YouTube Killed the Hollywood Star

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/youtube-at-20

https://archive.ph/1f9cq



Drive five miles north of the Hollywood sign and you’ll find yourself in Burbank, where they actually make the dreams for the dream factory. Casablanca, Reservoir Dogs, and Euphoria were all shot here. Today, tucked inside an unmarked warehouse in a particularly drab patch of the city, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal are filming their own contribution to entertainment history: a segment called “Will It Dip?” for their delightfully goofy and imaginative YouTube series Good Mythical Morning. After taste-testing a soupy dip made out of mashed Girl Scout cookies, the duo are presented with a bowl of black goo served under glass. As soon as McLaughlin removes the lid, thick smoke fills the set, which is designed to look like a ramshackle fishing lodge. When the cameras stop rolling, Neal tells the show’s culinary producer, “I do feel like you were trying to kill us a little bit.”

McLaughlin and Neal are friends from small-town North Carolina who met in first-grade detention. They experimented with making films as teens and, at 21, McLaughlin auditioned for The Real World. Unsuccessfully. In 2006 the guys were shooting comic skits and songs after work in a basement when they realized that YouTube, still very much in its infancy, could be a great outlet for their stuff. These days they operate out of this 17,000-square-foot maze, which comes complete with writers rooms, test kitchens, and a prop department full of bizarro pieces from episodes past and future. The Mythical company now makes multiple series and podcasts, as well as having a food website, merchandising, and an investment fund for the next generation of digital creators. Their YouTube channels have a combined audience of 30 million subscribers, and Good Mythical Morning alone has twice as many viewers aged 18 to 34 as Seth, Stephen, Jimmy, and Jimmy combined.



What more could McLaughlin and Neal want? Hollywood awards and a little of the prestige that comes with them, for starters. “Obviously it’s cool in LA when you’ve got a shelf with an Emmy on it,” says McLaughlin, grinning through his thicket of facial hair. “But the main reason is, the awards are designed to recognize what is resonating culturally. Well, we are resonating culturally, so we should be a part of that conversation. Shows that get the awards—there’s this sense that these are the real shows. And we want to be on the same stage because we are competing with them directly.” “You want to be treated like a real boy?” I say. “Exactly!” McLaughlin says, laughing. “It’s an expansion of what entertainment is,” Neal adds. “We’re not trying to kill anything. We’re just trying to be invited to the party.”


Rhett McLaughlin (L) and Link Neal. (R), hosts of Good Mythical Morning, on the set they use to produce multiple series, podcasts, and other ventures that garner an audience of 30 million YouTube subscribers.Courtesy of Good Mythical Morning.

Speaking of parties, YouTube is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, and no one could blame it for feeling jubilant. The platform—which has hosted 20 billion videos since launching in 2005— has overcome rampant underestimation and sporadic demonization to become the second-most visited website in the world (behind its parent company, Google). Two and a half billion people watch YouTube videos every month, and its content has partially, or completely, replaced traditional television viewing for many of them. Smart TVs have made the site so easily accessible that television screens have now surpassed phones and laptops as the primary way people watch it in the US.

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