TVSquad

Welcome to the post-YouTube world of television programming. Brookers got a development deal with Carson Daly. One half of Ask a Ninja signed with United Talent Agency, and now, Jack Black and friends are bringing viewer-produced comedy shorts along with their own original material to VH1.

Called The Department of Acceptable Media, the program is based on a live event that Jack Black, along with Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, have hosted in Hollywood since 2003. At the live event, five-minute "pilots" by aspiring filmmakers are screened and the audience votes on their favorites. The televised program will work in the same way - viewers will vote online at www.acceptable.tv - for their favorite shorts. The winning "pilots" will get to produce a second episode. The losers will be canceled.

Just a few days ago, we reported that online video blog Rocketboom's former host Amanda Congdon had signed a development deal with HBO. Well, while she's raking in the premium cable dough, she'll also be broadcasting on ABC as a contributor to the network's digital channel ABC News Now. She'll make occasional appearances on ABC's televised news programs and will be making a weekly video blog for abcnews.com on new media, political and environmental subjects.

Congdon may be the first "cewebrity" to land a deal with a major network, but she's just one of many to use the internet as a launching pad to wider fame. United Talent Agency's Digital Talent Agency has already signed Hosea "Ze" Frank, host of The Show with Ze Frank, and Kent Nichols, co-creator of the Ask a Ninja video blog.

Just because I'm introspective and I walk among the shadows, it doesn't mean that I can't hear you. -- Hope

Crista Flanagan, a writer and performer on MadTV, has teamed up with the fellas behind AskANinja.com for a new Web series called "Hope is Emo" that features Flanagan as Hope, a brooding high school emo chick with plenty of angst and depression to spare, and I'm guessing more than a few albums by The Cure. In the first episode, which you can view after the jump, she tearfully pleads to her listeners to stop destroying words by erasing or deleting them. She's so serious about this, in fact, that she made an urn to hold the chalky remains of words that have been callously wiped from the chalkboards at her school. Well, it's not so much an urn as it is a fondue pot, but you get the idea. Also, and perhaps even more importantly, freshmen and sophomores can't go to prom, and it's a rule people really need to learn to obey. I found it quite humorous, and I'm looking forward to more.