Five of Variety’s inaugural 10 Creators to Watch gathered at SXSW in Austin, Texas, for a conversation about building careers outside Hollywood’s traditional system, and why, increasingly, they’re not sure they want in.
Part of Variety Next Generation Entertainment presented by Google TV, the panel was moderated by Variety reporter Selome Hailu and brought together sketch comedian Sabrina Brier, interviewer and “Recess Therapy” creator Julian Shapiro-Barnum, YouTube video essayist Mina Le, “Are You Okay?” host Bri Morales and character comedian Vinny Thomas. All five traced their origins to the pandemic, when shuttered theaters and stalled productions pushed them online out of necessity and found something that stuck.
For Shapiro-Barnum, what started as a stepping stone has become the destination. After a TV show pitch fell flat in 2022, he turned his attention back to digital and is now launching what he’s billing as YouTube’s first full-blown late-night show. “That was heartbreaking then,” he said. “There are so many gatekeepers and so many barriers of entry — it’s much more interesting to self-produce and build my own team.”
Le has watched the same shift play out in her own career. She described going from treating YouTube as a launchpad into traditional media to watching the two industries move toward each other. “I think traditional gatekeepers are now saying, we actually are very interested in digital,” she said.
Thomas was equally clear-eyed about where digital fits into the bigger picture. He described starting out in Chicago doing improv and working at the aquarium, posting videos during the pandemic simply because that was how comedians were performing. “It felt very local at the time,” he said. “But ultimately, everyone can see the internet.”
His videos caught the attention of Billy Eichner, who cast him in “Bros” as, in Thomas’s own words, “gay Twitter witch number three.” He was ultimately cut from the film, but the connection led to a working relationship with co-director Nick Stoller, who has brought him into subsequent projects.
The group spoke frankly about the algorithm’s grip on their creative output. It rewards consistency and punishes experimentation, and the psychological cost of chasing it, they said, is real. Thomas warned of a very specific creative hazard. “There are people who will have gone dead behind the eyes,” he said, “because they know what they have to do and they’ll get up there and do it, but the light is gone.”
Brier said she has learned to zoom out from moment-to-moment metrics and take stock of the longer arc. “Where was I when I first started? What am I doing today that I would never have believed? Are we headed in the right direction?” she said. “That’s how I don’t go crazy.”
On brand partnerships, an increasingly central revenue stream, the panel was honest about the trade-offs. Le warned against short-term thinking. “If you lose trust with your audience, your career is going to be two years,” she said.
Shapiro-Barnum went a step further, zeroing in on a funding problem that doesn’t have a clean answer yet. “Celebrity Substitute,” his show in which celebrities teach at public elementary schools for a day, requires a crew of 60 people and a full production day, costs that are only possible to cover through brand integration baked into the storytelling.
For creators who want to retain ownership of their work, he argued, that deal is currently the only one on the table. “To make something and own something, you have to sell something,” he said. “And I have questions about that.”
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