There were movies with a similar premise. "The Truman Show" starring Jim Carrey and Matthew McConaughey’s "EdTV" followed the lives of the title role characters and aired their every waking and sleeping moments on TV 24/7. Similar- but with a twist, ‘If I Can Dream’ will be the first streaming online video show to be aired on the Internet exclusively, commencing March 2 and will mash-up ‘American Idol’ with ‘The Real World’.
Simon FullerWhile it seems all too familiar, producer Simon Fuller believes he’s pioneering new ground. For starters, the five aspiring stars will have cameras track them 24/7. And in addition to the weekly episodes, which will be shown on Hulu.com, there will be a live streaming feed at ificandream.com. The prize they all will be vying for is to win a place in the show via a public vote and an open worldwide audition.
In the social media space, Fuller’s hope is that this new genre will become a blogging mainstay, disseminated through the Twitter and Facebook social networks and uploaded on mobile phones for the commuting crowd.
Fuller, the visionary behind ‘Pop Idol’, ‘So You Think You Can Dance?’ and the ‘Spice Girls’ is If I Can Dream Cast Membersrarely wrong about trends and if this latest idea takes off it will change the way in which we watch programming on the Internet, paving the way for other producers to cut TV networks out of the loop altogether.
All this hype taken into consideration, perhaps the network shouldn’t have released this promo vid to YouTube, because these aspiring hopefuls don’t appear to be ‘star quality,’ even with their good looks. I could be wrong, so I will defer judgement to the readers (see POLL at the end of this blog).
The show’s title "If I Can Dream" is taken from the song made famous by Elvis Presley and is notable for its direct reference to Martin Luther King, Jr. That is a lofty analogy for this social media experiment.
While the contestants say, "they don’t want to be reality stars, they want to be real stars," I’m thinking their Hollywood ‘Big Brother’ type of living quarters playhouse is really only a stone’s throw away from the ‘Jersey Shore’ conceptual premise.Time will tell if Fuller the Almighty has deemed to bestow upon us mere mortals another hit or whether on the seventh day, he should have just rested.
