There is an exploding industry now of little (and big) production companies responsible for the youtube channels of Korean celebrities and former celebrities and b-list celebrities. You can just imagine that everyone even remotely famous has by now been “pitched” on one of these contracts.
It seems to me that they are a pretty brutal business sometimes. The channels make almost all of their money from cringey product placements for very low profit margins, but that’s not even the most off-putting aspect.
It’s just that a lot of times there is such a whiff of desperation and falseness to it that it is doing more harm than good for the famous ‘host’ – and I don’t mean “host” in the sense of host/parasite lol.
Like a lot of people, I have seen Mijoo on the variety shows and like her a lot. She’s hilarious and charming and down to Earth. So I started watching her channel, produced by a company called OOTB, which handles a lot of celebrity content. Something feels a little bitter about it.
Her sense of humor (shown in all the variety shows) is very much self-deprecating — she makes fun of herself, and doesn’t hesitate to embarrass herself. But on her show, it feels like the producers are constantly trying to just make fun of her and/or humiliate her. It’s not funny when it’s your own producers. I don’t know, to me it feels like a toxic abusive relationship. Not the world’s worst job but an emotionally grueling way to make a couple grand a month.
I could say the same or similar about some of the other celebrity youtube channels, where the host is the butt of the joke and put into countless outrageous situations, which often don’t land. I am not saying it’s an evil business model, but it must feel pretty dire for some of the participants.
I guess it’s part and parcel of the bigger picture of Korean media, where artists are indentured and subordinate cogs in the machine, at least until they become so big that they ARE the machine. It’s not just that the volume of video being produced has exploded since the pandemic, but also that the quality of it is really shifting in bizarre ways. An infinite firehose of parasocial addiction material.
Well that’s my rant. Thoughts?
submitted by /u/Cragalckumus
[link] [comments]
