Modified On June 1, 2006
Live at Gotham is described on the Comedy Central website as…
Comedy Central’s first stand-up series to premiere on Comedy Central’s MotherLoad broadband player before its on-air network debut. The series is filmed at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York City…
There follows a set of directions for folks over the age of 16 on how to view it first, in chunks, via broadband, then again, in its entirety, via the old-fashioned television. It’s multiplatform, dontcha know.
Gone are the days when a network or a cable outlet would cook up an idea for a TV show, shoot it, schedule it, then air it. A show is now not just a show, but an opportunity to “give digital advertising opportunities equal if not more attention than the TV programming from which they are derived.” Say wha? (For those of you who aren’t “alpha consumers” or “early adapters,” let’s just say it’s an opportunity to wring more cash out of the same product. If you insist on thinking in Antique Media terms, think of it this way: Remember when the daily papers usta serialize a book? They’d run a few broadsheet pages of a popular author’s upcoming novel or non-fiction tome over a period of a few weeks and the readers could hardly wait to purchase the next day’s edition– and eventually purchase the hard cover copy of the book itself… or hold off and purchase the paperback version. Serialization, hard cover version, paperback version– all different ways to squeeze revenue out of the same product… only back then, if anyone would have referred to the daily paper as a “platform,” he would have been immediately remanded to jail and eventually burned at the stake without benefit of a trial.)
We’re just happy that, no matter what the lame format (see Comedy Central’s description of the show), it’s a standup show on television, taped in a comedy club.