Ze End of The Show

theodp writes "Before YouTube caught on, there was Ze Frank. Slate mourns the loss of The Show, which came to an end last week after a 365-day run. Sorry, Sports Racers. 'The result was a new kind of improvised conversation/performance art. Ze beamed himself out to a worldwide audience and gathered them into a universe of his own devising. A wiki sprung up, with fans completing a transcript of every episode. Ze also gave out missions, such as creating the ugliest MySpace page and building an "Earth sandwich," which consisted of placing pieces of bread on exact opposite points of the globe. It was this "live" element that made the project not-televison, not-boring, and ultimately fleeting.'"

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Re:Ugliest myspace

[Chyeld]

This guy was the winner, Soybuddha [myspace.com]. Not sure which links you were refering to, but most of the info is in the Wiki pages [zefrank.com] rather than the front page.

My favorite

[dr_strang]

My favorite episode was the Scrabble one. I watched it over and over, like fifty times, laughing myself sick.

Re:ze frank: sad, but typical

[wootest]

[W]e should all really care about why ze frank stopped the show. ze frank was a perfect example of a slick little gem of a performance idea that had legs. If it died because ze frank just got tired, well, OK. But if it died because it didn't ever have a hope of turning into something that sustained ze, then we should all be concerned and try to figure out why.

It 'died' because Ze had his mind set from very early on to run it for a full year. I'm not going to tell you Ze didn't want to continue. It seems fairly obvious to me that he wanted to.

A recent article said Ze's got some kind of gig in Tinseltown now. I have no idea what exactly it is, or if he's a producer or writer or performer, but there are two basic outcomes: He falls victim of dramatic Hollywoodization, or he keeps going, doing his own tremendous thing, bringing his stuff more or less to the masses. I know what I'm rooting for.

Re:Anyone?

[FuturePastNow]

Frank Conniff [wikipedia.org]

Damn good show indeed

[Lisandro]

My brother introduced me to ZeFranks' world. I usually hate useless blogs, podcasts and "web stars" sites with a passion, but this guy had a genuinely funny and witty show, and it's well worth a look through the archives if you've never seen it before. It's even more interesting when you consider it was a one-year, five-episodes-per-week "experiment", and that he actually managed to keep it funny and interesting all the way.

"Do you feel safe drinking your tap water?"
"Not always..."

Thanks you for all the laughs, Frank.