Skip to main content

In 2017, the web series may be the new TV pilot

Web creators built audiences and honed their voices on their own

Illustrations by Alex Castro

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

In its current form, the HBO comedy Insecure often looks and feels like a lush, feminist rap video that pays tribute to black excellence and corporate success. The show is centered around two black women in their late 20s who live in LA. It’s also insanely awkward, channeling the same humor creator Issa Rae used on her YouTube series The F Word, I Hate LA Dudes, and Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Although HBO executives have said Insecure isn’t a direct adaptation of Rae’s other series, Rae’s writing has a unique, authentic voice that shines through across all platforms. The show was renewed for a third season in August.

Episode 1 of the original Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl show, posted in 2011, begins with a few piano chords and an illustration of Issa in a magenta shirt that says “ABG.” It shows Rae as “J,” looking washed-out in a car under the glaring sun. The camerawork is shaky, and the scene cuts make the three-minute video feel like a Vine. The plot is simple: Issa raps along to the radio enthusiastically in her car, then has an embarrassing run-in with her co-worker. Awkward Black Girl’s production quality is rough, but its reception on YouTube was enthusiastic. Commenters marveled that Rae had tapped into something in the public psyche, and identified a strand of humor the world needed more of. They posted responses like, “It is so good and so relevant to who I am. Much love to Issa Rae,” and “Bitch, this is what should be on Netflix! Eight stars!”

HBO programming president Casey Bloys was one of Rae’s online fans, and he let his team know about how she was being received. Seeing the audiences she was able to draw, HBO executives reached out to her in 2013, expressing interest in a partnership. They didn’t quite want to turn Awkward Black Girl into a pilot, however. Instead, HBO wanted to explore Rae’s creative ideas. How could she riff off Awkward Black Girl to tell a story that would fit a 30-minute time slot? Although Rae and HBO entertained the idea of an office comedy called Nonprofit, according to HBO executive Amy Gravitt, they ultimately felt that a show located in a single office wouldn’t have enough material to explore. Instead, they developed a series revolving around three main characters — Issa Dee, her best friend Molly, and her boyfriend Lawrence. As the characters grow up and apart, the show found plenty of material to mine besides petty office dramas.

After Rae piqued HBO’s interest, she spent a hard three years nailing down the details of what would become Insecure. Former talk show host Larry Wilmore signed on as the show’s co-creator. Rae then had to hire directors, actors, and producers, fleshing out a staff that had previously just been her. But the move to HBO still keeps a lot of the original YouTube series’ overly awkward sentiments alive, and it fleshes out more of Issa’s life. Symbolically, her character’s name goes from “J” to “Issa Dee,” which is a closer iteration of her real name, Jo-Issa Rae Diop. On an HBO budget, Rae was able to better depict Windsor Hills, the affluent black neighborhood in California where she grew up — and in season 2, the gentrification of nearby Inglewood.

Earlier in 2017, Insecure was renewed for a third season. But Issa Rae isn’t the only web series creator experiencing the mainstream’s embrace right now. Comedy Central recently greenlit the fifth season of Broad City, a comedy about two Jewish-American women trying to make it in New York. Broad City originated as a web series that premiered on YouTube in late 2009. In April, black comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey signed on with Comedy Central to make a still-unnamed late-night comedy TV pilot. And the web series Brown Girls, headed by co-stars Sam Bailey and Fatimah Asghar, got picked up by HBO in June for an adaptation.

