Watch a Man Unravel, Idiots at Work, and Whiskey Women
The Weekly Binge: 3 Web Series To Watch This Week
The Weekly Binge is a handful of recommendations based on what the Stareable Team has been bingeing on this week. Click through to watch and let us know what you think by leaving your own reviews on the site!
You Suck at Photoshop
Two birds with one stone — a confusing phrase but a reasonable desire. Yes, birds aren’t pulling their fair weight but do they deserve to be murdered? And why are we trying to conserve stones? But efficiency certainly has its appeal. After all, it’s why we love our phones so much. How else can we combine our love of emoji-based chitchat and fondness for taking photos of food unless we do both at the same time, poorly? In You Suck at Photoshop, you get two for your money — a tutorial on the popular image-editing software and a window into a man unraveling as his marriage crumbles. In one episode, the narrator walks you through how to prepare a photo of a wedding ring for Ebay while darkly explaining that maybe his wife doesn’t love him because he wasn’t able to satisfy his husbandly duties. In another, he passive-aggressively manipulates an image of a van where his wife may have had an extramarital encounter. The show is a testament to what someone can do with a genius idea and few resources — it’s little more than off-screen narration and screen grabs from a 2008 Macintosh.
Serious Business
It’s an open question — do idiots know that they’re idiots? Or do they assume they’re operating at the same level as the rest of us? With this show, the answer is clear — they’ve got no clue. These two friends run with every idea they have: treating dating like stand-up by workshopping bits, stealing jokes and worrying about how to build on A-level material; attending focus groups for the free food and hijacking them to pitch inane show ideas that take place entirely on trains; auditioning actresses for a movie that features Osama bin Laden as the protagonist; diverting an office and its employees to manufacture plans for a bi-level city. The show combines the close friendship, shocking amounts of free time and willingness to indulge in hare-brained schemes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the breezy banter of Gilmore Girls. The best scenes consist of the two characters ping-ponging jokes back and forth as they run amok.
Under the Table
Desperation can make people do crazy things. Here, they force three women who are behind on their rent to start bootlegging, attempting to sell moonshine to children and scenesters who want to seem cool. The show benefits from strong and quirky characters who play off each other well and some of the best moments are quick dry asides and visual gags that the show doesn’t dwell on. The other interesting thing about this show is that it’s being distributed through BitTorrent — the first time we’ve seen this for a webseries, though likely not the last. Their use of BitTorrent emphasizes how creators are using a diverse set of distribution platforms to make their shows available. Stareable’s goal is to help audiences manage that trend, allowing fans to find great shows no matter where they live.
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