Review: ‘Rockville CA’

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The Web-only show keeps things brief -- and inauthentic.

Television, like almost anything else you can think of, is going through great changes these days. And as with many other changing things, the change is being driven by ‘the challenge of the Internet.’ (Note: 269,000 Google hits for the phrase ‘challenge of the Internet.’)

Emerging media tend to be both over-hyped and underestimated. Although there are certainly masterworks in its future, the Web -- which has been heralded as the future of the medium that will one day formerly be called television -- is still nowhere close to reliably producing works of what might be called television quality. Sketch-style comedy works well in the short bursts that fit Internaut attention spans and producers’ limited budgets. But drama has been a bust, largely comprising genre exercises built on the old Roger Corman model of hot girls in danger.

Still, it is another place to work, and the search for the new killer model has begun to engage the attention of creators from the old media. Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, of ‘thirtysomething’ fame, took a swing at it (and missed) with their online drama “Quarterlife,” which came with its own social networking site. And now Josh Schwartz, the much younger creator of ‘The O.C.’ and the man who turned ‘Gossip Girl’ from a series of young adult novels into a teen-soap phenomenon that is also safe for adults, offers “Rockville CA,” a pop-themed romantic comedy residing on WB.com, the online component of the TV network. New episodes, running four or five or six minutes, debut every Tuesday -- episodes 15 and 16 debuted this week, and there are four more to go.

Read the entire review: ‘Rockville CA’

-- Robert Lloyd