Just a few weeks ago, The Ringer enlisted me to find a unified theory of MrBeast, currently the most popular creator on YouTube, with more than 451 million subscribers to his main channel.
MrBeast had struck a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia to open a seasonal theme park, Beast Land, in Riyadh. When a foreign government’s trillion-dollar investment arm circles a YouTuber, one begins to suspect that the gravitational center of global entertainment may be drifting away from Hollywood.
As The Ringer refreshes The 100 Best TV Episodes of the Century, we find ourselves contemplating the creative fortunes of television now that content creators such as MrBeast and web platforms such as YouTube have won much of the social mindshare that television traditionally controlled. We once saw Netflix as the great disruptor of the television business, yet YouTube has surpassed it as the dominant engine of mass engagement with long-form video content. In October, Nielsen’s data measurement report, the Gauge, found that YouTube (excluding YouTube TV) accounted for 12.9 percent of all U.S. television-screen viewing, the largest share of any streaming service. Globally, YouTube reaches more than 2.7 billion monthly users—nearly 10 times Netflix’s subscriber base—who collectively watch 1 billion hours per day on the platform. More than 150 million people watch YouTube on TV screens each month.
Netflix’s single biggest title, Squid Game, generated roughly 1.65 billion hours viewed in its first month. YouTube generates almost two-thirds of that watch time every single day.
MrBeast is instructive. For the uninitiated: MrBeast is a game show host, basically. He lures ecstatic participants into lightly dystopian endurance challenges to compete for six-figure cash prizes—“Survive 100 Days In Prison, Win $500000”—or else he performs self-inflicted stunts like “I Spent 7 Days Buried Alive.” His videos reliably rack up hundreds of millions of views. He represents both the professionalization of user-generated content and the cultural triumph of the influencer over the celebrity, yet he’s also roughly continuous with television’s lineage of hosts: Howie Mandel, Bear Grylls, David Blaine, Johnny Knoxville, Mike Rowe, Joe Rogan, et al. (That said, MrBeast’s recent dabbling in conventional, episodic TV has so far been met with unenthusiastic reviews.)
But MrBeast wasn’t created by Hollywood. He is but a YouTuber—a conspicuously uncharismatic digital native who started building a $5 billion entertainment empire from Greenville, North Carolina, in his late teens with a webcam and a preternatural mastery of the platform’s recommendation system. He’s a model of independence in modern media, in an age of user-generated content and widespread dissatisfaction with cultural institutions. MrBeast bankrolls his own elaborate production sets, and he pays his winners out of pocket. YouTube takes a 45 percent cut of his ad revenue but has no direct say in the direction of his channel.
The stars of YouTube are clearly inspired by the tropes and norms of television while nevertheless representing a decisive break from its infrastructure. On YouTube, creators face no formal constraints on timing, frequency, duration, format, or topicality. A video can be 30 seconds or six hours, it can drop without warning, and it can be designed entirely around how the algorithm responds within the first 30 minutes of upload. Television is discursive in its own way, as anyone old enough to have listlessly channel-surfed surely knows, but YouTube is utterly dynamic: Creators redesign their output in real time, pivoting toward new memes, trends, and formats within hours.
The Best TV Episodes of the Century
In sheer scale, YouTube eclipses every entertainment platform ever created. The website now hosts 500,000 to 700,000 hours of new video uploads per day, in a library that at this point must contain hundreds of millions of total hours of watchable content. By contrast, while Netflix doesn’t publish the total number of hours available in its platform’s ever-fluctuating catalog, The New York Times Magazine last year reported that the most recent snapshot offered by the company encompassed 16,000 titles. Even if we were to assume that the average length of those titles—seasons of series, movies, stand-up specials, documentaries, etc.—was, say, five hours, that’d get you to only 80,000 hours, a fraction of what’s uploaded on YouTube every day.
YouTube is high and low culture, big and small, and everything in between. YouTube is MrBeast sending contestants through a laser maze in a $14 million studio, but YouTube is also—and mostly—a galaxy of vloggers broadcasting from bedrooms, addressing all sorts of niches: knitting, motherhood, gaming, aviation, true crime, music theory, woodworking, whatever. The rabbit holes on YouTube are so numerous that to fall into one is cliché. YouTube is eminently bingeable—the very quality that has dictated two decades of television innovation.
Netflix popularized binge watching and reorganized television around on-demand viewership, but it didn’t threaten television as a form; shows were still shows, bound by seasons, made of episodes. YouTube, on the other hand, threatens the very form of television—not by imitating it but by offering something more flexible, more direct, and more behaviorally attuned and immediately adaptive than television could ever be.
YouTube behaves somewhat like television—and gets us to behave as if we’re watching television—without aspiring to be television, per se. That distinction matters, between television and not, if we’re to reckon with the shape and state of our attention spans as we head into the second quarter of the 21st century.
Let us briefly reminisce about the golden age of Netflix.
