Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
A Netflix show about BuzzFeed News reporters on the job immediately sounds like the most annoying thing ever created. But, surprisingly, it’s not. Follow This plays as sort of a millennial feminist 60 Minutes. It’s the kind of thing a high-school social studies teacher could show his AP class, except for maybe the sex-worker episode, and even that could work depending on the district. The show feels of-the-moment without being particularly hip. Oh no, I sort of found it interesting.
The first sentence spoken by a reporter in Follow This’ first installment is “I love my job.” This immediately made me think, “How did she get a job? Why don’t I have a job? What is a job? I really need to get a job.” But after brushing off the usual wave of self-pity that I feel after consuming any kind of culture in any medium, I gave the show a proper assessment.
Even though I haven’t had a proper benefits-paying job since the Clinton Administration, the jobs of all the reporters in Follow This reminded me of my work as an alternative-newsweekly beat reporter in Chicago, back before the dawn of time. Unlike me back then, these reporters have cell phones, speedy Internet access, and a seemingly unlimited travel budget, but the essence of the work remains the same: Walking a beat and talking to people. It’s a romantic vision of journalistic work that hasn’t much changed since Hildy Johnson was His Girl Friday.
The interchangeable drones of Vice News, so ably parodied by Bill Hader and Fred Armisen’s brilliant satirical show Documentary Now, give off a feel of “I was there to witness history, it was dangerous, it was awesome, and also I was there.” By contrast, the BuzzFeed reporters on Follow This just seem to go about their daily work. While the BuzzFeed brand gets plastered all over the show, it’s mostly content to stay in the background. One reporter, in a segment on black survivalists, fires a gun and watches a crazy lady skin a turkey, but she obviously doesn’t enjoy herself. She even refreshingly, reveals that she doesn’t have a driver’s license. The BuzzFeed reporters mostly provide down-to-earth contrast in a business where self-promotion often seems to be the only priority.
The show’s “main character,” inasmuch as she appears in two of the six available segments, is BuzzFeed culture reporter Scaachi Koul. She’s definitely the most “me me me” of the featured journalists. In a semi-interesting episode on sketchy “Men’s Rights” activists, she wastes several precious minutes talking about her TV punditry and Twitter drama. But even though she seems like kind of an annoying snob, she also comes across as funny, self-aware, intelligent, and keenly curious. She’s not so self-absorbed that she can’t listen to others.
Follow This does a lot of listening. The show espouses a progressive agenda, but without excessive didacticism. Every episode comes at its chosen issue from a variety of interesting perspectives. A segment on sex worker’s rights also features a long interview with a victim of sex trafficking. Koul, in her Men’s Rights episode, visits a Dallas shelter for male victims of spousal abuse. You’re rarely sure who the reporters are going to talk to next.
The best episode of the first batch centers on a reporter for BuzzFeed Germany who’s clearly outraged that hermaphrodites, or, as they’re now known, “intersex persons,” are still having their ovaries or testes removed at birth, essentially castrating them. But she manages to keep her outrage contained under a cool, professional façade, which makes her all the more effective as a reporter.
Not only does she conduct deeply moving and enlightening interviews with intersex people and their families, but she also talks to doctors, and, in a fascinating interview, the German Minister Of Justice, who traces the surgeries back to the gender policies of the Third Reich. Just like the best independent weekly stories used to do, the piece pursues an unusual social-justice agenda while also telling a deeply human story.
I found the infrastructure of the piece interesting and nostalgic, too. The German reporter cruises around Berlin on her bike or via tram, pounding the beat. This is her city. At some point, as in every episode, she rings up her editor (as if!), who, offscreen, provides some very helpful and unpretentious coaching. The reporting continues, she sums it up while typing alongside a canal, and then she closes her laptop, presumably to go about living her exciting, integrity-filled, and decently-paid life in the big city. Those were the days, and I wish they’d come for me again.
Follow This had the weird effect of making me dislike BuzzFeed less. Or respect it, even. Someone over there knows exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it well. Best of all, the show contains no quizzes.
Neal Pollack is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.
