The channels to follow. And a few reactors, too.
Photo-Illustration: Alex Meyers, Jenny Nicholson, Kennie J.D., NetflixThe Youtube TV-Recap Canon
There was a time not long ago when everyone was saying the Internet was shrinking our attention spans. That platforms for short-form content made it so we all became goldfish-brained, unable to sit through a full episode of a TV show without getting distracted by our second screens — just an entire human race reduced to a buncha marshmallow-test flunkies.
Tell that to YouTube’s TV recappers. In videos that can stretch longer than a Scorcese double feature, content creators are engaging with their favorite (and least favorite) TV shows like they’re open FBI murder cases, breaking down their component parts and rearranging them to find patterns, memes, inside jokes, conspiracies, philosophical lessons, stannable moments of iconicity, and rant-fodder. It’s now possible to be a fan of a show having only watched it refracted through some kid in a bedroom’s point of view. If you want to know what all the fuss is over a show like The Idol but you have too much dignity and self-respect to make it through The Idol, countless accounts will watch it for you, complete with commentary, Mystery Science Theater 3000–style. (Seriously, there are more hours of YouTube videos about The Idol than there are hours of The Idol.) The genre is a good way to catch up on something extremely long running, like Degrassi or Grey’s Anatomy. Or it’s a good way to nostalgically revisit something from your past without actually ruining it by watching it with your adult critical eye … like Degrassi or Grey’s Anatomy.
People have more patience for longform storytelling than ever before — and they want even longer-form storytelling about the storytelling. Mike’s Mic has elevated the form to a new level (and yes, the genre has gone full circle and made its way over to TikTok, with creators like Rob Anderson’s painfully funny, hyper-shortform 7th Heaven recaps). For the uninitiated, here is a canon of the most important creators in the TV recap game today.
Series-Spanning Recaps
Home to overarching theories, formal experimentation, and feature-length run times.
Mike’s Mic
Subscribers: 895,000
Most-popular recap: “An appropriately unhinged recap of Pretty Little Liars (Part 1)”
Views: 6.6 million
Length: 1:52:38
➼ In 2019, Mike’s Mic posted his pilot project for unhinged recaps to come: a 16-minute video called “I tried drawing the plot of Riverdale (season 3).” This established his unique visual language for much more extensive, successful recaps to come: plot points and characters laid out in splaying grids, their relationships and betrayals represented by a spaghetti web of lines that maybe only make sense to his engineer-brain. His series on Pretty Little Liars, Glee, and Gossip Girl upped the production value for this form — he started using elaborate printed-out materials, lending the whole thing a “Pepe Silvia” aesthetic. The joy is in watching him attempt to bring some semblance of grid-like order to some of the most poorly-thought out, bonkers series ever created.
Kennie J.D.
Subscribers: 684,000
Most-popular recap: “The dating show where no one should be together | Netflix’s The Ultimatum”
Views: 1 million
Length: 1:03:23
➼ The Beauty YouTuber found a brilliant niche doing makeup tutorials while giving clever movie commentary, but never is she more activated than in her hourlong Love Is Blind recaps and her coverage of The Ultimatum (recently galvanized by the show’s new Queer Love edition). Kennie J.D. is charming, funny, and unafraid of bold takes, and her videos feel like sitting down with a cooler-than-you friend.
Amanda the Jedi
Subscribers: 581,000
Most-popular recap: “Everyone Hates Emily in Paris | Explained”
Views: 736,000
Length: 23:52
➼ A friend of Kennie J.D.’s, Amanda the Jedi is a prolific Canadian YouTuber who makes videos examining everything, and a lot of that everything happens to be TV. Her videos hover around 20 minutes and treat obscure flops (Adults Adopting Adults), one-season wonders (First Kill), and popular Netflix shows (Emily in Paris) with equal enthusiasm. Her humor is casual and lived in and actually makes you want to watch whatever it is she’s geeking out about.
amandabb
Subscribers: 244,000
Most-popular recap: “Everything wrong with Dance Moms …”
Views: 919,000
Length: 1:12:10
➼ Another makeup artist and another Amanda, amandabb has some excellent medium- and feature-length recaps for a wide and wild range of TV shows: Hours of Degrassi analysis? Yes. Watching all of Grey’s Anatomy so we don’t have to? Yes. Breaking down the slow-motion crime scene that is Dance Moms? You bet. amandabb is off-the-cuff funny whether she’s talking about current series like Selling Sunset or older Disney Channel and Nickelodeon fare. She has an especially strong knack for giving underserved teen shows their due.
Lily Simpson
Subscribers: 41,000
Most-popular recap: “The Gang Does Trans Representation”
Views: 260,000
Length: 46:01
➼ Recaps series specifically from a trans lens, going through the history of trans representation in the shows, for better (Twin Peaks, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and for worse (How I Met Your Mother, Family Guy). She’s straightforward in production style — Simpson in front of a poster for fully automated luxury gay space communism, talking directly to the camera with some visual aids like clips thrown up onscreen. The strength of the recaps is in the specific viewpoint, educational heft, and Simpson’s delivery, both impassioned and blasé.
Nick DiRamio
Subscribers: 322,000
Most-popular recap: “Shane Dawson Was Very SHADY on this 2014 Reality Show (Directing ‘Not Cool’ on The Chair)”
Views: 1.6 million
Length: 31:58
➼ One of those YouTubers who has 20-to-40-plus minutes of stuff to say about literally whatever: They recap YouTube drama, review weird foods, and do it all with irreverent humor. (Their The Chair recap manages to bridge TV-recap coverage and YouTuber-drama coverage.) The TV rants cover everything from MILF Manor to She-Hulk with the energy and verve of your shit-talking work spouse. But with DiRamio’s film-school background, Hollywood-makeup-artist experience, and encyclopedic knowledge of reality television, they have way better takes than that shit-talking work spouse.
Quinton Reviews
Subscribers: 820,000
Most-popular recap: “The Failure of Victorious”
Views: 7.8 million
Length: 5:34:59
➼ Quinton is a Nickelodeon Adult in a sea of Disney Adults, documenting the rise and fall of series like Sam & Cat and iCarly like he’s a historian covering the late stages of the Holy Roman Empire. He also tackles Nick’s cartoon fare, but it’s in his coverage of the Schneiderverse that he shines; his two most-viewed videos add up to a combined 13.5 hours of talking about Victorious.
Friendly Space Ninja
Subscribers: 547,000
Most-popular recap: “Emily in Paris: Romanticizing Ignorance”
Views: 9.3 million
Length: 24:55
➼ The Canadian YouTuber’s channel began in February 2021 with a 25-minute video essay called “Emily in Paris: Romanticizing Ignorance.” It blew up in part because it hit at the right time — everyone was looking for ways to inform their hate-watching of Emily in Paris — and in part because Friendly Space Ninja mastered the subtle art of provocative thumbnails with an image of Lily Collins next to the caption “racism is quirky.” (That “racism,” for what it’s worth, was about Emily being “racist” to white French people.) Since then, he’s released extensive recap videos on all the usual subjects: two hours and 40 minutes on The Vampire Diaries, an hour and 20 minutes on Teen Wolf, and many follow-ups on Emily in Paris. His style is pretty pedantic, narrating clips with a sarcastic “Get a load of this” tone, but the channel is popular, and he uploads more consistently than most, including covering more recent series like Wednesday and Euphoria.
The Reactors
We watch them watch.
ur internet mom ash
Subscribers: 698,000
Most-popular recap: “Alright, Let’s See What the Hype Is All About”
Views: 2.7 million
Length: 18:47
➼ Like Mike’s Mic does, Ashley elevates reaction vids with a funny, fast editing style that makes even her longest videos feel like they’re speeding by. Her savvy, entertaining Gen-Z perspective is frankly the only lens through which I ever want to watch something like Wednesday or You ever again. Her most-viewed video — watching Euphoria for the first time — set off her best reaction series yet.
Nikki and Steven React
Subscribers: 328,000
Most-popular recap: “Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 9 ‘The Rains of Castamere’ REACTION!!”
Views: 1.1 million
Length: 22:02
➼ The couple that reacts to big-budget genre TV together, slays together. Nikki and Steven got big posting episode-by-episode reaction videos to The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones during its final season, and have applied the formula to other sort of widely viewed, blockbuster series like The Last of Us and Stranger Things. The funniest thing they do might be the thumbnails of them overemoting to each episode; they’re mostly mouths agape with Nikki’s hands covering her face but there’s one for Chernobyl where they just look really, really sad.
The Pink Popcast
Subscribers: 77,000
Most-popular recap: “a gay and straight watch Heartstopper *SEASON ONE REACTION*”
Views: 411,000
Length: 45:43
➼ Two pals, one gay (Benji), one straight (Rizzo), both funny, just out here watching full-length episodes of stuff and talking over it. Benji and Rizzo bring industry knowledge to their live commentary. Benji is an actor, and Rizzo is an actor-director, perhaps best known for working on the Drag Race crew and helping Trinity “The Tuck” Taylor nab a win. The Popcast truly popped off with their Bridgerton coverage, and now they do watchalongs for plenty of new series, including Queen Charlotte, The Last of Us, Heartstopper, and Shadow and Bone.
