These days, you don’t need a television to watch HBO; Netflix launches both original television series and movies, and even YouTube is starting to pay its biggest stars to make documentaries about – what else – being YouTube stars. The line between what is a television show and what is a web series is getting less and less clear.



“The difference between being a web series and being television is that on TV you have a marketing team,” says Adam Goldman, the creator, writer and star of The Outs, a cult hit web series that returns for a second season on 30 March, on Vimeo.

While The Outs isn’t going to get ad buys on major networks or images of the cast plastered on buses and subway stops all over Manhattan, Vimeo is hyping the show as part of its big push toward making original content. Goldman created the program, about a gay guy, Mitchell (Goldman), his best friend Oona (Sasha Winters), and their intertwined and simultaneous breakups with their significant others. It’s part of the cohort of series about twentysomethings living in Brooklyn, along with Girls and Broad City.

“I think the shows share a milieu, but that’s probably where it ends,” Goldman says of the inevitable comparisons to Girls. “[Girls] is more like Curb Your Enthusiasm, where the heart of the show is a little cringey and heightened. That makes it fundamentally something that The Outs isn’t striving to be.”

What The Outs always has been and continues to be in its second season, is grounded, real and human. Though there are some wacky happenings here and there, it is mostly about young people and their friendships, insecurities, dead-end jobs, and striving to make sense of it all while still making the rent.

The second season of The Outs picks up about three years after the last one wrapped (and since the last episode premiered in 2012, it’s about the same amount of time the show has been gone). Mitchell is in a committed relationship with a cute chef and working at a dating website, Oona is a social media star with a book out, and Jack (Hunter Canning), Mitchell’s ex, is trying to make a long-distance relationship work with his boyfriend Paul (Tommy Heleringer), better known to fans of season one as “Scruffy”.

Not much has changed since the original six episodes (and a Hanukah special). “I think this is more like a sequel to a movie than another season of a TV show, because I don’t think either of these are the definitive stories of these people’s lives – I think it’s just two separate times in their lives,” Goldman says.

However, the production was much different the second time around. While the first season was financed mostly through Kickstarter and other means, Vimeo footed the bill for season two, upping the budget considerably (though Goldman wouldn’t say by how much). It also changed the way the show was filmed.

“The first season we took almost a year to make, and this one we shot in six weeks and it was all out of order,” says Hunter Canning, who plays Jack. “So last season you could see the episode and realize what Adam was trying to do. Then you could adjust. We shot so quickly there was no time to dabble.”

Vimeo takes a different approach to releasing its content, selling its series on a pay-per-view model so that viewers only have to pony up for what they want to see rather than pay for an entire subscription. The six episodes of season two will be available at a rate of one a week. “I feel like if you’re going to [present a show all at once], you should write it that way, and these weren’t written that way,” Goldman says. “I realize that for the life of the show, people will be bingeing them, because once it all comes out, it’s just out there. But I think there’s something about letting it stew a bit and watching them as they drop.”

But the biggest effect of Vimeo’s intervention is that expectations are higher the second go-round. “There is so much more pressure with this season because you know the audience is going to be greater,” says Sasha Winters. “It’s kind of a tricky thing because you want to be consistent with the way you did it the first time, but you want to be able to go further.”

High Maintenance, the first show Vimeo funded, adds to those high expectations. It has since been picked up by HBO and is being turned into a cable series. “We’re not angling to get picked up by anyone else,” Goldman says. “This is the right scale for the show. There are times when we were looking to get the show on to a cable network and it felt like we’d have to blow it out in a way that wouldn’t be honest to the show and add a lot of characters and story that wasn’t really the show. This is not that story.”

No, The Outs is a story that is so small, specific and excruciatingly accurate that it pegs both the humor and profundity of relationships. Marketing budget be damned, this is real fine television.