78 Comments

Absolutely fascinating, thank you Dylan! I live with a TV editor and am always enthralled by understanding how the sausage is made (so to speak).

A shout-out to "reality show" JURY DUTY which is the most Must Watch show of last year! Get in there, if you haven't already, Webworm readers. 🤪

On a reflective note: I was living in the UK back when the first series of Big Brother aired, and it's incredible to think back to how fresh and new it all was - crucially, the contestants didn't have a clue what it would be like, what people would see, and how it would take over the tabloid world outside the BB house. Because they were relatively guileless and inexperienced, IIRC the ultimate winners were 2 genuinely nice/ordinary people - Craig the tradie, and Anna the lesbian ex-nun. And "Nasty Nick", on reflection, was way less manipulative than contestants seen on any show since. It was kinda lovely! I watched religiously, as did the rest of Britain.

Of course, the season 2 folk, and every player since, knew what they were getting in for. So really it's the inaugural UK season which makes for an enthralling study.

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Jury Duty is, I think, the only TV finale that made me cry over the last year.

I did *not* expect that.

PS: the guy who did our graphics for Flightless Bird instagram for a period was the wonderful comic who played the tech obsessed guy on that show - the cyborg enthusiast.

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James Marsden's comment about being on a jury before - "at Cannes" - was perfection 😂

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I have not watched Jury Duty yet, but it's been on my list ever since Mike Rowe had such positive things to say about it. Maybe I should bump it up to the top of the list.

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The first BB was an enthralling watch! I was a teen and thought it was the bet thing ever. I didn't enjoy any of the others, they didn't have the same appeal (the loss of nievity around it as you say)

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Love Island is the same in a way... The earliest seasons are sort of pure, but it quickly becomes an industry unto itself. Which is fine, but it definitely changes the nature of it. I think it's a concern for a lot of show creators - they want to keep things changing enough that it's always a different experience.

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I feel like you're underselling Doug's prolific skill :)

The way reality shows are sort of self-evolving is always interesting to me. It's different for different shows, but it's very common that awareness of previous versions influences the behaviour of new participants. At the extreme ends you have things like Love Island and Big Brother where later season players will often talk directly about prior players within the show itself, and then there are shows like The Traitors and, to some extent, Survivor where people try to concoct strategies based on previous seasons, while the producers are trying to tweak the game to prevent that.

And then there's the Jury Duty and Joe Schmo shows where you simply can't do them again because awareness of the show defeats it. Or some of the varied weird dating shows where producers basically mislead the participants about which show they're actually taking part in before they arrive.

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You're so right, they'd never be able to do a Jury Duty Season 2: The Appeal. And it's the better for it!

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The whole concept of "winners" and "losers" in life is obscene. Who makes the rules? Who said you had to accept them? Competition is what has made our society so appalling. Human beings actually evolved to co-operate not to compete, so this vile, super-competitive society in which we live, is forcing us to work against our instincts: the instincts that made us such a successful species in the first place. Indeed, if we don't shed our competivienes, as individuals, groups and nations, our society will collapse and: farewell humanity. (The planet will rejoice.). Only by rediscovering our ability to co-operate will we surmount the problems we have brought upon us, such as the climate crisis, mass extinction, resource overshoot, etc. If you don't believe me: look what is happening politically, as groups polarise and compete, instead of communicating and cooperating. Undoubtedly, one of the worst manifestations of this competition in entertainment, is the horribl, pseudo-gladitorial contests, where desperate people humiliate themselves, in the belief that winning a large sum of money will solve all their problems. I wouldn't watch one if you paid me to.

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Ive been thinking that competition (and grifting), only works because our primary skill is cooperation. Grifters leverage and exploit those instincts.

