From Meme Page to Hollywood 🍻

Plus: Pitch us a story for our next magazine!

blog.eighty // It’s official: We're opening up Creator Mag to guest contributors...for the second time.

Why? Three reasons.

Reason No. One: We had over a hundred people pitch stories last season.

• We only had budget (and bandwidth) for ten guest submissions. A lot of amazing pieces just missed the cut; therefore, we wanted to give you a chance to pitch us again!

Reason No. Two: Our last issue turned out better than we could've imagined.

• The variety of voices—from a personal essay on grief, to a poem about backpacking through the Southwest—genuinely raised the caliber of our storytelling.

Reason No. Three: We're looking for subject-matter experts.

• This season's theme, "TOUCH GRASS," is a cheeky reference to digital spaces' relationship with the "real world." But we're also interested in topics such as how science communication has evolved alongside the Internet.

Click here to pitch us something!

So far, we've received pitches for everything from reported pieces to photo stories to comics and more. We'll be compensating selected contributors, as well as sending them a complimentary print issue (and tickets to our next Block Party).

Interested in pitching? Fill out our submission form by Sunday, August 10—link is right here.

In the meantime, onto this week’s slate of Neighborhood Watch reviews.

— NGL

P.S. Last blog, we shared guest contributor Hope Habia’s wonderful essay, “The Everything Window,” which appeared in Issue Six. You can read it here.

Video: ‘How It Feels scrolling through Netflix Top 10’ (2024)

Creator: Almost Friday TV

Runtime: 9m 11s

Review by: Nate Graber-Lipperman

Take a quick glance at the Instagram account Friday Beers, and the overwhelming presence of bro content (think sports memes and the glorification of Pabst Blue Ribbon) would lead one to believe that this sprawling collection of podcasts, merch, and shortform videos is nothing more than Barstool Reincarnate.

That’s certainly what I thought when I was living in Los Angeles, walking by their offices on Venice’s famous Abbot Kinney Boulevard every day.

Eventually, after regularly bumping into the Almost Friday talent at the nearby coffee shop, curiosity got the better of me. Their first video I stumbled upon was “How It Feels Scrolling through Netflix Top 10.”

YouTube

We settle into a sketch told via a fictional television screen recording. The “user” scrolls through the Netflix Top Movies and TV Show list, hovering on fictional titles like action-thriller Agent London, Victorian-era drama Secrets of the Old Mill, and dating show sendup Crazy in Love.

The narrator-less observational comedy succeeds on its own, cheekily poking fun at the types of time-filling genre fare that creeps its way up the Netflix charts—while simultaneously providing a stroke of UX-filled editing excellence. Slowly but surely, however, we begin to realize that something is amiss, as the main character from Agent London (and its star, in-universe actor Charlie Von Pierce) keeps showing up in a tabloid-filled career spiral.

I can’t reveal much more plot-wise without spoiling the whole thing; there’s a major twist about two-thirds through the video that switches up the storytelling entirely, and the cinematography begins to legitimately resemble a Hollywood production. But what stands out most is Almost Friday’s masterful writing, as their team simply gets the modern media ecosystem.

YouTube

Von Pierce’s downfall is told through fictional appearances on Hot Ones and Variety’s ‘Actors on Actors’ series. Drama YouTubers help fill in the gaps; eventually, Netflix even gets in on the action, first making a documentary about its own star before moving into a scripted rendition of his life.

It almost feels like there’s a giant whiteboard somewhere in the Almost Friday writers’ room, and it resembles a giant puzzle. Each piece to this story slowly but surely slots into the sacred timeline, culminating in an explosive send-off.

While Friday Beers quietly built its meme-page empire—selling its own branded beer, and eventually opening a bar in Nashville—their smartest move has to be spinning off its scripted media arm into Almost Friday TV. Hiring talent they found on the FYP, the troupe of failed finance bro Will Angus, stand-up comic Liam Cullagh, and improv performer Eilise Patton (among others) produces original weekly sketches that genuinely feel like they could slot into a streaming service.

