Shall no one mourn the death of Seeso?

 Oh Seeso. It was not so long ago that you graced our internet screens with comedy, and more comedy, and some drama. You laughed every once in a while while watching it.

seeso as it is now

Oh and then you tragically fell. The first casualty in this upcoming war approaches us. Oh! Yet no one mourned you. No one wrote long epitaphs in your honor. Well, if no one dares to do such a thing. I will fulfill that role for you Seeso. Oh you were gone too soon. A great streaming service, well a great library but we'll get to that.

Seeso, as many of you aren't totally aware of, was comedy streaming project by NBC. Given its support, it was what should have been (and this is how the story is supposed to end), the ragged upstarts breakthrough and redefine the entire generation. But it did not happen. Well, it has happened, but it did not happen in such a beautiful dramatic way, terrifying way as certainly we all hoped.

It was lead of course, by the podcasters. It was supposed to be the podcasters. Big reveal into the regular world. Of course all that stuff has been slowly seeping through. The podcasting world never got a chance to shine with its more rigorous talent. Nowhere was this more apparent than with bagillion dollar properties. Oh poor, poor sweet bajillion dollar properties. What a fallen gem you were. You were placed the Reno 911 sized hole in my heart like so few others could.

Any show that gives Paul f Tompkins a home deserves an ever-loving respect. That man is a national treasure. His mustache should be placed in the Smithsonian. His opinions on the Big Lebowski are totally off-base, but that's okay because that's his truth.

Then of course there was Harmon Quest, a great show. A fun concept based on a very popular segment of Dan Harmon's podcast, and the list goes on and on. Great comedic shows, excellent casts, perfect timing. Why oh why did this service fail? There was no reason except several very good reasons why it didn't work.

Remember when I mentioned before that it was a great library and not a great streaming service? Well this is the part that comes to. The reasons why Seeso failed as a streemong service. The first one should be obvious: it was another freaking streaming service. So the streaming history is, of course, becoming overwrought. There is too many. The market is flooded and streaming service are a lot like MMOs in that people do not really leave the one they put the most effort into.

See, it wasn't supposed to be this way. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Streaming was supposed to cheapen everything, free us from lengthy cable contracts. But I'm telling you those contracts will come back pretty soon. Shows are getting segmented, the marvel movies will be on the Disney streaming app. CBS has its own thing. Netflix will have exclusive shows. Hulu will have exclusive shows. HBO will now have exclusive shows. Amazon will have exclusive shows. I'm telling you, its coming man, its coming. There will be a company soon that packages all this crap together. There are simply too many and too few amount of money for everybody to pay for it.

look at them, all of them!

There is another reason, a very practical reason. Say if you had already paid for it, like I did happily and wonderfully. I was enjoy for the 25% of the time, because the other 75%, the freaking thing didn't really work. There was always connection issues; there was always trouble.

Then the other issue - and this one is kind of a fault in design. This idea didn't work and I don't know why they did this. It was a bad, not really good well-thought out thing, is that I don't think they understood the streaming game, man. This felt clear design things of people who were slightly too old to understand or needless innovation. The needless innovation was this: Sees did not support binging. The name of the game in streaming is binging. They would play random stuff. That didn't really work. That was needless innovation for needless innovation's sake. It was difficult to operate.

So those are the fundamental reasons, probably, why it didn't work.

The other one, and this is the one that scares me. The one that I stay up all night because my favorite streaming service ever also does this. I of course talk about filmstruck. My beloved filmstruck. The one, who if it was personified as a woman, would marry on the spot and/or follow whatever dangerous cult they're plotting. And it's that Sees catered to a small specific group of people.

Now Paul F Tompkins is a genius. I love Carman Esposito and Rhea Butcher as much as any sane, logical, still-alive person can love. But I was wracking my brain recently to think of where they were ... See the thing about streaming, especially streaming exclusive things, is that you kind of need a big name. They don't all have to be big names, but you need one or two big names to be in the thing. And I would bring everybody. You know, it's the old problem of a lot of these people have critical respects or were beloved but Tompkins' of the world aren't mainstream and that sucks and I hate that they aren't. But the only way podcasts can be mainstream is if you talk about serial killers but comedy stuff - the meat and bones of what podcasts do and just not doing it. I don't know why. And they're all really funny. Maybe it's because they're probably an hour long.

Anytime I try to talk people into listening to podcasts ... Its like two hours long. But dude, what do you gotta do for like two hours. It's a commitment and you kind of have to commit to this idea, but you end up enjoying it, lovingly. So maybe Sees was never destined to survive, not with the technical issues I brought up, but maybe it was just a brief shining light in this sad world. Part of me fears that it wasn't the glorious crowning of this great comedy movement. Part of me fears that it was instead the final gasp of it. It's time now. The new generation must be coming up around this point, influenced by podcasters more than anything.

I recently took a class at UCB, and there were a lot of people, including myself, there who were fans of this type of comedy. Seeso might have been the end of the ... maybe a brave new world is upon us. Maybe its Instagram comedians. Or maybe it will great new things. I dunno. The world is new and scary and some of the change is really bad, like super duper bad like "Oh my god why did this happen?" Some of the change is good. Maybe we're all relics now. Maybe it's their turn, whoever they are. But Seeso was there and it was fun for a brief point. And I just think that should be talked about at least once. To be mourned, for walls to be banged against, for chairs to be thrown. Ugh. For somebody to write on their Tumblr "Ugh, all the feels right now." Something. Anything. Don't let this just be a cry in the night, man