Here was a high-tech DVD-rental business that leveraged its data advantage—millions of user ratings, sophisticated behavioral analytics—to build a groundbreaking web platform for movies and television in the late 2000s. It was the first entertainment company to algorithmically map taste at scale, tracking what people watched, paused, rewound, abandoned, or binged. And then—in its later phase, as a creator of shows in its own right—it commissioned new titles based on those patterns, long before its rivals even measured them.
From 2010 to 2015, Netflix pivoted from a DVD-by-mail service to a web video platform to a global entertainment brand. The runaway popularity of its original TV series House of Cards (2013) and Orange Is the New Black (2013) helped turn Netflix into the most enticing subscription in all of media. In 2018, Netflix briefly surpassed Disney as the world’s most valuable media company. By the end of 2020, Netflix had passed 200 million global subscribers, making it one of the fastest-scaling media businesses in history. This rush of milestones seemed to validate Netflix as the world’s new center of long-form video entertainment—a tech company that had outclassed the old media and was poised to define the future of TV in the new century.
In terms of watch time, Netflix’s megahits were seismic: Stranger Things, Squid Game, Wednesday, and Dahmer: Monster each generated over a billion hours viewed and reached well over 100 million households, with the likes of Bridgerton, The Queen’s Gambit, and The Night Agent not far behind. These numbers are damn near incomprehensible by traditional TV standards. In 2019, Netflix released more original programming than the entire TV industry had released in 2005, as binge watching became the norm for the wider streaming ecosystem: Seasons dropped all at once, allowing viewers to obsessively consume them in the span of a weekend, before (of course) moving on to another title in the same service’s catalog. Netflix optimized for volume and velocity, at the expense of durability. The writer Kyle Chayka famously clocked the company’s turn to “ambient TV,” as Netflix was increasingly forced to compete with the second-screen lure of home viewers’ smartphones. With time, Netflix became more USA Network than HBO (as HBO tried to become more Netflix than anything).
Meanwhile, engagement on YouTube was similarly algorithm-driven, but the content was, of course, mostly created by users. This made for a wildly different entertainment context, where niche figures could elevate niche content to massive visibility, where a guy making reaction videos about a TV show could rival the viewership of the show itself. YouTube may have once been viewed as a sort of cultural break room, a platform that hobbyists and creatives and critics might’ve taken only half seriously as Hollywood beckoned. But in the span of two decades, YouTube has become the ultimate viewing destination, one so peculiar and incomparable that it can seem like a medium in itself.
For millions of users, YouTube supplies the kind of ambient hum and low-stakes continuity that television has long provided. What it lacks in the formal sophistication that’s evident all throughout The 100 Best TV Episodes of the Century, it makes up for in its immense novelty. Not to mention Netflix’s ad-supported tiers start at $7.99 per month; YouTube is free. Netflix’s discovery is driven by a slower, more brittle recommendation system; YouTube’s algorithm is updated constantly using billions of daily data points.
Again, YouTube isn’t television, but it now plays a powerful rival to the old modes of episodic storytelling.
Oddly enough, in recent months, the person who has best illustrated the potential fate of television—to my mind, at least—wasn’t a showrunner or a critic but rather a video game executive.
Microsoft has spent the past couple of years seemingly sounding the death knell for their flagging console brand, Xbox. Phil Spencer, the chief executive of Microsoft Gaming, has controversially abandoned the old exclusivity ethos—once a defining aspect of competition in the console market—and instead embraced a strategy of reaching as many players on as many platforms as possible, even if that means releasing a remake of Xbox’s foundational exclusive, Halo: Combat Evolved, on the PlayStation 5. The strategic logic of decades past no longer applies.
The most revealing comment came not from Spencer but from Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, speaking to The New York Times: “Our biggest competition isn’t another console,” Booty said. “We are competing more and more with everything from TikTok to movies.”
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, echoed this a week later. “Gaming’s competition is not other gaming. Gaming’s competition is short-form video.”
In other words: All of these platforms, across all media, are scrambling for some share of your attention. Going forward, the best TV episodes of this century aren’t competing with each other for generational clout; they’re competing with the new modes of audio-visual engrossment. Cable television is a long, drawn-out story of decline. Box office revenue is barely climbing back to pre-pandemic levels. Streaming subscriptions are plateauing; churn is a persistent problem for the major players. Disney is now pivoting to cost-cutting and licensing, having second-guessed its own multibillion-dollar investment in the Streaming Wars.
Silicon Valley spent a decade revolutionizing television on the one hand, but also cultivating its successors. YouTube is something less episodic, less scheduled, and less cohesive than TV, perhaps, but it’s also more ambient, more ubiquitous, and more addictive. It’s both the present and the future.
So yes, let’s re-rank the best episodes of Breaking Bad at the half-century mark. Let’s honor the peak years of television, as one does at our venerable website. But should we also be preparing for the prospect that, in a decade or two, the relevance of the episode, as a unit of storytelling, will be wholly transformed? Should we be similarly ranking the creative heights of this thing that isn’t quite television but runs somewhat parallel to it—and if so, how?
The next decade in television will be about as restless as the last, I reckon. We’ll behold new forms of viral brain rot, and as we suck our teeth, longing for a simpler and more dignified time in our media consumption, we’ll still be rewatching The Sopranos.