And Hollywood seems to agree. In February, Variety reported that Almost Friday has inked deals with several studios to develop longform projects; they’re also creating a television pilot alongside Danny McBride’s production company, Rough House Pictures. Given McBride’s recent comedy hit rate with Eastbound & Down, Telemarketers, and The Righteous Gemstones, there’s a real world where we see the Almost Friday crew on HBO in the near future.

YouTube

For their part, too, they push back against the “Barstool Lite” label, arguably filling the gaps in a lane that needs fresh voices right now. “We’re always self-deprecating, never making fun of other people,” Almost Friday cofounder Jack Barrett told Variety. “That way of talking about being together and loving your friends is the opposite of the divisiveness and punching-down humor we saw elsewhere.”

The now-common narrative around YouTube’s collision course with Hollywood—a narrative I’m partially responsible for pushing—comes in many different flavors. One of them, it appears, is an odyssey that starts with lofi beer jokes on Instagram, and ends with bringing contemporary characters to the biggest screens.

And yet, even if that dream doesn’t pan out for the Almost Friday crew, their sketch comedy prowess clearly has a place on the small screen, raising the bar for writing on the platform.

Besides, YouTube is the new TV anyway, right?

Nate’s Score: 4.7 / 5

‘See Saw’ (2023)

Creator: Matt Porter

Runtime: 11m 30s

I fell in love with this short film originally because of its ridiculous premise and how surprisingly grounded it turned out to be. I fell in love with the film again when realizing just how economical this film is.

Not that it was inexpensive to make (although it was), but in how economical the story’s restrictions are. The film is shot all within the confines of one apartment—with two actors, and one lens.

These elements didn’t feel cheap, though. They contrast with the globally-scaled conflict that affects the main character Glenn, in a manner that enhances the feeling of vulnerability. Which [SPOILER ALERT] works towards a hyperbolized lack of privacy seen throughout the world of See Saw.

Judd’s Score: 4/5

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‘The Chicken Wars’ (2025-)

jnov_

A post shared by @jnov_

Creator: Johnny Novo

Runtime: ∞

This pick is rather…unconventional, at least compared to my usual choices. But such a revolutionary concept lives in unconventionality.

Shortform creator Johnny Novo is no stranger to the art of food reviews; with eight hundred thirty-three Yelp reviews under his belt (!!), he’s been developing his voice for a long time. He’s not just evaluating the items given, though. Johnny tells a story with each “tissi,” through quippy one-liners, journalistic scene-setters, and (eventually) artful taste descriptors. The reviews act, dually, as a personal journal entry.

As Pitchfork contributor and fellow Novo enthusiast Millan Verma writes, his Yelp entries are “real writing with an uncompromised voice laid bare on a platform frequented by boomers commenting on various fettuccine alfredo dishes.”

Johnny’s “Chicken Wars” website, where he regularly updates each “tissi” ranking

So why has this prolific Yelp writer ventured into the shortform video landscape? For one, it allows him to inject this vocabulary and “expertise” he has developed into the bowels of the FYP (of course, he still writes Yelp reviews to this day; it remains his preferred outlet of expression).

Yet in late 2023, Novo stated, “with writing, I’m like, ‘this feels so good.’ But the views are really in videos and TikTok, and something about making those feels off to me.”

Novo shared this, however, when he was uploading strictly conventional food (non-tissi) reviews. Through the new vessel of video, a series he has aptly titled “The Chicken Wars”—which sees him travel the world in search of the best grocery store rotisserie chicken—has led this dreaded “off-ness” to dissipate.

And I think that dissipation is rooted in the fact that now, with a series where the only variable that changes is the chicken, Novo is able to infuse his personality. Sure, he can describe the grocery store or restaurant atmosphere in great detail (like he does with his Stew Leonard’s review), but people only expect one thing from each video: the score. Yet they stay because, just like his Yelp reviews, Novo seamlessly inserts snippets of his daily life and vernacular into each upload.

He puts such a large amount of effort into this—even creating a website to showcase his rankings, and for viewers to request a specific rotisserie chicken to be ranked. All the extraneous stuff is not needed. But his personality, his life stories, his absurd passion for grocery store chicken…that’s what makes people come back.

Judd’s Score: 6/5

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