Pushing Twilight: Improves As It Goes

There’s something fairly risky in the concept of premiering all seven episodes of a webseries at the same time, as IFC has just done with Pushing Twilight. On one hand, such a tactic obliterates the potential of buzz building from episode to episode; on the other hand, if you get a viewer hooked with Episode 1, you’ve got a good chance of keeping them on the site for the 40 minutes that it takes to watch the full series. As the standard metric for measuring web success moves from the page view to the amount of time spent on a given site, this is the sort of thing we might start seeing more of.

If so, future series will hopefully learn from one of Twilight’s most major missteps: Its first two episodes are its most cheesy and insipid. As the series settles into its narrative, moves past genre clichés and raises the dramatic stakes, it improves.

Twilight carries the tagline, “Therapy without limits,” but the “treatment” depicted within looks more like a psychological S&M game show than any kind of sanctioned psychiatry. A group of apparent strangers, in clusters of one or two, meet to receive instructions from a bearded master of ceremonies who intones as ominously (and cryptically!) as Howie Mandel on Deal or No Deal. They’re sent out, one pair at a time, into scenarios designed to push their comfort zones. A typical scenario has a married couple on the brink of divorce entering a high-stakes poker game and, after nearly losing everything, finding their sexual connection reinvigorated. In general, when the “patients” follow their master’s instructions to the letter, they come out of the exercise with their lives newly affirmed; when they stray from the program, Bad Things Happen.

Twilight was produced as the result of a Red Bull-sponsored contest, designed to give the creators of a web series pilot a chance to work with a real budget and a professional production company to flesh out their vision. (Surprisingly, eggregious product placement isn’t slipped in until Episode 4. Maybe another reason to premiere the whole series at once?) According to Twilight’s About page, contestants “were forced to ask what can be done after dark, how do one’s attitudes change, and how are rules and expectations altered when the clock hits a certain hour?”

The word “forced” conjures up images of poor, defenseless web video makers, held captive in a room full of Red Bull, writing scripts against their will — a scenario which, if documented, would feel a lot more original than Twilight, which borrows liberally from pre-existing works of pop culture. Still, there’s something admirable about an effort that takes its generic forebears so seriously, rather than plumbing them for spoof value. It’s a little bit of David Fincher’s The Game, a lot of The Twilight Zone (including the last-minute twist in which the perpetrator of dark shenanigans gets the karmic comeuppance he deserves), filtered through the sensibility of the kind of post-Pi, third-tier, psychological thriller film festival also-ran that… well, that you could very well see late at night on IFC.

In this sense, Twilight not only fulfills the ambitions of this particular project completely, but also fits into a certain IFC curation model that Steve Bryant pegged last month as being more about making a splash with self-consciously “risky” content than about nurturing quality over time. At the very least, it’s keeping the brand consistent.