The Year Creators
Went Hollywood
Inside the past, present, and future of the entertainment industry’s collision course with YouTube, as told by those building the plane as they fly it.
BY NATHAN
GRABER-LIPPERMAN
Illustrations by Moy Zhong
“Where motion pictures are made, there is Hollywood.”
— Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946)
At some point along the cross-country drive to Los Angeles—in my case, roughly two-thousand miles in, near Phoenix—the flat plains give way to rolling mountains and roadside cacti, as the Southwest begins to reveal its splendor.
Eventually, though, I run out of highways headed westward. And as I unpack my bags and settle into my new life a mere twenty-minute walk away from the Pacific, I can’t help but think about those headlines I’d often read back home on the East Coast. California is on fire, has a housing crisis, and is losing businesses to tax havens like Texas and Florida.
Yet given my long-held fascination with the ins and outs of the entertainment world, I always knew life might take me here eventually. So upon arriving, I give Los Angeles its fair shot, spending my weekends hiking in Griffith Park and sprawling across Malibu’s beaches.
The scope of my exploration slowly begins to broaden, though, as my curiosity gets the better of me. Because I’m seeking a first-hand perspective of this town’s most notorious export: the Hollywood dream.
But has that dream—of unveiling a star on the Walk of Fame and placing miniature golden men on one’s shelf—endured, at a moment when YouTube is eating the world?
Throughout my travels, I cross paths with four creators whose lived experiences bring me closer to answering that question. Veterans and newcomers, each labeled as outsiders due to their online origins, each building their own unique slice of the Hollywood dream all the same.
Before embarking on this journey, however, I went looking for a history lesson on how we got here.
It’s late February when I call up Josh Cohen, who began covering the “online entertainment industry” in 2008 via his publication Tubefilter. His founding thesis was simple: There was a finite amount of time in the day, and only so many television hours (and actors) that could fit into it. “The people that were in Hollywood were there maybe because they were talented,” he tells me. “But also because of nepotism—or maybe they looked, acted, and liked the ‘right’ people, the ‘right’ way.”
In the early days of YouTube, he explains, “professional” creators were those like Felicia Day, an actor who ventured online after years of not checking the “right” boxes. Day created a web series about a group of Dungeons and Dragons players, and it became popular enough that Legendary Entertainment (which made hit movies such as The Dark Knight and The Hangover) acquired Day’s production company. “She was kind of the poster child for what you could do, the possibilities of this newfangled entertainment paradigm and the success you could have,” Josh observes.
If you’re picking up this story, you probably know the abridged version of what happened next. The “tools of production” became more affordable (think cameras and editing software) and “more democratized,” as Josh puts it, leading to a boom in online video content. By 2011, amateur and professional creators alike were uploading thirty-five hours worth of videos on YouTube every minute—the equivalent of movie theaters screening one hundred and fifty thousand new films every week.
Advertising technology, of course, advanced exponentially alongside the online content boom. YouTube introduced its revenue-sharing Partner Program in 2007; over the last three years, the company has paid seventy billion dollars to partner creators, injecting rocket fuel into the burgeoning creator economy that is projected to be worth half-a-trillion by 2027.
With promises of attainable fame and wealth, it’s no wonder that “YouTuber” surpassed “astronaut” as the top career aspiration among children five years ago. For the purposes of this piece, however, I’m less interested in analyzing these trends and more interested in discovering if the most logical path into Hollywood now runs through a platform once deemed an afterthought.
Because, with all due respect to Felicia Day, this year feels different. YouTube’s most popular creator is making a $100-million television show with the world’s biggest e-commerce platform—a television show that you may or may not watch on your television, as you shop for a new vacuum on that same e-commerce platform.
“Everything’s TV and TV is nothing, right?” Josh Scherer, the host of YouTube cooking show Mythical Kitchen, tells me. “Forty percent of our views now are coming from big-screen TVs, and, like, forty-eight percent are coming from phones. So everything’s sort of amassing into one organic globule called ‘content.’”
Over the next several months, my job is to make some sense of it all—and that job starts with an hour-long drive up the 405.
I’ve made this stop-and-go trek to Burbank, California, once before.
The city—located twelve miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles—houses some of the country’s most iconic movie studios, many of which I passed on a trip in 2022. I remember feeling the gravitas of these streets then , the concrete and steel entrenched firmly into the mythos of Hollywood. While grabbing coffee on Glenoaks Boulevard, I even stumbled upon the headquarters of Cartoon Network.
Just a year later, though, that same building was empty. Massive layoffs and restructures at Warner Bros. Discovery (Cartoon Network’s parent company) effectively killed the beloved kids’ channel overnight.
The nondescript brick building that I enter in Burbank this time around does not share a century’s worth of history like some of its neighboring studios, but the company operating here is anything but oblivious to the challenging landscape (and perceptions) surrounding them. “We do not want to be seen as an architect of some downfall of broadcast or television,” Brian Flanagan, the president of Mythical, tells me on an overcast late February day. “We see ourselves as a bridge.”
