When you’re No. 2, you have to try harder. When you’re No. 2 in unique viewers of online video by a score of 157 million to 53 million, you have to try a lot harder.  From left, Deanna Russo, Erin Muroski, Abigail Spencer, Morgan Walsh, Bear and Malin Akerman in âBurning Love,â Ken Marino and Erica Oyamaâs online âBachelorâ parody.  Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.  A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.  That was the margin in April between Google, powered by its YouTube numbers, and the online-video runner-up, Yahoo. It’s a gap Yahoo isn’t going to close anytime soon, and for several years the company has tried to differentiate itself from YouTube in advertiser-friendly ways: eliminating user-generated videos; creating Yahoo! Screen, a clean-looking, easy-to-navigate hub for its video offerings; introducing slates of original reality and infotainment series and now, with its heavily promoted comedy channel, inching into scripted programming.  The newest and most advanced result of this approach is “Burning Love,” a series that’s Internet scale (14 episodes of eight to nine minutes each) but has flashes of television quality in its writing and production. The most ambitious of the original comedy shows on Yahoo! Screen, it represents a midpoint between YouTube’s channels initiative, where scripted shows are largely an afterthought, and the original content at Hulu, which emphasizes traditional longer-form shows with commercial breaks. “Burning Love,” a straight-ahead parody of “The Bachelor,” is a product of Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Digital production company, and Mr. Stiller has a small role.  But the people centrally involved in it — the husband-and-wife directing and writing team of Ken Marino and Erica Oyama, and performers like Malin Akerman, Matt Besser, Natasha Leggero, Deanna Russo and Adam Scott — represent a younger generation that moves back and forth between online video and TV and shares certain résumé points, like the Web sites CollegeHumor and Funny or Die and cable comedies like “Children’s Hospital” and “Party Down.”  Mr. Marino stars in “Burning Love” as Mark Orlando, the firefighter sharing a house with 16 potential soul mates. His profession allows for the show’s most frequent running gag — instead of handing out roses, he asks the women, “Will you accept my hose?” — and through the five episodes that have been posted it’s still funny. (New episodes go up on Mondays and Thursdays.)  The show takes advantage of the freedom of language and suggestiveness the Internet allows, but its mechanics — the fidelity with which it mimics the “Bachelor” format, while exaggerating that show’s more vicious and venal tendencies — are surprisingly conventional. Mr. Marino, an expert at playing weak-willed narcissists with blandly polite facades, delivers lines like “I’m not crazy about the blind girl — I need somebody to see me for who I am” with a winsome sincerity, and the show’s satire is pitched at an intermediate level that shouldn’t drive away too many viewers.  The real reason to watch is for the showcase “Burning Love” gives to its actresses. They play an inordinately desperate bunch of contestants, including the blind girl (Carla Gallo of “Bones”), a woman in a panda suit (her identity is one of the show’s better jokes, and won’t be revealed here), a homeless woman (Ms. Akerman, who says as she arrives at the house, “It looks so warm inside”) and a woman who can’t keep her pants on because she didn’t bring any (Ms. Leggero, who’s excellent).  Much of what these women do is very funny; also impressive are Beth Dover as a psychotically jealous district attorney and Noureen DeWulf as a buxom favorite of Mark’s. Some other parts of the show, including segments with Mr. Scott as Mark’s therapist, are dull ideas that go on for too long.  Unfortunately the single best thing about “Burning Love” so far was eliminated in the second episode. Among the 16 women was Ballerina, a skinny sexpot in a blond wig and revealing red dress played by Ken Jeong of “Community” and the “Hangover” movies. “You are so exotic,” Mark says on meeting Ballerina, who replies, “You have no idea.” In perhaps three or four perfectly controlled minutes on screen Mr. Jeong completely steals the show.  Yahoo! Screen is pushing “Burning Love” hard, to the extent that if you watch an episode of another series on its comedy channel, like Mike O’Brien’s interview-in-a-broom-closet show “7 Minutes in Heaven” or the Funny or Die production “First Dates With Toby Harris,” your screen automatically bounces to “Burning Love” afterward.  That must be particularly galling to Elliot Dickerhoof, the creator of “First Dates,” and Seth Morris, the star of the series, which completed its 12-episode first season last month. Consisting of sharply written three-to-four-minute snippets from a series of annoying Los Angeles dating experiences, the show is proof that the kind of short-form, fragmented Web video now being de-emphasized in the rush toward more TV-like content can be just as rewarding.  “Burning Love” is perfectly watchable, but “First Dates With Toby Harris,” which can be seen in one 45-minute sitting, is something more than that: a textured, funny yet melancholy slice of life that packs cinematic ambitions into its brief running time. One thing they do have in common: you can’t see either one on YouTube.  This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:  The Watch List column on Monday, about the Internet series âBurning Loveâ on Yahoo! Screen, misstated the number of episodes planned for the series. It is 14, not 12.  The Watch List column on Monday, about the Internet series âBurning Loveâ on Yahoo! Screen, misstated the number of episodes planned for the series. It is 14, not 12.
Yahoo! Screen is challenging YouTube with original comedy programming like âBurning Loveâ (a âBachelorâ parody) and âFirst Dates With Toby Harrisâ (about dysfunctional encounters).