Dr. Horrible: Joss Whedon's strike-busting web musical that beat TV at its own Emmys

The Writers Guild strike of 2007–08 left TV's writers idle. Whedon had spent months in meetings trying to set up cheaper, web-first projects with companies — 'nothing was going,' he told Vulture. So he cast Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day, scored it with his brother Jed and Maurissa Tancharoen, and made a studio-quality musical with no studio at all, telling NPR it proved 'it was possible to create quality shows without giant corporations.'

Skip the studios: write, fund and shoot a three-act supervillain musical for the web, give it away free for one weekend, then sell it while the buzz is still hot.

Three acts went up on July 15, 17 and 19, 2008, free and ad-supported and even watchable outside the US — then vanished on July 20 as planned, pushing latecomers to iTunes. The first night's traffic crashed the site. Whedon set the rule that every dollar of iTunes and DVD revenue would pay the cast and crew, who had worked unpaid. The DVD added Commentary! The Musical — a commentary track that is itself an entire second musical.

Time ranked it No. 4 in its Top 10 TV Series of 2008. The inaugural Streamy Awards gave it seven prizes; it took the 2009 Creative Arts Emmy for short-format live-action entertainment — the format's establishment credentials — and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.

In the middle of a strike that had shut down scripted television, Joss Whedon decided not to wait it out. He gathered his brother Jed, composer Maurissa Tancharoen and a small cast, and made Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: a 42-minute tragicomic musical about a hapless supervillain vying for entry into the Evil League of Evil while pining for a girl from the laundromat. Neil Patrick Harris played the villain, Nathan Fillion the obliviously heroic Captain Hammer. Whedon funded it himself — a few hundred thousand dollars of his own — and acted as his own studio. 'Freedom is glorious,' he said.

The release was as engineered as the show. Acts I, II and III went up free on July 15, 17 and 19, 2008, streamed internationally through Hulu, and disappeared on schedule on July 20; NPR reported the website crashed under first-night demand. The show then moved to paid downloads on iTunes, with a soundtrack in September and a feature-rich DVD in December. Every cent of the digital and disc sales went to the unpaid cast and crew — all paid off by that November. The DVD's signature extra, Commentary! The Musical, turned the director's commentary into a full song-and-dance number about itself.

The establishment came to them. Time put Dr. Horrible at No. 4 in its Top 10 TV Series of 2008 — a web-only show ranked alongside network seasons. At the first Streamy Awards it won seven categories; it won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form; and in September 2009 it took the Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Special Class – Short-format Live-Action Entertainment Programs — NPR's phrase was an award for a show 'created specifically to be seen online.' When Neil Patrick Harris hosted the Primetime ceremony, Dr. Horrible invaded the broadcast in a live sketch.

The strike removed every excuse to compromise: with studios off the table, the creative team kept all rights, all control and the whole upside — 'it's as if our ids wrote a musical,' Whedon said.

The free weekend was a scarcity play as much as a gift: five days of open access converted fan enthusiasm into paid downloads without a marketing budget.

It rejected the assumption that web video meant cheap video — real composers, real singers and a real shooting budget made a product networks would have charged for.

Distribution was the innovation as much as content: direct-to-fan sales paid the crew before any platform took a cut, a model streaming platforms later industrialized.

When the gate is closed, the gate was the product: the strike stopped paid work but freed Whedon to own his output outright. The free window was the marketing — five days, then gone.

The project became the reference point for premium web-native content and a striking entry on Whedon's résumé; by 2012 Forbes was interviewing him about it as he promoted The Avengers. Commentary! The Musical went on sale separately on iTunes in January 2010. The show streamed on Netflix from 2010 until it left the service in March 2014. Its team carried the working relationships forward — Jed Whedon and Tancharoen became showrunners on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — and the Streamys it dominated went on struggling to find a successor hit of remotely the same scale.