When Brooke Brodack, a 20-year-old receptionist who lives in western Massachusetts with her mom and younger sister, started getting fan mail from Carson Daly's people, she figured it was all a joke, that somehow she'd been punked.
But strange things can happen when you post goofy homemade videos of yourself on YouTube.com, the website that the TV industry can't decide whether it should embrace or dread.
Daly, former MTV phenom and currently host of NBC's late-night show "Last Call," was noodling around on YouTube one weekend this spring when he told an executive at his production company to check out Brodack's short video parodies. An intense young woman with flyaway hair and a gap-toothed smile, "Brookers" had in eight months become one of the most popular hosts on the video-sharing site, which logs roughly 200 million page views per day and is ranked No. 18 in worldwide Internet traffic. One of Brodack's videos, "Crazed Numa Fan!!!!," a wry takeoff on the Internet lip-syncing craze inspired by the popular dance tune "Dragostea din Tei," has been viewed more than 1.4 million times since October.
"I thought there was something extremely charismatic about this girl," Daly said Friday. "Her directing, her use of music -- it was very MTV to me."
You can probably write the next paragraph yourself: Carson Daly Productions signed Brodack to an 18-month overall programming development deal, splashed across the pages of Variety last week. Other terms weren't disclosed, but it's believed to be the first time a recognized Hollywood firm has established formal ties with one of the homegrown (and mostly young) talents on YouTube.
Brodack -- who deleted as junk the first couple of exploratory emails from Ruth Caruso, a development executive at Daly's company -- is still trying to grasp what happened. Daly himself "emailed me for the first time about a week ago," Brodack said. "He goes, 'I'm a huge fan of yours,' and I'm thinking, 'Aren't I supposed to be saying that to you?' This is kind of 'Twilight Zone'-ish."
Well, we might be living in a media world more mixed up than anything "Zone" creator Rod Serling concocted.
To many in the industry, YouTube, launched in February 2005, and other sites like it are potential enemies, the TV version of Napster, whose early reputation as a song-piracy enabler made it a pariah to record companies. After all, in addition to allowing people like Brodack to distribute their own work, these sharing sites also allow the free exchange of previously broadcast, copyrighted material -- exactly the kind of stuff that studio executives hope to make big syndication and DVD dollars from down the road.
