No Strategy 3: The New New New Entertainment Media

A changing of the media guard.

It started with Chicken Shop Date. The format, designed by host/British national treasure Amelia Dimoldenberg, has turned disarming celebrities into something approaching art. The conceit of a date allows for cosiness that never feels sycophantic, permitting both archness and silliness. She is charmingly snarky and snarkily charming, portioning up the quips equally, and her guest is always in on the joke. But as well as being a joy to watch, what’s most impressive is that they genuinely work as promotional assets. Sweet, unassuming, but ambitiously pioneering, Chicken Shop Date has become the new benchmark in a rewritten relationship between pop culture, entertainment media, and brand celebrity. It is the trailblazer that’s helped make a crop of internet series, upstart podcasts, and independent journo-author newsletters must-visit destinations on any press-tour itinerary or PR trail; each of them online-coded, self-referential, unserious but sometimes incisive, and shepherded by a new media class born from internet culture rather than newsrooms.

A case study in this shift: Irish sadboi Paul Mescal eating nugs with Dimoldenberg, a year ago. He was promoting All of Us Strangers, a Proper Film. With Dimoldenberg, he didn’t talk much about the movie, and she didn’t ask him much. Instead, he threw himself into the real task at hand - doing the bit, en route to establishing himself as aware, likeable, and online enough to know that his appearance at that laminate-topped table was as valuable for his brand as Internet Boyfriend as it was for Chicken Shop Date. They flirted, weirdly, delightfully. And he banked about a million points on the scale of that tricky, mutable, internet-coded binary - he’s one of us. See also: Dimoldenberg dating/interviewing Andrew Garfield at the end of last year - a romantic/anti-romantic meta epic in under 10 minutes, and now a lynchpin media artefact in Garfield’s public persona.

From Chicken Shop Date, turn left at Hot Ones; hot sauce instead of fauxmance, and with a much more earnest line in questioning from fan-boy host Sean Evans, but presenting an aligned prerequisite from guests - be willing, be game, pierce the bubble of your own seriousness in ways mostly out of your control. Like Chicken Shop Date, Hot Ones both removes and re-layers the artifice surrounding promo spiels. Each offers a sense of existing in its own universe, with its own momentum, sympathetic to but not cowed by the contractual obligations of starry guests. Unlike traditional talk shows, the appeal is in the format just as much as in an interviewee’s handiness with an anecdote. Plus, they are made to be remixed: they are clipped for TikTok, recontextualised in our habitual way that both rubbishes every PR’s key objectives and counts toward that nebulous win, virality. They genuinely feel like entertainment, not marketing. But we all know why they’re there, and the appearance in and of itself achieves its aims - the guest has been inserted into the cultural conversation, the top of the algo.

While this brand of internet-based light entertainment - bridging long and short form, dealing in a quicksilver flavour of memetic humour and online insiderom - has been building steadily in the TikTok age, in recent months the balance has shifted in its favour. A recent high watermark came with Timothee Chalmet’s promo tour/Oscar’s campaign for his Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. His much-appraised cycle included usual fodder (a couple of chat shows, the SNL hosting gig, a sit-down with Zane Lowe, the Golden Globes with Kylie Jenner) complemented by pulling off some stunt-type moves, including bewigged Dylan cosplay, a Lime bike ride, and a slightly demented livestream. But the real interest came from the clever handful of appearances within this new entertainment media circuit, specifically the internet-TV-podcast hybrid properties that now generate the fuel of online chatter. He sat down with Theo Von, the manosphere-lite podcaster now regularly visited by male celebrities wanting Real Chat. He went to a record store with Naudwaur the Human Serviette, original internet weirdo and celebrity needler. He cropped up on the Broski Report, the comedy/commentary video podcast by Brittany Broski, meme queen turned internet culture high priestess. Much of the success of these appearances depended on the goofy earnestness and edgelord inklings of Chalamet, undoubtedly, but there’s a strong sense too that he was adroitly turning in the new direction of travel.

This content-journalism-entertainment mash-up is gaining enough power to seriously threaten to undercut the lofty profiles, contemplative interviews, and stage-managed talk show appearances that have traditionally formed the milestones of any entertainment marketing runway. Promo has always demanded a level of buy-in from stars (with those unable to muster the required enthusiasm badged as tricky forever after), but this era demands not just a higher level of gameness, but also convincing cultural cognisance, indicating how our expectations - our demands - of celebrities have changed in the TikTok years. Perhaps this has become most visible in how legacy media approaches celebrity content now. It’s all been gamified - Vanity Fair’s lie detector test, Wired’s autocomplete interview, puppies running amok, Most Likely To, Never Have I Ever, and on and on. But these formats too frequently feel lifeless - they’re too brazen a pursuit of virality, ceding too much ground to a type of content that only really works when it doesn’t feel like a sop to some social media team. Anyone who’s seen a star squirm as they’re asked to play “red flag or green flag” while promoting a literary adaptation or hard-hitting biopic would agree these more frequently create a type of throwaway pop culture slop with diminishing returns, risking the good work done by the staff writer who followed the movie star around for six months for the cover feature, the thoughtful filmic vignettes and roundtables.