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Back in the 50s and 60s here in the US there used to be a ‘game show’ called Queen for a Day. Each episode would have four contestants, and I’ll let Wikipedia take it from here:

“Each contestant was asked to talk about the recent financial and emotional hard times she had been through. The interview would climax with Bailey asking the contestant what she needed most and why she wanted to win the title of Queen for a Day. Often the request was for medical care or therapeutic equipment to help a chronically ill child, or might be for a hearing aid, a new washing machine, or a refrigerator. Many women broke down sobbing as they described their plights. The winning contestant was selected by the audience using an applause meter; the harsher the contestant's situation, the likelier the studio audience was to ring the applause meter's highest level.”

It sounds absolutely miserable, but it was very popular for a while.

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I'm actually kind of surprised we don't have something like this today but there are plenty of news stories and corporate philanthropy that mirror it. Fucked up shit in the world disguised as "feel-good stories" of kindness. I think about the vast amounts of people that love these stories and think that these are good things and maybe even get emotional about them (my mother)........and I think this is why we need to fund education better. We need full & up-to-date media literacy courses, uncensored history, better humanities funding, and free higher ed for those that choose it.

That said, Prime does have a show where they give people a chance to win things off their Amazon wishlists. I watched one episode and it does very little to disguise the fact that it is one big Amazon commercial. A single dad won bunkbeds for his kids & a guy won a ring for his lady and proposed on the show. It's designed to make you feel something but it's just so incredibly corporate that it feels like an advertisement. (It is.)

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I want to like Mr. Beast, I do. He is from Greenville, North Carolina where I use to live and went to college at. He does all of these give aways, and use to pass out money in the local town he is from. But as the years have gone by, it has become more about getting views and making money as opposed to helping out others. It seems good people get deterred when money starts to flow in.

It just makes sense this would be boring. It really is just his show on a bigger scale and seems like rich people mocking those desperate enough to subject themselves to humiliation and canon fodder for the hopes of turning their lives around. We’re watching America at its worst, with a 26 year old who makes more than all of us combined making it a joke to him and his friends.

Again, I want to like the guy, I do. But I can’t get behind it. And this show seems like he is shooting himself in the foot and will lose a lot of fans. None of it will matter really. He has chocolate bars and a ghost kitchen, merchandise and everything. He has turned his name into a brand. Just sad that it’s exploiting others trying to make a buck.

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It's interesting that you have him as this "home town local" in your head. It puts such a different spin on everything, I imagine. That said - I think we both arrive at the same conclusion.

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Just because he might be a local doesn’t make him good people either. I was more wishing Greenville got a better representation other than a party school back in the early 2000s. He did use to do a lot in Greenville and helped out people. It’s just a shitty feeling to know you lived or are from an area where someone like this came from or called home.

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Correction, he was born in Kansas but moved to NC. Still raised there though and such.

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I don't really hold any negative views about Mr. Beast... I mean there are certainly "problematic" aspects of his business and some of his videos, but I don't generally think it's malicious or badly motivated, more that it's ignorant in a way that most of us probably have been many times in our lives, but not with millions of dollars and eyeballs involved.

It's just that what he makes is really for a certain audience with certain tastes, although he's obviously played a part in creating those tastes too. There's probably a cynicism to some of the supposed altruism, but again that's hardly a unique thing.

From a TV making point of video I'm often fascinated by how not knowing the "right way" to do things has allowed him to create things that would just never happen any other way.

The example I cite most often is a July 2023 video where he dug a big hole and crashed things into it, including a locomotive. It's 10 minutes long. Absolutely insane!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuhE6PYnRMc

In the 1990s or early 2000s you can easily imagine a TV special built around crashing a train into a huge pit, but it would probably have run 90-minutes long, would have so much built up, big cliffhanger moments leading up to the event, countless replays of the actual crash and a huge promotional campaign.

He just made a 10-minute video of a stuff being crashed into a pit.

In that video he also includes a Tank-vs-Bus tug of war; Jumped a jet car over 12 buses; had a guy try to protect cash from explosives; did ten-pin bowling with cars instead of balls and port-a-loos for bowling pins.... All in 10 minutes. Each of those things could easily have been a 1-hour TV episode in traditional television thinking.

