Mel House, director of the recently released PSYCHIC EXPERIMENT, has ventured into more comedic territory with a new genre-tinged web series called PLACEHOLDERS. It reteams him with EXPERIMENT co-star Debbie Rochon, and we’ve got info and a few exclusive photos to share.

“PLACEHOLDERS focuses on the producers providing content to Channel 19, a fictional local public access station, and the strange situations they get into,” House says. “We’ve got the film student, the Alex Jones-ish conspiracy theorist, the preacher with flexible morals, the wannabe actress, the animal rights activist, the white-supremacy-show guy, the guy who’s using the equipment to do adult films on the side… I’m drawing on my own public-access employment experience, of course. Lots of crazy stuff to choose from there. Most of the stories don’t even need any embellishment. Along the way, I’m also folding in stuff about my experiences in the film industry—so it’s turning into a kind of comedy catharsis on that front as well.”

Rochon (pictured above) co-stars in PLACEHOLDERS as Carla, Channel 19’s station manager/executive director. “When I started writing the part of Carla, I knew it was a ‘Debbie thing’ pretty quickly,” House notes. “Carla has an interesting history and agenda that we slowly reveal over this first 10-episode arc, and watching Debbie dig into this shady kind of bureaucrat role has been awesome, to say the least. She also has a fairly weird auditory processing disorder, which we learn about in the second episode.” Other nods to the horror genre include a ghost that haunts the Channel 19 building and a character with only half a face. “We call him Faceless Bob,” House says. “That character is a trip as well. I wasn’t sure how it would play, as the Bob arc really gets into some strange territory, but let’s just say I’m very happy with how it turned out. I think Bob will be a fan favorite by the time episode six rolls around.”

While House wrote the complete series, he shared directing chores with a number of other filmmakers, including EXPERIMENT producer/co-star James LaMarr (who helmed the “remake episode”), Robert Luke (director of THE MAN IN THE GARAGE and the EXPERIMENT DVD featurette), Chris Warren (whose upcoming genre feature IMAGO was produced and co-scripted by House), Cliff Holverson (who created PLACEHOLDERS’ makeup FX), Jerry Ochoa and Carlos Tovar. PLACEHOLDERS is a bit aptly titled, as House says the series came up when “we basically wanted to do something fun in the gap between features. Lionsgate released PSYCHIC EXPERIMENT in December and we’re also prepping for our foreign rollout on that, we’re in post on IMAGO right now and about to button that up and we’re in preproduction for my next movie, a ghost feature titled SOON, A LIGHT ON.

“But we were getting a little antsy to actually shoot something, so we put together PLACEHOLDERS really quick, initially just to have fun and try the comedy thing out—and now it’s taking on this weird life of its own. People so far seem to really be plugging into it, and the cast and crew are having a blast—it’s definitely an awesome vibe. Season two seems pretty likely, but we still have to shoot our season-one finale…which is partly a musical. So I’m reserving any ‘series renewal’ announcements until we all get through that in one piece.”

The first two episodes of PLACEHOLDERS can be viewed at Comedy Central’s Atom.com website here and here; new segments will be posted every two weeks throughout the spring. You can find out more at the series’ Facebook page and the official website of House’s Upstart Filmworks.

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