Three Years ago Ragtag Productions created a show, filmed in New York, and posted it on YouTube. It was called We need Girlfriends and became an internet phenomenon. Though each show was about ten minutes or less in length, viewers couldn’t deny the concept. Three guys finding themselves single in a new city for the first time in a while and trying to navigate the rough waters of post-breakup life. Despite tons of sitcoms on television, few focus on what someone goes through after a relationship breakup. The three central characters, Tom, Henry, and Rod, went through the same things most of us go through: seeing your ex with someone else, observing their social media pages, and even meeting new people just to name a few. Here I take a moment with one of the people behind the show, Steven Tsapelas, to find more about the web series.
The idea for three guys just having their hearts broken is an unusual one, how did you come up with this?
It was based on myself and my friends that I produced the show with—Brian Amyot and Angel Acevedo. Basically, not too long after college, the three of us found ourselves single for the first time in years—dumped by our long-term girlfriends. And, for the first time since early college, we really only had each other. We kind of filled the void in each other’s lives. Around this time, Brian and Angel were obsessed with “Entourage,” and they tried to turn me on to it. While I recognized the camaraderie between male friends, I couldn’t connect with:
- Their lavish lifestyle and
- The ease with which they picked up women.
We were living in crammed little apartments in Queens, working a lot, and eating crappy food. We were also trying to relearn how to talk to women after spending so much of our formative years comfortable in our relationships. Now, in the months prior to this, we’d been entering a lot of short film competitions—were doing well in them—and were looking for something new and challenging to do to get people interested in our work. Webshows were just kind of starting to catch on so, based on my dislike for “Entourage,” I pitched to Brian and Angel a show that was kind of “The Anti-Entourage.” Essentially, about us, and what we were going through. My early scripts even had our names as the character names.
What’s the general reactions of women viewers vs. the male viewer after seeing WNG?
It’s very positive on both ends. Women loved the men in the show and said they’re the kind of guys they want to date (ironically enough, since we weren’t doing too well). Men appreciated that someone was showing another side to them rather than the, “Hey let’s go out and get laid” breakup show.
I will speak on behalf of most men when I say you’re quite accurate when it comes down to things guys actually do via post breakup. How did you manage to bring realness to the characters?
Most of it really did come from our lives—sometimes so close that we wondered if we should let people know that we’d had certain conversations. I was always stealing from real life and at times it wasn’t even like I was writing it—it was just like I was stealing it. We were young. We were in New York. We were very social. It was a fruitful time for conversations and life experiences and that was reflected in the show. It feels like a photo album when I watch it now.
Did you anticipate the massive wave of viewers that came from YouTube?
We always tried to get people to watch. This was done mostly through MySpace and we kind of thought of YouTube as a secondary site, as it didn’t have the social networking capabilities that MySpace had. However, one day, I came back to find THOUSANDS of messages in my email box. That was the day YouTube featured us on the main page and people were just subscribing left and right. Within days, everything changed for us and we had hundreds of thousands of viewers we never had before. It was mind-blowing. Here we were making this little show for nothing in a crammed apartment when, suddenly, it was being seen everywhere. It was an incredible experience. I think it was successful because we worked hard on it. We weren’t content with making something disposable—we wanted to make something rewatchable. So we worked hard on the writing, the shooting, the editing, the performances and wouldn’t move forward with an idea or an episode unless we were 100 percent confident in it.