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Wow, that was like a whole season of Mythbusters without the science. There was a reason that the show eventually got read of those annoying side characters, and it plays out here too. Also, why is he always shouting at me?

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I mean, he is slamming things into each other. It’s extreme!

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I mean, if you have the funds to do it, might as well drive a locomotive into a hole.

Also, well done on the piece you wrote. Another great read to end 2024 on.

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He’s obsessed with clicks, yes, but not the money. He’s said numerous times that he will give away every penny he makes, and I believe him. The moneys not for him. For now, it’s being sunk into the videos, but eventually it will all be used philanthropically.

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I read that before somewhere, and though I have a hard time believing it, I hope it is true that he would donate all of his money.

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Mr. Beast is a shill for capitalism. The entire conceit of his business model is “see guys? We don’t need to change systems because the nice rich people might decide to help you.” Ignoring how that puts the decision of who does and doesn’t deserve that help in the hands of a few individuals nobody chose, ignoring how this model specifically operates on the exploitation of the poor. It’s a legitimized bum fight. Yeah, this guy gave a bunch of money to the poors… don’t worry about how much more he was given to do it.

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Yes! Eurgh 😮‍💨 When I read that he makes 700 million (a year? That's more than anyone could reasonably spend in their lifetime) I was just like, that's redickularse. Greed is a truly unattractive thing

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Thanks for the peak behind the ‘reality’ curtain, Dylan. Just curious: what was it like going from a contestant on The Traitors to working on the show? Did it affect how you went about your job?

I’m not super familiar with Mr. Beast outside of the headlines, but part of why the ‘charity porn’ feels gross to me is I can see the worst bits of myself in it. It’s always nice to be patted on the head and told you’re a good person. If I was giving away huge sums of money to people in need I also might want to shout it from the rooftops and make it all about me. Not trying to excuse all the other unethical and/or exploitative practices that went into making his content though. Just because you’re doing “good things” doesn’t mean you’re immune from criticism, and I don’t think he understands that. There’s that old saying that once you become famous you’re forever mentally frozen at that age, so I guess it’s isn’t all that shocking that someone who became a YouTube star as a teenager doesn’t have the emotional maturity to understand this.

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I really enjoyed having personal insight into the experience of playing (and living in) the game when it came time to put together episodes of The Traitors. Was definitely fun to have that perspective!

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Dylan, I forgot to say - on that commentary podcast for Tickled I was on, the sound recordist kind froze and looked shocked when you appeared on screen. I thought the sound had fucked up.

Anyway, afterwards he exploded: "ME AND MY WIFE ARE HUGE FANS OF TRAITORS AND WE LOVED THE NEW ZEALAND VERSION".

It took him a moment after seeing you and then it hit him like a tonne of weird reality TV show bricks.

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Oh that's so weird... Someone else relayed a really similar thing to me recently.

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So true in terms of the format and why it lacks any heart. I've watched and they get a really good chance to build up characters when 'captains' are chosen and each don't take a million dollars - in order to take their whole team through to next challenge. You're then emotionally invested in these people but the show does bugger all to help you follow their progression.

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I think Dylan's point about characters being key was bang on, right? I think we all felt that watching.

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Yep absolutely. As Dylan says though, the show is about Mr Beast and his compadres, not the contestants. If they helped us like the contestants then we'd detest the hosts even more for the ridiculous situations they put those contestants in.

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There is, of course, a chance that once the number of players drops enough we may start to see more character and story in the show... But but that point, a few episodes in at least, you've already sort of established the hectic challenge-forward vibe, so that in itself might alienate viewers who are already committed by then.

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Bread and circuses.

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I watch a lot of youtube videos and have literally never heard of this mofo. Having said that I loathe "reality" TV and bullshit and this hits on both counts. Youtube is still freakin' amazing for people who DO stuff and MAKE stuff, both of which are relevant to my interests. Here are some (I am not a machinist, nor an engineer, nor a mechanic, but I do tinker a bit, and I am in awe of people who are, and can, do stuff.)

