Gemini Division Goes Live

The NBC backed web series Gemini Division went live today with a website that shows a lot of promise — that is, they promise that there’s a lot more coming. I got a sneak peek at the first two episodes last week, and as you can see, they didn’t compel me to come running in here to tell you guys about it.

Let’s start with the things that should work.  The show has some star power — Rosario Dawson and Justin Hartley — not huge names but in the genre biz, they’re good choices. The show has backing and quite a bit of it. NBC, Cisco and Microsoft have all contributed handsomely to the pie giving them a bigger budget than most web series.  And finally, the show runners know what they’re doing having already done it once with “Afterworld.”

Unfortunately, all of those pluses don’t add up to a hit in my book.

The story is told as a series of webcam messages from the point of view of Detective Anna Diaz (Dawson).  We, the audience, are on the other side of her fancy, funky PDA receiving each one of her “transmissions.” Only, we aren’t really the one’s she’s talking to, she’s actually speaking to some mysterious friend, whose identity is part of the plot.

In the first two episodes, Anna is in Paris with the new love of her life (Hartley) but she’s having second thoughts about the relationship. So now she’s sitting the in “bathroom” (aka in front of a green screen) having a clandestine conversation about her fears directly into the camera.  I’m bored already. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a TV generation girl and not an Internet baby, but I like my TV characters to talk to each other and not to the camera.

To get more out of the storytelling, Anna’s magical PDA allows you to “see” certain events that she’s describing.  The thing also has the ability to do a chemical analysis on the strange yellow residue she finds in the tub after her new beau takes a bath. According to creator Brent Friedman, the “smart PDA” was designed as a way to relieve the static nature of this type of web series. In that, they don’t succeed.  The episodes are still overwhelmed by that confessional style video and audio that have already become a big part of web shows. I was hoping for something more.

Still, I have to give Friedman and his team props for doing what they’re doing. Satisfying an audience in under ten minutes and giving them a reason to come back next week is a huge task. Writers will tell you it’s harder to write short than it is to write long and the same rule applies to web shows.  Friedman pulled people from the world of comic books, video games and TV and they all came back complaining that it was much harder than it looked.

“The intricacies of how everything fits into a small box is tough,” says Friedman.  “You have to craft each episode to be about something, not just a show cut into five parts.”

Gemini Division is much more than the sum of it’s parts. With a huge ARG on the horizon, comic books and mobile games, the brand is poised to become one of the biggest integrated media projects ever developed or one of the biggest media bombs.

Watch a trailer for Gemini Division, then visit the website to see the first two episodes which are available right now.