2021: The Year We Went Independent

Hello Friends, I hope you're having a nice holiday (no reason to go into the details of the hellworld swirling around online and often right outside our front doors!) 

I thought I'd take a moment and reflect back on this very strange year, 2021. Or as I like to call it 2020: Part II.

First: Office Hours continued to become a much more consistent and productive playground for me and my friends, Doug, Vic and Matt. Many of you have become loyal Patrons, friends of the show and talented folks who have helped make Office Hours such a fun place for us.  While we occasionally dabble in sponsors, your patronage makes up the vast majority of our revenue. It provides us with our gear, our talented Wes and Luke who make sure our videos look good and our sound sounds good. It allows us to pay artists and editors (mainly Chris Robison, Dan Mulcahy and Hannah Pugh) to create show cards, fake ads and take some of our favorite moments from the show and turn them into little bits of gold. It let us make the Thanksgiving Special ! We don't talk about it, but when a guest comes on to do a bit or sit in with us, we pay them for their time and talents. We also took the show LIVE LIVE this year with a few sold our shows at the Dynasty Typewriter and The Regent Theater. Would be fun to take it to some other cities next year, wouldn't it?  All in all, it's pretty cool! It's still one of my favorite things to do every week, gather with my friends and our online audience and just fuck around for a few hours.  

Over at the Hei Network (where I could never ever post something like this...) It's been really exciting as well. Late 2020, i may have told you that On Cinema is as good as a dead dog. Adult Swim was finally done with us and the show was just simply too weird and lodged in its own lore to take anywhere else.  After long talks with Justin, Gregg , Eric Notarnicola and others, we decided to relaunch the show on its own site behind a paywall, which would be the sole source of funding for the future. 

We had a strong launch built around the Oscar Special (one positive side effect of the Pandemic was the Oscars pushed into April which gave us some time to prepare. )  We knew we had to come out of the gate strong to make people feel their money was well spent and so we devised a bigger and more complicated Oscar Special which involved two separate streaming experiences. And although the launch wasn't perfect (you can watch me in real time having a mini nervous breakdown as our site was overwhelmed with visitors; a real Woodstock, 'this is now a free concert' moment)  overall it was a success and put us on a path to fund Season 12, several "Heilots" (or one off pilot ideas)  launch the idiocy of Hei Points, and generally let the On Cinema Universe expand in any direction and in any format that we could dream up. It's a lot of work, it's stressful and time consuming and often feels like we're walking on a tightrope of exhilarating creative freedom; under us, total ruin. Here's a look at what we're hoping to do in 2022>>> 

Thanks to Justin Gaynor's hard work and long hours getting the site built and keeping it active and basically tolerating my texts, asking for whatever nutty idea (including this latest year end fake anxiety inducing Hei Points Financial Report Documents Report) I throw at him.  And of course, thanks to the creative team behind On Cinema who make it all so goddamn great. Our credits always appear underneath the episodes, so please take a moment to scroll through and keep them all in your thoughts/prayers. 

Anyway, we'd just love you to bits if you signed up for a membership.  

Aside from that I got to some some fun acting this year (including a month in Italy fucking around with some very funny and wonderful people wow!) 

And I made a record! There will be a lot more on this coming next year, closer to it's release but i put out a single called "Dark Days" from the sessions earlier this year and I can't wait for you all to hear the whole record. P.S. being a Patron here will assure you get you early ears on this one.  

Thanks for sticking with me, and always giving me the encouragement to keep going and keep trying things.  As Shakira says:  TRY EVERYTHING 

Peace and Love, 

Tim 

photo by Robbie Augspurger