“Hello, my youthful contemporaries, it’s your groovy pal Netflix here with news of some cool young-people things we have here on our hip and happening streaming ‘platform’. *Cough* What? This thing? This is just my raspberry vape. No, I’ve always smoked a vape. I never smoked a pipe. And, yes, I am wearing a backwards baseball cap and not a stovepipe hat. What of it? That’s just how I roll as a fellow young person no different from yourself or Madonna. Yes, I am also wearing backwards shoes. Yolo and so forth.
“Anyway, I’m here today to convince you to watch our excellent new television programme. Have you heard of ‘television programmes’? You have? No. What you’re describing there is a ‘book’. Trust me, I’d never make you read a book. That battle is over. That last book was read a long time ago by a very old person.”
And that, Irish Times content consumers, is my impression of a Netflix executive trying to convince young people to come on their platform and watch Inside, their new YouTuber-helmed reality show. It’s nice to see a much newer media company grapple with the terrifying inevitability of format death.
Here at The Irish Times we’ve been dealing with this issue for a lot longer, of course. Newspapers are older than cycling penny farthings, taking snuff and singing the songs of Count John McCormack (all things that I, as an Irish Times columnist, regularly enjoy). Frankly, each day we’re still in business comes as a pleasant surprise. Like democracy or the environment, there is no reason at all newspapers should still be around. And yet here we are.
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The streamers, on the other hand, are relative babes, but they are also dealing with eventual irrelevance as dopamine-addled youngsters flock to the shorter-form content of TikTok and Instagram and probably several newer platforms that are too highly pitched and frenetically edited for my middle-aged senses to even perceive.
And so, fighting their future annihilation, Amazon has lured beige, bland, rictus-grinning MrBeast to present the nihilistic Beast Games while Netflix has tempted his fellow YouTube phenomena “the Sidemen” over to its cause for Inside. I know it’s hard to tell MrBeast and the Sidemen apart, given their similar penchant for loud and charmless buffoonery, but here’s an easy way to do so: if you look very carefully you will see that the Sidemen are actually seven people.
This is an entirely unnecessary number of television presenters. I initially thought that it had something to do with unions and that Elon Musk’s Doge would sort it out, but as I watch them swagger, babbling and burbling, into the room my view changes, for they resemble nothing more than a swarm of bees or a murmuration of swallows. I’m no science boffin, but they clearly share a single personality across some sort of distributed system.
Who are the Sidemen? They are gentlemen of the digital byways, specifically YouTube. One of the Sidemen is called KSI, because he is a financial-services company, and he invented the popular drink, perfume and engine lubricant known as Prime. He did so alongside Logan Paul, whose name is backwards. The other Sidemen are presumably called KSA, KSB and KSC, etc (coincidentally the names of my nephews). Though I think one of them is actually called “Simon”, which is just ridiculous.
Inside is a show in which the Sidemen have locked 10 influencers in an underground prison because you’re allowed to do that nowadays. The influencers must compete to stay in this eerie panopticon, in the process winning £1 million. Given the state of the world, it’s hard not to feel that a bunch of influencers in a windowless bunker is the future humanity deserves, but let’s park that thought for now.
The doomed young people arrive one by one. Some of them are YouTubers. Some of them are TikTokers. One of them is a “Twitch streamer”. (I think that’s actually a medical diagnosis.) These visually minded savants lose money from the big prize pot for every luxury they order from a menu on the wall, so they instantly start ordering stuff: prosecco, Pot Noodle, pillows, a jiggly ball.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Thanks to dopamine poisoning, these glossy youngsters have the impulse control and object permanence of the worst babies. Going by the clips that accompany each arriving goon, they seem to spend their everyday lives compulsively tasting things, trying on make-up and pranking one another or the public.
Few of them have useful skills such as nursing or farming or writing about television for a newspaper. And yet they earn more than the world’s top scientists. I’d suggest that when the time comes and you and your fellow marauders discover their bunker, it would be best just to eat them. It would be a kindness, really.
Squawking and chortling with their unitary personality, the Sidemen are soon making the influencers engage in sadistic challenges. In the first episode they must answer questions while rats crawl over their bodies, chickens peck their arms or they are given electric shocks. Yes, you are allowed to do this nowadays. Say what you like about Stanley Milgram but at least he wrote an academic paper after his eponymous “experiment” and didn’t just scrawl “For the lulz” on the wall in jam.
Tempting Fortune, on Channel 4, has the exact same underlying concept as Inside, except the contestants have real jobs (in so far as “greeting-card entrepreneur”, “food blogger” and “yacht stewardess” are real jobs), they are trekking through a Malaysian jungle rather than being cooped up in a compound and the prize money is a paltry £300,000, not £1 million.
It’s presented by Paddy McGuinness, who, next to the Sidemen, seems like Bertrand Russell or maybe Jesus. He watches benignly as the contestants are tempted by prize-fund-depleting luxury along the way to their destination. It is, of course, much better made and produced than Inside.
It feels strangely fitting that so much reality TV deals so bluntly with concepts of scarcity and abundance. It’s almost as though the collective unconscious is preparing us for something. There is a character on Tempting Fortune who says, “Certain things I will take if I want to. I know what I need. It’s about my wellbeing. I will do what I want to do.” For some reason I have an urge to vote for her.
The action frequently cuts away to shots of disgusted-looking monkeys and parrots and other animals that a toddler I know could name (I don’t know animals). “The time of man is over!” they hoot and shriek and gibber in the trees. Hard agree, to quote the internet.
