Cyborganic Launches First Online Drama Series: The Couch; Online Drama Features Eight Dynamic, Soul-searching, Fast-living Characters in Group Therapy with Serious New York Attitudes

Business Wire, Dec 31, 1996

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 31, 1996--The Cyborganic Corporation today introduced its first online drama series on the World Wide Web.

Titled "The Couch" (http://www.thecouch.com/), this daily online drama features eight dynamic, soul-searching, fast-living characters who meet for group therapy in a psychiatrist's office in Manhattan's Flatiron Building.

The site features weekly group sessions and daily diary entries, and will launch with one month of dramatic background so readers can become deeply and immediately involved in the characters and plot. Access to The Couch and to Transference, its related online discussion area, is free to anyone on the Web. Information about advertising and corporate sponsorship opportunities on The Couch is available by email (advertising@thecouch.com) or telephone (415/227-4335 x26).

"The Couch draws its strength from our amazingly talented, experienced, and diverse writers who were fascinated by the Web as a story-telling medium," said David Steuer, executive producer of The Couch and Couch participant. "While the weekly Sessions and Liaisons provide the main thread of a collaboratively developed plot, each Couch writer creates and directs the trajectory of his or her individual character. The structure allows us to share real-life anecdotes about pregnancy, suicide, doing the personals, and fear of commitment, but also gives us the license to embellish our lives with pure fiction and camp because it makes a good story. Often we don't even know what is fact and what is fiction."

"The Couch is Cyborganic's second online serial incorporating the bottom-up development process, and we are thrilled with the result," said Jonathan Steuer, president and CEO of The Cyborganic Corporation. "The characters are extremely well developed, and their interactions and self-analyses create a compelling and literate story that is unlike any other web serial. Readers will pick up on this and come back again and again to see what is on the Couchsters' minds."

"The Couch is also fantastic complement to our other online serial, GeekCereal found at http://www.geekcereal.com/," continued Jonathan Steuer. "Though both sites are updated daily and involve real characters played by real people, there are some important differences: The Couch is explicitly not about technology or the Web business, it is situated in New York rather than San Francisco, and it walks the other side of the line between real life and the Web. This diversity really helps us to expand our content base and to reach a wider audience."

The Couch is based around biweekly group therapy sessions, held in a psychiatrist's office in Manhattan's Flatiron Building, and biweekly "Liaisons," in which groups of characters split off for their own adventures. Daily diary entries provide an ongoing look into the lives of the eight New Yorkers as they engage in raw conflicts, explore controversial issues, and reveal their personal struggles. Each character develops a mini-drama within his or her diary, covering everything from drug addiction to dating through the personal ads to giving birth. And the lives of all eight characters are intricately interwoven to create a rich, complex fabric of storylines within the therapy group: -0- Celeste -- dating again at 41, finding romance, enjoyment and surprising connections with the world around her through the personal ads;

Mike -- tough and raunchy, just out of jail and obliged by his parole officer to join the group;

Will -- a 20-something with a Peter Pan complex struggling with career and commitment;

Beth -- a beautiful young actress, with a mysterious past, making ends meet as a dental assistant;

Gloria -- a PR woman, married, pregnant, and trying to reconcile newfound domesticity with her formerly freewheeling life;

Jimmy -- the angry club kid, oversexed and underpaid, a popular Bret Easton Ellis-like novelist now suffering from writer's block;

Zoe -- The New York Times reporter who spent her 20's chasing deadlines, now realizing she's missed out on life, about to get married, cheating on her fiance;

Adam -- the jazz musician, wondering if his art has a place in this postmodern world. -0-

The text on The Couch site is being edited by Adam Penenberg, a New York-based journalist and fiction writer who has written about technology for The New York Times, Wired, and Playboy. In addition to Penenberg, the Couch writers are M.P. Dunleavey, Mark Durstewitz, Christine Hull, Jay Key, Maud Lavin, Linda Solomon, and David Steuer. Linda Solomon is an award-winning former investigative reporter for the Tennessean and has written for The International Herald Tribune, the LA Times and New Age Journal. Maud Lavin is writing a book on Women and Money for Farrar, Straus & Giroux and her book on Berlin Dada artist Hannah Hoch was named one of the best art books of 1993 by the New York Times Book Review. M.P. Dunleavey is a staff writer at Glamour and has written for the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly. Screenwriter Jay Key's current script is being packaged by a New York production company. Mark Durstewitz, author of the novel Code Red, has won the National Fantasy Fan Federation award for fiction and is co-writing a rock opera with Christine Hull. Christine Hull's voice can be heard daily on the Sci-Fi Channel. David Steuer's writings on the Web include Documents Only (http://www.cyborganic.com/people/nwdave/docs/), a compendium of stories about his German-Jewish heritage.