who's the boss

Minisodes: For those who find 30-minute sitcoms too deep and drawn out

The average half hour sitcom runs about 22 minutes, but for some people that's simply too long. Most successful web videos average between 2 and 5 minutes, and the folks at Sony Pictures Television have found a new way to deliver classic television to this shortened-attention-span set. As highlighted in a recent story by CNN, The The Minisode Network is presented on Myspace and offers a swath of retro television episodes that have been carefully edited down to five minutes in an effort to update the old shows for the post millennium web format.

The network offers a variety of programming from Dilbert to Diff'rent Strokes, but is something lost in translation as the video editors slice and dice everything from the original that is considered not essential? Are these mostly ancient sitcoms even worth watching today in either form? While I can't be certain whether it's a result of the hack jobs or the dated material, most of the mini-episodes I watched felt incomplete and not really worth watching. The editing was clean and seamless, but the stories lacked any real development (something that's already a problem with the sitcom genre). The jokes were still there and the punchlines were also kept intact, but the timing was wrong and the humor was all but lost on me.

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Originally posted at Media Sphere

July 23, 2007 12:33 PM PDT By Josh Wolf

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