Are You Not Explained!?

With Vox and BuzzFeed porting to TV, we’re facing an excess of multimedia explanation.

Lately, media companies have become content providers for streaming services in an attempt to soak up subscription money like remoras on sharks. Two new shows, Explained from Vox.com and Follow This by BuzzFeed News, are now available on Netflix. Can the hyper-digestible digital content that these companies are best known for translate to television? It might be more difficult when ‘television’ sometimes just means another open Chrome tab and the new shows are competing directly with Game of Thrones.

Vox’s Explained is meant to be bingeable. Although the episodes clock in at around 20 minutes — roughly twice the length of the website’s longer YouTube content — the seamless transition to the next episode isn’t all too different from the way short videos are consumed online: first intentionally and then passively. Vox tapped a variety of celebrity narrators for single-topic episodes including comedian Aasif Mandvi (on cricket), Black-ish’s Yara Shahidi (on astrology) and Kyle MacLachlan (on the world’s water crisis).

The explainer format is Vox’s bread and butter, back to the days of its launch as so many “stacks of cards.” In Explained, the data visuals we’ve come to expect from the outlet are interspersed with talking-head experts and a collage of contemporary newscasts and historical b-roll. But presented on Netflix, which has no designs on being an information search engine, it’s all the more obvious that Vox’s content responds to questions that we already know the answers to. The ‘Can We Live Forever?’ episode is narrated by Kristen Bell. The answer is, no, we can’t. Welcome to The Explained Place.

Vox’s show confuses explanation with summary. The crucial issues that the series tackles are ultimately subjective, however the creators try to shoehorn them into chirpy, clinical show-and-tell presentations. When Jerry Springer narrates ‘Political Correctness’, one can only expect to come away with the prevailing definition of the term as well as a recap of the debate around it. Analysis or criticism is beyond the purview.

Take ‘The Female Orgasm’ for example. The episode might as well be an “explanation” of how little we know about the subject. And if Ezra Klein’s name in the first frame of the credits doesn’t jar you from contemplation of the fictional G-Spot, Vox’s semiotic inability to acknowledge the ambiguity of its chosen subjects will.

There is certainly value in Explained — including putting a diverse range of experts on screen and avoiding both-sides punditry — but it’s not of the conclusive variety that its title promises. The show scratches the same synaptic itch as Quora or Yahoo Answers — spaces of self-soothing inquiry rather than critical investigation. Next season: Are snakes real????????? [Ed. Note: In my opinion, they are.]

“Online advice forums express commonality through circulating the same problems and the same solutions — not advice, really, but more like a representation thereof,” writes Tatum Dooley in Real Life. Similarly, Explained does not offer an explanation, but the mimesis of one.

Meanwhile, BuzzFeed’s Follow This fits squarely in the documentary format. As with VICE’s eponymous HBO show, the journalist is used as the narrator to propel the episode forward. A single journalist tackles one topic, like ASMR or Men’s Rights Activism. Each episode ends with Carrie Bradshaw-like footage of the journalist at their desk typing their feature story, which runs on BuzzFeed dot com.

These stories are compellingly and sensitively told. It’s a solid look at reporting in the Internet age, starting with its social media-esque name. In a particularly memorable moment, BuzzFeed culture writer Scaachi Koul interviews the Men’s Rights activist Karen Straughan, who had previously attacked Koul online.

“Do you still think I’m a cunt?” Koul asks when they sit down together for the first time.

“Kind of, yeah,” Straughan responds.

But for a show interspersed with stock footage of the BuzzFeed newsroom and phone calls between the journalist and their editor (wasn’t Slack supposed to kill this?), it doesn’t actually increase knowledge of journalistic ethics or inquiry. Some of the most touching parts of the show — interviews with domestic violence victims, members of the intersex community, and parents of overdose victims — are the most difficult journalistically, in terms of figuring out how to accurately represent the stories of others.

Follow This is a show about journalists, but without the voices of their subjects predominating, journalists aren’t that interesting. It’s neither the reality TV (confession booth!) view of ELLE magazine as afforded by The City nor the ethical quagmire of The Fourth Estate. The show’s use of newsroom footage and editor-journalist interactions seem tacked on. The show doesn’t delve into what the editorial process entails: transcribing, losing your taxi cab receipts, crying, Seamless. Most of all, there’s little of the internal ethical debate that goes along with the framing of complex subjects. Some things can’t be visualized on TV.

The new shows demonstrate something about where we get our explanations from these days. Not everyone can make it through a magazine cover story on reparations, and that’s ok. There are also #gametheory Twitter threads and Wikipedia articles and daily podcasts all offering information faster than sitting through 20 minutes of video. You can pick what platform journalists talk to you on and if you see their faces or not. This variety does not seem to change the fundamental quality of the reporting, however, only its visual expression.

The infotainment shows target a different audience than words on a screen, and so the videos can serve as advertisements for redundant web articles and the news brand as a whole, inspiring further devotion (and revenue). Perhaps the multimedia explanation-fest is just a business decision. Facebook’s video push fell apart. Netflix is now overspending to create a content monopoly. TV is thus the easiest platform to monetize, then comes podcasts, and finally the most arduous, traffic-based web advertising, where Vox and BuzzFeed began. While we might not need to learn superficial information about blockchain all over again — the Wikipedia wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented — who can blame media companies for trying to survive another quarter?

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