There are two reasons why my journey begins here, at Mythical. The first is to get an up-close look at the company started by Rhett McLaughlin and Charles “Link” Neal, a towering comedy duo (six-foot-seven and six-foot, respectively) that turned online virality in the early days of YouTube into the über-successful talk show Good Mythical Morning (GMM).
These days, Mythical has spun off several lucrative shows and products. At the time of my visit, the aforementioned Mythical Kitchen team — led by Chef Josh Scherer — is prepping for their first cookbook launch (the Los Angeles Times would go on to describe the book as “every bit as colorful, personality-driven and flat-out deranged as its web-TV counterpart…[with] real culinary lessons to be learned”).
“We do not want to be seen as an architect of some downfall of broadcast or television…we have a huge studio space to be, like, in the mix in Burbank here —signaling that we’re ready to help companies that have lost audience,” Brian Flanagan, the president of Mythical, told me / Photography by Taiga Fukuyama
Rhett and Link, therefore, aren’t the only aspect of their company that stands large in stature. Mythical has ballooned to one hundred twenty employees. Everyone from editors and videographers to cooks and business strategists populates several sets and two open rooms that could be mistaken for small airplane hangars.
This demonstrated investment is purposeful. “We’re in L.A. spending more money than most creators do,” Brian says. “We employ a much bigger team than most and have a huge studio space to be, like, in the mix in Burbank here — signaling that we’re ready to help companies that have lost audience.”
One graphic designer, Matthew Dwyer, has been with Mythical for eight years. “When I started, I was the only person with ‘design’ in my job title,” he tells me. ”Now, I’m the Vice President of Design.” Still, his parents didn’t believe he had a real job until they visited and saw the office for themselves.
The second reason why my journey begins here is because of a video Rhett and Link uploaded on February 6, titled “We’re Done.” After acknowledging the soft clickbait, the creators go on to proclaim that no, they’re not retiring from YouTube. Instead, they’re done trying to pitch their creative projects to gatekeepers at traditional studios.
“How did we seem in that video? Like I seem right now?” Link asks me, uninterested in hiding his frustration when discussing their fraught history with Hollywood.
Here on the GMM set, Rhett and Link walk me through that odyssey for over an hour. We start with their first taste of Los Angeles, when The CW selected them to co-host a reality TV series called Online Nation in 2007.
The show lasted four episodes and has become something of an inside joke among Mythical fans. Nevertheless, flying out to L.A. for extended periods of time did have its perks. Rhett and Link hired a manager and took meetings—called “generals”—across town with the goal of pitching a TV pilot. Yet producers always seemed more interested in getting to know the internet funnymen from North Carolina than entertaining creative ideas.
One time, while waiting in the lobby before a general, Rhett and Link hatched a film concept about a group of aliens that falls in love with a human band. Thirty years later, the band has to get back together in order to convince the aliens not to take over the world.
“The pitch left a good impression, I think,” Link says.
“Yeah, but we didn’t get another meeting after that!” Rhett replies.
They burned a lot of gas driving back and forth over the hills in those days, with not much to show for it. Production companies all seemed to have the same message: Why don’t you just go make these projects and upload them online?
"Reacting To Our First TV Show," Good Mythical Morning (March 2021)
Rhett & Link review and roast clips from Online Nation.
There was a big difference between making “one-off internet videos” and “professional” movies with bigger budgets, though. At least, that’s what the pair told themselves. “Maybe there’s an imaginary wall we put up,” Rhett says. Nevertheless, producers wouldn’t greenlight any films without proof-of-concept first, so what choice did they have but to focus on their YouTube channel?
For the next four years, that’s what they did, returning to North Carolina and honing their comedy sketches. One series, I Love Local Commercials, saw them shoot low-cost ads for small businesses. The commercials began regularly reaching millions of viewers on YouTube; outlets like The New York Times and CNN even featured them. Their popularity led to sponsorships, and then profitability,
“It was so successful that television production companies started approaching us,” Link recalls. “Ironically, when we gave up on [generals]…that’s when our manager started getting those cold calls and emails.”
IFC won a bidding war with MTV for the rights to adapt the web series, and the first season of Commercial Kings premiered in 2011. The show was “the most viral thing IFC made that year,” (Rhett’s words), and TIME included one of the commercials in its “Top Ten Memes of the Year.” Rhett and Link were convinced IFC would order a second season.
It didn’t.
"Mormon Haircuts," Rhett & Link (November 2009)
One of Rhett & Link's first viral local commercials came with a catchy tune.
