Choose Your Own Dramas: An Interview With podOpera Brooklyn’s Jason Nunes

Cheating partners, threatening bar owners, fights, and good tunes. Sounds like a typical night at the local pub for me. But if you don’t want to risk getting into a tussle with a 40-somethingish man with a mullet and a English accent and damn near knocking over every table and chair in the place, you’d be safer to subscribe to the user-driven video podcast soap opera podOpera Brooklyn for your eye kick fix of the torrid and sordid.

podOpera Brooklyn’s “Cheddar”

I talked with one of the writers – Jason Nunes – about the inspiration behind letting the viewer control the plot, the pleasures and perils of surrendering narrative control, and their plans for world domination.

Jason Lubyk: How did the idea of a viewer-driven narrative come about? Were the Choose Your Own Adventure novels an inspiration?

Jason Nunes: Choose Your Own Adventure was definitely one of the things that inspired us, but the true inspiration came from soaps themselves. Soaps came from serialized radio, and before that serialized pulp fiction in magazines as far back as the Victorian era. Back then the magazines would ask readers to send in comments about what they’d want to see happen next. Then they’d have the writers modify and change the story based on the feedback. What we wanted to shoot for was, rather than a Choose Your Own Adventure model that allowed users to choose a path through a set of already written, existing stories, we wanted our watchers’ feedback to change and shape the single storyline that we told. Allow their feedback to take us in directions we might not have even thought about. In some ways it’s a bit like role playing, or improvisation. I have to say, as the writer of these things, it’s a blast to write this way. To have to be willing to turn on a dime if need be, if your audience wants, for example, more sex and revenge. It seems counter-intuitive, but being constrained requires more creativity than having things completely open.

Also, people’s attention spans are pretty narrow when watching web video. They really only want to sit there for 5 minutes max. (This may change with more web content being available on your Tivo, or Apple TV, but most people still watch on their computers.) If we had to take extra time to explain who the characters are, their relationships, and what kind of story we’re telling, well, we may have already lost them. By playing with the genre of Soaps, we can roughly brush in the exposition and character details, and jump right into the drama, which is what everyone really wants, right? Add to that that at the end of each episode it’s fairly easy to come up with a set of 3-5 directions a character could take in reaction to their situation, and that most people love gossip about their friends drama, and it was pretty much a no-brainer.

JL: How do the users change the story?

JN: Right now the primary way they change the story is by voting. At the end of each episode we give a set of choices for what a specific character could do next in their storyline. For example, in the current issue viewers get to vote if J, our resident lesbian performance artist, is going to A) seduce, B) blackmail, or C) shoot Dylan, the show’s womanizer musician character. (As to why she wants to do any of these things? Well, it’s a long convoluted plot… you’ll have to watch it. Whatever the viewers vote for will affect the storyline. If we get a tie (or close to a tie) we might incorporate both choices.

We also want to encourage our viewers to change the story in ways that aren’t constrained by the current plot. Primarily by commenting and letting us know that they’d like to see one character hook with another, or that they’d like to see 2 characters fight for example, or, well, pretty much anything they can dream up. That’s where I think the real fun will begin. We’ll have contests soon where the viewer with the most interesting and popular plot suggestions wins a piece of show memorabilia. And we plan on showing viewer bylines on the episodes that are based on viewer comments so that the viewers can feel some ownership of their storyline.

JL: Do you think the viewer – by choosing a possible outcome – might lose some enjoyment, as they have some idea where the narrative may be going?

JN: I think this might be the case if they were navigating through a path of pre-determined storylines, or if you’ve only got a binary choice to make … should a character do A or B. I remember getting pretty bored, pretty quickly with the Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was a kid. But I think that the stories that our viewers are helping us tell are open ended enough, and the directions that they can push and pull the plots fluid enough that the real fun is in watching the ways that, for example J seduces Dylan, or how 2 characters you’d like to see hook up, actually do hook up.

JL: Any plans to extend this to other cites, or just keep it on Brooklyn?

JN: We would LOVE to have podOperas everywhere. Los Angeles (maybe podOpera Silverlake,) and Chicago, and San Francisco, and Detroit, and London, and… it would be great to have the casts from the different shows overlap, and interact, but also to see how a soap might differ from place to place. We actually have friends (actors) who are back and forth between here and LA all the time, so that’s the logical next choice. That being said, we don’t have any specific plans right now. We’re primarily concerned with getting Brooklyn off the ground, and growing an audience for it. But after we’ve done that, world domination is definitely next on the list.