The criticism most often levied at media in the vein of Chicken Shop Date is that it boils interviewing and conversation down to nothing, to viral potential, but its symbiotic relationship with the tone and hue of social media content is the point. This kind of media has irrevocably changed as TikTok, chiefly, has repeatedly reconfigured both artifice and authenticity into a confusing mess of bit parts and half-plays and knowing nods. But it is the content creators (as in those who make media independently, outside of legacy umbrellas) who have understood what promo and the formats in the service of the pop culture machine should be in the parasocial age. While they may sometimes be unserious to an inane degree (and I am not defending the “what’s your favourite line from the movie” type of influencer-hack questioning now prevalent at press junkets), the best of these shows and formats work because they are created by people who appreciate pop culture for its own sake, not as an ancillary, “low brow” product of “real” journalism. How could they not - the elevation of pop culture in the internet age is the reason their jobs exist, and they’re trained in feeding the ecosystem. Some of their own credentials are drawn from an intimate relationship with engagement, in which metrics make momentum and pursuing views is aspirational. Their pursuit is cultural and their business is attention: they understand the need for promotion innately, and they command the sort of rapt audiences legacy media would die for (please see the great Eugene Healy for more on the decline of Hollywood celebrity and its usurpation by the creator class - smooth media operators who centre personality and subjective perspective in their star power).

Set apart from what we lump in under the term “influencing”, a swelling subset of content creators are using the wheels of entertainment media to generate their own kind of cultural power. Look at Brittany Broski. Hers is a (these days) well-trodden path - make content, go viral, turn that into a serious following, and diversify (start a podcast). But she’s also spent her cache on projects that de-centre her (a major influencing no-no, historically), seeing an available niche in this building media sea change. Royal Court, her self-funded, high concept but slightly (deliberately) rubbishy internet series, positions Broski as celebrity interviewer, asking fan-type questions to guests (they’re both wearing robes and crowns, Broski does a bad British accent, that’s the royal bit). In its strangeness and jollity, the show has snuck in as a Good Opportunity for celebrities with something to promote. In recent months, Royal Court has featured genuine stars including Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Saoirse Ronan, and in a major coup, Charli XCX at the crest of the Brat marketing cycle. Broski doesn’t look for intense answers about craft or artistry, but she doesn’t ridicule her guests in that arch Pop World way either - she achieves the new ideal, a balance of parasocial cosiness and genuinely watchability.

Another exemplar is Ziwe - an original who makes edgelords look idiotic and a progenitor of 2020s celebrity probing. Her recent guests - criminal and fashionista Anna Delvey, and the uncateogrisable George Santos - speak to her sense of what left-field, disruptor fame looks and sounds like. The best thing I have seen on any medium, in any format, in recent months, was Ziwe’s uproarious interview with content-creator-comedian Caleb Heston, in which they discussed American politics, gay culture, and maleness in ways that felt almost transgressively refreshing, unfiltered, even meaningful, without forgetting to make the viewers feel good, and involved. This type of media wears its capacity for genuine insight lightly - look also at Track Star, the TikTok/YouTube game show that asks a celebrity musician to prove their own fan credentials by correctly guessing song clips, and usually induces them to share stories about their musical journeys far more captivatingly and movingly than a po-faced sit-down with Rolling Stone. And this might be naive, but it feels like its guests really enjoy doing the show (please watch the Yung Lean episode).

And then there is podcasting. A medium completely reborn as a home for DIY entertainment and celebrity critique/celebration (among other, less good, developments in the category). Although I don’t feel compelled to add more commentary to the Wicked press tour, it is noteworthy that along with the iconic junket interviews, the magazine covers, the endless BTS films, the 400 brand partnerships, Ariana Grande-Butera visited relatively small-fry podcasts like Sentimental Men, where she was funny and unguarded and theatre-kid geeky. That particular appearance hit at another key element of this ecosystem, too - this media is being made by people who are fans, participants, not observers or distanced commentators. They are making the stuff they want to see and listen to; they are the audience - and while their guests are with them, they get to shed their remoteness and be that as well.

And what about Substack? Yes, the platform’s newsletters and essays are formats with much more in common formally with legacy media, but the particular, and unique, influence generated on that platform represents a sharp corner of this new media class. These mini media empires, especially those being built by internet figures including Raye Fische Quann, Emily Sundberg, and, gulp, now Ballerina Farm herself - are producing the sort of engaged fan bases that have more in common with content creator followings than publishing readerships. These authors are the new media power brokers - so it’s not hard to imagine a future where it’s standard for discerning movie stars to appear in choice Substack newsletters to discuss their new project.

The old way of doing things hasn’t run aground, but the most intriguing kind of media currency is on the move. Our collective definition of “the media” is getting more complicated, nebulous, and subjective. Everyone is a media outlet these days - whether you’re a YouTube essayist, Alex Cooper reinventing radio, Amelia Dimoldenberg making the Oscar’s fun again or flirting with Cynthia Erivo, or an aspiring bro-caster. But as we enter dark mode, as we navigate other, more sinister ascendant media powers, and with the social media sands shifting, it is encouraging that at least some of what is emerging from the free-for-all influencing boom years is not just a person-as-product wasteland, but a potential new vanguard making entertainment and celebrity content that is more than a mash-up of old TikTok trends. These shows - including Chicken Shop Date, Track Star, Royal Court, a growing list of podcasts, but a whole host more - use the best of our mess of platforms and formats, the most enduring qualities of internet culture, to produce an approach placing entertainment media back into audience ownership (and far removed from the through-the-looking-glass “creator-led TV” like Mr Beast’s dire Amazon Prime series - I refuse to hyperlink to it). This new media feels more free - it can be both intelligent and silly, anti-gatekeeping and IYKYK - but most importantly, it feels like ours.