So why are we seeing so many web series getting adapted for television lately? In this age of GoPros, neatly curated social media presences, and streaming services on demand, creators can design and shoot their own series, then serve as their own agents and manage their own online star power. As Webby Awards CEO David-Michel Davies says, “If you go back and look at webisodes in 2007, the quality of the ones made today are much, much higher, because the access to production is so much higher.” The road to becoming a TV star appears smoother than ever. And lately, we’ve been getting more of these perfectly curated DIY packages of talent and PR. A simple search for “web series” on YouTube garners 41.6 million results today. As more web series are posted online, more are getting noticed.

web series creators can draw press and buzz directly from the tap

Although Insecure is only a partial adaptation of Awkward Black Girl, Rae’s original series let HBO gauge her voice and keep it in mind throughout the otherwise traditional development process, according to Gravitt, who oversees Insecure at HBO. And when web series gain an online following, that brings the creators’ names enough credibility that television companies notice. Web series can be a great way to address social issues or develop a particularly quirky vein of humor that doesn’t immediately jump out at traditional television executives. By finding their own audiences online, these web series creators can circumvent the traditional gatekeepers and draw press and buzz directly from the tap. That also leads to more diverse works by underrepresented minorities, as creators bypass television’s usual racial and gender filters, and appeal directly to audiences.

Insecure was picked up this way, given its YouTube fandom. So was Broad City, although the show also benefited from the celebrity backing of Amy Poehler. Broad City’s Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson learned that Poehler watched their YouTube series and persuaded her to star in the finale. High Maintenance, about a nameless drug dealer and his clients, is another example that came to HBO ready made. High Maintenance was co-created by Ben Sinclair and his wife Katja Blichfeld. It’s quirky, and it doesn’t easily fit inside the box of traditional television, so the show’s supportive Vimeo audience is really what drew the network’s attention.

“[‘High Maintenance’] absolutely would never have made it on NBC at 9:30, they’d just never pick that up, it’s just too outside the box”

Part of what made High Maintenance’s adaptation successful is that HBO isn’t a typical television network. It sets itself apart from traditional family networks on primetime by having an on-demand pay structure and genre-redefining shows like The Sopranos and The Wire. Davies says High Maintenance “absolutely would never have made it on NBC at 9:30, they'd just never pick that up, it's just too outside the box… But after you saw how great it was on Vimeo, it's not super-complicated for an executive on HBO to be like, ‘Wow, that's amazing, and our audience would love it.’”

Davies’ evaluation of High Maintenance seems to echo HBO’s thoughts. Nina Rosenstein, an executive vice president at HBO, says picking up the series was a “no-brainer,” and that Sinclair and Blichfeld’s 19 webisodes already showed impressive production values. “It was so meticulously crafted in terms of writing, directing, and casting, and really captured these beautiful, fleeting glimpses into people’s lives.”

All three of these web series turned TV shows share one quality: they come from multidisciplinary creators. Ben Sinclair acts in, writes, and directs High Maintenance Glazer and Jacobson have written and acted in all 50 episodes since Broad City’s creation. As Comedy Central executive Sarah Babineau puts it, “For us, because we’re so talent-centric, it really is about the talent, and we’re really about hybrids — the writer-creator-performers.”

“Web series are often much more culturally rich, authentic-feeling, and fresh than the series we might see on broadcast and cable television today.”

This new pipeline to television content could also be the way to solving Hollywood’s diversity problem, although the votes are hardly in. According to Mary Beltrán, a film, radio, and TV professor at the University of Texas-Austin, web series can be a way to increase representation and tell culturally rich stories. Having people share narratives that are so close to their personal experiences can be an invaluable addition to the existing media landscape. Beltran says, “Because they’re produced with less worry about pleasing the largest audience possible, web series are often much more culturally rich, authentic-feeling, and fresh than the series we might see on broadcast and cable television today.” 

The main challenge of transposing a web series into a TV pilot is whether creators can maintain a loyal audience on the new platform. The difficulty is magnified when a web series switches from the free platform of YouTube to a paid service like HBO, because the show must deliver quality in order to justify the new subscription fee. Turning web series into television also means stretching a few minutes of content into 30. By switching the focus to relationships, Insecure was able to delve into uncharted, compelling territory for Rae. Mainstream media rarely focuses on supportive black female friendships: Hollywood stories are more likely to portray black women as catty or sassy, and put them in interracial friendships. It’s rare to see a center-stage bond like the one between Insecure’s Issa and Molly. Molly is also based off Issa’s real-life best friend, a South California corporate lawyer who’s skilled at code-switching in different environments.

