They Walk (or Sit) The Line

2008 hasn't been a great year for TV. There was the strike, for starters, and while we still have a third of the year to go, we haven't seen any amazing debuts on the order of Mad Men. But while it's been a weak year for TV on TV, TV online's been doing just fine, thanks.

Yesterday was the debut of the last installment of The Line, a seven-part online series and summer-break diversion for SNL's Seth Myers Meyers and Bill Hader (available at crackle.com, YouTube and Hulu). A sort of nerd buddy comedy, it has Hader and Joe Lo Truglio playing a pair of thirtysomething pals who show up at a movie theater eleven days before the premiere of a sci-fi movie (titled FutureSpace) to be the first in line for opening-day tickets:

Hijinx ensue. But not just hijinx.

The minisodes are funny in the predictable way that they spoof various geek archetypes: the fans dressed up and acting in character, the obsessive action-figure collectors, etc. There's a great running joke about the "five-minute rule," the limit on how long you can leave the line without losing your place.

But The Line also embodies what's great (and funny) about nerd subcultures: they way they create self-contained societies with their own rules, hierarchies and dramas. There's The Spoiler (Paul Scheer, 30 Rock), the nerd antagonist who tries to ruin the movie for line-waiters by revealing plot secrets; the mysterious hooded FutureSpace guru who wields a rare collectible toy dagger coated in toxic lead paint; and the movie-theater manager (Jason Sudeikis) who steals his scenes as the Dean Wormer-like authority figure who has grown to despise these ritual nerd encampments: "You people are worse than homeless," he says, disgusted. "Because this is a choice."

It's a whole world in a space about three feet wide and a block and a half long. (The setting, by the way, allows product placements for the movies Step Brothers, Pineapple Express and House Bunny.) But there's a real world too, which Hader and Lo Truglio's characters are just vacationing from—a world of girlfriends and ex-wives and jobs or the lack thereof—and the funniest bits come when the worlds collide. Hader gets dumped by his girlfriend and Lo Truglio tries to spend a day of quality time with his son, both while hilariously trying to obey the five-minute rule. (Lo Truglio's shuttle-parenting montage is especially funny.)

The Line is mostly a funny goof, but a well-executed goof: unlike a lot of web efforts, it actually plays like a tiny series, with recurring themes and even mini character development. There's a last-hurrah aspect to it for the two buddies, who last camped out in a line for a movie in 1996. ("It's a little more hardcore today," one of their fellow line-geeks sneers.)

They're fanboys becoming fanmen. They are, they realize, starting to get a little too old for this. But aren't we all too old for something? And does that stop any of us?