• Do You Even Care is getting people sweaty. Hosted by Esteban Gast and produced by Adam McKay’s climate media company Yellow Dot Studios, the LA-filmed show brings Hollywood and internet personalities into a sauna to ask them what they actually care about. Past guests include Colin Rosenblum, Reggie Watts, Adam Conover, and The Try Guys.

• Match My Angel is the Revival of The Fittest spinoff I didn’t know I needed. Host Erma Camporese brings a new guest each episode to see if they’re a romantic match for cult leader William Banks. Campy, raw, and somehow free.

• Junk Justice is community service as entertainment. Produced by Meag Cherry and hosted by Erik Martini, guests confess to something weighing on their conscience and are assigned a trash pickup quota as punishment. Flat Iron has reportedly seen a 75% decrease in litter since episode one aired.

• Meag Cherry also launched Picture This this week. A photographer trades headshots for early career artists’ stories. Friend of the newsletter Hope Glassel is featured in the first episode.

• Humbled is Reddit's r/dating_advice as a show. Bowlmates host and standup comedian Daniela Mora shares cringe-worthy dating stories in her new independent IG/YouTube show.

• Borrow A Boyfriend is Fallen Media's latest hit and it's exactly what it sounds like. Hosted by comedian Megan Bitchell, suitors borrow a boyfriend to complete any task they'd like, then decide if he's actually boyfriend material. The pilot dropped four weeks ago and is already popping.

Launching a show and want to be featured? Restack us or send us an email!

• Romantical‘s Jonah Feingold directed a film. Busboys, starring Theo Vonn, is coming to theaters April 17. Trailer here.

• Very Online Agency’s new show made me buy a new suitcase. Travel Companions, produced for Samsonite, has a host rifling through guests’ luggage to determine if they’re compatible travel partners.

• Kareem Rahma wants new social show producers to try harder. The Subway Takes host took to Substack to beg people not to launch a new short-form unscripted vertical video show. Pandora’s box has long been open, my friend.

• Tubi inked a creator development deal with TikTok. The Fox-owned streamer will partner with TikTok to identify a cohort of creators and give them a pathway to develop longer-form series. 100 million monthly active users and counting.

• Adam Faze is looking for a colorist for one of Gymnasium’s properties. DM their account if that’s you.

• Disney+ is going vertical. Starting this week, the streamer is rolling out “Verts,” a swipeable short-form feed pulling clips from its movies and shows. Users can add titles to their Watchlist or jump straight into playback.

• Street Hearts took the Actor Awards red carpet and turned it into a dating advice pit stop. Attendees were asked to draw a heart from a bowl and answer the dating prompt.

–Rommel

As we mentioned in our first issue, we work on an app for showrunners called Typo*. If you’re tired of duct-taping together iMessage, Slack, Frame, Dropbox and Asana to run your show, we’d love for you to be a design partner. Reach out to Sahil at sahil@typo.inc.

*design partner (n.) — a person or team who gets early access to a product and gives their unfiltered thoughts on it.

* typo (n.) — a messenger that runs your show for you. It knows what’s due, who’s late, where the files are, and what the notes were.

• Errands is seeking editors. Send your relevant work to questions@errands.show.

• Subway Takes’ Kareem Rahma is hosting a social show where celebrities air their dirty laundry. The show is a limited series sponsored by H&M. The guests include Ice Spice, Lynn Yaeger, and Jay Guapo.

• Are You Okay microdosed a host-less format this week. Nat Wolff interviewed Alex Wolff on the show.

• Snackish Media’s Like Old Times is back from it’s 3-week hiatus with a new episode. This week, Elizabeth hit the dance floor for the first time in 30 years.

• NowThis released a new show titled, “Standup Desk”. Comics tell jokes to the studio’s employees as they pretend to provide shareholder value.

• Adam Faze posted a photo of Kareem half naked in a Banya with two russian men. It’s our first look behind the scenes of the new season of Keep The Meter Running.

• A museum in Detroit started a mockumentary show starring… their employees. The Wright Museum uses the platform to promote their special events.

• The Telly Awards have extended their deadline to March 27, 2026. Submit your show for the online series category.

• William Banks finally delivered the Sabai Design couch to Village Revival records. The moment capitulates the first season of New York Nico’s show Revival of The Fittest.

• Macy Gilliam showed us what it’s like to ride in a Google Street View car in this week’s episode of Out There.

–Rommel

As we mentioned in our first issue, we work on an app for showrunners called Typo*. If you’re tired of duct-taping together iMessage, Slack, Frame, Dropbox and Asana to run your show, we’d love for you to be a design partner. Reach out to Sahil at sahil@typo.inc.

