Taking on One More Quest: Interview with Felicia Day from ‘The Guild’

Welcome, weary traveler. Sit down while I tell you the history of this thing called ‘streaming video’.

Once upon a time, the internet was new, fresh, and awkward. Almost everyone had what was called ‘dial up’ and the speeds were slower than a snail. You had to host your own videos on your own website (if you even HAD a website), and the files were not small.

Then, lo – someone thought to create a website that would host the videos FOR you, and the mighty YouTube was born. But verily, it was not taken seriously by most people, and the land was filled with cat videos, funny home videos, and – of course – porn. And in a butterfly effect, it led to the media landscape of streaming.

In 2007, Felicia Day decided to make The Guild, a series about geeks, online gaming, and found family. I managed to snag some time to interview her about the series in preparation for the Kickstarter for the 20th anniversary movie.

“When I wrote The Guild script, it was designed to be a half-hour comedy for television,” Day said when I asked whether she originally intended it for the web. “I showed it to people around town, and they had no idea what I was talking about. It was so early: no one understood games. They didn’t understand you could play a game with someone and talk with them online. It was really a foreign concept.”

She showed the script to her co-producer Kim Evey, who had been uploading her sketch comedy to YouTube. Evey had snagged a deal with Sony Crackle and suggested that it might be a good place to showcase the series for an eventual pickup from Hollywood.

“We did the first ten minutes – three episodes – all on our own dime,” Day continued. “This brand-new place called YouTube – which I had never really consumed much of, to be honest with you – was so new. But the minute I got comments on that video and realized I had an audience that liked my work versus Hollywood, who had been rejecting me for years and years, was when I realized what I wanted to to do with my life. I didn’t necessarily have Hollywood as an ultimate goal anymore: I just wanted to keep doing what I was doing.”

It was – by every definition of the word – a hit. The show ended up being six seasons (70 episodes total), garnering over 300 million lifetime views on YouTube. It has won over 20 awards, including six Streamy Awards, and was the first web series on Netflix. Codex’s costume is in The Smithsonian Institution!

Creating a hit isn’t easy (otherwise everyone would be doing it). I asked Day to tell me when she realized she had something big on her hands.

“I was in the van on the set of a Hallmark movie Prairie Fever,and I got an email saying that YouTube was featuring the third episode of The Guild on their front page. Overnight, we got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views. So many people started reaching out about the show. The other big turning point was ‘Do You Want to Date My Avatar?’, our viral music video, which boosted the show to beyond what I could have imagined.” (The song spent a week as the #1 download on iTunes and Amazon.)

“Because of those things and writing The Guild,” Day continued, “I got offered roles by creators in Hollywood who wrote parts for me at Eureka and Supernatural. So it was me being rejected for so many years and then you know just defiantly stating who I was through my art, and that opened all the doors in Hollywood for a while.”

Now, as a writer, I know that it’s all fictional. But I also know that writers use a lot of themselves in the characters. So, I asked Day how much of her was in Codex (the character she plays in The Guild), especially since she herself is a gamer and a geek. “The characters that I wrote were archetypal,” Day answered. “They were an amalgamation of a lot of people that I had played games with over many, many years online. For Codex, it was certainly autobiographical in the respect that I had been playing too many video games and I was depressed and I was kind of a shut-in and I was having mental health issues and had anxiety and all those things.

“I will say that having done the show made me a much stronger person. Playing Charlie on Supernatural made me even stronger. So the privilege of playing these characters and going through their journey makes me a better person and kind of why I love acting. It’s like self-care: it’s kind of therapy to kind of play these things out on screen and become stronger for all of them.”

When the show premiered, you still had to explain what a web series was. (I wrote an essay on the rise of web series for my master’s thesis in 2014. You can read it on my website.) But as written above, it is one of the many sparks that helped create the streaming entertainment landscape we’re in now.

As the media kit for this project states, “The Guild helped demonstrate that creator-owned digital content could attract a global audience without traditional studio backing.” It was one of the influences that Joss Whedon listed for creating Dr. Horrible’s SIng-Along Blog during the 2007/2008 writer’s strike, which is right around when Netflix launched streaming video, with Hulu launching in 2008. Netflix then started creating original content in 2009. I asked Day about her thoughts on how the streaming industry has evolved.

“At the very beginning of The Guild,” Day said, “it was really about indie film: this was the next Sundance and this is where creators were to come and they were going to work around the system. Then the bottom dropped out of all web content, and nobody had budgets. That’s why The Guild ended in 2012. Nobody was going to give me enough money to shoot a low low budget movie when they could just advertise against a hamster running around.

“So that was a lull, and then streamers took over and did super high-budget stuff, which was TV – to kind of cannibalize what we knew as networks. And then now, because streaming truly has broken all of the business models in the business and Hollywood is shattered in a lot of ways now with creators going around the middlemen to develop and create and support not only pilots, but ongoing work. This is the time when the potential of what everyone saw in the first episode of The Guild is finally coming to through fruition.

“The cracks in the system of Hollywood treating creators badly, trying to pay less and less and less, adopting AI: all these things are now providing the inspiration for very experienced creators to be like, ‘Oh, screw it! I just want to make stuff,’ because creators inherently just want to make stuff. And Hollywood was the best place to do it because they would pay the budgets to do it: they would pay well to do the work and they would actually make the work that you develop. Those things don’t happen anymore. It’s really in a bad place. I’m sure it’ll turn around, but right now, I think people are looking to other places to do all this stuff and they’re looking to different places to get creators on board. And I think it’s a wonderful time. Like: it’s a sad time for people who’ve been in the industry for a long time like me. [But] it’s a very exciting time for people to be innovative and plucky.”

The Guild did a sixth season back in 2022, which had a storyline about toxic fans. (Which, of course, Day has had to deal with herself.) I asked if the movie the Kickstarter will be funding will cover changes in the gaming industry and fandom at all.

“I wanted to channel the early web in this movie,” Day answered, “where I considered the web to be a gateway for people to be themselves and connect with people that they’ll love that they might not have ever connected with in real life. So, I will say that the tone of the show will be the same, the spirit of the show will be the same, the characters will be who you remember: but just extra. I will say that the setting of the movie was something I played with a long time, and I really am excited about the setting because I think it’s very relevant, very exciting for people to dive into.”

She continued, “Yes, gaming is different. The characters are different because time has passed. But I promise you, when I sent the script to my director who directed seasons two through five, Sean Becker, he said, ‘Oh, this is another season of The Guild but bigger.’ And that’s it: that’s what I wanted to do. So, if you loved what we did, you’re not going to feel betrayed or waylaid. It’s exactly what you want, but just a little extra.”

With the immediate success of such projects as RiffTrax bringing back MST3K, Dropout’s Game Changer home edition, and more, I had no doubt the Kickstarter would be a success. (And I was right: funded in less than four hours, in its first day live, it became the biggest movie launch Kickstarter has ever seen, the fastest movie to make $2.5 million in Kickstarter history, and raised the most funds in 24 hours.) When I interviewed her on July 14, I asked Day if she had any plans for stretch goals or special rewards.

“I mean, listen, we need a lot of money for a movie, so just getting the movie budget is going to be I hope very successful,” Day said. And if we are fortunate to exceed our goal to make the movie that I want, we’ll have levels of movie. I would just really like to be able to blow it out. We’ll see if we get there. If we get to that blowout point, I have so many stretch goals planned, and I’m not going to spill them. But believe me: I have prepared mentally for absolute disaster and absolute incredible success. And that is nothing I could predict. I have done everything I can, and one day I’m just going to release it into the world and hope it makes an impact and hope that the community wants to see what we have to show, because it’s going to be awesome.

“We also are doing things with the Kickstarter that no one’s ever done before with a movie, to be able to support the kind of budget we really need. I’m excited to unveil that to everybody. It’s been such a monumental task with dozens of people, you know, working on different levels to get everything ready.”

Obviously, the 20th anniversary of the show was what prompted the Kickstarter, but the sixth season ends in a pretty definitive manner, so I asked Day if there were any other reasons that prompted her to do this project. “Probably a year and a half ago, a Hollywood exec called me. They wanted to reboot The Guild, and I was so excited, because I had kind of written it off. I was like, we were so successful, but nobody in Hollywood ever cared. And to have that call was very exciting, until we got on the phone and they wanted to reboot the show with younger actors.

“First of all, I wanted to hang up immediately. I was nice – they were nice – but I was so enraged, because this is my baby and I have been rejected, especially since I became a mom and over 40. There is very little opportunity for women my age in Hollywood. Famous women I know – much more famous than me – cannot get arrested, and so to be in this environment and then have someone call to basically impose that view on my show and then recast me: no, absolutely not.

“I’m not going to go to Hollywood to try and get this movie made. Nobody will understand it or fund it. I’m going to go to the fans because they understand the show, and I’m not going to sit there and cater or recast people to make some random film financier who doesn’t really understand what we’re about maybe pick it up and put it on DVD in Romania.

“So, I’m very excited and hopeful that the fans are going to allow us to make this movie the way we want to make it, and if that’s it, that’s it. I love it. I love the show. I love the community and we’re going to make something awesome together. I just know it.”

