Love/hate social networking? SuperNews! gets it

Chicagoan-turned–Los Angeleno Brian Shortall* watches TV, surfs the Web and makes fun of stupid shit for a living. He’s a writer and producer for SuperNews!, CurrentTV’s animated weekly comedy series that just loves to pick on Facebook, Twitter and any other obsessed-over pop-culture phenomena. If you haven’t heard of the show yet, you may soon: Last March, SuperNews!’s cable outlet bumped the show up from short sketches to a full half-hour cartoon sitcom format after the show garnered a few big buzz-generating hits on the Web. Just in time for TOC’s own social-networking issue, we phoned Brian at CurrentTV’s L.A. office to find out what inspires his team to funnel its good-natured but scathingly observant cultural critiques into the show’s anthropomorphic characters—a self-important Facebook, a douchy MySpace and a dopey Friendster among them.

*Full disclosure: Brian and the writer are long-lost grade-school friends who just a few weeks ago reunited via….wait for it….Facebook.