I Got Paid To Make A YouTube Show! Here's What I Learned

This entry in my continuing series about a working writer, writing about writing, is about the time Macaulay Culkin hired me to write a YouTube show. Yes, it's true, someone paid me money to write and produce a YouTube show, which is, I guess, the dream? I mean, it's definitely someone's dream I'm just not totally sure it's mine. So how did I end up making a YouTube show for Macaulay Culkin? Well...

Back in 2017, Macaulay Culkin launched Bunny Ears, a short-form comedy site that was meant to satirize celebrity lifestyle sites like Goop. It was the most fun project I've ever worked on in my entire life. I met so many cool female comedians because they hired a ton of talented women, and they paid better than any other short-form comedy site (pro-tip most of them don't pay anything, the well-known ones pay around $30 per article).

One of the best things about Bunny Ears was that there was lots of room for experimentation. It was new, and they had big ideas and general directions they wanted to go in, but there weren't a lot of set rules. I got to write my first television pilot and pitch it to Macaulay Culkin! It was like Buffy The Vampire Slayer meets The Hallmark Channel. A woman who inherits a bakery learns that she's also inherited a portal to hell. There were puppets! It was ambitious.

At one point, Bunny Ears teamed up with a YouTube studio to start producing shows. I decided I wanted to get in on that action. One of my policies with work is to never say no to anything unless I physically cannot manage the time. I never say no to things just because I've never done them before. I watched a lot of YouTube shows, mainly a lot of stuff on Cracked like OPCD, and After Hours, I figured how hard could it be? I can pump out an episode a week for 8 weeks, probably. This is like watching Usain Bolt run a mile and saying yeah, I can probably do that like two minutes faster.

Writing, filming, and editing, a YouTube show in a week, while also doing other work, is a tall fucking order, you guys. It was a BAD idea. Don't do this. Don't be like me. Do you know why most polished, well written, YouTube shows update bi-weekly or once a month? Because that's how long it takes! And they usually have multiple people working on them. This was literally all me.

Jesus Herman Christ, I was stupid. I filmed the pilot to make sure I was capable of making the show at all, and I thought it turned out pretty good. I used some research that I loved and had been trying to wriggle into a Cracked article for months, but it just never quite worked. The Bunny-Ears staff were crazy about it and ordered a full season of the show right away.

We signed a contract for a ten-episode first season, but after eight, it was pretty clear the show wasn't taking off, and also the workload was breaking all of the bones in my body, so I said, "Hey guys how about just 8" and they very nicely agreed.

I made the show nostalgia-themed because I thought that would appeal to Bunny Ears' core audience of people who were really into Macaulay Culkin. Unfortunately, these people were mainly concerned about why I wasn't Macaulay Culkin, and where was Macaulay Culkin, and also did I know him, and were we friends? I think part of the reason the show didn't do very well is that many of the people following Bunny Ears were just in it for Mack stuff, and if Mack wasn't in it, they weren't interested.

(Obligatory disclaimer I always have to add when I talk about Bunny Ears stuff: I was in a few meetings with Mack. He treated his employees super well, even gave us a Christmas bonus one year, which is unheard of for contractors. He seemed very nice and yes, normal).

Another weird issue with the show came from the YouTube studio in LA that Bunny Ears was working with. I did 99% of the editing for the show as part of my contract. I chose that option because it paid more, but honestly, I'm not a fantastic editor. I used iMovie to edit the whole thing, and Bunny Ears Editor-In-Cheif would occasionally add in an extra graphic or effect if they thought it was needed. I think the YouTube studio designed the opening credits, but other than that, they only had one major impact on the show, and it's a weird one.

After I had already completed the first two episodes, they informed us that I could never have a clip take up a full screen. If I wanted to show clips at all, it could only be tiny ones, along with my reaction to them. If we didn't do this, the videos would be dinged for copyright infringement and taken down. We went back and forth on this a little, and I tried to explain fair use and critique and how tons of other shows use this, and yes, they get challenged but rarely completely taken off YouTube. In the end, they were a big LA YouTube studio who knew things, and I was a woman who had seen a YouTube once, so I figured they were right and reedited the second episode the way they wanted, but it looks super weird and continues to look weird for the whole series.

I think the episode I linked at the top of the article is the best episode of the show. It has a good cold open, it's on a topic I know a lot about and have a LOT of opinions on, and it's got puppets. Apparently, I'm really into puppets? The most popular episode of the show is this one. It's got almost 10K views, and that's because Mack went on some other big show and got them to link to me (again Mack is very nice). I think the bait and switch in the title also helped.

Many of the comments on this episode are about how my sound sucks, which is apparently really important to the discerning YouTuber viewer. I filmed most of the show in a loft, using a comforter clipped to a backdrop bar to muffle the echo. I also didn't have a mic at all; I just use the one attached to my iPhone, which I filmed the whole thing with.

My total investment in the show was maybe $100 for a lighting kit, a backdrop kit that came three backdrops (green, black, and white) and various props for the show, including a cake that said Women! on it and a bottle of cheap champaign that also served as that day's craft services. There was talk of a season two for Rewind, Rethink. I was planning a trip to LA anyway, and the head of Bunny Ears talked about possibly meeting up with me, and another writer for the site he thought might be interested in hosting the show if we moved the production to LA and more of the work was done by the YouTube studio. Something I was very in favor of.

The writing was always my favorite part of the project. I'm a writer, I don't hate performing, but I'm always more comfortable off camera. I think I could have been better if I wasn't so exhausted from putting out a show a week, but we'll never know. Obviously, Bunny Ears is still out there, but they're no longer updating regularly. It's sad, but what a great ride while it lasted! No more Bunny Ears means no season 2, though.

I'm not sure if Bunny Ears owns Rewind Rethink? I went back and checked my email as I was writing this, and we never had a formal contract. I'm apparently also supposed to be getting 40% of the ad revenue from the show, but with most of the episodes having only 2K views, I'm probably not missing much. It was cool to work with people in LA on a video project. The studio was based in Beverly Hills, which made me feel fancy by association. Would I ever do YouTube again? Yes. Would I do it exactly the same way obviously not. Some days I was writing a show in between takes of filming a show, and if I wasn't doing that, I was editing the last episode in-between takes filming the current episode.

I won't miss the one guy who commented: "How you Doin" on every single one of my videos, or the occasional "would smash" that confused the hell out of me because I weigh 200 pounds if anyone is getting smashed in this interaction it's you bitch. I will miss getting to do something that weird every day. One time I got in a fight with my husband (because I was overworked), and I was crying and saying over the phone, "I just don't think you take my job seriously" as I glued a Chicken McNugget to a tiny popsicle cross.

Learn from my mistakes. Take things 60% slower then you think you should. Invest in better equipment. Don't read the comments. Take any help you can with editing, writing, or performing. Maybe do have a friend read the comments and pass along the helpful ones. Oh, and if you get the chance, work for Macaulay Culkin! I highly recommend it!