Transcript Episode 1: Travis Richey
Intro music.
Angie: Welcome to G33k Out with Angie Fiedler Sutton, a series of conversations with geeky and nerdy people about geeky and nerdy topics.
It’s one of the most unwieldy titles of a show ever: “Untitled Web Series About a Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel Through Time.” But the name of the show is drenched in almost as much history as the show it’s a spoof of: “Doctor Who.” I sat down with producer, co-writer, and star of the series, Travis Richey, to talk about the origin of the show, as well as season two, which premieres Tuesday, September 24, 2013. Full disclosure: I donated $50 to the season two Kickstarter campaign.
Let’s just start talking a little bit about the series as a whole, where the idea came from.
Travis: So, I was originally cast as Inspector Spacetime on “Community,” which was a— it was just a standard audition. The interesting thing about it was that it was not posted as sides— it wasn’t posted out for people to submit to generally. It was just the casting director called in specific people that he wanted to have read for it, and I think that was because it was such a small role. And so, I went in and read for that, and also the other role that was in the season three premiere, which was the “Downton Abbey guy.” And then they cast me, and when I was on set, we were talking about how this is the type of thing that NBC and “Community” would do for supplemental content, because “Community” has a history of doing it for things like “Kickpuncher”, NBC has a history of doing it for things like “The Office” and also “Heroes” did a web series.
And so, we thought, okay, great. So either they should do an episode of “Inspector Spacetime” for the DVD, like, just an extra episode, or they should do a web series. So, on the way home from that shoot, I call it my writing partner and say, “Look, we need to write a web series for Inspector Spacetime so that if they decide they want to do it and I get back on the show for a second episode, we can show them a script and say, ‘Hey, you guys should do this, and by the way, here’s a script if you don’t have the time to do it, yourselves.'” And so we did that, and on my second episode‚—I did three episodes total—I brought the script with me. We wrote six episodes out, and they basically said, “We can’t take a script. We can’t just look at a script,” which is a Hollywood, normal thing. You can’t just hand a script to somebody because there’s a lot of fear about if they independently come up with an idea that is similar to yours and even if they haven’t read your script yet, then they open themselves up to being sued for copying ideas or whatever.
So, nobody looked at my script and they told me to submit it through my agent, and I did submit it to my agent and he submitted it to various people at NBC and Sony but got no response whatsoever— you know, just nothing, not a yes, not a no. And so, we when “Community” was in peril— in the middle of season three, there was this long hiatus that just happened— like, suddenly out of the blue, they took it off the schedule, and nobody knew it was going to happen. The season had finished filming, but we didn’t know when it was going to finish airing and we didn’t know if there was going to be a season four.
And so, I was going to be a guest at Gallifrey One, which is the world’s largest fan-run “Doctor Who” convention and I decided to do something special for that, which was do a script reading for the first episode of our web series. So, we had the cast there and read it live. And so, we were going to launch our Kickstarter campaign right after that and basically say to fans, “Look, if you want this web series enough—” and fans were clamoring for it; they wanted extra content for Inspector Spacetime. I said, “If you guys want this badly enough, fund it and we’ll know it’s worth making.” And I made it very clear that we weren’t connected; we weren’t doing it officially, or anything like that. And they did. The news exploded after Gallifrey One on the internet that we were working on Inspector Spacetime web series, and we managed to raise $25,000, and our goal is $20,000.
And it was about halfway through that funding that I got a call from a Sony lawyer— just one phone call. It wasn’t a cease and desist order, it wasn’t anything, just one call where she said, “You need to shut this project down,” and I told her basically, no, I don’t, because (laughs) everything in the web series was completely original except for the title and the look of the main character. And I’d done a lot of research before embarking on this mission, and you can’t copyright a title and nobody had a trademark—nobody had bothered to trademark Inspector Spacetime—and as far as the look of the character, that bowler hat and trench coat look, you can’t copyright either because it’s scène à faire, I believe, is what it’s called.
