This photo made me want to go to space.

While the TV networks are struggling to figure out a business model for distributing television online, a small company called Revision3 is actually doing it (disclosure: revision3 has been a client of my employer). They produce a whole bunch of shows, and the quality varies, but there are a few gems.

Their best show, by far, is a weekly movie/tv/game/comics review show called The Totally Rad Show. The show consists of three guys who stand in front of a green-screen and talk about the latest movies, tv shows, video games, and comics. This doesn’t sound great, but it is.

What makes this show so enjoyable is that the three hosts clearly love the stuff they are talking about. They grew up with movies, tv, and games – this is their culture. They are so enthusiastic that it’s contagious. It’s almost enough to make me care about comic books (but not quite).

This type of passion, even about something as trivial as movies and tv, stands out from the drivel of cable/network TV we’ve grown accustomed to. Most “entertainment” news consists of celebrity gossip and sixth-grade-book-report style movie reviews (plot summary != review). These guys watch the movies, watch the shows, play the games, and actually tell us how they feel about it. They are excited when they find something great, and disappointed when find a dud.

These guys talk about video games with more interest and sincerity than a typical cable-news anchor talking about a school shooting. Perhaps the formula for online video has more to do with making something you care about than distribution and subscription models.

Man Falls Out of Plane and Lands on Printer

Me: “Hi, I’d like to cancel my reservation. Booking #55555.”

Hertz phone lady: “We have no record of that reservation, sir.”

Me: [pause]

Me: “Ok, thanks.”

This excerpt from Margaret Talbot’s profile of David Simon, creator The Wire, explains why the tv show is one of the greatest ever made:

Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled—at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”