*design partner (n.) — a person or team who gets early access to a product and gives their unfiltered thoughts on it.

* typo (n.) — a messenger that runs your show for you. It knows what’s due, who’s late, where the files are, and what the notes were.

For most of the TV age, the path for a writer to get a 60-page pilot made was clear. They’d outline the characters, the world, the stakes, and package it all up to show to agents around Town. If a studio loved your script, they’d purchase the project and send you a paycheck. Then they’d have to turn this into a hit with characters that people would get behind.

A few of these legacy deals are still getting done. 33 scripts were sold in 2025. But there’s a rapidly expanding market for people who understand how to adapt narrative to social media. Plenty of those deals are hidden in plain sight, although the studios behind them look less like Paramount’s golden historic lots and more like corporate tech and finance offices.

BILT’s Roomies is the best example of a narrative show that has adapted the legacy model to the new landscape. The show centers around Ellie, Griffin, Ovie, and Rain: 4 roommates making a 3 bedroom in NYC work. Cyrus and Brooke, the Roomies’ showrunners, first came up with the idea in 2024. Cyrus had been working with the venture capital firm that incubated BILT since 2020 managing their video operations. After the rewards program company split into its own entity in 2021, Cyrus moved over to BILT to lead social. He began to read the tea leaves: narrative might have a place in social media. BILT could act as the studio.

We caught up with Cyrus and Brooke over drinks to understand how they convinced the unicorn start-up’s leadership to fund their pilot. Cyrus explained,

I’m very lucky that Zoe Oz, our CMO, has always understood the…opportunity of short form video. The process started with an internal pitch where I laid out the ongoing challenges of organically telling Bilt’s story, the current landscape of social…, and what I saw as a way to break through the noise with a scripted narrative show. The answer was ‘go for it’!

Roomies officially launched in June of last year, to massive success. The pilot garnered 1.9M views and its subsequent episodes sustained a 700K average viewcount. The key to Roomies’ success lies in the 3 month runway they had to work out the kinks of the show. Brooke and Cyrus tweaked the writing by gauging audience responses week after week. This allowed them to get the concept off the ground rapidly, converting a marketing ploy into a property that has taken on a life of its own.

BILT isn’t the only company taking on a studio role in the space. CAVA launched a dating show called Bowlmates just 4 months ago via Very Only Agency. Crocs launched Charmed To Meet You via Reel Short. And P&G launched Beyond the Gates. Cyrus told us: “if you have a great concept that you feel passionate about—go make it now! If you can get through that initial stage of iterating and remixing until you find a pilot format that clicks and finds an audience (I.e. gets 100K+ views), you’ll be in a much stronger position to then go out and pitch brands and say ‘I have an idea that will work, let’s partner to bring it fully to life’”.

After a 2-month hiatus, Roomies returned for a season 2 in January of this year. Your pilot could be next.

• Girl Room season 1 is over. The wildly popular Gymnasium property hosted by Owen Thiele closed its first season with 110K followers and an all-time viewership peak of 6M across 9 episodes. Submit your girl room here for a chance to be featured on the next season.

• Gymnasium started an unemployment hot line. If you dial +1-877-UNM-PLYD and tell them your unemployment story, you can be featured on their IG series. They will call back with a career counselor on the line, free of charge.

• Follow-up from last week: The first episode for Mad Realities’s new show, Good Dog, is now live. It features Shorty, a five year-old pitbull. Spoiler alert: he’s now been adopted!

• Keep The Meter Running is looking for a post producer. DM Adam Faze if interested.

• Fallen Media is launching The Love Network. This new content division will house all of its popular dating shows including Street Hearts, Love Train, and Sketch My Ex. They hope this makes it easier for advertisers to integrate with their content ecosystem.

• Untitled, the music collaboration platform, launched a new series called [brackets]. Personalities rank popular artists against each other in a tourney style this-or-that.

• Filmology Lab is building a $250 million studio for micro-drama production in New Jersey. This is the first studio for micro-dramas of its kind on the East Coast.

As we mentioned in our first issue, we work on an app for showrunners called Typo*. If you’re tired of duct-taping together iMessage, Slack, Frame, Dropbox and Asana to run your show, we’d love for you to be a design partner. Reach out to Sahil at sahil@typo.inc.

*design partner (n.) — a person or team who gets early access to a product and gives their unfiltered thoughts on it.

* typo (n.) — a messenger that runs your show for you. It knows what’s due, who’s late, where the files are, and what the notes were.

