WWW.WEB-to-TV.COM

Back in 1995, when he created a brief sensation with “The Spot,” Scott Zakarin thought he had stumbled onto the future: a soap opera that would begin life on the Internet, building the kind of audience that would eventually make the show a multimedia phenomenon--a hit on both television and the World Wide Web.

“The Spot” was the most talked about of the so-called “cybersoaps” (online soap operas featuring text, still photos and graphics), this one starring a bunch of twentysomethings living in a Santa Monica beach house. Internet users could not only follow the plot, which was updated daily, but also interact with the characters, sending messages and getting replies in kind, learning their innermost thoughts.

“Imagine if you were reading the diaries of all the characters on ‘Friends,’ and in ‘Rashomon’ style you could get the points of view of all the different characters,” Zakarin said of his brainchild.

But something happened on the way to the future: “The Spot,” after garnering interest from NBC and earning Zakarin and “Spot” co-creator Rich Tackenberg a deal with the late entertainment executive Brandon Tartikoff to create more Web-based shows, eventually fizzled as a TV entity, just another in a long line of projects to disappear into the development black hole.

Today, “The Spot” plots no longer thicken (the Internet site is inactive), and Zakarin and Tackenberg are focusing their talents on TV-based entertainment, developing shows under separate deals at Wind Dancer Productions and DreamWorks SKG.

But the notion that a Web site can spawn a TV show is still alive, if not exactly thriving. Witness the progression of Matt Drudge from Internet celebrity/cybergossip to on-camera reporter for the Fox News Channel, or the dancing baby of “Ally McBeal” fame, which began life being passed around the Internet as a sample image from an animation software company.

In more recent developments, writers at the Onion, a popular underground satirical newspaper out of Madison, Wis., with a popular Web site (https://www.theonion.com), are in talks about doing a prime-time news parody special for an undisclosed network. This is the second development go-round for the Onion; in 1997, previous writers at the magazine wrote the pilot “Deadline Now” for Fox, though the network didn’t pick up the show.

Some Web Sites Get TV Nibbles

Meanwhile, Robert Morton, former executive producer of “The Late Show With David Letterman,” is developing a pilot with Lynn Harris, based on Harris’ Web site (https://www.breakupgirl.com), which features the animated adventures of a young woman whose alter ego is a superhero dispensing advice to the lovelorn.

This is hardly a bevy of development, and the notion that the Internet is a hotbed of potential TV writing talent hasn’t reached a groundswell stage. To be sure, much of what’s out there in cyberspace is either rudimentary, crude or hard to follow.

But Web sites with inventive content can at least lead to TV industry nibbles for their creators, particularly as the Internet draws more female users, shedding its image as the province of white, male techno-nerds.

Joey Anuff, 26, has met with executives at Comedy Central about adapting his witty online magazine, https://www.suck.com, into a television show, which Anuff says he’s pitching as “ ‘Sesame Street’ for grad students.” The site features cultural criticism, humorous essays and an edgy, pop culture cartoon strip.

The attempt to translate a magazine into a TV series is hardly a new concept; People magazine, for instance, after several tries, has reportedly completed 10 test episodes of a celebrity profile newsmagazine show that will air on CNN early next year.

The fact that a magazine as popular as People hasn’t landed on the small screen is what gives David Grant pause about the viability of turning online magazines into TV content.

Grant is president of Fox TV Studios, among whose stated goals is to find creative talent from nontraditional development sources like the Internet. To him, there’s a long way to go before TV and the Web fully embrace each other; Hollywood, he says, has to get more educated about the potential talent online, but at the same time creators of Web content need to understand that there’s more to manufacturing a successful TV series than putting up a hip site.

But should the Onion or Suck make the transition to television, it isn’t hard to picture TV executives scouring the Internet for the next “hot” site.

For those who aren’t among the estimated 50 million regular users of the Internet, the notion of Web content becoming TV programming may seem alien, but the convergence makes sense at a time when media synergy is a practiced art--when the book becomes the movie, which becomes the video, which becomes the CD-ROM.

Some TV Industry Executives Skeptical

Recently, Universal Pictures released a trailer for the upcoming remake of “Psycho” online, where it was downloaded by “Access Hollywood” for broadcast.

“Convergence” is the buzzword for Ted Turner’s Cartoon Network, which recently announced it will launch a new venue for interactive animation on the Web in December. Animation on the Web is also the mandate at Nucleus Interactive in Brentwood, a start-up company offering to produce pilots “at one-third the cost” for would-be animators, who could then shop the project around town.

For now, though, there is still a pervasive mistrust and skepticism among many in the TV industry toward the fictional material that begins life online. Yes, there are talented people doing creative things on the Web, TV executives say, but how much of it can actually translate to a mass audience?

“Most people on our side of the business tend to be afraid of it and discount it,” said Bill Sanders, executive vice president at Big Ticket Television, which produces the syndicated series “Judge Judy” and “Judge Joe Brown.” “It’s a niche area and doesn’t play to the broad array of people broadcast TV needs to play to.”

Nor do executives necessarily believe that a Web site that has a lot of “hits” (i.e. visitors) will by definition have a large amount of TV viewers.

“There’s still a huge difference [between] browsing something on the Web and watching a show every week,” said Chris Albrecht, head of original programming at HBO. “The only way we can look at it constructively is if it’s a good idea for HBO. If it then also happens to be a successful Web site, that’s a good bonus.”

Even Morton, who is developing https://www.breakupgirl.com, acknowledged: “I don’t think the Web is conducive to the development of fiction television.”

Web Sites Dedicated to TV Shows Improving

For years now, TV series have had Web sites devoted to die-hard fans, who with the click of a mouse can get episode guides, cast bios and go into chat rooms to discuss the series with other fans. Many sites, however, have long been glorified billboards for the shows--updated irregularly and thus relatively cheap to maintain.

But interactivity with the characters and programming-like features now distinguish the better sites.

On the Web site for WB’s teen hit “Dawson’s Creek,” for instance, fans can go into “Dawson’s Desktop” and exchange messages with the show’s main character. And then there’s “Homicide: Second Shift,” NBC’s 2-year-old online spinoff of its drama series “Homicide: Life on the Street.” Three original stories have premiered online in the last year, with their own cast, a 3-D squad room and a role-playing game. The network is now doing similar crossover with another series, “Profiler.”

Though he couldn’t get his cybersoap “The Spot” on television, co-creator Zakarin can still envision a day when a TV series and its Internet counterpart exist on equal footing, where plot points are introduced on television and resolved on the Web, where viewers can virtually climb into the worlds of their favorite TV shows.

Fox TV Studios’ Grant, however, is more doubtful. The Web, he says, is the ultimate talent showcase, but who has time to wade through the 2 million bad acts?