The B-Team

Spokane’s Luke Barats and Joe Bereta were not, as Variety magazine seems to think, “spawned by YouTube.”

And NBC certainly didn’t sign them to a six-figure pilot deal just because YouTube is hot right now.

NBC signed Barats, 22, and Bereta, 23, because they are talented, smart and milk-snortingly funny. YouTube, the video-sharing Web site, just happens to be where the network found them.

This pair of Gonzaga University grads signed a one-year deal last month in the “low, low six figures” (with a second-year option) to write a pilot episode for a potential NBC series.

“They (NBC) said they like what we’ve done in the past and want us to incorporate it into a pilot,” says Barats.

If the script gets picked up, the team of Barats and Bereta will act in and produce their pilot episode. Then, if NBC picks up the pilot, they will become the writers, producers and stars of their own sitcom series.

They’ll be the 2007 version of “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

Whooaa. Hold on. Barats and Bereta know as well as anybody that this scenario is sprinkled with monumental “ifs.”

“All of this seems more likely to not happen than to happen, just because of the statistics involved,” Barats says.

“I mean, for every pilot script that gets pitched, only a minority get made into pilots. And then only a minority get picked up. We’re taking it a step at a time.”

Essentially, they have been hired to write a script for a possible pilot. Period.

And they aren’t even leaving Spokane to do it.

“Even the president (of entertainment) of NBC, Kevin Reilly, when we were talking with him, he asked us, ‘So, when are you moving down here?’ ” says Bereta.

“And we just looked at each other and we were like, ‘Uhh, we don’t plan on it.’ And there’s this pause, this beat, and he looks at all of his other execs and says, ‘Good! Don’t come down here. Don’t get tainted. Keep it fresh!’ “

So they haven’t exactly gone Hollywood. Still, they’re feeling fortunate to be getting paid handsomely for what they used to do strictly to make their Gonzaga friends laugh.

Their first video, in 2003, was a goofy, crude and hilariously un-PC song about one of their friends (it is available on YouTube as “Aaron P”). Bereta sardonically calls it a “joyous romp about our friend.”

After that, Bereta, a broadcast studies major from Columbia Falls, Mont., needed to come up with content for “The Show the World Needs Most,” a comedy show for GUTV, the Gonzaga campus station.

He and Barats, a theater and history major from Boise, teamed up on a number of mostly college-themed videos including “Gonzaga RAs” (a “Cops” spoof), “Gonzaga Love” (a rap parody containing the line “Lidgerwood, up to no good”) and “PC Frat Boys” (in which two guys high-five each other to the chant of “Social justice!”).

“YouTube hadn’t even been created yet and we had our own crappy little Web site,” says Barats.

“Then we found a Web site called Filmfights.com, which is what we used as our excuse to make videos. It was basically a bunch of teenage guys tossing stuff up there.”

By this time, the pair had “a spark of belief” that their joyous romps might go somewhere.

“We were kind of developing an online fan base,” says Barats. “We had to appease them, to keep making videos, so they wouldn’t revolt.”

“At this point it was just pretty small – a flicker,” adds Bereta.

Then, last winter, they entered First Night Spokane’s 48 Hour Film Festival. In the space of two days, the duo (with help from collaborators Ben Mallahan and Tyler Jacobson) made a funny and polished five-minute film called “Just Wonderful.”

It won both the festival’s Jury Award and the People’s Choice Award.

“Then, maybe a month later, we found YouTube and started posting,” says Bereta.

They already had a small fan base, which meant that their videos immediately had more than the average number of views. In May, YouTube posted their “Mother’s Day” video on the site’s front page. The number of hits exploded.

“That’s where the popularity first started,” said Barats. “I mean, the digital Internet popularity, which is a lot different than the TV exec popularity.”

“Mother’s Day” is about a brother who sabotages his sibling’s attempts to shoot a formal portrait for Mom (sample line: “Put down the yardstick!”). It has been viewed 1.6 million times on YouTube and is in the Top 20 of the site’s all-time comedy favorites.

They soon followed it up with a number of other short sketches, including “Completely Uncalled For,” about an annoying office worker. That 39-second clip has been viewed on YouTube 1.9 million times.

Another clip, titled “Windward Repots: Office Cubicle Wars 2006,” quickly garnered over a million views.

They were becoming famous – if not exactly rich.

“You get paid in respect on YouTube,” says Bereta, deadpan.

Yet it wasn’t long before those numbers began to attract the other kind of popularity – the TV exec kind.

“They liked what they saw and we were fortunate that we had a backlog of videos made before those,” Bereta says. “So YouTube was kind of like a resume of work so they could go back and look at our other stuff, which was pretty diverse.”

A talent agency, sensing the interest, came calling. Not just any agency: The Creative Artists Agency, one of Hollywood’s most powerful.

Barats and Bereta signed with them and immediately entertained offers from NBC, HBO and MTV. But NBC was definitely the hungriest. They signed with the network because it offered them creative freedom – and a degree of faith.

“The only direction we got from them was, ‘We like your stuff and your style. Don’t forget that,’ ” says Bereta.

Now, however, comes the work. Their average video clip has been about two minutes; now they have to write a half-hour show.

They say they will take inspiration from existing shows that make them laugh: “Scrubs,” “The Simpsons,” “South Park.”

They do not, however, have to start from scratch. They plan to use characters and sketches from their previous videos – probably “Mother’s Day” and “Cubicle Wars.”

“We’re confident that if the same sense of humor is propelling it, we won’t have too many worries,” says Barats.

“… Of course, we want it to be successful. We don’t want to blow a shot like this.”

Meanwhile, they will be doing all of this work in Spokane – because, as Bereta says, “We’re already in the best corner of the U.S. Why leave it if we don’t have to?”

Barats is devoting his full time and attention to the NBC gig, but Bereta hasn’t even quit his day job.

You can still find him at his desk at Corner Booth Productions, a local production company.

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