We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jarred White. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jarred below.
Hi Jarred, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
The review process is startlingly complicated and individualized system. Some strive for objectivity (which I believe is impossible to achieve), others prefer pure reactivity, and still others gravitate toward a mix of informational and interpersonal. I discovered my preferred style—which places a special emphasis on assessing characterization and a vigorous examination of plot structure—while going through a dual-concentration Masters program in English literature & rhetoric.
The perspectives I found most useful were the writings of Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Oscar Wilde, and René Descartes. I would recommend these authors to anyone who wants to understand how subjectivity and epistemology (an examination of different types of knowledge) can enrich our lives.
I probably should have absorbed these texts via an audiobook format, as I tend to retain information better if I listen to it and enjoying these authors through audiobooks would have greatly sped up the process.
Reading these philosophers taught me the most essential skill that any critic and/or rhetorician should have: You can always go deeper…but there comes a point where you have to determine your own bedrock of thought.
For example, you could analyze a character by how much you personally enjoyed them. But that’s only one layer of analysis. You could just as easily examining the author/creator feels about the character, or how general audiences have regarded the character, or how the character interacts with others, or what archetype the character fits into (if any).
This plethora of possible routes (which are all equally valid), means that the critic’s greatest obstacle is choosing a path. Learning to commit to your style, while being fully aware of the pros/cons of the alternative choices that are running concurrently to the one you’ve chosen, is extremely difficult.
Although, for me personally, my greatest challenge has always been…well, brevity.
Jarred, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Jarred White, I am currently enrolled in Alaska Pacific University’s English MFA program. At the beginning of my enrollment (summer 20230, my career options were…limited, as many English grads can attest.
I didn’t have a teaching credential, which left me dead in the water. Instead of doing the smart/stable thing—going back to substitute teaching—I decided to put my writing skills to the test.
I returned to a channel that I had set up a few years back, which I called, Reviewed2Death. I had already created 2 Horror movie reviews in previous years but they had seen little success.
After enrolling in the MFA program, and with few other prospects to cling to, put my nose to the grindstone and started doing something with more mass appeal: reviewing TV shows.
To my delight, I was able to reach 1,000 subscribers (and monetization) in two weeks, which is an extremely unusual growth rate. I credit this explosive progress to the show “King of the Hill,” which catapulted me to levels I never would have thought possible.
While we may think of Youtube as a platform to get news, enjoy imaginative animations, and a thousand other things, I have discovered that there is an enormous audience for critical analysis. You have likely been drawn into such videos yourself. A video that charts the growth of Walter White’s ego, essays on “Murder, She Wrote,” or even something like “why didn’t Thanos just double the universe’s resources?”
I am currently working on reviewing all the episodes of King of the Hill in chronological order but am eager to find another series that people are excited to see picked apart. My sights are set on King of the Hill’s sister show, Daria, as well as Avatar: The Last Airbender, Hazbin Hotel, South Park, Bojack Horseman, and similar series.
What distinguishes me from my peers is that I fully embrace subjectivity and my own opinions.
Many channels will to cling to objectivity—listing off a set of facts and general information that you could get from a Wikipedia page—with very little of their own thoughts present in the video. To my eye, this strikes me as a way of granting the reviewer a greater sense of authority. It creates a “you can’t argue with me because these are just the facts” environment.
But Youtube channels tend to thrive when the comment section is lively. So if I were to say an opinion that a commenter believes is “wrong,” then they WILL tell me, which drives engagement and allows the video to grow.
And, in a way, I think I am most proud of how my honest thoughts brings out such vivid conversations.
Even statements that you wouldn’t think would cause discussion, something like, “that character’s shorter hairstyle is great, I think I prefer it over their usual look”—will bring out twenty people who say things like, “UH, actually, my cousin has cancer and her hair is really short right now…and I don’t think it’s very nice that you’re saying that her cancer look is preferable to healthy hair…just so you know.” That may sound like a negative comment, but that person took the time out of their day to share that information with me, and you don’t share something that personal unless you’re extremely engaged with whatever you’re viewing.
And I think that gets to what the main thing I want people to know about my channel: I have been consistently blown away with how honest and forthwith my viewers have been, which I think demonstrates the strong rapport I’ve been able to foster on my channel.