It’s just stuff that appears in everyday life. You can’t copyright a telephone. But I said, “I don’t want to fight with you guys because ‘Community’ is one of my favorite shows,” so I said, “Look, if I have to, I will change the title and the look of the main character. Everything else being original—” we weren’t using Constable Reggie, we weren’t using Blorgons—but “you have to know if I do these things, I’m going to have to tell these people who are giving us their money why I’m making these changes. And you know they’re not going to be mad at me, Sony (laughs), they’re gonna be mad at the big company not giving the fans what they want. And basically, she said, “We don’t care.”
And so, I did. I made that change and I told people why, and sure enough, there was this backlash against Sony for not letting us make it Inspector Spacetime. And so, we titled it “Untitled Web Series About a Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel Through Time.” And the look of the character is— we got, actually, a costume designer to build a new coat for the inspector, which is so much cooler, actually, than just a simple trench coat. So, it all worked out. And plus now, we own it, and so we can do whatever we want with “Untitled Web Series,” including make a second season. So, that’s what we’re working on right now.
Angie: Well, and I know that TV Tropes took it on, and the forums over there, I want to say, is where I first started seeing your name popping up as wanting to do something about it. Am I correct in that?
Travis: Yes, there were a couple of big websites right off the bat. There was TV Tropes did a whole page on Inspector Spacetime. Then, there was an Inspector Spacetime on ProBoards.com, and so that was a forum where people were actually writing— they were coming up with the canon for Inspector Spacetime; they were writing episode ideas and, indeed, whole scripts for the show and coming up with whole 50-year history for this fake show. And then, the Inspector Spacetime’s Confessions Tumblr was big for a while; that has since died out. And there’s another Inspector Spacetime Tumblr that the guy posts every day very regularly. But it’s still going strong.
Angie: With regards to the second season, I wanna talk a little bit about that— premiering Tuesday (laughs).
Travis: Sure, yeah. So, I think the easiest way to start talking about the second season is to talk about the constraints we had for the first season, which were when we were writing it, we didn’t know whether Sony or NBC or whoever would want a web series or an episode. So, we wrote it to be, basically, a sitcom-length episode but broken up into six acts with commercial breaks in between, for want of a better description. So, we made six parts. Each one has a cliffhanger, but it’s very short; it’s less than 20 minutes long all told if you put it all together.
So, with season two, when we were doing it ourselves, we knew we wanted to tell a bigger story. With season one, we were constrained by time and budget. We were also writing it to be very cheap, to be more appealing to them. But with season two, we were like, “Okay, we have this story that we want to tell, here’s this trope that we want to play with,” which is the idea that the main character is put in a position where they’re trying to be convinced—and the audience is trying to be convinced—that everything we’ve ever seen is not real. “Buffy” did an episode where she wakes up in an insane asylum and the fans still don’t really know is that real or is— and so, that’s the trope are playing for.
We also wanted to tell something longer for a couple different reasons. One is that we have more story to tell, we have a bigger story to tell. Two is that our biggest complaint for season one was the episodes are too short, which is a great complaint to get—and we agreed—but we are going to now take season two— instead of 20 minutes for the whole thing put together, season two’s about 60 minutes. So, there’s still gonna be six episodes, but they’ll be about 10 minutes apiece, so much meatier. They’ve got more stuff, more characters.
We also changed directors. So, Vince Talenti, who directed “Fallout: Nuka Break,” that web series, he directed our first season, and then now he’s doing he’s doing stuff for Machinima. So, we were looking for a new director, and we got Nicholas Acosta, who is an amazing director. He’s a young guy. He directed “Battle of Hogwarts,” and he did a new film called “Riddance” and also “Friend Request” that just won some awards at a film festival up in Hollywood. And he’s got this amazing visual style. And he’s so enthusiastic, and so it’s fun. It’s great working with him.
But here’s the thing: we knew that we wanted to raise more money for season two. It was going to cost more because one important thing for me was to be able to pay my cast and crew for their work because people did such amazing work on season one and were so dedicated— nobody got paid… anything.
So, with season two, I want to be able to do that. Plus, with more content comes a bigger budget. So, we’re looking at a minimum of $125,000 for the cost of season two. I knew that was going to be a hard thing to raise because season one, although successful and we got a lot of critical praise, our total views on it was like 250,000, 300,000 views, and I suspected that we weren’t going to be able to use that audience that was engaged with season one to fund season two. So, we needed to show people what our new look was. We needed to really raise the bar, get some guest stars involved, and try to make the audience bigger.
So, we wrote a prequel episode to season two, which takes place between season one and season two, and we funded that—just one episode—for $12,000 on Kickstarter, and we had Nick come in and direct that, and that’s what we’re about to premiere on Tuesday the 24th. So, it’s about eight minutes long, and big things happen. We reveal our guest star, Robert Picardo, and Mayim Bialik from “Big Bang Theory” provided the voice of the BOOTH, the Inspector’s time machine, and one of our main characters dies. And it’s very exciting. And so, we’re in post-production right now doing music and audio mixing, and the special effects are just stunning. I can’t wait for people to see it. I flip out every time I see it, and I hope that the fans do, too.
Angie: Now, this isn’t your first web series that you’ve done—
Travis: No, no, not at all.
Angie: —and you have a bit of a background. What do you think is the draw of doing something on the web versus trying to get it produced through TV or film or—?
Travis: Well, I’ve been producing for myself for about four years doing web series. The first one I did was called “Robot, Ninja & Gay Guy,” and I do another show called “2 Hot Guys in the Shower” that’s fairly popular, some Mac vs. PC ads, and then also just random sketches that I call “The Travis Richey Sketch Show.” And the reason that web series are so important—or, web television, as I like to call it—is that the barrier for entry is so low. There is zero reason why you can’t, as an actor or a writer or a director, make content for yourself. If you need to act, then act. And if you need to write and you need to get your stuff seen, produce it yourself because you can do it for relatively cheap. Now, I was putting a lot of my money into it, like, let’s say $10,000 over the course of a year or two, so I was working my butt off to get that money and then not doing anything else— not going to bars, not spending money on superfluous things, being very frugal (laughs), putting all my money into my web series. But with that, people were able to see that we have a talent for it. I have a good writing team. Basically, my creative team is extraordinary. The people who do music and writing and who help produce my content are an extraordinary group of people. And we slowly build an audience.
I mean, the simplest reason is that we are creative people and we need to be creative, and if you wait for a studio to buyer script or a TV show to greenlight your project, or a network to put you on the air, you’ll be waiting for the rest of your life. You need to just do it. And so, that’s what we did. I mean, that’s my opinion. Now, there are other ways. There are as many ways to be successful as there are successful people, so mine’s not the only way, but it’s certainly a way for you to get your product out there and also get seen. And if you want your show to be on TV, it’s a lot easier for you to bring them a product and say, “This is what it’s going to look like,” or, “This is what it is” and have them say, “Oh, yes, I get that,” and then they’ll work with you on it.
Angie: And following up on that, doing a web series nowadays, it’s starting to have a little bit more legitimacy to it. Not five years ago, if you talked about doing something on the internet, you were talking about cat videos and Rickrolling (laughs). But now you’ve got your show, you’ve got “Husbands,” the series by Jane Espenson, you’ve got a few other— TableTop on the Geek and Sundry channel, as well. And so, it’s becoming a little bit more, like I said, a legitimate channel for producing. Do you think that trends going to continue?
Travis: Yeah, I think the trend towards web television being more mainstream is going to continue faster and faster every year, and part of that is that the whole industry is getting some legitimacy because of shows like “House of Cards” and “Arrested Development” going to Netflix and Hulu and Amazon, and everybody’s producing their original content. And so, what that does is give the smaller people like me and “Husbands” is a great show that I love and “Husbands” is now even on a network or a network website, and YouTube, they’re paying people to do original content. I think that people are recognizing that— a couple things.
One is that there is all this talent out there that is untapped, and if you look at television now, if you look at— a lot of times, there’s bad TV on the air. There’s no obvious explanation for it. You sit there and go, “Well, I know a guy who writes better than that. Why isn’t he on?” Well, now that guy can have his own show. It’s on the internet and it can’t be as expensive to produce and all that, but… I think that’s the other side of the coin, is that these companies are starting to realize that original scripted content, they can do it for less expensive than people have been doing it. It’s not terribly expensive to do. Unfortunately, that means a lot of the people involved are not getting paid what they’re worth or living wage to do it, but it’s a stepping stone and it’s better than being paid nothing to do it, which a lot of us would do, anyway. But that’s the thing. Because the barrier for entry is so low, because the cost of production can be a few hundred dollars for a nice DSLR camera and a cheap-ish computer to edit on, the people that just need to create can create. And so, I think they will at a faster pace.
