The web has been fertile ground for shows more quirky and less genre-specific than what makes it onto television. The Crew, written and directed by young filmmaker Brett Register, is a perfect example of that kind of show.
Best understood as a blend between The Office and Star Trek, The Crew is a comedic romp about the lives of several crew members on a spaceship traveling through space. The idea for the show came from Register, a Star Trek fan, who wondered as a child why viewers never got to see the people who kept the ship running.
“As a kid, you want to be on the ship,” Register said. The ship on Star Trek is supposed to self-sufficient, like a city, but you never see all of its residents. “I thought ‘is it really a city?”
The Crew, newly distributed on Babelgum, mixes short comedic situations, sci-fi technical dialogue, and faux documentary-style interviews heavily reminiscent of The Office. Its members are humorously depressed by their situations, resigned to hopping beds and conversing with the same group of uninteresting people.
On the show the people who run the ship’s engine, manage its electricity, and clean up its sewage are second-class citizens, kept completely isolated from its residents and leadership. The first season deals with their boredom, limited romantic options, and general ineptitude. By the end of the season, crew members were cast off — literally discarded — by the rest of the ship to save residents from being sucked into a black hole by a gang of pirates.
At the beginning of the second season, which premiered this month, the crew are hostages on the pirate ship and a long way from home. New episodes will have improved special effects, said Register, who has more money this season, enough to pay actors, and a distribution deal with Babelgum. Viewers can also look forward to guest appearances from actors in past and current hit web shows like The Guild and Lonelygirl15, along with web entrepreneurs like Benny Fine (The Fine Brothers).
If you have an hour, you can watch the full first season online without breaks, before cracking into season two: