The Daily Swarm

New York Times preview:

Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Patsavas’s series, “Rockville, CA,” makes its debut on Tuesday with the first four of its five- to seven-minute episodes. Set in the fictitious Club Rockville in Los Angeles — the name is a homage to the 1984 R.E.M. song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” — the 20-episode season follows Hunter (Andrew J. West), an archetype familiar to devotees of Mr. Schwartz’s series: he’s the dark-haired, hyperarticulate, self-deprecating, self-professed nerd, like Seth Cohen of “The OC,” Dan Humphrey of “Gossip Girl” and Chuck of, uh, “Chuck.”

In this case he’s a music blogger with a crush on Deb (Alexandra Chando from “As the World Turns”), an A&R rep for Wall to Wall Records. Deb, whose primary trait is her obsessive use of the word “major” (as in “that band is major”), comes to the club to see and sign her favorite acts.

Those acts — a diverse mix of established (the indie rock band Eagles of Death Metal), up-and-coming (the synth-pop singer-songwriter Lights), foreign (the Swedish singer Lykke Li) and local artists (the power-pop group the Broken West) — are as essential to “Rockville” as Hunter and Deb’s budding romance. Each episode was shot at the Echoplex, a real rock club in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and takes place in one night, with a single band playing in the background. The show’s home page on TheWB.com features interviews with those bands and exclusive live performances of two of each band’s songs.

“It’s how people find music now,” Ms. Patsavas explained. “They don’t go to their record store anymore.”

Record stores aren’t the only things becoming obsolete; the concept of “selling out” has gone by the wayside too, as bands now jump at any opportunity for exposure.

New York Times review:

In the middle of the first of the 20 installments, while we’re being introduced to the fictional Los Angeles dive Club Rockville and the super-cute, squeaky-clean kids who hang out there, the show’s sensitive male geek, Hunter, goes on a rant. (As played by Andrew West, Hunter is closer to the smarmily intellectual Dan Humphrey of Mr. Schwartz’s “Gossip Girl” than to the charmingly inarticulate Seth Cohen of Mr. Schwartz’s earlier show “The OC.”) This jeremiad against overhyped indie bands, opportunistic record labels and, worst of all, music bloggers — a clever dig by Mr. Schwartz at his own new milieu — takes a full 30 seconds, or nearly 8 percent of the episode.

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A few last notes on the television Josh Schwartz versus the online Josh Schwartz: In its early going “Rockville, CA” lacks the languorous homoerotic charge of “The OC” and “Gossip Girl”; maybe bashful bromances just take too much time to develop. On the other hand, Club Rockville, even though it’s filmed in an actual Los Angeles club, is as unnaturally tidy as those shows’ California piers and New York streets. When Mr. Schwartz surprises us in Episode 6 — the second one he wrote — by having two characters bond over a joint, they share it in a restroom so clean that it could exist only on a computer screen.