Love/hate social networking? SuperNews! gets it
source: http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/features/81022/love-hate-social-networking-supernews-get...
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Chicagoan-turned–Los Angeleno Brian Shortall* watches TV, surfs the Web and makes fun of stupid shit for a living. He’s a writer and producer for SuperNews!, CurrentTV’s animated weekly comedy series that just loves to pick on Facebook, Twitter and any other obsessed-over pop-culture phenomena. If you haven’t heard of the show yet, you may soon: Last March, SuperNews!’s cable outlet bumped the show up from short sketches to a full half-hour cartoon sitcom format after the show garnered a few big buzz-generating hits on the Web. Just in time for TOC’s own social-networking issue, we phoned Brian at CurrentTV’s L.A. office to find out what inspires his team to funnel its good-natured but scathingly observant cultural critiques into the show’s anthropomorphic characters—a self-important Facebook, a douchy MySpace and a dopey Friendster among them.
*Full disclosure: Brian and the writer are long-lost grade-school friends who just a few weeks ago reunited via….wait for it….Facebook.
Why does SuperNews! love satirizing social-networking sites?
We never seek out things to make fun of. It’s more like, Let’s write about our daily lives and living in a modern world. Early on, Josh [Faure-Brac, the show’s creator and executive producer] had the idea to make fun of this stupid site called Twitter, long before it broke. We did a show and had it in the can for months before putting it in our first half-hour show [which debuted in March 2009]; the timing of that cartoon really put us on the map as being the show that made fun of these sites.
And from there…
We thought, hell, let’s make fun of all of them—Friendster, Facebook and Twitter—and put them on an actual sitcom like Three’s Company. We created these personas that are sort of what I imagine those sites would be like if they were alive: Facebook is the Ivy League snob, MySpace is this trashy club guy and Friendster is borderline retarded. We’ve taken things even further [in the coming season]. Without giving too much away, we change up the characters so you might, for example, find that Friendster is all but dead or in a mental institution.
But why social-networking sites? What makes them an especially fun/funny target?
They’re a trend, and anything that hits a population quickly and with such impact deserves to be made fun of. Whether it’s pegging your jeans in the ’80s or Twitter now, anything that people jump on and get so excited about is fair game. Things that have a mass following are funny to me; it’s a mob mentality. Social networking is an anonymous way of being in a mob. That’s funny.
Where do SuperNews! writers/producers get their inspiration for the characters and story lines?
Every day I’m at my computer staring at every website imaginable for nine hours looking for stuff to jump out at me, for things that seem worthy of being made fun of. That’s literally what we do. We have TVs on in the writers’ area, we tape every show, every 24-hour cable news network, The View, TMZ, everything. When you hear something really goofy, you stop and rewatch it. You ask yourself, Did I actually just hear or see that?! It’s about absorbing what pop culture is telling you—even if pop culture itself isn’t yet aware of it.
What’s your personal relationship with social networking?
I have a Twitter account, I have a Facebook account—ironically, that’s how we reconnected after so many years—but I don’t fully understand it or use it to its full capacity. A lot of people want to tell you every little thing about themselves, but I find more joy in the voyeuristic aspect of it. I marvel at the people on Facebook who just can’t stop bragging about their career or reporting on what they’re wearing. They have the audacity to assume that 500 people care.
What is it about social-networking sites that speaks to our generation?
In my opinion, there are two reasons: One, we are a voyeuristic culture; reality shows are what make up most of prime-time TV. Everyone wants to know what’s going on in this other person’s life right now. So it’s that right-now attitude, too. We want it now, we want it fast, and we want it all the time. Social networking embodies that. Those are two huge factors. Ego is a third factor; it’s assuming everyone wants to know what you’re doing and what you had for breakfast.
Why do you think we have such a love/hate relationship with social media?
Anything that is successful is easy to hate, whether it’s Twitter or the band you listened to before they got big. As Americans, we seem to want to build something so high that it sways in the wind, so that we can knock it down. That’s happened to MySpace and Friendster already. But that [pattern] says more about us than it does about any of these intangible things on the Internet.
SN!’s humor is very topical. What do you, as a writer/producer, see as the next big thing? And hence, the next big thing to make fun of?
I don’t know what will hit. I do know that with each incarnation, these social-networking sites have become more and more personal. You used to only be able to send someone a Friendster message or see someone’s quote of the day on MySpace. But now on Facebook, you’ve got a live feed and those personalized ads that say things like, Do you like The People’s History of the United States? What?! How did you know I like that? And then you realize Facebook knows because you said it in your profile. It gets more Orwellian the more we delve into it.
In that our info could be co-opted by a third party?
