One of the more intriguing-sounding projects coming our way this spring is Harper's Island, a murder thriller airing on CBS for thirteen weeks, and telling a complete story within that time frame. The premise is simple: a group of friends go to a destination wedding on the titular island, off the coast of Washington State. But, one by one, people start dying. 

Equally intriguing-sounding is Harper's Globe, an online series that ties in with Harper's Island, and runs the same span of time, interweaving its storyline into the main thread of the series. 

We caught up with Harper's Globe producer/co-creator Miles Beckett (lonelygirl15, KateModern) today at Wondercon, and asked him to describe the story of his new online series, and explain what makes it unique…

"The story of Harper's Globe," he said, "is about a girl named Robin, with a very mysterious past, who's gone to Harper's Island to work for the newspaper, Harper's Globe, and to digitize articles from the newspaper and to create a community online for the Harper's Globe newspaper and the citizens of Harper's Island. And then she gets pulled into the story as it begins to unfold on the island."

"Harper's Globe," he said of the online series, "is a social show that's a companion to Harper's Island. The way that you watch it, there are really two ways to experience the show. You can simply be a passive viewer and you can watch one episode per week -- it's five minutes long and it's gonna be posted to HarpersGlobe.com every Wednesday afternoon -- or you can participate in the show every day, so you can go to the website, essentially, every day of the week, and there will be a new piece of content every day. And the way that we produce the show is very similar to LonelyGirl and Kate Modern -- all the characters are treated as if they are real people, and you can communicate with them. The difference this time is we have a full social network on Harper's Globe -- it hasn't launched yet, but it will in a few weeks. They have profile pages, they can send text messages, the characters can update video blogs to YouTube, etc. So when you go to the site, Monday through Sunday, every day, a character will post some piece of content to their profile page, whether it's a photo, a text blog or a video. All of that content that's occurring organically in the social network is being sourced to the home page. So when you go to the home page, HarpersGlobe.com, you see a linear feed of content, kind of like a blog. And each day you can read a text blog from the main character Robin, or you can watch a video from her or another character, and you can participate in the story as it unfolds. So you can send messages to the characters, you can solve puzzles or mysteries or whatever. So if you're a really active viewer, you'll see the story as it's unfolding, and you'll get to watch an episode once a week that kind of brings it all together. If you're somebody who's totally passive you can come once a week over the course of the seventeen weeks and know the same story that the person who participated was following.

"Also, the weekly episodes are being distributed everywhere -- they're gonna be throughout the entire CBS audience network, they're gonna be one YouTube, they'll be on TV.com… They'll be on a ton of websites, iTunes, things like that."

We'll have our full and complete exclusive interview with Beckett up soon, so keep checking back for more, thrill-seekers, as we cover both Harper's Island and Harper's Globe!