As the internet continues to transform the way we consume and even create entertainment, it is interesting to see how members of the LDS church are using the medium to create Mormon-specific entertainment distributed on the web.
As is usual with the web, not all of the content is worth promoting, or even consistently worth promoting.
In addition to blogging, we’ve seen the beginnings of a couple of LDS-oriented comic strips.
The 9th Ward is posted most Fridays by father-son team Rick and Ryan Goldsberry, who live in California, and features humorous vignettes related to Mormon culture.
Zarahemla Times is also posted Fridays by Kevin Beckstrom. It’s about a family living in the suburbs of Zarahemla in the time frame of about the end of Alma or Helaman in the Book of Mormon. Interesting in that it employs modern LDS terminology, such as the Relief Society, anarchronistically to an ancient setting.
So with blogging, podcasts, and now comics, we arrive at the next step in web-based LDS Entertainment: The Book of Jer3miah.
The Book of Jer3miah is a web series produced by a group of BYU Students and Faculty with new episodes posted…you guessed it…every Friday. The series is an interesting experiment in Web-based LDS Entertainment. Each episode is between 3.5 and 5 minutes long, and tells the mysterious story of Jeremiah Whitney. It starts on Jeremiah’s birthday with the gift of a video camera. The appearance of a mysterious card in his locked car directs him to the Manti Library, where the mystery begins to unfold.
The story has a lot of LDS thematic elements as well as an LDS setting. While some of writing and acting is pretty mediocre to poor, the story is interesting and takes an approach similar to popular Television shows Lost and Heroes. Like those shows, The Book of Jer3miah seems to have some supernatural overtones and only reveals some of what is going on in each episode, leaving fans to speculate and come up with theories.
Watch The Book of Jer3miah Trailer
The Book of Jer3miah – Trailer
I’ve watched all six existing episodes, and I hope that while entertaining and interesting, they can manage to not trivialize the Gospel and the church.
The episodes are available in HD and at 5 minutes an episode, I’ll definitely be watching to see what happens next.
Let me know what you think.