• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 24, 2007

When I look back upon a decade and a half of parenting, I realize how much children thoroughly trash your tastes in just about everything. When spittle and more unmentionable bodily essences populate your clothes like so many badges of fatherhood, then video game tee shirts and Old Navy sweat pants suddenly seem fashionable, necessary, and (if you rationalize feverishly enough) morally superior to wear. After a few years of blanded down meals, countless macaroni and cheese dinners and pilfered Chicken McNuggets, your taste buds are hopelessly immune to the piquant hint of orange zest in roast duck sauce. Discriminating honey mustard from hickory barbeque dipping sauce is about as sensitive as your tongue gets. And when it comes to media, it is hard to say at this point what has rotted my taste more -- Barney the Purple Dinosaur, Jimmy Neutron or the pre-teen TV and film oeuvre of the detestably perky Amanda ("She's the Man") Bynes.

I say this by way of warning, apology or excuse for my declaration that I actually appreciate "Prom Queen," the video series from Michael Eisner's new Vuguru group. Now showing on Verizon's VCast service, "Prom Queen" is also available online at PromQueen.tv and soon on Verizon's FIOS IPTV service. The story and the characters are nothing more than the usual cable TV teen-oriented dreck. Anonymous threats of violence overshadow the upcoming prom. Oh, the drama. As in a good Disney or Nick series, the cast is a de-fanged collection of high school stereotypes (smiley boosters, angst-ridden bohemians, bone-headed jocks, class clowns, etc.). The adults are all predictably goofy and clueless. And the teen drama surrounding every minor encounter gushes harder than hormones in homeroom.

And yet, all of these elements actually make for good mobisodic TV. "Prom Queen" may be the first mobile video series that works with and for the platform. It comes in daily doses that are under two minutes. Unlike many of its predecessors, the daily and brief nature of the show invites routine viewing. Much like the 15-minute radio soaps of the 1940s or the newspaper comic strip, these shows are as regular as they are consumable. Getting a series like this into daily routine is going to be critical to the success of the format. A twice-weekly or once weekly series is too easily forgotten on a cluttered and inconvenience phone deck. Mobisode programmers should be emulating comic strips, not prime time.

The episode structure is interesting here, because the writers give each installment a different piece of the developing mystery and they switch focus to a discrete set of characters. Unlike a soap opera, we don't pick up where the last episode left off so much as cycle around the cast and sub-plots. Each episode is modest in its goals, usually to introduce a single new insight about a character or a plot turn. A jock wants to cover up an affair, or a roommate finds money and contraband in his roommate's valise. That is enough for one day. Thankfully, the writers also seem to know when the weight of the plot can get too heavy, so we have some daily set pieces for comic relief (streaking a soccer game) or a character's Webcam soliloquy lets us reflect on the story from a single viewpoint. What I like about the structure is that it challenges the audience to keep track of a reasonable set of characters and storylines without overwhelming them with detail and confusing paths. Again, it plays within the nano-drama structure of daily episodes without being pedestrian and too straightforward. It teases you back for more.

The episodes play well on the phone deck in large part because someone behind the camera and in the editing room had the handset in mind. The visual grammar hangs entirely on medium shots and close-ups. There is little frantic action within the frame to blur an LCD or confuse the eye on such a small scale. And the editing is done in reasonable bites of visual data. The feverish cutting and hand cam perspective of prime time drop away here, thankfully, and we get a pace and perspective that works on a micro-screen.

In the end, "Prom Queen" may prove as forgettable to mobile TV's pre-history as "The Spot" was to early Webisodic programming. And from the looks of the sparsely attended PromQueen.tv message boards, quilting blogs may have a larger audience right now. Nevertheless, the series shows some signs of life in mobile programming and suggests directions snack-sized video drama might take. Ultimately, "Prom Queen" still retrofits old dramatic structures to the phone, and so we still await mobile formats that embody the handset's mobility and interactivity more effectively. Even a veteran of Powerpuff Girls like me knows that this show is cheesy, third-tier cable fare.

Hey, it ain't no "Rugrats in Paris"! Now that was drama.