It already has—wait, that sounds kind of bad! Well, there are corporations who are paying good money to know what we like. Not in a dark, ominous way but if someone has information and someone has means to make money off it, don’t you think they’ll do it? Absolutely! That’s the American way. It’s Orwellian in terms of accessing our information.
Anything else you’d like to add about the show?
I’m just glad to be on a show that can do this kind of [irreverent] stuff. We’re in a position where we’re small enough to fly under the radar but we’re well known enough that people actually watch it.
http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/features/81022/love-hate-social-networking-s...
*Full disclosure: Brian and the writer are long-lost grade-school friends who just a few weeks ago reunited via….wait for it….Facebook.
Why does SuperNews! love satirizing social-networking sites?
We never seek out things to make fun of. It’s more like, Let’s write about our daily lives and living in a modern world. Early on, Josh [Faure-Brac, the show’s creator and executive producer] had the idea to make fun of this stupid site called Twitter, long before it broke. We did a show and had it in the can for months before putting it in our first half-hour show [which debuted in March 2009]; the timing of that cartoon really put us on the map as being the show that made fun of these sites.
And from there…
We thought, hell, let’s make fun of all of them—Friendster, Facebook and Twitter—and put them on an actual sitcom like Three’s Company. We created these personas that are sort of what I imagine those sites would be like if they were alive: Facebook is the Ivy League snob, MySpace is this trashy club guy and Friendster is borderline retarded. We’ve taken things even further [in the coming season]. Without giving too much away, we change up the characters so you might, for example, find that Friendster is all but dead or in a mental institution.
But why social-networking sites? What makes them an especially fun/funny target?
They’re a trend, and anything that hits a population quickly and with such impact deserves to be made fun of. Whether it’s pegging your jeans in the ’80s or Twitter now, anything that people jump on and get so excited about is fair game. Things that have a mass following are funny to me; it’s a mob mentality. Social networking is an anonymous way of being in a mob. That’s funny.
Where do SuperNews! writers/producers get their inspiration for the characters and story lines?
Every day I’m at my computer staring at every website imaginable for nine hours looking for stuff to jump out at me, for things that seem worthy of being made fun of. That’s literally what we do. We have TVs on in the writers’ area, we tape every show, every 24-hour cable news network, The View, TMZ, everything. When you hear something really goofy, you stop and rewatch it. You ask yourself, Did I actually just hear or see that?! It’s about absorbing what pop culture is telling you—even if pop culture itself isn’t yet aware of it.
What’s your personal relationship with social networking?
I have a Twitter account, I have a Facebook account—ironically, that’s how we reconnected after so many years—but I don’t fully understand it or use it to its full capacity. A lot of people want to tell you every little thing about themselves, but I find more joy in the voyeuristic aspect of it. I marvel at the people on Facebook who just can’t stop bragging about their career or reporting on what they’re wearing. They have the audacity to assume that 500 people care.
What is it about social-networking sites that speaks to our generation?
In my opinion, there are two reasons: One, we are a voyeuristic culture; reality shows are what make up most of prime-time TV. Everyone wants to know what’s going on in this other person’s life right now. So it’s that right-now attitude, too. We want it now, we want it fast, and we want it all the time. Social networking embodies that. Those are two huge factors. Ego is a third factor; it’s assuming everyone wants to know what you’re doing and what you had for breakfast.
Why do you think we have such a love/hate relationship with social media?
Anything that is successful is easy to hate, whether it’s Twitter or the band you listened to before they got big. As Americans, we seem to want to build something so high that it sways in the wind, so that we can knock it down. That’s happened to MySpace and Friendster already. But that [pattern] says more about us than it does about any of these intangible things on the Internet.
SN!’s humor is very topical. What do you, as a writer/producer, see as the next big thing? And hence, the next big thing to make fun of?
I don’t know what will hit. I do know that with each incarnation, these social-networking sites have become more and more personal. You used to only be able to send someone a Friendster message or see someone’s quote of the day on MySpace. But now on Facebook, you’ve got a live feed and those personalized ads that say things like, Do you like The People’s History of the United States? What?! How did you know I like that? And then you realize Facebook knows because you said it in your profile. It gets more Orwellian the more we delve into it.
In that our info could be co-opted by a third party?
It already has—wait, that sounds kind of bad! Well, there are corporations who are paying good money to know what we like. Not in a dark, ominous way but if someone has information and someone has means to make money off it, don’t you think they’ll do it? Absolutely! That’s the American way. It’s Orwellian in terms of accessing our information.
Anything else you’d like to add about the show?
I’m just glad to be on a show that can do this kind of [irreverent] stuff. We’re in a position where we’re small enough to fly under the radar but we’re well known enough that people actually watch it.
http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/features/81022/love-hate-social-networking-s...
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