So about a month ago, we were approached by the folks behind the new series Kirill, a sci-fi drama being showcased on the web. The show is a collaboration between MSN UK and Endemol UK, and stars British actor David Schofield as the lead character. (You might be familiar with his work in Pirates of the Caribbean and Gladiator.)
Here’s a teaser trailer for the show:
Now, I will be the first to admit that I’m automatically skeptical of anything that Microsoft had a hand in. My laptop runs Vista and I use MS Office, but other than that I avoid Microsoft pretty much all the time.
The show, however, is really very interesting.
I’d love to give you a summary of what the show is about, but that’s a bit difficult to do. From what I can gather, Kirill, the lead character (who interestingly shares his name with Kirill Tatarino, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions) is living alone in an underground bunker, trying to send a message to the outside world to warn them of some coming apocalyptic event.
There are five 2-3 minute episodes available on the Kirill Uncovered blog. Those are the only ones I’ve seen so far.
The sixth episode was available as of Tuesday, but I haven’t seen it yet, despite wanting to know where the story is going. Why, you ask? Well, Microsoft apparently wants to use the show to demonstrate Silverlight, which is basically Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash. Which is fine, but in order to view episode 6, you have to download Silverlight, which I am loathe to do.
It seems to me that Microsoft is using the show as sort of a proverbial dangling carrot to get us to download their product, which seems a little bit shady to me. If the product is good on it’s own merit, I’m sure there will be buzz about it and I’ll be persuaded to download it without needing a pseudo-bribe to do so.
In short, Kirill is a very well-put-together and interesting show so far, but I think it’s being marketed poorly. Which is really a shame, in my opinion. It would suck if something that cool got a bad name just because the folks at Microsoft don’t know their audience well enough to put together a good social media campaign for their products.
If Kirill wants to survive as a standalone show, they’ll have to stop alienating viewers and continue to showcase all the episodes in a more user-friendly manner.
Despite my misgivings about the show’s marketing, I encourage you to view at least the first five episodes that I linked to above, and then judge for yourself wheter or not you want to download Silverlight to view the rest.
As you probably know, a new trailer for J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek was released over the weekend.
Obviously, a lot of people have Watchmen on the brain. With the release date looming closer (if Fox’s lawsuit doesn’t screw that up), I thought I’d show you a couple of the previous attempts at adapting the classic graphic novel.
