Phase Two Will Feature Crapisodes From 'Too Close for Comfort' and 'Jake and the Fatman'

Is it possible to wring five minutes of compelling entertainment from an episode of “T. J. Hooker”? I’d say it’s an, ahem, crapshoot, but Sony Pictures Television feels otherwise. The studio is editing down episodes from TV kitsch classics like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker” and “Starsky and Hutch” to their … essential elements for broadcast on its new Minisode Network. Now Sony execs insist these “minisodes” are not simply excerpts or highlight reels. They’re stand-alone minishows with Freytag’s pyramid-style story arcs, albeit with Vince Romano and Sabrina Duncan instead of Orestes and Lear. As Steve Mosko, president of Sony Television, explained it, “So in ‘Charlie Angels,’ they have a meeting, Charlie’s on the intercom telling them what the assignment is, there’s a couple of fights, and then a chase, and they catch the bad guy. Then they’re back home wrapping it up.”

Makes you wonder why these shows ever ran more than five minutes, doesn’t it?

Anyway … does there exist an untapped audience for this sort of diminutive programming? Who knows. But, really, does the answer to that question even matter? After all, this is Web 2.0 we’re talking about.

“There are no expensive costs,” Mosko told the New York Times. “It’s just editing. Our people are really having fun with this. We’re not overthinking the process. You could almost look at this and say a group of college kids put this together.”