William Sanderson plays a 20,000-year-old bartender in crowdsourced sci-fi show Bar Karma.

Just four short months ago, a web programmer from Barberton, Ohio, named Jason Lee Holm had an idea for a TV show that sounds like something right out of a vintage episode of The Twilight Zone: What if a man, worried that his soon-to-be published book will cause a global meltdown, rectifies the problem by traveling to the future and hashing out the dilemma with a 20,000-year-old bartender?

Holm’s 22-scene outline of the concept found favor with a small online community of sci-fi fans and, as a result, the story arc will air this month in Current TV’s new series Bar Karma.

Conceptualized by The Sims creator Will Wright, the show is a ballsy experiment in crowdsourced entertainment that transforms storylines written by passionate non-professionals like Holm into 30-minute episodes produced by professional cast and crew members on a New Jersey soundstage.

“We can take an idea from anybody out there … and put it into a professional production so people can see it on the air a few weeks later,” Wright told Wired.com in a phone interview ahead of the show’s Friday night debut. “What we have right now is basically interactive television with a long lag time.”

True to its groupthink aesthetic, Bar Karma’s overarching premise was created by anonymous participants in an online brainstorming session. It borrows a page from Star Wars‘ famous cantina scene, casting William Sanderson (Deadwood) as the ancient barkeep at an intergalactic cafe, with Matthew Humphreys and Cassie Howarth rounding out the core cast. Each week, a new time-traveling guest star visits the tavern to confront his or her destiny.

With his new show Bar Karma, Will Wright (center) is putting creative power in the hands of the Current TV community, just as he did with games like SimCity and Spore.

Using Current’s Story Maker, members of the Bar Karma community post one-line story concepts, which can be expanded into 22-frame storyboards. Members vote on the ideas, and the most popular plots move into the production pipeline for the show’s 12-episode season.

It’s an easy way for first-timers like Holm, whose episode, titled “Once Upon a Timeline” airs Feb. 16, to collaborate with others and get a taste of the television industry.

“Writing for TV is one of the many things where I was like, ‘That’d be fun to try,’ but I wasn’t going to commit all my time to pursuing it,” he told Wired.com in a phone interview. “I like working with other people, and that’s what I really like about Bar Karma…. If somebody else had a good idea they can add to it so it’s not just a lone-man operation.”

Show creator Wright said Bar Karma’s TV professionals run potential stories through a “reality check” to make sure they are possible to bring to the screen before throwing the whole thing up to a community vote.

“We’re blending the anarchy of crowds on the internet with a professional production team that’s inserted into the loop at strategic points,” Wright said.

The radical move for Bar Karma comes in entrusting story creation to meatspace strangers who skip traditional dues-paying tasks — moving to Los Angeles, finding an agent, schmoozing — and proceed directly to content creation simply by filling out a three-minute registration form.

Some Hollywood traditionalists disdain such egalitarianism in the arts. Aaron Sorkin, Oscar-nominated for his The Social Network screenplay after a decade of crafting Emmy-winning TV series, once decried the growing power of bloggers as ushering in an “age of amateurs.”

James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, argues that the wisdom of crowds threatens to devolve into coarse mob folly when it comes to finely nuanced cultural products.

“This debate [can be] posed as the People (democratic and free-wheeling) versus the Elites (aristocratic and ossified),” Gleick said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “But sometimes it’s better to think in terms of the creative individual versus the Borg. Poetry by committee? Really? I’m a great believer in the power of the hive mind, but I’d rather watch a TV show written by Aaron Sorkin any day.”

Skeptics don’t surprise Wright. The San Francisco-based thinker encountered near-unanimous variations on the theme when he pitched Bar Karma to TV networks a few months ago.

“Most of them thought I was crazy,” he said. “Current TV was the only network to embrace the idea. They’re more of a tech startup than a TV network so they understood where I was going, whereas with a lot of TV networks, community-diming was a foreign concept.”

Unlike network development execs, Wright’s not particularly interested in discovering the next great TV auteur. And he’s surely not in it for the money: Wright’s Sims franchise has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.

Nor is Wright a frustrated fanboy who harbored secret dreams of becoming a television mogul. A child prodigy who graduated from high school at age 16, Wright initially studied mechanical engineering and architecture, stumbling into the videogame world after the digital characters he used to flesh out building designs attracted more interest than the structures themselves.

Instead, Wright sees television as a logical next step for the socially engineered creativity fostered by his Sims empire.

“Emotional engagement is the key factor for me,” he said. “Games are captivating because they really respond to players. In that sense, we want to give people the [traditional TV] lean-back experience, but they can also lean forward to the point of pitching new episodes or polishing existing episodes or music scoring. Even if you come up with one idea for a prop, all of a sudden you’re connected to the show on a deeper emotional level than any other television show you’ve ever seen because you were actually responsible for changing something. It’s that sense of ownership that we’re trying to bring to television.”

Pages:12 View All