Dylan Is in Trouble
Subscribers: 1.64 million
Most-popular recap: “Watching only the FIRST and LAST episode of *The Vampire Diaries*”
Views: 3.7 million
Length: 24:04
➼ In his “First and Last” series, writer Dylan Matthews watches the pilot and finale episodes of a series back-to-back, pausing along the way to riff. Matthews is quick on his feet and very easily flabbergasted, which turns out to be a winning combination of traits for a reaction-video guy to have. In many ways, these are the ultimate recaps: such a sweeping overview that you only get the bookends. You’d be amazed at how you can get the gist of a show this way. (However, he might be capitulating to trends: He recently “Watched all 236 Episodes of Friends” in a whopping three-hour video.)
Trixie Mattel & Katya’s ‘I Like to Watch’
Most-popular recap: “Drag Queens Trixie Mattel & Katya React to Glow Up”
Views: 7.5 million
Length: 16:06
➼ Of course Netflix found a way to capitalize on YouTube reaction vids by just bringing the whole operation in-house for its Still Watching channel. It’s a double whammy, a way of promoting its new content while carving out an audience on YouTube. It was lucky to book Trixie and Katya, two popular Drag Race alums who had proved themselves as YouTube auteurs with their (still ongoing) World of Wonder comedy web-series, UNHhhh, in which they shot the shit over topics like “Body Parts” and “Crying” as bizarre, low-budget graphics play around them. With their kooky, surreal sense of humor and addictive way of laughing at each other’s dumbest jokes, Trixie and Katya could probably recap a leather shoe and find a way to make it entertaining.
Episode-by-Episode Recaps
Short ’n’ snappy.
Alex Meyers
Subscribers: 3.41 million
Most-popular recap: “Insatiable is the weirdest show I’ve ever seen …”
Views: 5.9 million
Length: 10:30
➼ Meyers started his channel in 2015, and he still hews to a format that was more emblematic of that era of YouTube video essays: He never shows his face, narrating over a little animated avatar that emotes and reacts to the action onscreen. With a sense of humor that veers a little hard into “lolcatz random” millennial internet territory, Meyers produces 15-minute hits that span years as he follows series like Riverdale and the CW’s DC superhero shows through their entire runs. Sometimes he breaks out into song.
Emergency Awesome
Subscribers: 4.45 million
Most-popular recap: “Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 3 Top 10 WTF and Easter Eggs”
Views: 4.9 million
Length: 15:43
➼ Creator Charles Schneider brings depths of nerd lore and context to his recaps for all of the Marvel, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones series and breaks down trailers for upcoming entries in those franchises. Good for the completists who want to know the context around all of these adaptations without devoting 20 years of their lives to consuming them.
Influential One-Offs
These pop-culture channels don’t normally focus on TV but have each made a longform TV recap that influenced the genre.
Hbomberguy
Subscribers: 1.24 million
Most-popular recap: “Sherlock Is Garbage, and Here’s Why”
Views: 11 million
Length: 1:49:53
➼ Harris Michael Brewis, known as Hbomberguy, usually directs his hilarious, critical voice toward video games and the rightosphere (notably Ben Shapiro). He brings that same rageful verve to his pop-culture analysis in his nearly two-hour opus “Sherlock Is Garbage, and Here’s Why” from 2017. His analysis is brilliant for the way it breaks down the nature of how episodic entertainment should function and how Steven Moffat jerks viewers around by not meeting those basic tenets.
Jenny Nicholson
Subscribers: 1.04 million
Most-popular recap: “The Vampire Diaries Video”
Views: 11 million
Length: 2:33:19
➼ Theme-park vlogger, Star Wars scholar, and My Little Pony collector Jenny Nicholson released her then-longest video in January 2021: a two-and-a-half-hour recap called “THE Vampire Diaries Video.” This media analysis is broken into 26 distinct parts (28 with intro and conclusion) and features Nicholson’s signature wry commentary: When she mocks plot holes or calls out missed opportunities and weak story lines, it comes from a genuine nerdy place of her wanting her trash TV to be the best trash TV it can be. She doesn’t focus exclusively on television, but her Vampire Diaries video established the TV-series deep-dive style as we know it (Mike’s Mic’s Pretty Little Liars series came later that year).
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 3, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.
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