You’re making a soap opera…on TikTok

Isn’t this app for kids?

I don’t know if any of you have been inundated with “skit” comedians on TikTok over the past few years. From ‘The Nursery Nurse’ to ‘Bistro Huddy’ and the ‘Shawnaverse’, there are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of people standing in front of their cameras in wigs, acting out full narratives for the delight and emotional investment of millions.

I wish I could say I didn’t get it.

The internet is once again eating its own tail. In the early 2010s, skit comedy became something relatively popular amongst children. Eventually, key characters and motifs became foundational to these channels, and you saw longrunning narrative form around these people. Look at the infamous Shane Dawson, who spoke candidly about his desire to mimic shows like ‘MadTV’ (1995-2009) in how they created memorable comedic characters. In retrospect, Dawson’s attachment to one of television’s most offensive skit comedy shows should have been a major red flag. But children are not discerning viewers, and it wasn’t like actual supervision online was the norm at the time.

The same has been seen on TikTok. Creators started out creating skits in the “POV” format. Immensely popular, these are front-on scenes where you may be cast as the silent girlfriend, the bored classmate, or the beleaguered best friend. Often, these skits chose not to actually represent a non-visible character’s point of view, which is where the soapiness came from. They became pure narrative fiction.

Because people see the internet as communal, one of the funniest things about skits online is that every successful one will have identical remakes within a few hours. Word-for-word remakes of popular videos will sometimes surpass the original, and despite the app’s former obsession with credit regarding choreography, this trend seems to be considered fair game. TikTok is not a great place for any kind of community fostering, or creativity in general.

This trend seems to have sprung up parallel to creators who remake videos with the purpose of mocking others on the app, while claiming their pre-teen bullying is “just parody”. I find this inconsistency to be laughable, but very in line with the app’s culture of teen brattiness performed by adults pushing thirty.

But certain creators have definitely sprung up as representative of something more…elevated. Comparatively. Still aesthetically ugly and often more than a little obvious, but there’s something a touch more sophisticated in the storytelling. They have arching narratives across multiple videos. Plots that have now spanned years. Near daily content feeding into subplots and thematic tension.

It would be fair to say that these influencers are making the modern equivalent to soap operas. ‘The Nursery Nurse’ has become a full blown melodrama focused primarily on the romantic pairings of one woman in about a dozen wigs - a far cry from the workplace skits she built her platform on. Which is not me complaining. It is entertaining to watch these short, tense conversations that always end with some quippy line or dramatic reveal. But it does have me questioning…why.

The ‘Shawnaverse’ is probably the easiest video series to explain why. It’s pure drama. Centered around the fictionalised life and strife of TikTok creator @ShawnaTheMom, it mostly focuses on the adult relationships and dynamics that shift after having children. Early videos were more one-offs and acted more as parables about how to treat new mothers, but as time went on, these stories stretched across multiple videos and saw a cast of characters settle in.

One thing I want to touch on in regards to the ‘Shawnaverse’ is that the shift here happened, in part, because ShawnaTheMom started making her own take on a trend of videos where self-centred mother-in-laws (MIL) were used as antagonists. I can’t say for certain that she started this trend, but in 2022/2023, this became extremely popular as a video template. MIL does something selfish, the mother protagonist subverts her will, MIL leaves in a huff. There’s dozens of accounts on TikTok that have built their entire persona off this format.

Most have not managed to shift these stories into a larger, more complex arc.

Much like ‘The Nursery Nurse’, these changes have led to a more sprawling universe and storytelling that has engaged a fanbase that treats these plotlines with the same dignity and respect as traditional television. You have creators who traditionally talk about whatever shows are popular, discussing “Barb’s narcissistic personality” and “Jennifer’s growth moment” in the same way they talk about ‘The White Lotus’ or ‘The Last of Us’. Because people are watching these videos the way they watch television.

In many ways, soap opera storytelling being whittled down to the dramatic scenes and made for cheap/free on a smartphone is understandable. This is ultimately just the equivalent to your grandmother’s “stories”. But I do wonder what this means for our future media diets.

On one hand, maybe nothing. The boom of multi-hour video recounts of anything and everything clearly shows there is an appetite for long-form content. Television isn’t dead and streaming has already made its mark in our expectations of pacing - to the point where I had to question whether the first half of ‘Hacks’ Season Four was poorly paced or I was just used to instant narrative gratification (it was poorly paced).

On the other…it really does feel like these videos have cut out much of the “groundwork” of watching television. Or at least, they’ve serviced an audience that would have traditionally tuned on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ (1987-present) or the like. What does this mean for short form content in the future? Did we give up on ‘Quibi’ (2018-2020) too soon?

Ultimately, I just think this is a neat little phenomenon on an app I do need to wean myself off of. I find myself watching these videos all the time, and it makes me feel old. This trend might be a that the users on the app are aging up and so we’ll probably have a new app in the next 2-3 years - if not sooner. Once the content on a social media site becomes too adult focused, the teens find a new place to hang. Then all that will be left are thirty-year-old-minors and their stories.