Kit Williamson: Logo Online and the Web Series Renaissance.

A few weeks ago, The Huffington Post announced that my independently produced web series “EastSiders” had been acquired by Logo to air on their website logotv.com.  When we put the first two episodes on youtube in December I had no idea that the series would attract the kind of attention it did– being featured by the likes of USA Today, The Advocate, Out, Film Independent, Towleroad, After Elton, Queerty and of course right here on Gay Voices– much less the attention of a company like Viacom, which owns MTV and VH1 as well as Logo.

Kit Williamson and Van Hansis star as Cal and Thom in the Web series “Eastsiders.” Watch at http://www.logotv.com.

I only have one quibble with Kit Williamson’s excellent essay and that’s his use of and the headline writer’s pick of the world “renaissance.”

(My editor’s hat gets in the way sometimes. Editing professionally for years means I come with certain tics and strange opinions about semicolons, word choice and Oxford commas. You’ll just have to go with it.)

Renaissance implies a rebirth of something that has been before. Pick up your Roget’s (it’s a book, youngsters. Fine, use the app….) and you’ll find lots of synonyms that begin with “re” like reawakening, regeneration, renascence, renewal, resurgence, etc. Web series’ are not undergoing a renaissance, but rather they are a part of a revolution in entertainment — specifically independently controlled entertainment — that is in its nascent state.

Look back on this time period 12 or 18 months from now and you’ll see a shift. Two years from now the cultural landscape will be unrecognizable. I guarantee you that. Hell, Apple recently announced that the original iPhone — released in 2007!! — is now obsolete.

Bottom line: what Kit and his group and what others are doing in other places is quite extraordinary. They are the absolute pioneers in this new era and they will set the tone for what’s to come.

I have such admiration — and real envy, if you want to know the truth — for people in their early 30s and younger who have the technology and the chutzpah to throw their ideas out into the vast cauldron of the Internet and to see what bubbles to the surface. And to make an actual cultural impact.

I’m not really that old (I keep telling myself) but, honest to God, to think of the mind-numbing things I had to do when I was in college to get 100 people to see the creative stuff that I was working on, well, it would simply make your toes curl today!

Anyhow, I’ve been a dedicated viewer of this series since Day One and it’s deserving of a large following. I did see, recently, where someone asked that fans watch the show on the Logo site so that if “they” see the traffic someone might put it on TV. To that, I say with the wisdom of the ages (aged??) that’s skipping down the garden path to hell, my friends.