Having something be fan funded isn’t new to Day. When she realized she needed a budget for the rest of season one, she had put a PayPal button on the website (this was before Kickstarter) and funded it that way.

I asked Day what the most important lesson she learned doing The Guild. After thinking for a minute, she responded, “Going back to it, the lesson I would love to go and impart to myself is that the misery that you put yourself through writing the scripts is not necessary. You can figure out a way to write with joy. Unfortunately, I had an anxiety disorder back then. I had ideas about how writers wrote, and I was always under pressure. We had no one helping us. We never had an office, we never had a full-time assistant: we did everything ourselves, me and Kim Evey, the whole time. There were no resources. There were no easy turnkey things for creators back then: we had to invent everything.

“I was determined in going back that in the process of trying to make the movie, I would not burn myself out again. I would not be unhealthy physically or mentally, and in writing the script, I would allow myself the time to wander, to enjoy myself, to explore.”

As mentioned, the Kickstarter has already launched and is funded, but I asked Day how fans could help support the project. “Honestly, I understand the world is not in the best financial shape right now,” she said. “If you can’t pledge, you’re spreading word yourself in the places you haunt on the internet. I have found coming back to doing a big project like this that the social media platforms are so broken and unfriendly to creators. It is actually astonishing.

“I used to tweet something, and pretty much my followers would see it. There was no barrier between me and the person who had chose to follow my information and what I was putting out into the world for free to help build this billionaire’s platform. Well, now we’re just all looking at the billionaire up on their castle, and we’re all serfs renting a piece of land. We’re all just employees now, but for free or very little, and it really frustrates me.

“As a creator, I will tell you the best thing I ever did was invest in Twitch, which is a smaller platform but I have a very loyal audience there who means so much to me. Discord, where you have a smaller audience but again, people are coming back on a regular basis. Newsletter: being able to reach somebody’s inbox is the only way that people actually pay attention nowadays. The big number doesn’t matter. I might have 1.7 million people on Instagram, but I get 500,000 people watching a video there. The click-through rate is less than a newsletter. It’s the way the platforms are designed and the way they give you access to your fans, which is a tragedy I think, and it’s not serving any of us. It’s just making us scroll, scroll, scroll, and not really support anybody ourselves or the person we actually care about.”

As I always do when talking to a creator, I asked what advice Day would give others wanting to do something themselves. “I would definitely caution that it’s not going to be easy and you’re not guaranteed success,” she started. “If you’re looking for fame and fortune, look elsewhere. But if you’re a creator, you have to really figure out why you’re doing something, and it needs to be as important as it possibly can in order for you to get through the hard parts and keep creating.

“As a creator, especially online, you’re creating a long-term relationship with fans. This is a relationship, and when you’re not making stuff, you are still maintaining relationships. That’s what’s important to me. The way I make content is always the first and foremost thing in my mind: community. Genuine community: not just gathering people so they’ll buy things, gathering them so we can enjoy something together and they feel like they have participation and transparency and how it’s made – the process and the struggles and victories of it.

“I want people to know that it’s hard to do all this crap. I want people to know that halfway through a script, I want to throw it out and quit. I want people to know that nothing is easy or guaranteed, but creating is self-care. So if you can get yourself to care about what you’re working on right now and enjoy the process – figure out a way to get from A to B on your project and level up along the way – that’s where you become the most potent creator that you can be, and that’s how you become the best person you could be.”

The Guild: Ren Fair’d brings back the “Knights of Good” (the guild that Codex belonged to) for an adventure set in a Renaissance Faire. There’s still time to back the Kickstarter, and there are already lots of great add-ons. (I know I am very tempted to get the popcorn bucket, even though I have no idea where I will put it.) You can make a pledge without any reward, but the lowest reward tier is $20.

If you haven’t seen the show, the entire six seasons are available for free on the YouTube channel for The Guild. And if you’re worried about doing ‘homework’, don’t worry: each episode is roughly 5-10 minutes long (remember: it was created when online video was new) and it took me only a few days to do a re-watch. It is at times funny, heartwarming, and painfully relevant (did you REALLY have to call me out like that so many times?).

So, traveler: you have enjoyed my tale of the YouTubes. But alas: I see you are thirsty for more of such tales. You can find what you seek at the link for the Kickstarter.

Author: Angie Fiedler Sutton

Angie Fiedler Sutton is a writer, podcaster, and all-round fangirl geek. She has been published in Den of Geek, Stage Directions, LA Weekly, The Mary Sue, and others. She also produces her own podcast, Contents May Vary, where she interviews geeky people about geeky things. You can see all her work (and social media channels) at angiefsutton.com.

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