Cutting Edge Engineering. From Straya. Maker of things. Fixer of things. Has a cute dog. Strayan humour https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering

Project Binky. Two nutters shove the underpinnings of a much larger (four wheel drive) car into a classic Mini. British humour. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGSOZAHg1yQHU1tc_3Y5MTQg1qjtxA_nq

Tally Ho. SEVEN YEARS of hard graft. Anyone who has ever tried to nail two bits of wood together will appreciate God-tier skillset of these people. She is out and sailing now. This was the only good thing to come out of Covid for me. https://www.youtube.com/c/SampsonBoatCo

The best custom motorcycles come from Japan (IMO). Zen master fabrication skills. Usually set to a jazz soundtrack and no voiceover. https://www.youtube.com/@shiroh73

Wristwatch revival. ASMR at its finest. I love the zoomed in shots and then you zoom out and see just how small the bits he is working with are. https://www.youtube.com/@WristwatchRevival

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Yes yes yes. All the goodness of those god like creators should be the reason for YT to exist.

Take Marty T from little old Nelson, NZ. Find him a buried digger/bulldozer/tractor that’s been knackered for 40 years, and he’ll have it running within the 30 minute YT video. So satisfying……. and then he’s showing his 6 year old how tractors work. Every video a treasure.

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Honestly one of the coolest things about YouTube is the way it's allowed weird previously unexplored things to be revealed like this.

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I think a better phrase for this isn't "Charity Porn" -- it's "Charity Voyeurism". In TV, the main characters are who you're supposed to empathize with, as a viewer. Beast's TV show and videos put him as the main character-- so you're supposed to empathize with him. You're supposed to empathize with his actions and his goals, and they're just "Look at the cool shit we built and the money we totally gave away don't ask questions". How much that relates to you is dependent entirely on how sympathetic you find wealth.

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I won't be watching this and it doesn't surprise me but I have to admit that when he wasn't as big, I watched a video where they were pulling money from a tree and that fascinated me good. Money in a tree!

I didn't not like the guy and believe he started out from a kind place but the uncertainty is the philanthropist concept npw, making the world a better place? Those blue chocolate bars keep hitting my eyes for months at the supermarket as they reduce in price.

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Totally agree. Money changes people.

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I would say more on this but am biting my tongue. Ha!

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Do tell David!

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One day, one day....

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I will say in all fairness not everyone is affected by money. But a 26 year old with that kind of capital doesn’t fair well against the odds of greed.

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I was going to strongly disagree with that statement but then I realized that if someone were not affected by money, I would likely not know about them because they shutup and keep their head down.

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😂

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Making a comment here, completely unrelated to the story, more for other webwormees, rather than for David & Dylan.

I did in fact speak with David on the phone on his birthday and, as expected, he was an absolute delight. We mostly spoke about Christmas & birthday things, then I yapped about ska, as I tend to do. What struck me about this conversation was David's accent -- I have never spoken to someone with a New Zealand accent before! It's very nice!!! I can't explain it but it's pleasing to my ears in a way that I'm not sure I've heard before. Unsure if it's just David or kiwis at large.

I am an American from Virginia and I tend to think most American accents are flat and boring. Even those that are a little different don't do much for me. I've had many Latino & Asian pals over the years and it's mostly their parents that have non-American accents and I've never really thought anything of it. I've met a handful of Brits in my life and even had a British therapist for 3 years but didn't think much about their accents at all. And the same goes for the Australians I've met in passing. David's voice just kind of went ding in my brain, though. Something about pronunciation, cadence, and tone.....? And like, it wasn't "ooh sexy foreign accent". It was just really pleasant. Like scratching a minor itch inside my brain.

I've obviously watched & listened to things with David and other kiwis but nothing in my brain really clicked then, either. Why did it do that when I spoke to him on the phone...?

