Rockville, CA, a Web-based show about a rock club that premieres on TheWB.com today, is the latest project from Josh Schwartz, the executive producer of Gossip Girl, Chuck, and The O.C. The series—20 episodes that each run about five minutes long—has obvious Schwartz trademarks, including an attractive cast and witty, Seth Coen–esque banter. But it takes Schwartz’s other signature—a great soundtrack—to new heights, featuring live performances by the Kaiser Chiefs, Phantom Planet, Travis, and Lykke Li, among other indie-rock bands. VF Daily talked to Schwartz about what to expect from his new venture.

VF Daily: How did the Rockville, CA project come about?
Josh Schwartz: Rockville was always designed to be for the Web. The WB had launched TheWB.com, and they needed originally programming, which I was approached about. I have always wanted to do something that was set in the music world, and I thought setting a show inside of a rock club could be producible for the Internet. And for me it was a chance to reconnect with my early 20s, when I spent a lot of time at clubs like this.

Did you collaborate with people you’ve worked with on your other shows?
Once the WB was onboard with that idea, I reached out to Alex Patsavas, who has been my music supervisor on everything, and asked her if she wanted to produce this with me. I assumed we’d get a bunch of artists who perform in the subway for nickels and pennies. But because Alex is Alex, we were able to get an unbelievable lineup of bands.

I called in a bunch of favors, so the casting director from Gossip Girl cast the show, and we got this incredible cast, way beyond what I thought we’d get. I promoted my former assistant, Sarah Frank-Meltzer, to be the show runner. I reached out to a writer on Chuck, Zev Borow, who used to write for Spin and Rolling Stone, and asked him to help out. I thought it would be cool if all our other writers were rock journalists and rock critics, so he drew from his network of friends from that world, so we got people like Andy Greenwald, who has done a lot of writing about music, to really get a verisimilitude of that pretty accurate. Luckily they all happened to be witty people.

The whole thing just surpassed all my expectation in terms of how much work it actually was to do, and how much fun it was when it was done.

How was collaborating with Alex Patsavas on this project in comparison to the other shows you’ve worked with her on, since, in this case, the show is actually about music?
Alex was very busy, to say the least. We had to produce 20 live performances while we were shooting 20 episodes, and it all had to be done in three weeks. Sometimes we’d shoot two or three bands in a given day. On The O.C., at the Bait Shop, the bands would lip-synch to their own playbacks—it was awesome to have Death Cab or the Killers there, but it was a pre-recorded version of the song. Here, all these bands performed live, which really gave it electricity and an energy you can’t fake. Sometimes the bands would play in the daytime at Rockville, and then go play at an L.A. nightclub at night for real.

I know for Alex it was incredibly involved, and it was really intense. It brought her back to her days as a college concert promoter, putting on shows for no money, because that’s basically the budget we had for this.

In your other shows, Orange County and New York City are sort of like silent characters. Did you think of Rockville in the same way?
Rockville is the lead character of the show. In some ways, without sounding too profound here, we thought of it as a metaphor for the music business itself. The idea that there’s all this great music out there, but no one can figure out how to survive economically in the music business right now. It’s true with Rockville—they have all these great bands, but the club is still struggling to make ends meet. But this club is their home. The people they hang out with are their family.

What was different about producing a show for the Internet rather than for TV?
The biggest difference in doing something for the Web is that you get total creative freedom. I didn’t have to get any script notes, I didn’t have to get notes on casting, you are able to do what you want, and you succeed or fail by your own merits.

What kind of audience are you hoping Rockville, CA will capture?
I guess if you like the things in the past, you might like it. If you don’t like the things I’ve done in the past, you might like it. It’s a different vibe. None of the characters really has any money on this show—they are all struggling. They are out of high school, people in their early 20s, finding themselves falling in love with the wrong people, falling in love with the right bands … that’s the world. Anybody who thinks that sounds appealing, I hope they check it out.