It's a cruel, cruel fact of summer: As the mercury climbs, TV programming inevitably takes a nosedive. But couch tubers who get frustrated surfing through channel after channel of reruns may find relief these days on the other small screen. A spate of new Web-based programs offers fresh faces while hewing to the hipper genres of conventional TV.
For viewers in Dawson's Creek withdrawal, the most ambitious new Web show may be Digital Entertainment Network's month-old Chad's World (www.den.net), a live-action Web serial about a gay teen (played by newcomer Brian Stark). Unfortunately, Chad's World's biggest problem is that for now, you can't enter it. At press time (a week after the official launch), DEN's feeble server was often down; worse, though the home page claims the show is available in streaming-video formats, only a downloadable MPG version was ready—and it took me eight hours to get a measly 10 percent of the 200 MB file. Even UPN gets better reception than that.
If the hiatus between MTV's Real World installments has you bummed, meanwhile, you might want to try the bite-size video segments of a Web soap. One of the most appealing is Austin (www.internetv.com/austin/index.htm), InterneTV's sudser about the adventures of 13 young Texans: a New Age vegan, a politico grad student, a sweet bookstore employee, and so on. With streaming video and audio available in four different formats, Austin approximates Real World's postgrad, postmodern melodrama with herky-jerky aplomb; creator Rob Campanell manages to make this slacker Sturm und Drang trashy voyeuristic fun.
As for South Park junkies, they'll doubtless want to climb aboard Heads Up! (www.berksalive.com/headsup.html). Reading, Pa.-based writer-producer-animator Bob Cesca infuses his tale of a blustery rodeo clown with affectless, SP-style gross-out humor: Eyeballs fly out of their sockets, a relentless bull dismembers a cowboy, and blood splatters everywhere. It's sort of like All Kenny, All the Time.
Even reality programming has its online analogue. For an edgier, much funnier version of America's Funniest Home Videos, there's videographer Nancy Cain's CamNet (home. earthlink.net/~camnet), which provides such hilarious and mildly unsettling five-minute video delights as "Nude Handyman" and "Pat Boone Speaks in Tongues."
And, yes, the Web offers warmed-over reruns too, available at—no surprise—the TV network sites. Still, archived material can make for great entertainment. One nice nostalgia trip: NBC. com's Saturday Night Live online (www.nbc.com/snl/), where you can watch clips spanning all 23 seasons and revisit characters from Roseanne Roseannadanna to Mary Katherine Gallagher. Reruns that are better than the actual show? That may be the best way of all to beat the summer-TV blues. Chad's World: NA Austin: B Heads Up!: A- CamNet: A SNL online: B
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