Fellow readers: What do you all think of accents? Have you ever had this experience? Is this one of those ASMR things (which I do not really understand at all)? The internet often suggests that I am austistic; is this an autistic thing? (Also, for research, if any other New Zealanders want to speak with me, that'd be cool.)

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New Zealander here! Lots of people make fun of the New Zealand accent, but I like it, and I'm glad you do too. I think David has a particularly pleasing NZ accent and voice in general. That is probably part of what makes him a good journalist and podcaster.

My son is on the autistic spectrum he has a great ear for languages, accents, music and all things Audible, and l think this could be quite a common skill for those on the spectrum.

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I'm also finding that more things are "clicking in my brain" since I quit my job. I would describe my brain as cloudy back then and I didn't really know what I liked anymore. I was in this corporate world, trying to be something I wasn't, and performing for 8+ hours per day. And I was dealing with very serious depression and anxiety. I guess my brain did this before but now, it's VERY clear when it does. Another example is, I saw a band about a month ago in Baltimore and they did the same thing to my brain that David's voice did. I am now kind of obsessed and listen to their album every few days. The interesting thing about that experience is that I had seen this band a year prior and then, even further back, maybe around 2018, but did not have the same experience at all. Back in 2018, I was still working and there was no clicking, no joy in sounds. And last year, I saw them at this big open festival, in broad daylight. A friend in the band even gave me their album then & I listened once but it just didn't do anything for me. When I saw them in Baltimore, they played in this small dark room in a brewery and it sounded completely different to me. I fell in love with this music immediately!!! It was calm, steady, melodic, and almost hypnotic. After the show, I told my friends in the band that it sounded like a warm bubble bath, maybe lavender-scented and with some candles. I've been going to a lot of shows lately and that just doesn't happen often. I can only think of one other time when it has happened in the last two years. I take it normal brains -- whatever normal is -- don't do this...?

Also, in case anybody wants to know, the band is called The Loving Paupers. Female-fronted melodic reggae with a vintage pop sensibility. I made up that description myself; I'm sorry if it sounds douchey. They're really wonderful, I promise. Their singer's voice is incredibly unique. It sounds very calm and controlled in a way that I could never accomplish.

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I'm clearly not the target market for any Beasts, as this sort of thing bores me senseless. But this guy, what is with this guy? He has dead eyes and a grimace he thinks is a smile, on. The expression of a sociopath, all the time. How do people watch it and think yes, I need more of that dead eyed man who looks like he wants to kill and eat me. There is nothing likeable about him.

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“Hyenas come with merry smiles”.

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I don't like it when his face comes up on ads for his show, I skip them so quick 😭 it's just ...I don't want to look at it

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an enlightening read on a future president 💀

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This week one of Mr Beast's beneficiaries died. She wasn't beloved by her wider community because her community disagreed with her rescuing child brides and stopping their abusers, but she was beloved by many regardless. The circumstances around her death are questionable but she comes from a district without access to post-mortem analysis.

There was a small statement but I believe he's still said very little about it. It isn't lost on me that throwing money at a need means very little if there isn't then further ongoing support with the practical stuff, including protection in cases like these.

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There's a really interesting video (with more to come?) that has Jimmy (Mr. Beast) talking through a lot of the production of the show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xrfkdO4fBI

On a purely technical level, there's so much cool shit they did for this show. Honestly I find the BTS stuff much more compelling that the show, but I'm also a big nerd for TV production stuff.

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Fun fact - The Joe Schmo Show had a New Zealand remake called Living The Dream. It was made in 2004, my first fulltime year in TV, by Touchdown TV and you can watch the whole thing on NZ On Screen (maybe only from within NZ?) - https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/living-the-dream-full-series-2004

You'll find my name in the credits for every episode I think. And this series features in one of my often-retold work stories... "Did I tell you about the time I had to spend a whole day painting out nipples?"

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