Attractive Lunatic Seeks Same in Meet Me in the Graveyard

They say romance is dead, but when two lonely hearts meet online and exchange online videos, a passionate courtship ensues.  So what if the girl is an institutionalized nutter named Viola, and her suitor is a halfway house resident named Ace who’s working on his recovery issues while digging graves in a work release program?  If there’s indeed a lid for every pot, these two are the cybergoth equivalent of Rhett and Scarlett.

This dramatic webseries began on MySpace, with videos exchanged between Viola (Milly Sanders) and Ace (Adam Saunders) from their characters’ respective profile pages.  Ace inadvertently captures Viola’s attention after he posts a video of himself frolicking in the very same cemetery where Viola’s mother is buried.  She sends him a message, enlisting him to keep an eye on her mother’s grave, which she is convinced is rising…due to the fact that — to hear Viola tell it — her mother is coming back from the dead to finish her off.  Ace is excited enough by the prospect of interacting with a perpetually slip-clad “pretty lady” that he’s willing to overlook this slight personality quirk of hers.

Meet Me in the Graveyard has made its way from MySpace to YouTube and, now, the WB, in time for its Halloween-themed lineup.  As the webisodes unfurl, small details are casually inserted that reveal volumes about our protagonists.  We learn that Viola must have inherited her decidedly fragile nature from her mother, who attempted suicide when she was nine months pregnant with Viola.  A questionable relationship with her father — and subsequent boundary-free interaction with her psychiatrist, who suffers no shortage of ethical shortcomings himself — also comes into play, as do a number of creepy homemade puppets.  Meanwhile, Ace’s sobriety — and sanity — are soon pushed to the brink as he finds himself pining for his maddeningly out of reach (and mentally out of touch) dream girl.

A story on Tilzy reveals that Milly Sanders, who plays Viola, also wrote and produced the saga. Two separate directors — Matthew Thiesen and Benjamin Epps — were employed to shoot the videos for the Viola and Ace characters, respectively, in an effort to impart a distinct voice to each side of the relationship.

The marriage of old-school goth elements — like an asylum-confined heroine and the proposed graveyard rendezvous — with the modern premise of online romance has led to a format that is both clever and restrictive. And the MySpace pages for the characters are a nice touch, albeit underutilized (Viola’s creepy doctor is listed amongst her online friends, but his profile is little more than a token bookmark — much fun could have been had in addressing his highly unsuitable bedside manner). But while many aspects of the social networking site setting do contribute to the effectiveness of the series, certain monologues/episodes can start to feel tedious and long-winded, given that the “action” mainly consists of the characters addressing the camera.  (Perhaps this merely contributes to the realism of the series, as it’s rare that real-life conversation is consistently riveting, either.) 

Watching the series in one fell swoop can prove tiresome, but there are enough suspenseful elements — Will the characters meet up in person? Will Viola make good on her suicide threats? — to entice viewers regardless. At least, those within the WB’s target demographic.