Ramshackle. Chaotic. Amateur. For two years now, that’s been the vibe of the comedy Twitch stream “Go Off Kings,” whose humor mostly comes from the giddy embrace of absurdly trying to wrangle dozens of unwieldy technologies to turn physically remote hosts into one coherent nightly show. It's the funniest, most innovative and most prescient show on any platform. But on Wednesday night, I watched as the hosts realized in real time that the rest of the world was about to join them in creating excruciatingly awkward media products. News of Tom Hanks’ and Rudy Gobert’s positive tests for coronavirus and the NBA season’s suspension all broke while the hosts were streaming. Suddenly, it became a real possibly that everything from political rallies to podcasts would soon become awkward messes just like their defiantly unprofessional Twitch stream. Using the site Watch2Gether, the hosts of “Go Off Kings,” Jesse Farrar, Stefan Heck and Rob Whisman, plus a rotating cast of friends, use every Wednesday night to simultaneously roast the horrendous “Daily Show”-style program “Huckabee” from their individually remote locations. The thing is, nothing ever works right. The Discord chats cut off.
The sound is always fucking up. The chat is constantly interrupting the show with extremely loud and abrasive sonic jokes. Much of the comedy comes from the imperfect nature of a talk show produced from multiple locations using a jury-rigged tangle of apps and sites and services. Three days later, Joe Biden’s virtual town hall played out almost exactly as if the “Go Off Kings” had scripted it. Biden’s audio cut in and out. It came out garbled. Biden wandered off stage with his phone on speaker mode, forcing the producers to cut to a technical difficulties screen that read “Illinois for Biden.”At the same time, the genius comedy podcast “Hollywood Handbook” used the awkwardness of remote recording as a jumping off point for an episode-long bit involving the guest Sinbad. Social distancing’s effect on media was the joke. Every sentence was stilted. Every interruption lasted three seconds longer than it usually would. Nothing worked right. Nothing sounded right. It was very funny. There have been a few rumblings of watch parties using Watch2Gether, but I would expect more in the future.
This is a state of affairs familiar to anyone under 30, whose friends are often geographically distant and whose media is often produced under socially distant circumstances, but probably new and frustrating to everyone else, like the Biden campaign. But “Go Off Kings,” and recently “Hollywood Handbook,” have turned their social distance into a genre. The awkwardness of trying to create something when you’re a continent apart physically is the idea. For “Go Off Kings” and thousands of other streams, the inherent loneliness of not being physically in the same room as your friends is the joke that drives both the community and the hosts. In the of this newsletter, I predicted that the “Go Off Kings” would be “the Velvet Underground of streaming: not many people watched, but everyone who did started their own Twitch stream.”I was wrong in a few ways, but right in others. Maybe your favorite content creators won’t use Twitch, but it will feel a lot like it. And it will be super awkward. The media awkwarding was already here. It took social distancing for it to become more widely dispersed.
The shorter stuff
"Devs" is "House of Cards" for San Francisco. (YouTube)
I am put off by how Grimes only refers to Elon Musk as "my boyfriend" throughout this profile. (RS)
I was fascinated by the saga of The Hunt before it got stuck with the worst release date in history. (NYT)
The time Fiona Apple did cocaine with Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson in Tarantino's home theater convinced her to quit forever. (TNYer)
Michael Rappaport is suing Barstool over a diss track. (THR)
Tom Brady proves again that if you're a sports, business or politics elite you get your own production shingle. (Deadline)
Will there ever be a new cult movie again? (NYT)
Netflix thumbnail art turned There Will Be Blood into a father-son feel-good movie. (Twitter)
Judging by their use of the word "apparently," the Post is not impressed by Billie Eilish's body shaming protest gesture. (NYP)
After slogging through six installments of this, I never, ever want to read the words Fotis Dulos again. (AirMail)
Is "Kids In The Hall" an older millennial touchstone, or is it just one for me? (Vulture)
I did not expect this account of socialism's rebirth in America to feature so much Grateful Dead talk. (FT)
Speaking of the Dead, Steven Hyden, host of the excellent Dead podcast "36 From The Vault," interviewed noted Dead enthusiast, Vampire Weekend frontman and Stupefy-approved internet radio show "Time Crisis" host Ezra Koenig for the Times Magazine's music issue. If Koenig's nuanced opinions here on genre, taste and criticism are interesting to you, you would love "Time Crisis." (NYTMag)
The TV anchorman in the futuristic Armando Ianucci satire "Avenue 5" on HBO has a face tattoo. (YouTube)
The Cut has published a handful of hits lately, but I especially loved Marisa Meltzer's excerpt on weight obsession from her new book. (The Cut)