Mining the Awkward for Laughs
The Weekly Binge: 3 Web Series to Watch this Week
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OMG HI
The premise of OMG HI is simple — two frenemies, both actresses hustling to get work, keep running into each other. The joy of the show comes from the concentrated bursts of intense dislike and awkwardness as they try to make small talk. They banter back and forth about who has a face for comedy, their respective body fat percentages, audition success rates, fake invites to grab lunch, skill levels at fancy made-up gym classes, and anything else that has the potential to damage the other’s pride or emotional well-being. Ultimately the show is about the tension from society’s contradictory demands that women be both exceedingly nice to each other and intensely competitive, and that tension makes for some fantastically cutting quips.
Echo Chamber
The series follows two artists who claim to be starving and searching for their truth, but are really more focused on the appearance of struggle. Each episode focuses on a different hypocrisy, whether it’s claiming to be broke but not actually pulling back on spending, reveling in being undiscovered but being jealous of others’ success, claiming that criticism is irrelevant until they’re confronted with a negative review, or the belief that their art defines them, even though the type of art they care about changes from week to week. And in each situation, they’re confronted by the truth in painfully awkward yet comic ways. The best parts are when the camera pauses on the actors’ faces, searching for whether they realize the hypocrisy, before the camera, and the audience, realize that the required self-awareness just isn’t there.
Ghosted
Everyone has been in that situation where they go on a good date or two, think there’s a future or at the very least a connection, and then that person disappears. They could be dead, they could have gotten shotgun married, they could have fled the country — you’ll never know. “Ghosted,” we’ve named it, as if coining a term for it makes it less sociopathic. This show gives people the opportunity to reach back out, months or even years later, and have the awkward phone call to understand what happened. What’s especially interesting is that everyone seems to approach it in the same way. As they’re making the call, they lean forward in expectation. When the other person picks up, they identify themselves in a cautiously excited way, waiting for a hint of recognition. And then they probe, trying to understand where it all went bad and whether it’s still salvageable. Each one the same and yet addictive in their brutal awkwardness.
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