Will Wright, creator of virtual world The Sims, is getting into television with a episodic series for Current TV tentatively titled Bar Karma. While this is Wright’s first time working in TV, the series’ central element is built on the kind of user-participation that his games were based on. Essentially, the audience will be playing a major part in directing the show’s storylines and plot developments. Current has also signed Albie Hecht, a former MTV Networks exec who worked at Spike TV and Nickelodeon, and David Cohn, who was previously GM of MTV2.
Hecht will serve as Wright’s co-creator on the project as executive producer. His digital entertainment studio, Worldwide Biggies, will be show’s production company. Cohn, meanwhile, will serve as executive in charge for the network.
The show is briefly described as a “mystical watering hole at the edge of the universe,” which kind of sounds like Cheers meets Battlestar Galactica. It will debut early next year and the development of the storylines occur in four basic steps.
Users start by joining an online community at Current TV’s Creation Studios. From there, they can submit story ideas and discuss them with the producers and other users. The producers will try to prevent the community from becoming an open-ended free-for-all by steering the discussion with a rough outline for the upcoming episode. Once those parameters are set and the producers have elevated what they consider to be the most promising concepts, users will then take the proposals to a vote of what stays. After that the storyline will be rendered into a 30-minute TV episode.
As the producers gear up the creative side, Current TV is now in the process of arranging sponsorships. The idea of a community-based creative endeavor has been tried before, mostly in the area of electronic novels, but often, the results bear the signs of too many cooks. Give Wright’s experience in community gaming, and the experienced ex-MTVN execs managing the process, Current TV hopes to avoid the mess of too much community involvement.
The combination of online and traditional media elements has been a basic tenet of Current TV since Al Gore and Joel Hyatt came up with the idea for a hybrid web/cable TV network over five years ago. Lately, Current TV has sought to move away from short-form clips since Mark Rosenthal, who has served president and COO of MTV Networks for nearly a decade before becoming CEO of Current Media last year.
The concept of a user-generated TV series still sounds kind of gimmicky, but if Current TV can pull it off and attract a sizable number of viewers and advertisers, it could offer a pathway for the major networks and studios, who had little success in figuring out ways of incorporating social media into the creative process for years.
