This week, we want to draw your attention to Classic Alice, a literary web series sure to be a hit with all Lizzie Bennet Diaries fans.
Every other week, we feature a new quality web series here on Hypable, to promote fresh talent in the movie and TV industry.
This time the spotlight hits Classic Alice, a web series focusing on a bright college student who decides to experience life through the eyes of classic book characters.
The main character, Alice Rackham (played by series creator Kate Hackett), is likeable and instantly relatable. She speaks to the camera, confessional-style, and the show mainly takes place inside her dorm room.
Alice has a companion, the film student Andrew Prichard (Tony Noto), who has decided to make a documentary following her experiment. Predictably, sparks fly between the pair as they embark on their first adventure: Alice has to commit a crime, in the spirit of Crime and Punishment.
The dialogue is fast-paced and witty, and the acting is very convincing by both leads (and Elise Cantu, who plays Alice’s roommate Cara).
The idea for this series is intriguing, with the potential for an exploration of many classical novels’ outlook on life.
However, the first season — while engaging and intriguing — is only a chain of reactions from Alice and Andrew to her first mission (the decision to commit a crime).
The decision to focus on the characters rather than the plot of the book is a wise one (the audience has to care about the people before anything else), but one might have hoped for more rapid-fire book-related missions, to draw in as many literary references as possible.
But that doesn’t mean Classic Alice is not still an engaging, top-notch web series. The show is entertaining and original, and we commend the writers’ decision to use a less pop culture-saturated book to start out with; it’d have been all too easy to go with a Jane Austen or a Charles Dickens.
Following Crime and Punishment comes George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the original inspiration for My Fair Lady. In this segment of the story, a slew of supporting characters are introduced, including the lovable nerd Ewan (Chris O’Brien).
The second season is more humorous than the first, mainly because of its premise: Alice now has to give someone a social makeover, My Fair Lady-style.
Intrigued? You should be! The show really picks up pace here, and you’ll find yourself emotionally invested in the characters and their problems.
New episodes of Classic Alice are released every Tuesday and Thursday; follow them on Twitter for updates and check out their YouTube channel for lots of extras.
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