The line between TV series airing on your television and those being broadcast online is constantly being stepped over. Shows like Lost or The Office offer exclusive extra footage online, while others got their start there and moved to TV screens.

The Canadian sci-fi fantasy show Sanctuary started as an eight-webisode series in 2007. It was developed for TV, and starring Amanda Tapping (the Stargate franchise), has aired two seasons on Syfy and The Movie Network/Movie Central.

Over on Spike in 2007, a gamer web series MoCap, LLC spotlighted a small company that created motion-capture animation for video games.

But there were failures too. The much-ballyhooed Quarterlife started online with 36 eight-minute segments, and followed “a group of twentysomething artists coming of age in a digital generation.”

NBC picked up Quarterlife as a TV series, and it promptly tanked when it debuted in February 2008. It was cancelled after one episode, which snagged only 3.1 million viewers.

Now two new series – one an online phenomenon moving to TV, the other sticking to the Internet – offer very different experiences, and two very different results.

Canadian production Pure Pwnage (“Pwnage” is pronounced “ownage,” don’t ask me why) is making the move to television when it debuts on Showcase this Friday, March 12. An online smash hit at purepwnage.com, Pure Pwnage the series tells the story of a 26-year-old video game enthusiast, Jeremy (Jarett Cale), who is known to the gaming geeks as “teh_pwnerer.”

Jeremy still lives at home with his mom, spending his days in the basement in front of a computer screen. His brother, Kyle (Geoff Lapaire), is a budding filmmaker, and decides to use his brother as his documentary film subject. Jeremy leads a loser life, alternating between his mom’s basement, the local Internet café and his best friend’s – “FPS” Doug (Joel Gardiner) – living room.

If this sounds a lot like The Trailer Park Boys, you’re right. With wacky characters speaking their own vernacular (a non-gamer or bad player is called a “N00b,” and everyone is a N00b to Jeremy), a speaking-to-the-camera style and offbeat situations, the only thing really missing is Bubbles, Julian and Ricky cruising by in Ricky’s Shitmobile.

Actually, I would have cheered if they had, as there really wasn’t anything appealing about Pure Pwnage.

The brainchild of Cale and Lapaire, Pure Pwnage bowed online in 2004, showing Cale’s Jeremy character delivering rants about video gaming and Internet culture. In 2008, it had become a phenomenon, garnering over two million unique visitors to purepwnage.com. It has been translated into 15 languages around the world and boasts 46 countries that have had at least 10,000 visitors checking out the website.

With those numbers, it really should have stayed there. As Quarterlife showed, online success doesn’t translate to TV. I admit that I’m not a gamer, so I’m clearly not the demographic for Pure Pwnage, but Jeremy was annoying, over-the-top and wholly unlikable. With his cocky attitude, weird twitches and constant reference to N00bs, I couldn’t wait for the first 22-minute episode to be over.
Simon Fuller backs 'Dream'

Again, I’m not the demo, so I may be way out of line. After all, the online clips are pretty much what I saw in the first episode, “The Life of a Real Gamer,” so perhaps fans will enjoy it on TV screens as much as they do on computer screens.

Much more successful, in my opinion, is If I Can Dream. The Internet-only series from Simon Fuller, the mastermind behind the Idol franchise, treads a similar path to Idol in that it puts newbie talent – in this case, a musician (Miley Cyrus’s ex-boyfriend, Justin Gaston), an actor, two actresses and a model – and in a posh L.A. home. Sixty TV cameras track their movements 24/7, Real World-style, as they work with mentors to get a big break in the entertainment industry.

Broadcast on ificandream.com, with weekly recaps on Hulu.com (the first Hulu content to be available to Canadians), If I Can Dream would fit perfectly in MTV’s stable of reality shows.

Sponsored by Pepsi and Ford, and with an online networking hook tied to Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, it seems custom-built for success, especially with a heavyweight like Fuller behind the project. If it does garner page views, expect a ton of copycats to vie for your bandwidth in the future. (Currently Canadians can’t watch any other content on the American-based website save for If I Can Dream recaps.)

Fuller calls online series “the next frontier,” and it very well could be. But for every Dream there is a nightmare.


Pure Pwnage debuts Friday, March 12 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Showcase. If I Can Dream continues to air at ificandream.com and hulu.com.

Thoughts? greg@tvguide.ca

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