There are three ways people consume content right now. Discovery — the algorithm serves you something, you watch it, you may never see that creator again. Routine — you come back to the same person or show because it’s become part of your day. And ritual — you show up because other people are showing up too, and the experience of being there together is the point. Most shows are stuck in the first category. The most valuable ones figure out how to get to the third.

Almost the entire creator economy has been built for discovery. Short form is optimized for it — shoot, edit, publish the best version, let TikTok or Reels find the audience. Even the most dedicated followers of a show frequently miss whole sets of episodes. There’s no cost to absence because the content isn’t asking anything of you. You watch alone. You scroll past. Maybe you send it to a group chat, but you’re passing along something that already happened.

The interesting shift happening right now is from discovery to routine. The biggest creators on the internet — IShowSpeed, Kai Cenat — aren’t making videos anymore. They’re running practically nonstop livestreams.

You don’t watch a specific piece of content. You tune in. TBPN, a daily three-hour live tech show, has built the same thing for the startup world — a show that looks like CNBC but runs like a creator business, with 10 employees and $5M in revenue last year. These are routine machines. The flywheel is simple: live generates clips, clips generate reach, reach generates live viewership. You become part of someone’s day.

But routine isn’t the real prize. Ritual is.

I know this because I grew up watching sport. Growing up in London, Sky Sports News was perennially on the family TV. On matchdays, my dad and I would set up in the living room to spend all day taking in the live games, commentary, and clips. Every match had a broadcast truck, a replay booth, a highlights package, a distribution plan, and a crew that knew how to turn three hours of real time into a week of content.

It worked because watching brought you closer to your fellow fans, near and far. I used to wonder if Manchester United still would have scored in the 93rd minute if I hadn’t been watching. Our attention felt wrapped up in the outcome. We wouldn’t simply watch games as part of our day — we would look forward to games as the highlight of our day, just as we looked forward to gathering around the dinner table. When the final whistle blew, we would check our fantasy teams and banter about who was winning our own league. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the real reason I was watching is the same reason I still watch today — my dad is watching the same match on the other side of the earth, and we both know it. That’s what ritual does.

It’s no surprise that live sport is doing better than ever. Sports rights now account for 14% of all US television revenue, up from 8% in 2015. The broadcasters and streaming platforms are spending a larger and larger slice of their dwindling revenues just to keep live content on their platforms. The Super Bowl isn’t the most-watched broadcast in America because it’s the best football game. It’s the most-watched because 120 million people are watching the same thing at the same time, and they all know it. The togetherness is the product.

So what separates sport from a daily livestream? Not just participation — shared participation. The crowd at a match is in it together, and the best live creators are starting to figure this out. TBPN works because the audience shapes the show. Someone flags breaking news in the chat and it’s discussed on air minutes later. Someone the hosts are talking about pops up and gets pulled into the broadcast live. Everyone in the chat felt like they were in the room together when it happened.

When I turn TBPN on, I feel like I’m tuning into tech. I suddenly feel part of a world, even if I’m not talking to the people from that world. That’s why it’s approaching ritual status in the tech industry — it generates an entire ecosystem around it. For sport, it’s pundit shows, fan reactions, fantasy leagues — for TBPN, it’s the reactions on X, quote tweets, and office gossip. The insider tech world is smaller than sport fans, but a ritual for only a few people is still powerful: the TBPN team are expecting to triple their ad revenue this year.

And this is where it gets interesting for anyone making shows right now. Because discovery, routine, and ritual aren’t just different parts of life. They’re different businesses.

Discovery is a volume game. You’re selling moments — the perfect cut, the perfect hook, the thing that stops a thumb. The algorithm is your distributor and it guarantees you nothing. Your audience doesn’t know your name; they know your format.

Routine is a loyalty game. You’re selling presence — the comfort of knowing someone is on, every day, and that you can drop in whenever you want. This is what Speed and Kai have built. The clips are the marketing. The stream is the product.

Ritual is a belonging game. You’re selling togetherness — the feeling that you are experiencing this with other people, that something is happening right now and you’re all in it.

What showrunners need to realize is that ritual compounds and discovery doesn’t. TBPN can clip its stream into a thousand TikToks — each one plays the volume game for free. Meanwhile, a short-form studio that goes viral starts from zero the next morning. The question for any showrunner right now isn’t what platform or what format: it’s whether they’re building a media property that compounds.

• Celebrity Substitute featured A$AP Rocky. He taught Harlem P.S. 125’s kids how to rap, then collaborated on a remix of “Punk Rocky” with them.

