Netflix's Hype House is a morbid tale of what happens when your 15 minutes of fame is up

Vox

"To understand what’s going on in this bizarre, entirely-uneventful-but-also-sort-of-fascinating television show, it’s important to know why it exists in the first place," says Rebecca Jennings. "Almost exactly two years ago, a splashy feature in the New York Times introduced the arrival of the Hype House, a collective of mostly white, attractive teenagers who had recently become famous on an app that was only just beginning to be part of the national lexicon. It was part of a wave of Los Angeles social media mansions to pop up in the first half of 2020, all with the same purpose: to use each other’s clout to build more of it. TikTok, at that point, only had a handful of stars to break out beyond the app — the Hype House’s Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, and D’Amelio’s boyfriend Chase Hudson among them — but within the app itself, more and more teenagers started growing their audiences to hundreds of thousands, then millions, of followers. And when you get a taste of fame and decide you want more of it, you move to L.A...The problem here is that the Hype House has been hemorrhaging its most famous members since practically the beginning, and at this point (filming took place in early 2021) most of what’s left are the members who haven’t become famous enough to break out on their own." Jennings adds: "This was always the plan. From the very beginning, every single TikTok house member aspired to have their own reality show. Most TikTokers don’t pull in enough money to cover rent at a Los Angeles mansion, even when they’ve banded together as a group. They need to set their sights on something bigger: something like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, a show about people largely considered to 'have no talent' but who are watchable nonetheless, and which can serve as a springboard for its stars to become household names and entrepreneurs. Influencer management companies were willing to front some of the cost of a house in the hopes that the brand would become more than just the sum of its members, perhaps turning into an incubator for up-and-coming social media darlings...But reality shows take time, money, and access to produce, and time moves a lot faster in the influencer world. Most content houses don’t even stick around long enough for a deal to get signed, never mind actually film a season." ALSO: It’s almost like Hype House was made with the explicit purpose of convincing teenagers it sucks to be social media famous.