MLQ Productions will debut their latest work, the web series “Minimum Security,” on Friday, July 31; the first episode will drop on the MLQ Productions YouTube channel — @mlqproductions — that day. Pictured, from left: Kian Barker, showrunner and co-director, as Conrad; Olive Cooper, as Macey; Miles Gilchrist, as Philippe; and Lili Herzog, as Clementine. (Film still)
Villagers debut ‘Minimum Security’ web series
- Published: August 15, 2026
Last month, local residents might have noticed a group of young folks — conspicuously dressed in orange jumpsuits — hauling a bag of trash around Yellow Springs, unloading it, packing it back up and moving on.
They were the cast and crew of “Minimum Security,” a new, four-episode web series from MLQ Productions — the independent local film collaborative formed by Kian Barker and Miles Gilchrist in 2020 and peopled over the years by a growing cast and crew of friends.
The first episode of the series will landed Friday, July 31, on MLQ Productions’ YouTube channel, @mlqproductions, with subsequent episodes released weekly. A trailer is already available on the channel.
In speaking with the News, co-directors Barker and Kirby Kingsley said “Minimum Security” follows four prisoners assigned to an experimental community-service rehabilitation program. Each episode centers on a different member of the group, placing the characters in locations connected to their backstories.
The show’s central premise arose while Barker and several friends, including Gilchrist and Lili Herzog, were sitting at his house, kicking around ideas for a summer project.
“What if we did a show about prisoners doing community service?” Barker recalled asking.
From there, the group started dreaming up the characters who would eventually occupy the screen: Olive Cooper plays Macey, a self-centered pop star whose carelessness lands her in a jumpsuit alongside Gilchrist’s Philippe, a suave Frenchman with a secretive past; Barker’s Conrad, a former genetic researcher who carries a mason jar containing a bug he claims will someday take over the world; and Herzog’s Clementine, an alleged serial killer who, as it happens, becomes the group’s emotional center.
Keeping them all in line are correctional officer Bobby Orange, played by Kaiden McFarlane — and in her first film performance, local resident and chanteuse Jenny Gilchrist portrays the supervisor in charge of the program.
The directing duo said the comedy is deliberately unruly — its episodes include a “slightly deranged” ice cream shop manager played by Kingsley and, at one point, mimes — but, at its heart, it’s warmer than its premise might suggest. Barker cited James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Suicide Squad” films as tonal touchstones that feature outsized, troubled characters colliding comedically before resolving into a found-family dynamic.
“I think there’s a nice balance in the show of some edgy, chaotic comedy, and then there’s a heart at the center of it, which I think is what makes a lot of stories like that work,” he said. “I think [Minimum Security] is definitely very deeply rooted to the humanity of the characters.”
“It’s pretty wholesome,” Kingsley added. “The show is very focused on the relationships between the characters and how their friendships build.”
The series is the latest project from MLQ Productions, which began during the pandemic with the two-season web series “My Life in Quarantine,” from which the collaborative draws its name. The group has since produced the mockumentary series “The American Theatre,” the horror-drama “OTIS” and a number of experimental shorts and other works.
The majority of the cast and crew are young adults who attended or recently graduated from YS High School; Barker returned to town this summer fresh off his first year of film school at New York University. He said he’s learned a lot at NYU, and came home to the friends who helped shape his earliest films with a stronger grounding in story structure — particularly the demands of episodic comedy.
“We have to have these concise plots that have a satisfying resolution,” he said.
As the group’s longstanding showrunner, Barker had the final word on scripts and editing, but as always, with plenty of input from everyone else on set. Barker and Kingsley co-directed two episodes, and Kingsley and Herzog each directed an episode on their own.
“Geez, [Herzog] was so good at directing,” Kingsley said.
“She wrote the script for that episode and she did a wonderful job,” Barker added.
Kingsley — who also spent much of the shoot behind the camera while Barker appeared on-screen — said he first entered MLQ’s orbit several years ago after showing up as an extra on one of Barker’s school film projects. Barker handed him a script and asked him to feed actors their lines, and Kingsley soon found himself suggesting new takes and adjusting performances.
“I didn’t know that I loved directing until I just happened to, I guess, accidentally direct one of Kian’s films,” Kingsley said. “It was so fun, and I would love to keep directing in the future.”
Barker described Kingsley as a trusted second opinion — someone who’s primed to say when a take is good enough and, on the flip side, when the group could stand to run it once more for better results.
“[Directing] was really natural for him from day one,” Barker said.
Shared control at the helm ended up being necessary under the show’s compressed filming schedule: The series was written beginning in June and filmed in the first two weeks of July, with about 10 days of shooting after rain shortened the planned shoot by a few days. The production spread across the Corner Cone, WYSO’s Dayton Street space, Ellis Pond and the farm of the group’s former art teacher, Bill Neal, just outside the village.
As with MLQ projects past, “Minimum Security” remains something of a scrappy venture, the filmmakers said — the orange jumpsuits out in the wild at Ellis Pond, for example, made folks driving by look askance, though Barker said he did stop by the YS Police Department to let officers know what was up. Elsewhere, the cast and crew made do with what was on hand: they hauled around the same bag of prop trash, they duct-taped a camera to a car dashboard to catch Cooper’s mid-drive reactions and they filmed from the back of a truck as actors ran behind to pull off a moving shot.
“I think a lot of the fun of it is trying to find simple, practical solutions,” Barker said.
Barker said the makeshift, improvisational spirit of MLQ now exists alongside the technical knowledge he’s gained at NYU — training he was excited to carry back to the place where he first learned to make films.
“I really want to bring it back here and share it with my friends,” he said. “When I think about why I’m doing this, I think about Miles especially. I want everyone to see how great he is.”
For Kingsley’s part, he said he felt newly energized by the work and proud of what he and the pack of artists put together.
“I think everyone on this was so confident and so creative,” he said. “They just really blew me away with the talent that they have.”
Barker and Kingsley said working the MLQ way — independently of outside input, but open to inside input — enables the group to engage with ideas that might be rejected on a larger set. And it requires the filmmakers to decide for themselves where traditional structure ends and invention begins.
“It’s not just that we can make our own rules; we have to make our own rules,” Kingsley said.
“That’s where the magic happens, I think,” Barker added. “In the chaos.”
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