The concept of a show whose episodes debut solely online is the future of television. Sorry, Nielsen. While Hulu gives people a chance to acclimate to this inevitable step in entertainment, others have embraced the idea wholeheartedly. One of the more prolific series to have made a name for itself in the content-saturated world of YouTube is The Guild. They’re now on their fifth season, and now their fourth has landed on DVD. The first three seasons are currently on YouTube, but if you want to enjoy the fourth, for now, the only way to do so (or if you’re one of the show’s many loyal fans) you’ll need to pick up the DVD. To be fair, they’ve managed to make the purchase worthwhile.
Unlike some TV shows where a new season starts as if months or years have passed since the end of the previous season, The Guild continues with its fourth season as if the third season ended not but a week before. Accordingly, Codex (Felicia Day) just had a one-night stand with Fawkes (Wil Wheaton – still coasting on Star Trek pseudo-fame), the leader of a rival guild, and is now reeling with guilt over the prospect of being a sexually promiscuous female prone to sleeping with men whom she’s not seeing on a regular basis. Aka a skank-ho, or other variations on this. Thus, she attempts to get Fawkes to date her in the midst of starting a new job at the same burger joint where Bladezz (Vincent Caso) works as a publicity guru, which is really just a front to use the office computer since hers went into total meltdown. In the virtual world, Tink (Amy Okuda) and Clara (Robin Thorsen) compete with Vork (Jeff Lewis) to raise the most in-game gold to see who gets to design the new guild hall. Vork gets a little help from the mother of Zaboo (Sandeep Parikh), who has come to live with the duo in Vork’s house.
Something I always forget when watching The Guild’s DVD releases is that the show’s episodes are only about 5 minutes each. When you watch them as they’re created you have to suffer through that seemingly endless delay when the cast and crew are putting together the next episode, not so in DVD form. Instead, when you click “Play All”, the DVD globs all twelve episodes of the season together in one 82-minute long “movie” (they don’t call it that, but that’s how it feels). It takes away any episodic feel, making it better and worse all at once. On one hand you get to see how well the episodes keep up their continuity and tell a single story despite having been originally sliced into single servings, while on the other it gives you more time to focus on the production as a whole and you start to notice faults that you’d otherwise overlook in a web series.
One of the show’s greatest flaws has always been the writing. Sometimes it comes across like early Kevin Smith and at other times it just goes balls-to-the-wall goofy with a side of ham. There’s nothing wrong with this bi-polar nature in its writing, the real problem is that when it feels like Kevin Smith it has all the same faults of Smith’s writing without as much kick. It tries, but it never manages to get there. When it goes goofy, it sometimes loses itself and runs a joke into the ground. Codex’s self-deprecating vlog monologues are the perfect example; they can start off charming, but more often than not they go on just a few seconds too far and become a bit too cheesy. When you watch the season in piecemeal form, these flaws never hit you quite as hard as when you watch it on “Play All” and you have the chance to notice the discrepancies in tone and writing quality. I prefer the seamless experience, but it may come at the cost of how much you appreciate the show.
DVD Bonus Features
Besides essentially being an 82-minute movie with a cast fans of the series have come to love, The Guild folk have made an effort to fill out the disc with more than enough to coax you into buying the fourth season on DVD. Beyond the more basic features like audio commentaries, a gag reel, a PDF of the script, and a video of the table read, you’ll find the second The Guild music video (“Game On”, a nice Bollywood homage), the commercial for Cheesy Beard created in the season, and a making of featurette for the music video. The final three are the most worthwhile, though the audio commentaries are almost good enough to warrant a second and third viewing of the season back to back. For those more enraptured with the series than I, those commentaries might be more than enough.
"The Guild: Season Four" is on sale February 22, 2011 and is not rated. Comedy, Drama. Directed by Sean Becker, Greg Benson. Written by Felicia Day. Starring Amy Okuda, Felicia Day, Jeff Lewis, Robin Thorsen, Sandeep Parikh, Vincent Caso, Wil Wheaton.
