The problem with online series created by professional actors and directors (the oft-maligned quarterlife, for example, or even the excellent Clark and Michael) is that the vids, despite their quality, seem too much like TV shows. Herskovitz’s series felt like a lower-budget Melrose Place, and Michael Cera’s resembled a special feature from the Arrested Development DVDs. Throw in a few dashed-off viral vids, and the web looks like little more than Hollywood’s carefully groomed midden heap.
The excellent Children’s Hospital, directed by peripatetic funny man Rob Corddry, and written by Corddry and Wainy Days producer Jonathan Stern, breaks this cycle. In many ways the series is born of Dr. Horrible, the Joss Whedon hit that appropriated TV quality and ran in a limited online engagement before going on to top-seller status on iTunes. Children’s Hospital uses a very TV-meets-Web business model (or, in other words, artificial scarcity ported online). The 10-episode series will run Dec. 8-31 on TheWB.com. And though the network hasn’t mentioned plans for iTunes sales, it already distributes its most popular fare on Apple’s store.
None of this would matter, though, if Children’s wasn’t so good.
The series unfolds at a children’s hospital, though really there’s nothing but the occasional toddler on a gurney to support the setting. Corddry plays an awkward, lecherous doctor in clown face with delusions about the healing power of laughter — “I once saved a kid from Lou Gehrig’s disease by pretending I was in a box” — accompanied by Dr. Cat Black (Boston Legal’s Lake Bell), Dr. Lola Spratt (Worst Week Ever’s Erinn Hayes), and The Office’s Ed Helms.
Corddry’s style consists largely of arch-absurdisms delivered in overserious, raised-eyebrow fashion; when confronted he then retreats from them with boyish, dismissive laughter, or propels into further absurdity. Nearly every scene in the series’ first four episodes reflects that style to great effect, as when ex-cop Dr. Owen Maestro (Rob Huebel, Human Giant, Arrested Development) explains to his former partner on the force, “I’m a doctor now. In my line of work, we use a different kind of gun. A kind that doesn’t take bullets.”
“I get it. You’re talking about a scalpel.”
“No, a laser gun.”
In addition to the excellent writing, what makes Children’s Hospital great media is how it plays off the narrative formula of TV dramas. For example, each episode of Children’s Hospital, even the first one, starts with a recap of previous episodes. Better, the recaps include some scenes that weren’t in the prior eps, creating a spoof within a spoof. That’s why Children’s Hospital feels so, for lack of a better term, webby. Without the typical demands of a 30-minute comedy, Children’s Hospital is free to run riot with the form.
All in all, the effect’s one that’s native to online: a pastiche of pastiches spliced into a loose narrative frame. It sorta feels like it takes place in between the frames of a TV show, a parallel universe that may be web comedy’s best aesthetic yet.
