NBC Offers Online Minidramas To Bridge Holiday Gap

As NBC has cast about for ways to restore its fortunes in the new century, its most prominent ideas have involved making more out of less: "supersizing" episodes of its few popular shows, like "The Office"; scattering "Deal or No Deal" across the week; giving five hours of prime time to Jay Leno.

But not everything the network does is reductive. One area in which NBC, and its sister cable channels in the NBC Universal family, have consistently provided more than the other big networks is online: they're the only reliable purveyors of true Webisodes, if we define the genre narrowly as minidramas produced in conjunction with an existing television series.

(To be fair, you can go to cbs.com and watch many episodes of "Big Brother House Calls." You could also poke yourself in the eye with a stick.)

At the moment, with network television having gone into a profound holiday slumber of repeats and musical specials, practically the only original fiction the networks are offering consists of a pair of online dramas on NBC Universal Web sites, each of which will post a new episode on Monday.

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