other, better shows I should look at?
arghh! i just ran across this scandalous accusation! seriously though, i am/was not a shill for prom queen, i just thought it looked cool and that it would be fun to watch the show with other people--its not fun to watch high school cinema by youself. even when its bad, it can be good. i will say in retrospect, however, that there may have been one or two "shills" on the official PQ boards. but it was not anything impressive.
the way i found your blog originally was to google "prom queen" under blogsearch. your post came when PQ was starting, so I was probably checking to see what articles and bloggers were saying (if anything) about the show, since i had blogged about it. luckily, i did not keep googling PQ all summer and stayed gainfully employed.
other BETTER show recommendations? there are a number of internet shows springing up, but its a mixed bag. there's something called "getting away with murder" on ifc.com (i think that's the URL) that i haven't watched yet. there's a bunch of series referenced in the anchor cove board forums (http://www.anchor-cove.net). cheers,milo
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