Thanks to Whitney at Pop Candy, I discovered a new web series that may prove worth watching, starring the one and only savior of The View, Whoopi Goldberg.
Whoopi stars in FEARnet.com’s Stream, a six-episode series in which she plays Jodi Quinn, a woman who has had hallucinations since she was a teen. When she was 17, Jodi took a drug that has the effect of letting her live two moments at once — including moments from the future.
Stream flashes back and forth between three times in Jodi’s life: her turbulent teen years, her present in a psychiatric unit and her future as a 50-something adult trying to live a normal life in the South Bronx.
In an interview with the L.A. Times, Whoopi said that Stream is not the usual blood-and-gore horror story we usually find on FEARnet:
My character has this thing that happens to her where she wakes up at different times. She doesn’t know what’s happening to her, or why. But there are two or three different ‘hers’ as well. So it’s quite fantastic that she’s trying to figure out what is happening, as are all of her different renditions. It turns out there are other people who this happens to as well, and we go from there.
She ended up producing the series herself, she told the New York Post, because she wanted to do another science fiction role:
I’ve been desperate to get back into the sci-fi waters. I loved doing Star Trek and I’ve always said I’d love to go back out into space or do a horror film and people just smile at me. No one ever says, ‘Here’s something scary to do.’
Whoopi also enjoys the freedom from studio restrictions that a Web series allows:
You’re not bound by what it’s supposed to be — you can go off in a bunch of different directions. I think that’s the best part. So often you can see it coming and on a big film for a big company it’s hard — you’ve got so many rules to hit. But on the Internet those rules are tossed out — I mean, it still has to be good, but it can be drastically different.
The good news for those of us who enjoy The View again now that Whoopi leads the table is that she intends to stick with the show despite her other projects. She says of the show:
I really like it. I like talking and now I’m much more quiet at home. Before this job I used to talk up a storm at my house and now I’m mellow. I’m learning about pop culture, I’m learning about things that perhaps I wouldn’t have been interested in, or given a minute to. I’m getting the opportunity to see and do lots of different things I probably hadn’t realized are part of the greater world. It’s been a big eye opener.
She also gets to hang out with people like Michelle Obama.
Watch the preview and first episode of Stream at the show’s site and let us know what you think. Is the show your kind of fright-fest?