Angie: And with it being on the internet, it’s a little bit more difficult to monetize it. You talked about going to Kickstarter to fund your stuff—
Travis: Yeah.
Angie: Do you have any plans to move to monetize it beyond Kickstarter campaigns?
Travis: Yes, absolutely. So, monetization of your content is a tricky thing. The standard method is through advertising, so you advertise on your video when you post it. And that’s fine. I have always thought that video advertising was not going to be the future. That’s a model that— people are watching videos online kind of to escape advertising, and you never will, but they’re moving away from watching TV on the air, on their couch, sitting through ads, and that’s a trend that’s been going for several years now starting with starting with TiVo.
Now, as far as my plans to monetize my shows, I’ve always kind of issued the idea that it had to be advertising-based, and… people have asked if we’re going to move away from Kickstarter and I would very much like to not rely on fans to fund our shows, but I don’t think that Kickstarter is necessarily a bad thing because what you’re doing is you’re basically pre-selling your content or your product. With web series, it is the most difficult thing to do on Kickstarter because you are producing something that you’re going to give away for free, and how do you pre-sell that? I mean, you can’t pre-sell free, so what you have to do is come up with other things, other incentives to give people. And so, that’s a difficult thing for web series to do. But I think that web series, if done well, have good merchandising potential.
So, I think there are a couple of ways that I would like to ideally fund our shows— one is through sponsorships, so have a company either sponsor or advertise on the show. B is through a fan-funded drives like Kickstarter. So, it’s a way for them to really engage and support a show, and there are other other websites than Kickstarter that do something very well. There’s Subbable that was started by Hank Green that allows people to give $5 a month for a show that is ongoing, so it allows you to really back a show.
There’s also, then, merchandising, which some shows lend themselves to more than others. Like, I think that Inspector Spacetime or “Untitled Web Series” lends itself towards merging energizing fairly well. We have characters, we have quotes, we have things that can be put on t-shirts and posters, we have amazing artwork. Christopher Jones just did a comic book cover for us for our Kickstarter campaign that is absolutely unbelievable. And so, those kind of things are our ways to fund the show. Although with Inspector S— or (laughs), with “Untitled Web Series”— internally, yeah, I always call it Inspector Spacetime, because that’s what the fans— the fans know that if ever there were to be an Inspector Spacetime show starring me—Inspector Spacetime, Travis Richey—this is what it would be.
But I have a policy where anybody to create anything creative for my show, whether it’s the guy who created the optic pocket knife or the guy who writes the music or the person who does artwork for us, they own what they produce and they have the right to monetize it. I don’t. I won’t. I have the right to use it when I need to, but I won’t be selling I won’t be making money off of it.
Because of that, I’m not gonna be making money off of the soundtrack; Brian Giovanni who wrote the soundtrack will be selling that on iTunes.
So, those kinds of things limit my ability to create revenue from this particular show. But then we have a show like “Robot, Ninja & Gay Guy” which we want to get back into second season, which that also has a lot of merchandise potential.
Angie: Now, were you much of a Doctor Who fan before getting cast as Inspector Spacetime?
Travis: I had watched “Doctor Who” when I was a kid. Tom Baker was my first doctor. And mostly because my brothers were 10 and 12 years older than I was and so I was always forced to watch whatever they watch, so I grew up on, you know, “Battlestar Galactica” and “Star Wars” and “Doctor Who” on PBS. And after Tom Baker regenerated, I kind of lost interest, but I was always surrounded by friends who were into it. Like, one of my friends built a TARDIS replica in his bedroom. So, I always was around it.
