The
Guild Webseries Review
Cyd
Sherman’s life is complicated. “It’s Friday night
and still jobless,” she tells her webvlog. “Haven’t
left the house in a week. My therapist broke up with me.” She
then pauses for a moment before adding with a shrug, “Oh, yeah,
there’s a gnome warlock in my living room, sleeping on my couch.”
Thus begins the first episode of the online webseries The
Guild, which recently concluded its
ten-episode first season. Created and written by actress Felicia Day—who
also plays the aforementioned Cyd, aka Codex—this award-winning
series follows a group of World-of-Warcraft-style
online gamers who suddenly find themselves forced to face real-world
obstacles when Codex’s life takes a screwball-comedy turn for
the worse.
Day, who
admits to having had a two-year addiction to World of Warcraft,
originally wrote the script as a television pilot, but when told that
the plot was too “niche,” turned it into a webseries instead
with the assistance of fellow producers Jane Selle Morgan and Kim Evey.
“I decided to write something to show the world that gamers weren’t
just guys in their twenties who lived in their mom’s basement,”
she told WoW
Insider last August. “That cliché
has become so annoying. I love doing comedy and I wanted to write something
that didn’t make fun of gamers but was funny to gamers and non-gamers
alike.”
Day has
indeed populated The Guild with an assortment of non-stereotype
characters, ranging in age from their late-teens to middle-age, and
each carrying their own neurotic behaviors and tendencies. Vork/Herman
Holden (Jeff Lewis), for instance, is the eldest of the group and brings
his own cheese slices to restaurants in order to not pay the price difference
between a hamburger and a cheeseburger. (“I want to grow my money,”
he says, “not spend it on cheese-gouging.”) Tinkerballa
(Amy Okuda) appears to be in her early twenties and resists revealing
any personal information about herself to the rest of the group, insisting
that her real name is the same as her avatar and using the plot of Ugly
Betty to explain how she earns a living. (“I like you guys
the way you are,” she responds when Codex first raises meeting
face-to-face. “Cartoon characters who let me feel a sense of achievement
in an imaginary world.”) Clara (Robin Thorsen), meanwhile, really
does use her given name as her online moniker. A mother of three, she
is forgetful, a little bit clueless and often neglects her children
in favor of gaming. (“My husband’s in pharmaceuticals,”
she tells the group, “and I stay at home with the kids where I’m
in pharmaceuticals, too.”)
Zaboo/Sujan
Balakrishnan Goldberg (Sandeep Parikh) is a college student who eventually
serves as the catalyst for Codex’s life to spiral downward: mistaking
his fellow female cohort’s online interaction for that of affection,
he arrives at her doorstep with suitcase and laptop in hand, ready to
“woo.” Bladezz/Simon (Vincent Caso), the youngest of the
group, adds to the mayhem when he’s banned from the game for twenty-four
hours, posts an inappropriate video depicting the Guild’s cartoon
avatars naked and refuses to return the group’s “bank”
that he had been entrusted to guard.
Despite
all the chaos around her, Codex eventually learns to cope not just with
the events of the first season but her isolated and neurotic life as
well. It turns out that her father was actually gay; the same for a
former boyfriend, a musician who’s cello Codex apparently set
on fire. Codex, meanwhile, is a violinist: “You know, former child
prodigy,” she explains. “Now I’m old.” In the
initial episode, her therapist tells her, “You can’t grow
if you’re still immersed in an imaginary social environment.”
Codex, in one of her webvlog entries, even reveals that “I just
don’t cope well. With anything. I mean, there’s always a
lot of drama in the game, but at the end of the night you can always
just log off. You can’t log off from your life.” But as
the comedic escapades of Zaboo and Bladezz escalate, Codex finds an
inner strength that gives her the needed confidence to rally the online
group of gamers to real world action. “We can do this, OK? With
just a few of us we can take down a ten-man dungeon. Life can’t
be that much harder.”
Give Felicia
Day credit: she has crafted a solid, layered plot with three-dimensional
characters and witty-yet-intelligent dialogue in a medium that consists
of three-to-eight minute episodes; many traditional television sitcoms
fail to achieve the same blend despite numerous years of production.
And although all the actors bring the right balance of comedy and emotion
to their roles, it is Day who truly shines as the psychologically damaged
Codex, demonstrating exceptional comic-timing with her vocal tones,
body language and facial expressions.
Despite
only recently concluding its ten-episode first season, The Guild
has already won numerous awards, including the 2007 YouTube Award and
2008 Yahoo! Video Award for “Best Series,” as well as the
2008 South by Southwest Greenlight Award for “Best Original Digital
Season Production.” The first nine episodes, meanwhile, have amassed
over 5.3 million hits. As further testament to the show’s quality,
a majority of the episodes were financed by fan donations, proving that
The Guild is both a critical and popular success.
The webseries
medium may still be relatively new, but with well-rounded creative talents
like Day entering the fray, it can expect to have a long and prosperous
life.
May 26,
2008
