Datebook: Where the Bizarre World of Online Dating Comes to Life

In this ever increasingly fast-paced world, who hasn’t had at least some experience with the horrible/wonderful world of online dating?  During the early parts of the relationship with my boyfriend Eric, we would often commiserate together over the many ridiculous online dating experiences we both had before meeting each other (thankfully in the wild – not online).

As the two of us, both actors, dealt with the monotony of day-to-day auditions, it dawned on us that we were both itching to create something of our own to share with the world – a web series!  After some brainstorming and deliberation we decided to use our struggles with online dating as inspiration for this new series – so, obviously, it would be a comedy.

We brought some friends on board to help us with the process of carefully crafting what this series would eventually become.  We started with the idea of each episode featuring some crazy online date gone wrong, but this wasn’t enough; we found that, while this direction was funny, it was shallow, and we wanted to dive in deeper.  What better way to do this than to create a core cast of characters and explore their personal online dating lives, and how they affect their relationships with each other? From there, we delved into who we want our cast of characters to be and how each of their personalities would play into their unique dating stories.  We also wanted to make sure that every sexual orientation was well-represented for plenty of dating variety.

Our next question was: which dating site do we want this to be about?  The answer: let’s have this be about our own fictional site that will allow us plenty of room for creativity, and that can combine many elements of various dating sites we’ve all had experiences with.  And thus, “Datebook.com” was born, the site our characters find themselves members of after the first episode of the series.

Now, one year after we started working on the series, we’ve filmed two episodes (currently working on the third) and have written four more, with an additional three planned out, making a total of ten episodes for season one.  We’ve been extremely fortunate to build a partnership with Jeff Thacher (vocal percussionist of a cappella super-group, Rockapella), who has created the jingle for the series, as well as done all of our editing.  We also have a fantastic and committed cast and crew who are a joy to work with, and bring so much to the series.

We’ve also come to learn throughout this process that things aren’t cheap though, and we’ve quickly burned through our savings accounts to make our dreams for this series a reality, causing us to put a halt on production until we have more funding. We are currently at the tail end of our crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo, and are hopeful more viewers will connect to our material, and help us finish what we’ve started.  So please give our page a gander and watch our recently released first two episodes:

Episode 1 –  “Namasté”  

Episode 2 – “Date Napper”

http://youtu.be/LmBjL4iEdJk
If you like what you see, contribute or share with your friends!  We can’t wait to show you what we have in store for episodes three through ten!

Author Profile

Matthew Hazen

Website

An actor, originally from Miami, graduated from Syracuse University B.F.A., currently trying to make it in NYC. Creator/writer/director/producer/actor of Datebook, a comedic web series about online dating disasters.