• Are You Okay? launched a podcast hosted by Brianna Morales. The first episode is out now.

• IG introduced clickable graphics on Reels. You can now link out to other videos or profiles if you cut your videos via Instagram’s Edits feature.

• Ramp is expanding its campaign with The Office star Brian Baumgartner. The latest video introduces ‘The Brians™’ — multiple Kevins loose in an office — ahead of their Super Bowl spot. The financial company has been running the series since announcing Baumgartner as spokesperson last year.

• SNL Host Veronika Slowikowska created a 8-episode series on Instagram where her wish to appear on Subway Takes becomes a (sur)reality. Here is the series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

• Disney posted the entirety of High School Musical on TikTok in 52 15-second videos. Could traditional studios finally be adapting to a new format?

• Mad Realities is launching a new show called Good Dog. They collaborate with local shelters to take dogs out on life-changing walks. First episode out next week.

• Ask A Fuckboy is hosting their biggest show yet on February 14th in Brooklyn. Get your tickets!

As we mentioned in our first issue, we work on an app for showrunners called Typo*. If you’re tired of duct-taping together iMessage, Slack, Frame, Dropbox and Asana to run your show, we’d love for you to be a design partner. Reach out to Sahil at sahil@typo.inc.

*design partner (n.) — a person or team who gets early access to a product and gives their unfiltered thoughts on it.

* typo (n.) — a messenger that runs your show for you. It knows what’s due, who’s late, where the files are, and what the notes were.

Gymnasium founder Adam Faze screened two episodes of Girl Room at Sundance last weekend. Not in a theater, but on stage at a Brand Storytelling panel, with Amazon’s Head of Content Marketing sitting next to him. They discussed reaching Gen-Z audiences at scale. The Cannes Lions energy was intentional. So was the message: brands are thirsty for social shows, even when they barely understand why they work.

The usual suspects covered the festival. Variety, Deadline, Indiewire, Vulture. But the most telling content from the weekend wasn’t coverage of creators—it was legacy media trying to make creator-style content itself.

Take Vulture. They sent Zach Schiffman, a comedian and video producer on staff at New York mag, to film a man-on-the-street series called “Off The Slopes.” Schiffman talked to festival-goers about Sundance’s move to Colorado, their favorite Park City memories. Solid premise. Hilarious host. But his episodes averaged 19K views each—well below Vulture’s 91.7K reel average.

This isn’t a story about bad content underperforming. It’s a story about strategy. Vulture runs all their short-form through one account: actor interviews, red carpet clips, event coverage, shows. The upside is flexibility—easy to shift formats with the same host and crew. But it also means that individual series disappear into the feed.

With Off The Slopes, they chose to create a series out of events a year apart from each other. A few dedicated Zach fans recognized the format from last year, but they missed the opportunity to build cachet throughout 2025. Imagine if Kareem brought Subway Takes to the ski carts—it would be instantly recognizable, because people know the host and format. Vulture could build a repeatable format around Zach and bring it to each event. Instead, the short form shows they’re doing feel like a sequence of promising starts. Off The Slopes wasn’t a property. It was content.

Compare that to Girl Room. In three months, Faze’s series amassed 94.5K followers and averages 2.4M views per episode. It launched as a follow-up to “Boy Room,” hosted by Rachel Coster, which already had Amazon’s financial support. Brands used to buy ads against legacy media content. Now they’re going direct to the showrunners. Girl Room formalized the partnership: Prime boxes on screen, delivery driver cameos, the whole brand integration playbook executed cleanly.

Off The Slopes was sponsored by Paramount+. Girl Room is partnered with Amazon. The difference isn’t the money—it’s the sequence. Vulture built event content for a sponsor. Faze built a show first, proved it worked, then brought the brand in. One disappears after the festival. The other keeps compounding.

The weekend ended at UTA House, where the guest list told the whole story: Julian Shapiro-Barnum from Recess Therapy, Amelia Dimoldenberg from Chicken Shop Date, Rachel Coster from Boy Room. These aren’t people circling Sundance hoping to get discovered. They’re the story now.

• BILT's Roomies got renewed for season 2. A credit card company built a show people actually want to watch. 138K followers in 7 months.

• Fallen Media, the studio behind Street Hearts and Subway Oracle, launched a new series called Show & Tell. The host @megspectre invites guests to present screenshots or battle scars, and grades them at the end on a standard A-F scale. The show is averaging 41.6K views per episode in it’s first month.

• Channing Tatum appeared on Are You Okay? to promote Magic Mike Live. To our knowledge, this is the only short form show that Tatum did on his press tour.

