The Gregory Brothers have had a pretty great year. They won Best Viral Original at the Comedy Awards. They autotuned the Oscars. They created an app called Songify This. And they are now working on a pilot for Comedy Central. And all from the Internet! All I ever got from the Internet was a cabinet from Craigslist that turned out to be made out of bedbugs and human parts.

The New York Times just profiled The Gregory Brothers and it covers their unique place in the business of show. To paraphrase Britney Spears, they are not quite girl (they are on the Internet), not yet a woman (not on television). But that's about to change…

Among those who agree that the Gregory Brothers have staying power is Comedy Central, which commissioned the band members to create a pilot for a possible TV series that they have been filming this summer. When I asked Kent Alterman, the network’s head of original programming and production, if he thought there were any risks in developing a show around a group of performers who are best known for what might turn out to be an Internet fad, he told me: “If I thought that their only talent in the world was to do ‘Auto-Tune the News,’ then I would probably agree with that. But I feel like their talent transcends that.”

If you were wondering how a series would be made out of short YouTube videos, Kent Alterman also fields that question…

He compared their possible series to a mixture of “The Monkees” and the cult HBO comedy “Flight of the Conchords,” describing it as “a narrative show that has some music elements.”

You should read the whole article. It's interesting for The Gregory Brothers, but also as a little time capsule of what the paths to success in comedy and music mean in this crazy, future digital Matrix dystopia we call life.

(Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)