Stevie Levine, Chief Creative Officer of Mythical, came to L.A. with dreams of producing movies. But after a heart-to-heart with Rhett and Link, she doubled down on GMM—and helped turn it into one of the most recognized talk shows on the Internet / Photography by Taiga Fukuyama
“What it amounted to was, ‘Okay, some people in a small room make this decision about what they want their network to look like, and they really have our fate in their hands,’” Rhett says. “Looking back, it’s so easy to see how asinine it is. What we didn’t realize — because we hadn’t done it yet — [was that] you can put your fate in the hands of a much larger group of people.”
Rhett and Link — in their early 30s, married, with young children — had uprooted their lives and moved to Los Angeles for the show. The duo had no choice but to get back to work and figure out the next step themselves. With their backs against the wall and chips on their shoulders, they launched their morning talk show, GMM, out of Rhett’s garage in 2012.
After a year of uploading GMM every weekday, YouTube (the company) funded The Mythical Show, a half-hour, weekly version filmed in front of a live studio audience—the platform’s version of SNL. That show only lasted one season, but the budget allowed Rhett and Link to bring on a small team, including Stevie Levine as producer.
Stevie is now the Chief Creative Officer of Mythical. Back then, she was a recent film school grad and L.A. transplant trying to make a name for herself in Hollywood. So, following The Mythical Show, the trio had a heart-to-heart. Creating episodes of GMM had become a “to-do list” no one really enjoyed, but everyone recognized its potential.
“The three of us sat down and were like, ‘We should elevate the creative and we should elevate the look, and we should build a team that does all those things,’” Stevie tells me. “‘And if we do that, we’re all going to be creatively fulfilled by it.’”
The rest, as they say, is history.
That early buy-in unlocked everything. It was a gradual process, adding parts to the airplane as they were flying it daily. Slowly but surely, everything grew: the headcount, the episodes (over twenty-five hundred), and the revenue (over thirty-five million dollars in 2023, according to Forbes). Celebrities including Post Malone, Amy Schumer, and Kobe Bryant have appeared on GMM, and the overall business has diversified through products, podcasts, premium subscriptions, and live tours.
My first stop on this journey: Mythical’s studios in Burbank, California, where—sitting on the set of Good Mythical Morning—co-creators Rhett McLaughlin (left) and Charles “Link” Neal (center) walked me (right) through their fraught relationship with Hollywood. / Photography by Taiga Fukuyama
At this stage — and amid the overall entertainment industry’s struggles—Mythical presents the type of flywheel media executives salivate over. And yet…
“Whenever we had time, it was still always a priority to try to make something—a television show, or a movie,” Link tells me. “That was always our original desire as kids: to be filmmakers.”
Doors did open as their star power increased online, and they kept having the “right” conversations. Adam Sandler, Jack Black, Ben Stiller — name a comedian, and there’s a good chance Rhett and Link pitched that comedian’s production company on a project. What disheartened the duo was that the big names never actually sat in on the meetings. “We even met with Andy Samberg’s company, and he was in the other room,” Link says.
They tried everything: scripted, non-scripted, docu-reality, reality competition. They offered to direct and star; when that didn’t work, they agreed to write and bring in younger cast members. They penned a bestselling mystery novel, The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek, in 2019, which they thought would naturally lend itself to a silver-screen adaptation (no dice).
One of the final straws was a full-circle moment, mirroring their first experiences taking generals around town a decade earlier. Rhett and Link brought in a well-connected screenwriter for a last-ditch effort to adapt Bleak Creek, and Peacock, NBC’s then-fledgling streaming service, had shown some interest. Yet Rhett and Link knew things were trending in the wrong direction by the time they arrived at the meeting.
“We’re sitting in the lobby with our Hollywood writer-collaborator,” Link says. “And I remember we’re about to go into the meeting, and I turn to him and say, ‘Well, this may be the last time we see or talk to you again.’”
“You manifested it,” Rhett adds.
Which brings us back to “We’re Done,” where they announced their next big project: a scripted, TV-esque series made with the resources at Mythical’s disposal. They’re releasing it in the fall to the over five million people subscribed to their original “Rhett and Link” YouTube channel.
The duo is mum on plot details for now, but they do mention that they’re focused on process over profit. As creators, they (and their team) are used to wearing many hats. Everyone involved in the project has contributed to writing, directing, starring, and producing, in one way or another.
“Our entire lives, we’ve run up against the rules of the way things are supposed to go,” Rhett says. “If any sort of traditional outfit showed up and watched the way that we work on set, they would be like, ‘I don’t really know who’s in charge here.’
“[But what] we’ve cultivated works for us…it doesn’t fit a mold we’ve ever seen before, because we just can’t fit in now,” he concludes. “We can’t. We just don’t fit.”
After years and years of searching for approval from Hollywood bigwigs, Rhett and Link are finally taking the wheel, channeling their creative energies into simply doing the thing themselves. They tell me they’re feeling invigorated by this revelation, excited for any and all opportunities that will follow.
I think I believe them.
"We're Done," Rhett & Link (February 2024)
Rhett and Link announce a TV-esque, Mythical-produced series.
