By Ryan Gowland.

The popularity of new media has ebbed and flowed since the The Spot became the first online series to draw advertisers in 1995, but it’s safe to say that there’s never been a higher demand for web series than the current climate. Studios are creating online channels reserved specifically for new media, with The CW Seed premiering last moth with a slate of web shows, while Netflix has also started debuting its own original shows such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. For the past several years, Yahoo! has remained firmly entrenched in becoming a major player in online media, with shows like 7 Minutes in Heaven, hosted by SNL writer Michael Patrick O’Brien and Burning Love, which also aired on E! in a half hour format. Recently, Yahoo’s reformatted online network Screen debuted an entire slate of original comedies, including celebrity chat show Losing It with John Stamos, puppet cop show parody The Fuzz and Ghost Ghirls – less a paranormal parody and more a show about two clueless female paranormal investigators whose ability to speak with the dead is rivaled by their awkward social interactions and hilariously shallow attempts at fame and fortune.

Ghost Ghirls is the brainchild of writer/performers Maria Blasucci and Amanda Lund and writer/director Jeremy Konner with Jack Black on board as executive producer and guest star. While the show features a number of celebrities such as Black, Colin Hanks, Molly Shannon, Jason Schwartzman, Dave Grohl, Val Kilmer and Bob Odenkirk, the shows real success is built on the winning chemistry and subtle comic nuance displayed by Lund and Blasucci, two real-life best friends who met doing theater at Loyola Marymount. Both went on to study and perform improvisation in various theaters around Los Angeles, working together in their improvised show BEANS!, but it wasn’t until a chance meeting with Konner in a public park that Ghost Ghirls would get its start.

“I was tricked by a friend who said his band was playing a show in the park and said I should come and play along with them,” said Konner, who plays the saw. “And when I shows up I realized, ‘Oh, we’re just busking in the park, there’s no show.’ And I really thought that nothing would ever come of that.”

“On Amanda and I’s side, we had never been to Pan Pacific Park,” Blasucci continued. “So we took a walk and saw this band playing. We were one of three or four people watching it. And then the main singer was like, ‘Hey guys thanks for watching, we’re the Wild Yaks, find us on MySpace.’ And then when I got home, I messaged him and said, ‘Great job at the park today!’ And Steve wrote me back and said, ‘That was the nicest thing someone’s ever done. I live in New York, but my friend Jeremy lives in L.A. and he’s going to take you to coffee.’ And that was that.”

Konner had already been directing the Drunk History web series (now a half hour show on Comedy Central with Blasucci in the cast), while Blasucci and Lund had also begun tinkering with online content with a web series titled LAPD: Pregnant Detectives. “There was only one episode,” Lund said with a laugh, however it was enough to convince Konner to want to work with them.

“There was so much there,” said Konner. “It was so clear that these two girls were so brilliant and funny together that I was like, ‘We just need to come up with something solid.’”

It was Blasucci’s love of paranormal shows like Ghost Adventurers that got them thinking about doing a paranormal parody, thought that idea morphed away from parody into what became the show’s pilot, “Home is Where the Haunt Is,” which guest starred Jake Johnson (New Girl) and Jason Ritter (Parenthood) and was kept as the season’s first episode. Another inspiration was a single episode of Ghost Whisperer, which Lund says gave them “eight episode ideas, it was so jam-packed with crazy stuff.”

The Ghost Ghirls pilot was funded by a commercial company that Konner worked for that came forward with a small budget and crew, and the resulting episode brought Jack on board to produce. Konner had known Jack for years, not only as the director of a Tenacious D documentary but also from working as Black’s assistant.

“I came on to be his assistant when his wife had their first baby, so there were a lot of runs to get baby butt cream in the middle of the night,” said Konner of the experience.

While the original intent was to just put something together for FunnyorDie or YouTube, SyFy was the first to bite on the Ghost Ghirls concept, and so a year was spent developing the show before the network dropped them. “It was such a crazy process, because all we were doing was writing lists of ‘ghost rules’ for months,” said Konner.

“SyFy had a slate of comedies they were developing, and they ended up pulling the plug on all of them,” Lund explained. “The guy in charge of them left I guess so then it just stopped after a year.”

Jack Black, Dave Grohl and Val Kilmer

Eventually, Yahoo stepped forward with what Konner describes as “Brewster’s thousands” and a limited time frame to shoot an entire season of shows. “Yahoo said, ‘We have this extra money and if you guys can spend it by the end of the year, you can have a show,’” explained Konner.

And so the rush to complete the season was on. A few writers were hired, and the entire season was written in about two weeks with Blasucci, Konner and Lund serving as head writers to make sure each script fit the comedic style of the two leads.

“We had our little writer’s room for two weeks, and then we were writing up until production,” said Lund. “And even through pre-production we were still doing drafts. There really wasn’t much time. We maybe did two drafts of each script.”

“And we were writing up until the day we delivered the episode,” added Konner, who said they had only twelve days to shoot twelve episodes, excluding a few pick-up days. Outside of the short schedule, however, Yahoo offered an enormous amount of freedom.

“They were really, really enthusiastic about it the whole way through,” said Lund. “From the very beginning, they were really wanting to do this show and they carried through all of it, so they were really supportive. They really gave us almost 100% creative control. They had maybe half a dozen notes total throughout the process that were really agreeable.”

“They had no interest being nit-picky with notes,” Konner added. “They just wanted us to deliver the show we wanted to deliver and they were really clear about that and they stuck to that.”

Ghost Ghirls received its first promotional push came at South By Southwest earlier this year and then had its own panel at Comic-Con, with Ritter making a guest appearance as a specter invading the panel’s opening minutes. Both were a great boost for the series, and the trio remain appreciative of the attention online series are currently receiving.

Amanda Lund, Maria Blasucci and Jack Black

“There’s no question that it’s very, very helpful for people like us that House of Cards came out and was a success and that Orange is the New Black came out and was a success,” said Konner. “Those things – along with Burning Love, which was a wesbseries and is now on E! – those are things that are really making this whole process easier and giving a lot more cache to the idea of a web series and it’s not just being seen as little webisodes or a YouTube show, but people are seeing them as a new form of television.”

So far, there’s no word of another season (“We’ve talked about it amongst ourselves, but not anyone else,” Konner admitted), but then, Yahoo! is likely waiting to see how successful their Screen slate will be. Considering the quality of the show and the positive response so far (Splitsider called it “far and away the best comedy out of Yahoo!’s new fall crop”), it’s not hard to imagine that Heidi and Angelica will be back at it soon, somewhat solving people’s paranormal problems.

All 12 episodes of Ghost Ghirls are available now on Yahoo! Screen.