Lab Rats (2005)

Lab Rats is the brainchild of Sean Carruthers and Andy Walker. When the two technology journalists saw that podcasts were taking the Internet by storm they figure it couldn't be that hard to make TV for the web. They were wrong. It was really hard, but after a month or so of messing about, they got to it and shot a pilot episode in October 2005 called episode zero. Again they got it all wrong. There were shadows and bad audio and a bad couch. So they begged TV genius Matt Harris, who produced Andy's field segments while Andy co-hosted Call for Help, for some assistance. Harris, who was also the associate producer of Call for Help, said he'd help only if he didn't miss the Bruins play, so the first episode was shot between periods of a Bruins game (which they lost), but Lab Rats was summarily born. In the middle of all of this, Sony kindly chipped in a couple of cameras and Canon fixed Sean's GL-1. Then Geo Perdis, long time pal of Andy's (both worked on MSN.ca years ago) offered lighting help and gear. And then the deluge happened. People liked the show and downloaded it furiously. And here we are. Incidentally, Andy's cats Biff and Boo were not slated for co-star status on the show originally, but they wouldn't get off the set, so they became the lab cats by default, and have since produced some of the funnier outtakes on the show.