Another month and another trendsetting social media campaign for Comedy Central’s @midnight with Chris Hardwick: On the heels of the successful and ongoing #PointsMe competition comes Plot Twistagram, an interactive create-your-own-adventure series of 15-second videos, launched on the show’s Instagram.

Devised as another way to activate @midnight’s #HashtagWars playing audience, each installment ends on a cliffhanger, imploring fans to comment on what should happen next.

Much like an improv skit, producers will then pick their favorite idea and shoot it as the next episode, finishing on another cliffhanger. The first episode launched Monday March 9, kicking off a weekly, open-ended adventure, and every new episode posts Mondays at 7 am PT.

The hope, according to Joe Farrell, an executive producer of @midnight and director of development at Funny Or Die, is that this “truly becomes a crowd-sourced narrative.” As Farrell explains, “it’s another way that people can communicate with us directly and we can create something together.” Farrell has no idea how long the story will last, but “it’ll be fun to see it all strung together and see the different handles, the 12, 15, 30 people who contributed to making the story.”

Plot Twistagram has already been successful, with the pilot episode garnering 5-6 times the number of comments @midnight’s Instagram normally receives. Plus, the pitches have been impressive: “a lot of people wrote really fun, cool things. We spent a significant time figuring out which one to do, because there were so many good ones.”

Plot Twistagram connects back to the DNA of the show, the idea that social media has created “a great democratization of comedy.” The barriers between us and our comedy heroes are disappearing, and @midnight seeks to embody that.

“From the very beginning, this show was created to celebrate comedy but also, we hoped, [give us] the ability to put famous comedians that we all idolize on the same stage, or in the same piece of content, with someone who might have an office job in Dubuque, but who is really really funny.”

#PointsMe and Plot Twistagram have been extensions of that. The goal, as Farrell puts it, for #PointsMe was to “find someone that may not have the spotlight of being on TV and shine it on them. For PlotTwistagram it’s to give voice to comedy storytellers.”

Now it’s up to the Internet to hone that voice.

Produced by Funny Or Die, @midnight airs Monday-Thursday at midnight ET/PT and is executive produced by Chris Hardwick, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant; Mike Farah and Joe Farrell for Funny Or Die; Alex Blagg, Jason Nadler and Jon Zimelis of Serious Business; showrunner Jack Martin; and Alex Murray of Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

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