Bwog’s Internet-based television critic Rob Trump returns with another installment of Know Your Web Series. This week: Drunk History.

There are certain things that are perennially hilarious, but by their nature are difficult to focus on for the purposes of fictional comedy.  A prime example: drunk people incoherently telling stories are extremely funny, but drunk stories are inclined to be personally focused, insular, anecdotal, and difficult to make humorous to a wide audience.  Often, the most brilliant comic minds are the ones who figure out how to penetrate that bubble and make something funny in real life funny in fiction as well.

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It’s TV on the Internet! Brought to you by Web-only television critic Rob Trump. This week: Toyboize.

Whether you prefer the British Office or the American version–and I think a case can be made for either–you have to concede one point to the Americans: they’re much better at keeping their actors employed.  While Jenna Fischer can bounce back from a dud like The Promotion into a full-time job on a hit show, the same can’t be said for, say, her British counterpart Lucy Davis, whose post-Office resume runs the gamut from the aggressively mediocre (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) to the downright embarrassing (Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties, Sex Lives of the Potato Men–and no, I am not making that up).

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Your guide to what’s worth watching on the Internet returns and TV critic Rob Trump comes bearing good news for fans of Neil Patrick Harris and Joss Whedon alike.

I feel like I’ve started the last three or four of these with some variant on “Well, I’m not sure that this really belongs in the category ‘web series,’ but…” Add another to that category, because Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is perhaps too short — it’s exactly three episodes, or “acts” — and perhaps too professional — it’s directed by Joss Whedon, he of Firefly and Buffy fame, and on an actual budget — to be comparable to most of the other shows I’ve reviewed.  But it debuted on the Internet, and that’s enough for me.  Dr. Horrible is a web series, and it’s an absolutely great one.

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Internet Television Critic Rob Trump returns after a brief sojourn from Bwog’s series on web series.

Well, I’m back, after a few weeks hiatus of just basically forgetting to write this and nobody noticing. I promised several weeks ago that I would review the other major CollegeHumor webseries, The Michael Showalter Showalter, so that is on the docket now.

The Michael Showalter Showalter, is, like The Jeannie Tate Show, a sketch-like riff on talk shows, where the central joke is how unlikable and terrible the talk show host actually is.  In Showalter, the titular’s host self-parodic character isn’t mugging and self-satisfied like Tate, but instead passive-aggressive and cruel.  And instead of a minivan, Showalter takes place in a studio, where half the footage is of the actual interview taking place, and the other half is filmed by “behind the scenes” cameras that usually highlight the “real-life” tension between Showalter and his guests.

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Just because you have homework doesn’t mean the TV watching has to stop — really 12s, it’s true! Rob Trump’s weekly web series fun continues with Mark Erickson’s Infinite Solutions.

Well, my original plan for the first week of school was, having done Jake and Amir, to quickly knock off a review of the other major CollegeHumor webseries, The Michael Showalter Showalter.  But while I was watching some other CollegeHumor stuff, specifically their awesome “Minesweeper: The Movie Trailer”, I discovered something magical that made me abort my original plan.  It was Infinite Solutions with Mark Erickson.  Specifically, it was this:

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 It’s time again to learn about another exciting Web Series with Internet television aficionado Rob Trump. This week, a multimedia presentation of why you should be watching Jake and Amir.

Relationship problems stemming from insignificant reasons.  One person acting like a chump and another person being annoyed by it.  Dudes getting nailed in the nuts.  Will any of these things ever stop being funny?  Let me throw my hat in the “probably not” category.  With that short introduction, allow me to introduce Jake and Amir, a couple CollegeHumor writers with an eponymous webseries that fits squarely in the “rube and foil” category.  And yep, they do it right, and yep, it’s great.

Before watching the entirety of Jake and Amir — for which I deserve some award hopefully called “going to somewhere other than Minnesota for the next nine months” — I mostly knew Amir Blumenfeld from the CollegeHumor series “Prank War”, which, while not really a web series, is still highly recommended if you’re a fan of good pranks.  (Watch it chronologically.  It will make you laugh, then want to be in a prank war, then realize you really don’t want to be in a prank war.)  Anyway, Amir in that came off as a really, really likable guy who could probably sometimes be a little annoying and needy.  So, I’m guessing that Amir’s character in Jake and Amir — the idiot/loser to Jake’s straight man — is an exaggeration of how the other people in the CollegeHumor offices see him.  And it’s a really funny character.

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It’s time to further explore the exciting world of Web Series. Your tour guide today — as always — is Bwog Television Critic Rob Trump. For even more of Trump’s musings, direct your attention to his blog, which has been added to our blogroll for your convenience. 

If you like to keep up on your Saturday Night Live news, you’ll be happy to know that fantastic New York stand-up comedian John Mulaney has been hired as a writer (as well as UCBT vet Bobby Moynihan as an actor) for the upcoming season.  Besides getting me really excited for this year of the show — Mulaney is seriously hilarious, see him live if you can — that makes now a good time to muse on the subsequent careers of SNL non-cast writers, a legacy far less-examined than that of the performers.  Because while a handful of them have gone on to more visible careers , they’re much more likely to end up writing for a sitcom or late night show and remain as invisible to you as they’ve always been.

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Last week, Bwog’s online television aficionado Rob Trump discussed The Burg. Trump returns this weekend with thoughts on Michael Cera’s latest venture, Clark and Michael. 

Anyone who recently saw Pineapple Express probably caught the following trailer to Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist:

If your reaction to that was, “MICHAEL CERA WHY?” then congratulations, you have a soul.

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Since we know there’s only so much Hulu you can keep watching, Bwog’s enlisted comedy expert and television aficionado Rob Trump to guide us through the wonderful world of web series. First up: The Burg. 

The Burg’s most recent short, “Jump,” [Sorry, we would embed video, but it's not working -- Ed.] opens with a cheap jab: “Have you guys seen this new ‘Hipster Olympics’ video?” gushes Ryan, the preppie-out-of-water, “They make all these jokes… like hipsters wearing tight jeans.  It’s so true!”  Cue Xander: “I couldn’t get through that shit.”  And uber-hip Jed: “I don’t watch things with the word ‘hipster’ in them.”

Just like that, The Burg shows why it’s so much funnier and smarter than all the other milquetoast hipster-satire out there.  The show, a sitcom centered on five hipsters (well, four hipsters and Ryan) living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, doesn’t just check off hipster stereotypes laundry-list style, it engages the truly hipper-than-thou persona of the main characters.  There’s Xander, the excitable film auteur whose dress style pushes the boundary between intentional and unintentional irony; Courtney, the morally indifferent aspiring actress; Spring, the righteously liberal activist of the group; and my favorite character, Jed, the sour know-it-all and bass player in the band Sea Monkey Do.  They’re all hipsters– that’s obvious enough — but they have importantly differentiable personae and potentials for disparate storylines and conflicts, which the team behind the show exploits wonderfully.

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