That's Intertainment

TV and film execs have finally uploaded their talent to the Web, and watching such companies as Digital Entertainment Network (www.den.net), Atom Films (www.atomfilms.com), and Sputnik7 (www.sputnik7.com) grow is as fascinating as watching the programs they create. But remove the dot-hipness factor from the content, and there hasn't been much that couldn't ultimately be seen on cable.

Enter WireBreak (www.wirebreak.com), an Intertainment network that adds a new -- and defiantly juvenile -- level of interactivity to the usual slate of herky-jerky streaming video and short-attention-span webcasting. The mantra at the site, according to WireBreak vice president of sales Jamie Hooper, is ''If it would work on TV, we won't do it.'' Which is true enough when it comes to audience participation, but the lowbrow humor that's a staple in three out of four WireBreak shows is annoyingly aimed at the Man Show demographic.

Topping the lineup is the daily News Blast, in which cohosts Maz Jobrani and the Ben Stiller-meets-Adam Sandler Alex Cambert deliver headlines from wherever the camera crew happens to find them -- cooking, driving, shaving...you get the picture. As they offer up useless real-news summaries with fake-joke punchlines, headlines appear on the adjoining screen -- say, ''Aging movie star Gloria Stuart is 'devoted to masturbation''' -- and viewers guess whether they are real or fake (in this case, the correct answer is ''real,'' but do everyone a favor and keep it to yourself).

Tuning your antenna, so to speak, is also a topic on Girls' Locker Talk, WireBreak's sex-tips show. Watching Locker Talk is like eavesdropping on a late-night, girls' dorm-room BS session, except that the three twentysomething hostesses -- Lindsay, Roxanne, and Sarah -- are riffing off questions submitted by e-mail. Although the show is hardly restrained -- Sarah hates it when a guy brazenly jousts his tongue down there -- it doesn't cover any new territory compared with the dominatrices and gay blades who pen columns in alternative weeklies. Worse, Talk's token male, comic Brian Vermeire, who does an abysmal stand-up bit after each segment, had me lunging for the RealVideo stop button every time.

Fart jokes, a perennial online favorite, are used advantageously -- and repeatedly -- in In the Neighborhood. This weekly beach-bum sitcom combines dumb-and-dumber acting and bluntly low-rent production values for a choose-your-own-adventure format that's funkily amusing in spite of some worn-out slapstick moments. After a segment where host Saul Good is challenged to a ''Dieathalon,'' for instance, viewers decide whether he should go on to train with a drill sergeant or a karate master. One plot path leads to a California-beach-babe scene, the other to a pull-my-finger gag.

While admittedly more hilarious than the current lineup on DEN or the Pseudo Online Network (www.pseudo.com), these shows still don't break through to the bladder-bursting, scatologically ingenious levels of South Park or The Waterboy -- or the shame- less poop-'toon-a-day website doodie.com, for that matter. WireBreak's no-brainer interactive features have great potential -- but it'll take more than fake headlines to make for must-click TV. B-

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