Successful shows are the ones where creators used to telling 10-minute stories are able to deftly switch to telling 30-minute stories, evolving the universes of their series to grow along the way. Extending the content of a show to 30 minutes could lead to broadening the content too much, diluting the focus with subplots and side stories. This is the case especially with Insecure’s season 2 episode “Hella LA,” where Lawrence has a tension-filled encounter with the police and a threesome gone sour, all within the span of a couple of minutes. In Lawrence’s few scenes, Insecure drops commentary on racial profiling, Ivy League privilege, and fetishization, all without letting the audience take a breath and consider the implications. By contrast, the original web series Awkward Black Girl kept things tight and focused. Each segment had to be under 10 minutes, but still pack a punch.

The question of lost or diluted messages isn’t the only problem adapted web series face. They have to meet the approval of TV executives, so they can wind up with more Hollywood-friendly, sensationalized, or stereotypical elements. Networks want ratings, which sometimes translates into using cheap sleight of hand. For example, because Insecure focuses on the emotional trials of its three main characters, the show needs to give these characters equal space to grow. But season 2 of Insecure sees Issa and Molly spiraling back to the same bad lovers they know they shouldn’t be with, and it cuts a lot of room for development in favor of Hollywood-friendly cheap tricks and thrills. The theme of characters reverting to their bad habits isn’t common in Rae’s other web series. It’s a quirk of longform network TV storytelling that feels frustrating and gimmicky.

That’s why Beltran would rather that her favorite web series, East WillyB, Becoming Ricardo, and Husbands, weren’t adapted for TV. She fears their creators would lose the complete creative control they enjoyed when making their series, and that these shows would be stripped of what made them unique.

A larger budget can help artists portray their created worlds as bigger and better than before

But getting network backing also has obvious financial benefits for web series creators. A larger budget can help artists portray their created worlds as bigger and better than before. Transforming Misadventures into Insecure involved adding complex lighting and thoughtfully artistic close-ups. There’s a scene in Insecure’s first season where Issa sits on her old couch and has a long montage flashback about the couch’s significance in her relationship with Lawrence. The cuts of Issa with her old hairstyle, the warmer lighting, and the nostalgic romance is a far cry from the web series’ cold shots of White Jay under fluorescent lighting. The series extends to new sets and locales, like the offices where Molly and Lawrence work, which lets Issa extend the kind of stories she can tell.

To company executives at HBO and Comedy Central, web series are just a modern version of trips to comedy clubs and other venues where talent scouts have watched for the next wave of creators. According to Gravitt, “It’s no different than the more traditional ways we get to know writers. The voices that connect, like Issa’s or Sam and Fatimah’s (of Brown Girls), just stand out from the pack. The thing that distinguishes web series from, say, reading scripts is that the creators have the ability to go one step further than the page in conveying their tone.” As Issa Rae puts it in an interview with ABC Radio, “Your individuality is such a currency, because it makes you rich. It makes you, you.”

And now the development process has come full circle, with networks using web series to develop promising talent in a low-cost, low-risk environment. The Comedy Central-backed sketch web series Alternatino, which aired from 2015 to 2016, gave Broad City supporting player Arturo Castro a chance to explore his leading-man potential, according to executive Sarah Babineau. While the network financed Alternatino, Castro got to write and perform his own scripts and hone his voice as a writer and actor. Babineau says this method lets networks take more chances on talent that may not be ready for the bigger stage quite yet. “It’s a useful development tool for us for our talent, talent-driven shows, and projects,” she said. Castro is developing the concept into a TV pilot with Comedy Central. Whether web series are showcasing undiscovered talent, or letting them explore new material before it hits a bigger stage, they’ve become another reliable step toward the majors for this age of peak TV.