Burning Love may be the closest thing to a breakout hit for an original online series.

The spoof of TV dating competition shows from executive co-producer Ben Stiller and Yahoo! grabbed over 11 million views during its first season.

And the parody of ABC’s The Bachelor continued on its hot streak by jumping to the E! network.

Not bad for an online series that started out as a one-off Internet short.

Burning Love writer and co-creator Erica Oyama recalls watching far too much of the Bachelor and Bachelorette series as a “genuine fan,” without looking to produce anything.

Then one season finale of the Bachelor convinced Oyama to write a script for an internet short that husband Ken Marino, a comedy actor, writer and director thought could be turned into a full series.

So they brought the project to Abominable Pictures’ Jonathan Stern, who produced another web series, Children’s Hospital, a parody of Grey’s Anatomy on which Oyama and Marino collaborated.

And Stern brought Burning Love to Stiller’s Red Hour Digital shingle, which had a first look deal with Paramount’s Insurge Pictures.

Lucky for Oyama, Red Hour Film’s Mike Rosenstein was a big fan of Marino for his star-turns in TV series like The State and Party Down.

That turned the Red Hour  producer onto reading Oyama’s treatment for Burning Love.

“The idea made so much sense. There’s so few ideas for shows that can work online and sustain for multiple seasons. It has a hook for being so topical and current, and yet so funny,” Rosenstein recalls.

Red Hour and Insurge Pictures offered financing for a sizzle reel that Marino directed.

From that, Paramount secured the deal with Yahoo! to stream Burning Love, starting in June 2012, as part of the comedy channel on Yahoo! Screen, the site’s video destination.

“That was a great partnership. They (Yahoo!) bring such a massive audience to the table. When they turn on the firehose, it gets it out there,” Rosenstein insists. 

Oyama calls Burning Love a spoof of TV dating competition shows that plays on their absurdity, whether as a fairy tale for some fans or a train wreck for other viewers.

“We think of it as a loving tribute. We amp up the ridiculousness and call out things that are funny and weird about those shows,” she explained.

Season one of Burning Love featured Marino as a fireman looking to settle down with a stranger.

The web series also stars Michael Ian Black, June Diane Raphael, Rob Huebel and Natasha Leggero.

Stiller’s Red Hour called in some favours and got stars like Jennifer Aniston and Seth Rogen to do cameos on the web series.

The first season was shot over eight days, including one pick-up in New York City to include Stiller.

“We had a tight budget and we were able to just make it work by having a really great team around us, and these amazing actors who could pop in and be funny all the time,” Oyama says.

As with many web series, the Burning Love creators experimented to find the right episode lengths.

“We figured it out as we went along,” Oyama recalls as they went longer on the minute count for first season episodes to remain faithful to the TV Bachelor formula.

In the end, the first season episodes were mostly from 7 to 9 minutes.

Oyama says they were mindful of the attention span of the online audience, which they at first under-estimated.

“We saw as we went along that people were staying with the show. They would watch a 12 minute episode if they needed to,” she remembered.

Oyama knew in-built fans of The Bachelor would appreciate the satirical bent of Burning Love.

She didn’t foresee the web series becoming an overnight hit.

“What we didn’t anticipate is people enjoying it and getting into the characters and caring about who would get sent home and who would be engaged,” Oyama said.

Yahoo! renewed Burning Love for a second and third season.

And Paramount, which distributes Burning Love, also got the series’ first season onto TV, on the E! network from February 2013.

Here the first season seven- to 12-minute web episodes were combined into seven half-hour TV episodes.

Rosenstein says the repackaging was helped by extra footage Marino shot during the first season shoot and high production values from the get-go.

At the same time, “we had to make it into a four act structure,” he adds.

Rosenstein insists Burning Love has legs to travel internationally, and onto still more digital platforms.

“We have a great partnership with Paramount and they have such a powerful distribution model. We’re going to go international with it,” he says.

To help that push, Paramount now has three seasons to sell abroad across a host of platforms.

“The model for Paramount is definitely multiple windows, and always starting with a digital window,” Rosenstein says.

And that fits the Red Hour Films strategy to make content inexpensively and debut it digitally to come up with winning cross-platform content in a hits-driven business.

“We want to make cool and funny stuff that looks great and is great and tells great stories. It’s working through this series,” he adds.

Along with audience success, Burning Love has also earned a host of awards, including four Webbies and a submission for the Emmys in the short format live-action entertainment program category.

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