And then when the series relaunched, I was aware of it but I was also— it wasn’t easy to watch in the United States yet. And so, I remember watching— and I didn’t have cable, so I couldn’t watch BBC America. And I remember watching an episode, the Agatha Christie episode, and thinking, “Oh, giant bees, this is so British (laughs)” and not being really into it until I had the audition for Inspector Spacetime. And the series had just gone up on Netflix, including Matt Smith’s first season, and I knew enough about it to know that they were referencing Matt Smith, because in the “Community” script, they mentioned that he had a bow tie on, and so I was like, “Okay, this is the new guy.” And so, I went and watched the first Matt Smith episode and it was pretty good! And so, then I got cast and I went back and started with Christopher Eccleston, ’cause I’m also one of those people who needs to watch stuff from the beginning. So, I watched all the way through, including “Torchwood,” and then I went back and watched it again because I’d watched it too fast and it was just that good. So, I watched the whole thing twice in the space of a couple months. So yeah, I’m a big fan now.
Angie: Well, and I have to ask, since Matt Smith’s getting ready to regenerate, are there any plans (laughs) for the inspector to regenerate?
Travis: The inspector metamorphoses, and we do have some ideas about what to do for that, but for now, I’m content to play the role.
Angie: A little bit about your process, in terms of your creative process: you both star and write the show. How do you separate the writer from the star when you’re being acted?
Travis: Well, separating the writer— when we’re creating the show, first of all, I have a writing partner in Eric Loya, who also co-stars in the show with me, which is great, because he and I co-wrote “Robot, Ninja & Gay Guy” but he wasn’t in it as much. So, it’s fun to have him there with me. You don’t actually separate yourself as an actor all that much from the writing— at least I haven’t. And part of that is not having enough time, because I’m so focused on also producing and I’m helping to do costumes, I’m helping to facilitate prop building, I’m getting locations. And so, it’s kind of an unfortunate truth that I don’t have a whole lot of time as an actor to delve into the role. And there were some moments in season one where— and I’m content with my performance, but there were moments where I would watch it and go, “Ah, I If only I thought of this for that moment.” And those things maybe are the curse of being an actor, is you’ll always see those moments later on and maybe other people won’t notice.
But the interesting thing now is having a director like Nick on board who is so engaged. He really has his own vision about what the performances need to be and what’s going on. But I always have a very collaborative atmosphere on set where anybody who has an opinion about something that might be better or funnier should feel free to speak up. Normally, kind of a faux pas for actors to give other actors notes, but I love hearing from Eric. If he says, “What if you said this this way?” Or, hearing it from Carrie [Keranen], who is Piper Tate, who is amazing, or just even the PA says, “Hey, does this mean this, or does this mean this?” And I believe that you always get more out of having more voices, and as the producer, ultimately, it’s my job to make a decision about what is good or bad or in or out, but having that information is always better.
Angie: And then was there anything else that you wanted to talk about that we haven’t covered (laughs)?
Travis: Well, people can engage with us. I love talking with fans, and so we have fans engaging with us on Facebook at facebook.com/untitledwebseries, which I was amazed that that was available, but it was (laughter).
And then theinspector.tv is the place to watch the show if you want to or share it with friends. We did just move YouTube channels. So, the old channel where season one started is being slowly shut down, and the new channel which is just youtube.com/travisrichey is where season one now lives and season two will live— and, in fact, all of my content going forward in the future. So, make sure people subscribe to that channel because after we premiere the prequel episode to season two, we’ll also be doing original sketch comedies and more episodes of other shows every single week.
Angie: Any chance that this will one day be available on DVD?
Travis: You know, I’ve thought about putting the show out on DVD or Blu-ray. The problem is, is that— two things. One is we are becoming such a culture of downloads and streaming that I feel like very soon, the point of diminishing returns is going to be like it’s not worth it. The other thing about that is that it is very expensive to make DVDs and Blu-rays, so you have to sell them for pretty high cost in order to make in order to make it worthwhile. And I can’t help but asked myself, “Well, if people can get it for free online, who wants to buy a Blu-ray? Who wants to buy a physical copy?” The only thing I can think of is if we had extra content like behind-the-scenes stuff, which might be something to think about for season two or three. But for right now, I’m not sure that that’s something we’re going to do. I think maybe season two, we’ll have a Blu-ray and that way we can add season one to it and maybe offer some things, but probably only as a perk to Kickstarter donors.
Outro music.
Angie: G33k Out with Angie Fiedler Sutton is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. For more information, visit creativecommons.org.