Does HBOvoyeur Somehow Make You Feel Stupid?

It's a good thing that Portfolio staffer Andrea Chalupa has raised her hand to attend HBO's kick-off party for their new project HBOvoyeur on Ludlow St. at Broome tonight in NYC (they're projecting the show on the side of a building at 9 PM. Go ahead and stop by if you're in the neighborhood. It's at 90 Ludlow St. Tell them Tim at Portfolio sent you). I'm hoping she'll be able to explain to me how this whole thing works. I have to admit, I'm a little baffled by it. I had seen the promo for it when I was watching Entourage, but had thought it was another new show. It's not. Or it is, but just not on the premium-cable channel.

HBO has made eight Rear Window-style short films about strange stuff going down in different apartments in one building. These vignettes, which will all tie into each other, will run on HBOVoyeur.com. Okay, that I get. But this morning the Wall Street Journal is telling me that the shorts are actually "an elaborate marketing manuever" made by HBO's ad agency Omnicom Group's BBDO that will "reinforce our brand image of being the best place for storytelling," says Courtney Monroe, senior vice president of consumer marketing at HBO. Huh. I thought the best way to reinforce the image of being the best story teller would be to tell the best stories, like HBO did with Sex and the City and The Sopranos.

Anyway, I visited the website this morning, which is one of those oblique jobs where you have to muddle about to see what's what. To be fair, Voyeur seems to have all the right online ingredients. Fancy website with portentous music, clips up on YouTube, characters with MySpace pages and a blog by some self proclaimed "impartial third party" dude named Kesu James (do you feel the intrigue building?). HBOvoyeur, which cost between $7-$10 million to produce and market (for two and a half hours of programming), is also designed to promote the cabler's wireless and VOD offering. Sure, the concept seems creative and vaguely compelling, but wouldn't you rather just watch an episode of a solid series (and that's not John from Cincinnati). Makes you wonder how HBO is going to survive in a post-Sopranos world, and how many of their 30 million subscribers are right now deciding if they want spend their time/money elsewhere.

But judge for yourself. Here's the trailer:

And here's HBO's description of the series from the site:

The HBO Voyeur Project is a collection of multi-media stories that HBO has built around the theme of voyeurism. See what people do when they think no one is Watching is the tagline that they have used to describe the experience that starts in the streets of New York City, behind the countless windows that we pass everyday. It comes together in a silent film that will be projected on the side of a building, and extends to the HBO channel, HBO on Demand, and online at HBOVoyeur.com. There are also "artifacts" of the characters everywhere, pieces of story which have been sprinkled around the web and in the real world to heighten the experience for those who like to get involved. However it is experienced in whichever medium, the point of the HBO Voyeur Project is to get the viewer to confront the uncomfortable question: "Do You Like To Watch?