Colony Bay matte artist Jonathan Neil is working on a new online theater for the show.  Even though it’s not finished, it’s so clean and captivating, I check it out every hour or so.  You can too, by clicking on the graphic on the right.  (Not every hour if you don’t want to.)  Fairly soon, we will be updating the site so that those who have joined the colony can watch any of the shows, online, without re-purchasing a ticket.

We did a few things backwards in our effort to bring a period drama to the screen.  First of all, we wrote scenes with dialogue in them.   Second, we used real actors.  Third, we used the furniture, tools, and firearms of the period itself, (unlike, say, Tim Burton’s musket with a sniper scope on it in “Sleepy Hollow.”*)  Fourth, we have yet to do a show about a soldier, home from the war and traumatized by his own heroism, complete with horrible combat flash backs whenever someone drops a glass in the kitchen.  Fifth, we took the novel approach of basing the historic fiction around things that actually happened — in history.

Well, with so many risky production standards, you can imagine why the folks at the History Channel have been slow to respond, but the truth is that History channel has put in its time producing lots of brainy documentary stuff, some of it actually filmed here on the Colony Bay Backlot, Riley’s Farm.  (To be honest, the formula of posting a few reenactors in the background, conducting slow-motion conversation, inter-cut with talking heads solemnly pronouncing their tweedy, and utterly final interpretation always sort of left me cold, but at least it was history.)   At any rate, they have moved on, to other reality things, and as our fans remind us, sometimes they work a fair amount of cultural and artifact history into shows like Pawn Shop Stars.   Fine, so be it.

But the truth is your writer/creator needs a little prayer.  I look at our show, and while we can always improve, I still find it so much more entertaining, so much more visually and emotionally rich, so much more attractive than anything I scrounge for on Netflix, that when some ill-educated, unlettered boob in that online goliath turns us down without looking at the show, or even making a comment, it’s all I can do to prevent myself from writing a blog about it.

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*  Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is so completely untrue to Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, that it really should be called something else entirely.   Sleepy Necrotic Creeps?