She's a new Day

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Felicia Day (BLOOMBERG THE WASHINGTON POST)

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Felicia Day (CP)

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c_ (BLOOMBERG THE WASHINGTON POST)

This is a story about Felicia Day.

Right now, 30 per cent-ish of you are squealing with besotted fan-girldom and fan-boydom.

The other 70 per cent of you do not know what a Felicia Day is.

"That's probably more like 90 per cent," she says. "Whenever I go to a meeting at a studio lot, it's always the IT guy or the assistant or the accountant who knows me. And then the executives look at me, like, 'I don't know why I'm meeting with you.'"

Here is an explanation.

Day, 32, is the creator and star of The Guild, an online series whose episodes have scored 150 million views since its 2007 inception. She's won two best actress "Streamys" for her twitchy, flustered performance as gamer Cyd Sherman. In January, the Hollywood Reporter named her one of the industry's top 50 digital power players, a list that included George Lucas and the chief executive of Twitter.

A few months ago, YouTube announced that it would launch 100 new original-content channels. The selected producers would get a cash influx to help them ramp up quality; YouTube would amass artistic credibility. Deepak Chopra got a channel. Shaquille O'Neal, Amy Poehler and Madonna-affiliated outfits got channels.

Day got a channel.

She named it Geek & Sundry. Its slate of shows -- six new, original programs, created by or developed by or starring her -- debuts this week.

"It's this sort of grand experiment, and I don't know what's going to happen," she says.

What will happen with Day is intrinsically tied to what will happen on the Internet, at a potential watershed moment in the future of online content.

"Remember that movie Three Men and a Baby?" Joss Whedon writes in an email. The creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast Day in that show as the slayer Vi, and in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, his web opus. "Felicia is the baby, the three guys raising her are Preston Sturges, Gordon Gekko and Rain Man. Her mind works faster than mine ever will and her mouth works faster than that. She's funny, savvy, focused and encyclopedic to the point of scary. And, sidebar, the baby grows up to be really hot."

She darts into the Santa Monica, Calif., bakery just ahead of me -- red hair; green sweater; skittish, quick steps.

She looks like an elf, more Lord of the Rings than Keebler. She has the sort of awkward/cool vulnerability that invites immediate intimacy.

This is what made her famous online.

Day's alter ego, Cyd, is the introverted emotional centre of The Guild, anchoring every show with an entry in her video diary. "I play with real people," she insists in one episode, explaining that she doesn't need to meet them in person because she can hear their voices over her computer. "It's good enough for the blind."

After studying violin performance in college, Day moved to Los Angeles, getting the Buffy arc and not much else you'd remember. What she was doing more than anything was bunkering in her apartment playing World of Warcraft. She tried writing a TV pilot about a group of gamers, but she couldn't sell it. Someone in her support group (women struggling in Hollywood) suggested that she produce the show herself and put it on the Internet. She did, and it became a template for how web content could make money: sponsorships were struck with Microsoft and Sprint.

The Guild -- five seasons so far -- is weird, wonderful and unapologetically dorky, and not in a stereotypically Big Bang Theory/Steve Urkel kind of way, but as an honest, complex portrayal of online existence.

Her new channel, Geek & Sundry, builds on the brand. There's a show where Wil Wheaton (Wesley from Star Trek: The Next Generation) teaches people how to play strategy-based board games. There's a fantasy book club and a particularly inspired program in which professional filmmakers make movies based on rambling stories told by five-year-olds. In The Flog, Felicia's personal video diary, she travels around Los Angeles, learning to sculpt ice, play country music and other offbeat, oddnik activities. After this breakfast interview, she has to run off and be fitted for a powdered wig.

"Now I understand what exhaustion is," she says of her 24/7 working schedule. "It's not just a code word for heroin addiction. People don't teach you how to handle the workload that comes from a little bit of success, and it's something I'd never had to handle, because I'd been rejected for so long."

"What Felicia's accomplished has been extraordinary," says Drew Baldwin, a co-founder of Tubefilter.com, a site dedicated to covering web series and online television. "Her fans are completely portable. They go wherever she goes. She's become an icon for this group."

On television, Day might have been the nutty neighbour. "For online video?" Baldwin says, "She's Audrey Hepburn."

At its core, what Geek & Sundry represents is the future of web series. In the early days of original content online, there was an assumption that the best of it would be good enough for television. That rule no longer holds up. The best web content is strong enough for your TV, but it's made for your laptop.

"It's not just a 'phenomenon' when someone online is getting an audience every week that's bigger than a television show," Day says. "People don't understand that maybe (television) is not the goal anymore."

The goal, she says, is to harness and exploit the natural strengths of the web: its communal nature, its fanatic/frenetic devotion, its exasperated baloney detector and its thirst for authenticity.

"The Internet is not best for passive consumption -- it's not like sitting down and watching a movie. It's about sharing how you feel about the video and experiencing how other people experience it. It's a circular thing.... People assume that you're trapped in this web on the Internet -- that it's a place of isolation, when really you're connecting with your authentic self."

-- The Washington Post

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 9, 2012 D1