Spiner: Poking Fun Online
2 min readIn his webseries Fresh Hell, Spiner is having a great time making fun of both himself and Hollywood.
“I did a project with a guy named Chris Ellis, who’s a director, quite by accident,” said Spiner, explaining how Fresh Hell came to be. “We wound up having lunch and I ran this by him. He thought it was a really fun idea and he said, “Let me talk to a friend of mine who’s a writer, Harry Hannigan. I think he’s the perfect guy to write something like this.”
Hannigan and Spiner got together and the webseries began to take shape. “So we got together and started talking story and ideas and things like that,” said Spiner. “Harry wrote it, we shot it and we thought, ‘Let’s just throw it up on the Web and see if anybody’s interested in it.’ Fortunately, we got enough feedback on it to want to do more. We’ve got about 200,000 hits on it right now, and so we are doing some more of them.”
Why a webseries? “I’d love to be doing it on television, but nobody is offering me my own series right now,” said Spiner. “People ask me, ‘Why are you doing a Web series?’ Aside from the obvious, which is that the networks aren’t exactly banging the door down, the other obvious answer is, ‘Why not?’ Everyone I mention it to says, ‘Well, that’s the future.’ In my mind, actually, it’s not the future. It’s now. So it’s really fun on all sorts of levels.”
There is more freedom on the Internet as opposed to the networks. “…we don’t have any censorship,” said Spiner. “We don’t have anyone saying, ‘You can’t say that’ or ‘You can’t do that.’ We’re not going to get canceled unless we decide to cancel ourselves. And, probably the most fun aspect is how interactive it is with a large audience. We get immediate feedback from all over the world. It’s not like we put it on for thirteen weeks or whatever and see if we can get a sale to another country. It’s all over the world as soon as you post it.”
In addition to Fresh Hell, Spiner has been working on other projects. He recently had a guest star role in an episode of Alphas for SyFy, and he will be seen tonight with Wil Wheaton on The Big Bang Theory.
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