YouTube may have cornered the market in self-surgery tutorials, teen vlogs and lyric videos, but for everything else there’s Vimeo, the reliably hip video site beloved of all those unwilling – for one reason or another – to share a platform with Zoella. The site has become a breeding ground for a new generation of visually inventive film-makers, for whom the ultimate status symbol is a place among the hallowed “staff picks” on its homepage.
Vimeo has been less successful in convincing its audience to part ways with actual cash. Its transactional VOD service, Vimeo On Demand, allows film-makers to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of online film distribution and sell their content directly to viewers. It’s a noble enterprise, but one that seems not to have taken off with the site’s user base, perhaps because the platform’s wealth of freely available material is already keeping them busy.
Now, like literally every one of its competitors, Vimeo is putting its hopes in original programming. Launching this Tuesday, the sketch series 555 sees comics Kate Berlant and John Early star in a series of standalone short films, each one the kind of thing you might otherwise see riding high among the site’s staff picks. Produced by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, veritable demigods of the online comedy scene, 555’s hipster credentials are close to unassailable.
The show’s title – a reference to the fake area code used in Hollywood movies – hints at both the California setting and the sheer vacuity of the characters inhabited by Berlant and Early across the series. In one episode, they play bit-part sci-fi actors planning a would-be viral video. In another, Early becomes an aspiring child actor, played in long shots by an actual pre-pubescent (a daft visual joke that gets funnier with every repetition).
Director Andrew DeYoung has become something of a luminary of the staff picks scene in recent years with a series of charmingly dizzy, off-kilter shorts that make a feature of their own aimlessness. It’s perhaps admirable that he makes no effort to overcomplicate that approach in 555, even if his intentionally mannered style proves a little grating after two or three episodes.
The challenge now will be persuading users to pay for something they’re used to getting for free. At £3.25 for five episodes, the series is far from expensive, but in offering so much remarkable work for nothing, Vimeo might have inadvertently raised the bar of what its audience thinks is worth paying for.
