The “Good Mythical Morning” stars tackled their YouTube Red series with a flat-out sprint back to the comedy tropes of their early days.
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For their most ambitious online video yet, YouTubers Rhett and Link went back to their roots.
The pair, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, rose to prominence with their daily YouTube variety show “Good Mythical Morning,” in which they challenge each other to eat strange foods and riff on internet oddities. But when Google’s YouTube began bankrolling its stars to make shows and movies for its subscription service, McLaughlin and Neal spied the chance to do more of the sketches, music videos and local commercials they originally loved.
The result was “Buddy System,” a scripted series inventing a “fictionalized world…behind ‘Good Mythical Morning’ that brings in all this stuff that we really want to do,” McLaughlin said.
“Buddy System” is one of many premium shows found on YouTube Red, Google’s experiment to see whether superfans are willing to pay upfront for longer, sleeker videos by the YouTubers they’ve grown accustomed to watching free for years. It also puts YouTube stars at the helm of pricey, long-form movies and shows on a site most folks still associate with cat videos.
But employing a Netflix-like subscription model isn’t without its risks. McLaughlin said asking fans to pay for the content they’re used to getting for free, “without a doubt, that’s going to be a challenge. ”
“It is taking the time for people to get that,” he said.
