Streamys 2010

Sunday night saw the 2nd annual Streamy Awards, an awards show "devoted to honoring excellence in original web television programming." My girl Felicia Day was nominated for Best Actress, and her web series The Guild was nominated for eight awards total. As a special bonus the organizers planned to showcase the cause of net neutrality, especially in light of the recent Comcast/FCC ruling (turns out the ISPs do have the right to restrict/slow access to certain websites - wait, what?).

So I'm scratching my head as to why Sunday's show was, apparently, a total disaster. This LA Weekly blog post does a great job of explaining the total cluster that was the 2010 Streamys: "technical difficulties, crude humor, a run time of more than three hours, a poorly executed script, etc." Apologies have been issued by the executive producers and the board of directors.

Personally, I was puzzled about the complaints of 'crude humor.' I mean ... how crude do you have to be to shock a room full of internet denizens? Technical difficulties make records sketchy - and mostly based on Twitter accounts from people backstage. Apparently, not only were the jokes in extremely poor taste (think necrophilia, infanticide and 9/11) - they were flatly insulting to the web TV industry. Here's what Chance McClain of Horrible Turn (an unauthorized homage to Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog) had to say:

It was deliberate, crafted, written by pros, and terrible... it was almost like some brass from TV and movie land decided to pay off some local scrub actors. “Here’s 10 grand. What I need you to do is make the whole notion of web television into a joke. They want credibility? We’ll give them vulgarity! Remind 'em that the internet is for porn and amateurs."

As a result, lots of people didn't even stay until the end. Felicia Day probably booked it immediately after she was assaulted by a man wearing a thong. Yeah, I wouldn't advise clicking that link.

Maybe we'll never know what the heck caused the 2010 Streamys disaster. The real question is - will this hurt the cause of net neutrality, or help it? On one hand, the fact that its major awards show was so terrible and offensive can't make the industry, and any of its associated causes, look very good. On the other hand ... any publicity is good publicity, right? If the web TV peeps can spin this right in their blogs, they can keep the moral high ground and shine a bigger spotlight on the cause of net neutrality than a well-mannered Streamys alone ever could.

Just trying to make lemonade out of lemons here, people.