Presenting honesty (in a compassionate way) and demonstrating vigorous thought tends to bring out the same from your audience, which Youtube greatly rewards. Plus, it’s a whole lotta fun.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
You have to be willing to accept what does (and does not) have the possibility of success.
It is all too easy to become hyper-fixated on one particular topic/niche/style, just because you’re hellbent on making your extremely focused idea work.
For example, let’s say I wanted to review a crime show, and let’s say I’m a HUGE fan of the show NCIS. So I start making videos on it and I find…the views aren’t coming in. But whatever, I ignore those warning signs and keep making videos on the show. I’m now hoping that one of my videos will kick off but have no clear idea of how to do that. As the years go on, the attention never materializes and my channel dies.
Now, let’s turn back time. Let’s go back to when this hypothetical channel was fresh. Instead of jumping straight into NCIS without any idea of how my videos would perform, I start looking around on Youtube, Instagram, and Reddit for NCIS content. And guess what, I find? There isn’t a single video that has over 50,000 views. That tells me that even BIG channels have failed to draw in an audience with this show, meaning that the best of the best couldn’t make the subject work.
But! While doing research I notice that videos of Law & Order often get 3 million views, and not just from one channel either. There’s actually a huge viewership of people who want to see Law & Order examined. So I start making videos on that show…and oh my gosh, people are starting to watch my videos, whoo!
Now, there IS a risk of the opposite problem occurring, where a subject is SO saturated with content that it becomes impossible for anyone to find your channel. This happens a lot with gaming/Let’s Play channels, as the barrier of entry for making those videos is extremely low.
So you have to try to find a happy medium. You want a “market” that isn’t so populated that you may as well be a grain of rice in a twenty pound bag…but you also don’t want to be a grain of rice in an abandoned alleyway.
This mindset also applies for artists, podcast hosts, and anyone who creates content that interacts with other creative media.
This will mean that you need to be aware of trends and possibilities! If no one has spared a thought for “Between the Lions” for +15 years, then maybe you’re better off talking about something like “Reading Rainbow”…although it is possible that you COULD draw the public’s attention back to something they’ve forgotten about and “corner the market” on that discussion, but that that sort of effort would be better attempted once you already have a large audience and aren’t trying to “break in” to your field.
It’s a tricky balance but one that can make or break your creative efforts.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
“The customer is always right.”
Back when I ran a small gaming channel (between 2011-2018), I had a group of dedicated fans (about 10 people) who would always tune into my streams and provide insight into whatever game I was playing.
It was a fantastic time and I honestly treasured their feedback. However, I became so subservient to their tastes and preferences that I would shy away from projects that I wanted to try. I was terrified of losing the small group I had, even though I had the opportunity to (potentially) grow in a new direction.
Worse still, I disabled any ads on my streams because I didn’t want to make my viewers miss anything fun or sit through annoying ads. But that meant that I had to entirely depend on viewer donations for revenue—which only one person ever did consistently.
It was an unsustainable situation and I eventually became so frustrated with the amount of effort I was putting into the channel for practically zero returns.
These days, I still try to conform to what my viewers want to see…but I do so in accordance with the amount of views a video will get. If someone comments on a video, asking me to do an incredibly obscure show that they would LOVE to have me review, then I need to weigh the amount of effort against the potential reward.
For example, I once conducted a community poll on my current channel, asking viewers what new show I should try reviewing. They selected Futurama. I made a few videos on the show but they only got a fraction of what my King of the Hill reviews did.
This means that I had to dismiss the notion of, “the customer is always right” because even if someone directly tells you what they would enjoy, that is not an indicator of a successful idea.
The more appropriate advice, which may amuse some people, comes from “Spongebob,” where Mr. Krabs remarks, “the money is always right.” That may sound like greedy sentiment but it is surprisingly effective for determining what sort of content you should be focusing on.
If a thousand people ask for one particular video, but ten thousand people silently click on a different kind of video, then you would be wise to lean into what the trend is telling you.
This obviously doesn’t apply if you’re just making videos for fun, but for anyone who wants to actually make productive use of their skills, then the money is, indeed, always right.
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Honour Harry – [email protected] and https://www.honourharry.com/