As I look back at the posts TV Squad did this year, a certain topic popped up quite a bit: "Hey, folks, take a look at [Name of big star] in this [funny/quirky/dramatic] web series you can only find at [Name of web site]!" While the quality of and star power behind web-exclusive programming has been building for a couple of years now, 2008 saw an explosion of web series that attracted enough buzz to make one wonder if Jeff Zucker wasn't thinking of this a little bit when he offered Jay Leno the 10:00 slot on NBC.

What caused this explosion? Well, we can thank one of 2008's other big stories -- the writers' strike -- for a lot of it.