• Nova launched Creative Confessional. The freelancer job board released a show with a rotating cast of hosts over the weekend. They collab-posted with Nova's main account (78K followers) and tagged every season 1 guest in the trailer. The results so far: 474 followers, 8.8K median views.

• Amber Singletary’s Judgy live SOLD OUT. Amber Singletary took her show to a stage in NYC and made the audience the jury. If you attended, let us know what you thought!

• Zohran Mamdani appeared on Subway Oracle to warn New Yorkers of the weekend’s snow storm. It came right after the Mayor’s creator summit. He's not treating short form shows as novelty press hits. He's using them the way politicians once used local TV.

• Baron Ryan's Two Sleepy People is the top-grossing film in the country this week with no major studio or distributor. His marketing strategy was creating content and appearing on short-form shows: @submityourick, @gabriel.desanti, @15secondfilm, @subwaytakes. It worked.

• Public Opinion just set the tone for shows looking for private funding. They raised a seven-figure investment from former Rolling Stone CEO Gus Wenner. The team behind Track Star has plans to expand operations, launch new properties, and turn it’s show into a new MTV.

If you wanted to understand this world, to see who the players are and how they stack up, you couldn’t. No one had mapped it. So we did. The Showrunner Universe is the first attempt to chart the short-form show space: who’s making what, how they’re performing, and where the gravity is. We’ll keep it updated as the landscape shifts.

You can find it here.

• Instagram is becoming a home for scripted sitcoms. Creator of Brooklyn Coffee Shop Pooja Tripathi is celebrating 300K followers after just one year on the platform. The show featured big-name comedians Kumail Nanjiani and Atsuko Okatsuka, another example of a social show becoming a routine stop on the celebrity press tour.

• A film starring Subway Takes host Kareem Rahma just landed on MUBI and Prime Video. Or Something is the latest sign that show creators can cross over to traditional distribution, if they choose. In a recent interview with Seth Meyers, Kareem revealed his first hit show Keep The Meter Running returns to YouTube in 2026.

• MorningBrew and NowThis are doubling down on live shows. Judgy’s Amber Singletary goes live January 24. MB’s Meg Baniewicz and Annie Bennett are doing a ‘Best in Business’ variety show February 5. The studios sold out events in NYC, Chicago, and LA last year.

• Kevin Smith is making films for the feed. The nineties indie director behind Clerks made a short called WE(E)’D LOVE TO for Fallen Media’s 15 Second Films series — out now, only on Instagram.

• NYC has a new Media & Entertainment commissioner. Rafael Espinal, formerly of the Freelancers Union, just got the job. He says he cares about affordable housing, workspaces, and small venues. Could be good news if you’re a showrunner who needs a place to shoot.

• Fia James is leaving Crosswalk Crush. She’s stepping down as host to focus on music. Her single ‘Jealous Baby’ is out now.

Something changed. You don’t need permission anymore. You don’t need a greenlight from a network or a budget from a studio. You can make what you believe in, put it out, and reach more people in a week than a TV show reaches in a season.

Instagram Reels and interview podcasts are now on TV screens. Elections are being decided by appearances on social shows. YouTube gets more watch time than all the Hollywood studios combined. The people behind these shows are passionate about entertainment and meticulous about their craft. But most publications either blithely dismiss them as “influencers” or use them as statistics in consulting reports.

The stuff we’ll dig into is the stuff we’re all whispering about. How do these shows actually make money? What happens when someone copies your format? Why do some shows with huge reach feel like they don’t matter, while others with smaller audiences feel like the center of the culture?

SHOWRUNNER* is a weekly newsletter about the shows replacing TV. We’ll write about what’s going on in the world of videos that live on the feed — the people making them, the business behind them, what’s working and what’s not. The goal is to learn who is replacing Hollywood and how they’re doing it.

Some background on us: We’re building Typo*, a messenger for people who make shows. We operate 474*, a community space for artists in Manhattan. And we’re working on our own shows, including Artist Office Hours* and Where It Happens* (500K+ views across Instagram & YouTube in 9 months). We spend all day talking to creators building shows and studios for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Sahil is the CEO at Typo*. He’s written about TikTok security policy, David Bowie’s internet, and the truth behind Brexit for the WSJ, Foreign Policy, and Mercatus. He was on the founding team at Persuasion, a newsletter with 100K+ subscribers.

Rommel is the Creative Producer at Typo*. He was a producer at an agency that was acquired by UTA before jumping into the fashion world as an assistant to Désiré. He’s developed and edited social campaigns for Meta, Google, Prada, and BOSS.