Jamaica Plain Gazette
May 24, 2002
“Friends” JP-style
Local artist turns his life into Internet sitcom

By John Ruch
Gazette Staff

Everybody knows life in Jamaica Plain can be funny sometimes. But local artist Ravi Jain has actually turned it into a sitcom.
“Three Abreast,” which Jain and his roommates film in their Victorian house and other JP locations, can be seen at www.three-abreast.com.
Like so many funny ideas, it began over drinks at the neighborhood bar.
Jain was enjoying the company of his new roommates, Sarah Shreeves and Brian Pearson, when inspiration struck: “Let’s do a sitcom with just the three of us.”
Since Jain’s background includes filmmaking, this was no idle threat. Thus was born “Three Abreast” – though it took another one-and-a-half years to complete the project.
“They were both excited,” said Jain of his roommates. “But it was a lot more work than we all realized. By the fourth or fifth episode Brian was like, ‘Can you kill me off?’”
From the start, Jain planned and scripted seven episodes, most of which were shot simultaneously. Some are still being shot.
Seizing the possibilities of new technology, Jain shot the episodes on digital video and broadcast them on the World Wide Web. Each commercial-free episode is about eight minutes long. The show premiered in March, following a screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, and will continue through mid to late June, with a new episode appearing every couple of weeks.
The show is filled with campy allusions to old TV sitcoms and features an over-the-top laugh-track. But Jain said it’s grounded in a love of JP and the trio’s real life. The debut episode, “The Prize-Winning Tomato,” has Jain trying to hide the fact that he inadvertently ate a special tomato from Shreeves’ garden – something he actually did in real life, though minus the commando-raid antics depicted in the show.
Jain said the show also reflects his feelings for JP. He moved here in 1999 as a Massachusetts College of Art grad student after spending three years in Sweden, when the tight housing market forced into a series of sublet spartments. “I felt like the Fugitive,” he said. By contrast, JP “was such a home.”
Jain said he “can’t confirm or deny” rumors that the trio lives on Chestnut Avenue (the show is set on a fictional “McKinley Avenue”). But he said he’s found JP businesses to be especially artist-friendly. The trio filmed several times at City Feed & Supply, which Jain called, “Our set away from home.”
Other locations have included the James’s Gate and the Forest Hills T stop. Jain said he hopes to film an upcoming episode at J.P. Licks, since it calls for a “cone take” – him and Pearson spitting out their ice cream in surprise.
Viewership of the first episode was “between 7,000 and 8,000,” Jain said, with the second episode having fewer than that. Jain, a freelance designer, said he worries about having too many viewers, because his Web service fee is based on the number of users. “My friends say, ‘I watched it again,’ and I’m like, ‘Don’t! You’ll bankrupt me!’” he said.
Getting some sort of sponsorship would help, but Jain has skipped it. “I’ve tried to stay pure to it,” he said. But he said he wouldn’t mind if Apple Computers would host his site, since “Three Abreast” is created entirely with Apple products and the Comedy Extender is an innovative use of their software.
And what if Hollywood took notice and asked him to write for TV? “I would listen to anyone,” Jain said, but added he’d only be interested “if someone wanted to do something that was trying to break new ground with narrative.” For “Three Abreast,” he said, “The strength of it lies in the whole context of it, when people look at it and understand it’s an individual endeavor. It’s not a Time Warner product.”
Jain emphasized the “element of fun” in “Three Abreast,” and said he has to disillusion his artist friends who say the show must have “some subversive hidden agenda.” And he said he shies away from calling himself a “conceptual artist,” saying, “You get this idea of someone sitting around wearing beads, presenting a napkin as their art.”
But he’s also a serious artist himself, using the show to explore issues of modern identity and technology. In fact, the show was part of his MFA thesis, and three episodes were shown at Cambridge’s Zeitgeist Gallery in an exhibit of self-portraits.
“I did a lot of research on identity on the Web, how malleable it is,” Jain said. Pointing to them “JennyCam” site, on which a woman broadcasts her entire daily life on-line, Jain said, “Just because I can go and watch her all the time, I don’t think you know her any better.” He said the same probably goes for “Three Abreast,” which is both an insight into the trio’s life and yet is “obviously not real.”
“I think it’s something people can identify with,” Jain said of the sitcom format. “It’s not hard to imagine one’s life as a sitcom.”
The show also reflects Jain’s interest in new technologies such as the Web, which he called, “all this great potential being used to just sell stuff.” Each episode of the show includes a feature called the Comedy Extender, which allows viewers to click the screen and pull up extra footage or trivia about subjects mentioned in the show.
Technology is the focus of Jain’s other on-going project, “Transportation Pioneer.” Clad in witty costumes, he attempts to become the first passenger on new transportation systems, skipping the fancy official ceremony and creating his own brouhaha over the actual, “proletarian” first run.
“The conceptual underpinning is that no one cares when it really starts,” he said. He said the “Transportation Pioneer” will next appear at magnetic-levitation train run in Virginia: “I’m envisioning a costume which would look like fake legs in a lotus position and maybe dry ice” – to look like a levitating yogi.
As for “Three Abreast,” when it’s done, it’s probably done, except for a possible Christmas special and possible re-broadcasts with extra blooper footage later. “I don’t think I would do another seven episodes,” Jain said. “It would be repetitive and would take another couple of years. And Brian wouldn’t do it.”

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