My other blog is a TV show.
Daniel Radosh
Not that I need an excuse to self-promote, but a new project I'm involved with may actually be of some interest even to people who don't find me or my writing particularly amusing.
It's a new pop-culture news roundup on VH1 called Best Week Ever. If you're familiar with I Love the 80s or I Love the 70s, this is for all intents and purposes I Love Last Week. New episodes are broadcast every Friday night at 11, starting tomorrow, and are then repeated endlessly throughout the week (I did say it's on VH1 after all). I'm trying to convince them to let me on as a commentator (I'm good on TV, dammit), but for now I'm strictly behind the scenes.
But here's the part that will intrigue the kind of people who like to ruminate about the impact of blogging as a medium regardless of the program's merits as entertainment: It's the first TV show assembled via blog.
The Best Week Ever writers' room — where we all sit around tossing out lame ideas, topping one another's jokes, and honing a random collection of riffs into a tight(ish) comedy broadcast — is a completely virtual space. And the coolest part is, it's open to the public.
Fans of the show (purely hypothetical creatures at this stage, but I have high hopes) can watch as it's being assembled and even pitch in (presumably VH1's lawyers have worked out something so that if a joke made by a reader in a comments section gets on the air, the network doesn't have to pay royalties; that's not my department). This experiment in cross-platform entertainment takes place at bestweekever.vh1.com.
I'm posting over there (as DLR) along with smart, funny folks from places such as stereogum, Modern Humorist, Real Time with Bill Maher, and other venues.
The hope is that Best Week Ever (the blog) will eventually be self-sufficiently entertaining, so that you'll want to check it every day just as you do radosh.net (OK, bad example; make that Metafilter). But if nothing else, it should be intriguing to watch a TV show come together. You'll see what trends we're tracking, what stories are being combined and contrasted, and get an advance look at episode lineups and other inside info from producer Fred Graver, whose marvelous (or insane) idea this all was. If it takes off, I expect NewsHour to adopt this format.
Shorter This Post: Best Week Ever debuts tomorrow night at 11 pm on VH1. Follow the adventure online at the Best Week Ever blog.