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Friday, September 4, 2009

Tweet with Glee Tonight

It appears someone at FOX actually gets it:

Last night, the rerun of Fringe included a scrollbar across the bottom 1/3 of the screen which ran tweets from fans, castmembers, and production staff. Most of the creators' comments had to do with behind-the-scenes things, like how hard it was to film a particular scene and etc. Fans could pose questions or simply discuss the show with other Twits. The idea has been compared to the commentary one gets with most DVDs.

Tonight, FOX is going to do the same with the one-hour comedy, Glee. I caught the premiere Wednesday night and though I was busy doing 100 other things and so couldn't pay close attention, what I did see of it just great! It's pretty rare for a sit-com to actually be funny, but Glee is just that. Politically incorrect and intentionally heavy-handed, Glee was a joy to watch and I now have my calendar set to remind me to watch it every Wednesday.

FOX' VP of marketing and communications, Joe Earley, dismissed the idea that adding tweets was merely a gimmick. "What we want to make sure of is that fans get something out of this," Earley told reporters. "We did not just want to have a scroll across the bottom of the screen, where hundreds of unidentified people were sending messages through. You're getting to interact with the talent." Fringe contains a lot of dialogue and background and is nearly impossible for new viewers to latch onto; the Twitter scroll was meant for the true, hardcore fans.

FOX is not the first to do this; the most famous instance was when Current added a Twitter scroll to the screen during President Obama's inauguration. Still, it is an important step for many reasons - not the least of which being that this experiment is taking place on a mainstream network; not even people with cable/satellite watch Current...

I'll comment on the show later tonight and I'm adding them to my Twitter account, so you just might see a tweet or two from yours truly crawling across the bottom of your TV set. But... probably not; I'm not a big Twit. You can follow the Twitter banner across the TV or online and send Tweets to the cast and crew as you watch the show. All tweets are monitored before they are added to the scroll; inappropriate tweets will not make it to the screen.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009

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