Joss

As of this writing, I have been trying for six hours to access the premiere of Joss Whedon’s web musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. (If you click the link and it works the first time, congratulations on always picking just the right time to try everything. I bet you always pick the fastest-moving checkout line too.) I would have all kinds of stuff to say about it, if I could see it. But I cannot, and neither can a lot of people. The servers just can’t handle the kind of traffic they’re getting.

More nostalgia for the early part of this century: remember when web-only cartoons were going to be the big thing? When writers for The Simpsons and other shows were signing deals to create things like web-only episodes of The Critic? And then we actually saw the web-only episodes and got turned off by the fact that a) The animation sucked, b) Most of our favourite characters weren’t there, and c) The episodes only lasted two minutes? And then the companies went bust? Well, that’s happening again, except for the part about the companies going bust. I don’t think Google’s going to go bust, and Google is the company that seems to be most interested in the potential of web-only content. (As opposed to most webisodes, which are made to tie in with shows that are running on the networks; even if you don’t buy the networks’ insistence that these features are merely “promotional,” they’re not really self-contained works that are supposed to stand on their own.