The Try Guys and the Prison of Online Fame

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/magazine/try-guys-internet-fame.html

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The thing about the video is that people like me weren’t really supposed to be watching it. You could tell from the first line: “Ned Fulmer is no longer working with the Try Guys.” If those proper nouns held any significance for you five weeks ago, you were the intended audience. If not, well: The Try Guys are four dudes who make a goofy, mild-mannered web series in which they test out different experiences, like wearing corsets, doing stand-up comedy or eating really spicy noodles. Ned Fulmer was one Guy, as well as the subject of frenzied speculation among fans; rumors were circulating that he was cheating on his wife with a woman who starred in a spinoff series called “Food Babies.” Now the other three Try Guys were here to break the sad news to their eight million YouTube subscribers: It was true. (Fulmer did not respond to a request for comment for this article, though he has confirmed and apologized for the relationship on Instagram.)

Sitting grimly on a drab couch and summoning a jarring level of vehemence, the other Guys recounted a three-week process, involving “employment lawyers, corporate lawyers, H.R., P.R. and more,” that led to Fulmer’s exit. They described “digitally removing” him from some videos and “finding creative solutions” for scrubbing him from others. (“Major props to our editing staff.”) They prepared the audience for upcoming branded videos not subject to this process, which may contain trace elements of Fulmer. “What we hope is that within this, there’s also opportunity for positive growth — and better videos ahead,” said one of the Try Guys, Zach Kornfeld, seemingly on the verge of tears. “But it’s going to be hard.”

This video provoked two very different responses. The Try Guys’ hordes of fans expressed outrage at Fulmer and sympathy for his colleagues. But millions of others, who had never even heard of the Try Guys until seeing this video, were baffled and amused: Who were these guys, and why were they talking about their philandering friend as if he were John Wayne Gacy?

It was the enormous gulf between these reactions that turned an embarrassing episode in the history of a YouTube channel into a weekslong news story. By Saturday, it had even become an “S.N.L.” sketch, about a CNN anchor who can’t get her correspondent to focus on Ukraine because he’s too fixated on the Try Guys drama. “I’m sorry,” the anchor says once she’s been apprised of the situation, “why is that heinous?” “You have to remember the power dynamics,” says the reporter, played by 67-year-old Brendan Gleeson. “He’s a Try Guy, and she’s a Food Baby.”

Try Guys fans felt this mockery missed the point. Not only did Fulmer get involved with a studio employee, he did so at a company where his wife, Ariel, was also on-screen talent: in videos about the “Try Wives” and “Try Moms” and, with Ned, on a cooking show called “Date Night” and a podcast about raising their two children. Last year, “Date Night” became a cookbook tracing the story of their romance, starting with the tacos Ned once cooked for Ariel in his dingy basement apartment in Chicago. This is what success looks like in the creator economy: A group of friends becomes a cast of characters, strip-mines lives and relationships for content and, in the process, turns into a corporation, with payroll to process and liabilities to consider. (It’s entirely possible that the Stalinesque removal of Fulmer from certain videos is rooted in legal concerns, not moral ones.) Their various obligations to fans, employees and one another had been neatly aligned, but the misbehavior of one Guy threw it all into disarray. To fans, taking Fulmer out back like Old Yeller made perfect sense, because it would return this content universe to a state of harmony.

If those chuckling at the video did not know what the Try Guys meant to fans, the fans may not have known what they, collectively, looked like to the Try Guys. In a 2020 interview, Kornfeld shared that the group’s audience was between 70 and 80 percent female and very young, with the 13-to-18 and 18-to-25 demographics in the lead. Another Guy, Keith Habersberger, explained the group’s origins in a 2014 video made for BuzzFeed, where they all worked. After discovering that videos about “guys understanding a woman’s identity” were performing well on Facebook, they decided to make one, and filmed themselves trying on Victoria’s Secret underwear. The numbers were so good that they went back to the well — this time, sexy Halloween costumes. An even bigger hit. “We joked that we came up with the world’s largest and fastest focus group,” Kornfeld said. “We followed their signal and let them inform and refine the show.”

Over the years, that audience has developed an oddly codependent relationship with YouTube. According to Google’s research, the platform is especially popular for young people seeking to de-stress; some 69 percent of Gen Z say they often return to “comfort” channels that they find soothing. The Try Guys, like everyone making a living online, were inevitably shaped by their audience’s desires: They and their fans all had their hands on the Ouija board, and together they conjured a nontoxic brand of masculinity — until Fulmer flicked the lights on, exposing the fantasy.

Seen this way, the video feels more mercenary: Its severe mood was, in part, a performance, meant to reassure a world-historically anxious and distrustful audience that they had not been led astray for the last eight years. This message was far more explicit on the group’s podcast. “You feel like there was a level of trust you had with us, as your favorite hashtag nontoxic boys,” Kornfeld said on a recent episode. “People have called us their comfort channel. Now you have all these questions of: Was it always a lie?”

Maybe that’s why the whole thing felt a bit like a hostage video, as if there were people just offscreen with rifles and high expectations. There sort of were; they just weren’t in the same room. They were on the other side of a camera and miles of fiber-optic cable, scattered across the planet, watching through millions of one-way mirrors, seeking something more than entertainment. And the Try Guys had found themselves in a position where, however shocked and betrayed their audience felt, their own livelihoods depended on appearing equally distressed.

It is often reported that some astonishing share of American children would like to become YouTubers. It’s not hard to imagine kids peering into their screens and seeing something like freedom — the dream of getting paid just for being yourself. Yet the bizarre tone of the Try Guys’ video suggests a more disturbing dynamic: that as young people congregate, separately and alone, seeking comfort from strangers, they are in fact constructing a prison for their idols, one fashioned out of eyeballs, anxiety and BetterHelp ads. Maybe fame has always been this way. But fans’ emotions are no longer filtered through ticket or album sales; they’re heard directly, constantly, at all hours, on all the platforms people visit to generate and extinguish bad feelings in a never-ending cycle. You can imagine Ned Fulmer watching the video, seeing his former friends solemnly tamping down the freshly laid dirt, all in an effort to mollify an audience of strangers, and realizing that however badly he may have messed up, he was also finally free.

Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTube.

Willy Staley is a story editor for the magazine. He last wrote about billionaires.