TBS’s Final Space is a serialized intergalactic space saga about an astronaut named Gary, his friends, and his adorable, planet-destroying friend, Mooncake. Gary is overly ?excited to make new connections, true friends, and ?play cards with someone… ANYONE?. Entertainment fans, especially Millennials and Gen Z, ?are just as eager to get closer to the characters they watch and love. We knew they would immediately want to virtually ?partake in the "?clasp? of? friends?"? with Gary? himself?, but we ?knew we could do one better when it came to playing cards: actually playing with him LIVE.

Using relatively new but untapped Facebook Live technology in a completely imaginative way, we built the first-ever, live-streamed interactive game with an animated character voice acted in real time.

With every new season launch, TBS endeavors to execute a new LIVE social stunt, in order to boost engagement, earned media potential, and drive tune-in.

To achieve this, we assembled a multidisciplinary team of 12 to make several layers of technology communicate with each other. The real-time animation was made via a complex digital puppet rig of Gary, built with native illustrations provided by the show. Actor movement was captured with a live camera and fed into Adobe’s Character Animator software, allowing the show’s creator and star Olan Rogers to voice the character live and have the puppet respond in real-time. Additional animations were controlled by a second puppeteer operating a custom interface on an iPad.

The gameplay and fan interactions were powered by GLOW’s proprietary software. Built to work on top of Facebook’s API, it allowed multi-round timed voting, user comment features with profile picture and name, card selection, and scoring.

The event is the most engaging Facebook Live ever produced by TBS, with an engagement rate of over 100%.

During the live experience, fans loved finally playing cards with their favorite character, and even used friendly trash talk using in-show references, proving they were fully immersed and talking to Gary like a real person.

Behind the scenes, this was strategically executed during a hiatus week for the show, and as counter-programming to the NCAA Finals that were on TBS at the same time—something the Final Space audience wasn’t likely to be watching. Thus, TBS was able to still engage that audience instead of losing them to another network.

This stunt created awareness of Final Space through expanded audience engagement using innovative storytelling. Thanks to this overall strategy and this social stunt, Final Space is the youngest skewing show ratings-wise for the network.