Teens Unplugged
February 7, 2023 – Burbank, California, USA
Traveltown Productions’ three-person team stared hopefully at the whiteboard propped against the wall. Their tiny office space held little more than a few worktables and computers, but it was time for their big break. After assisting with the editing and marketing of a reality series for the History Channel, they were convinced they had the experience to create a show of their own. They were not leaving until their big brainstorm session yielded a guaranteed hit.
It was Katie who wrote “Teen Alone” on the board. She was thinking about the survival show Alone that stranded people out in the wilderness. She wrote a note under “Teen Alone” explaining the new show idea would remove teens from technology to see how long they could survive.
As soon as Katie explained the idea, her partners, Adam and Delila, forgot about everything else written on the board.
“We would need a prize,” Adam said. “Something big enough to keep contestants going, but small enough that we could afford.”
“I’m thinking $50,000,” Delila added. “For a teenager, that’s going to sound like big money.”
“And all they’ve got to do is give up their phone. We’ll have a million people signing up,” Adam said excitedly.
“They’ll want to do it for the money and to get famous,” Katie added. “I think they should have to give up more than just their phones. All electronics. No internet. No computers. No TV.”
“We could call it ‘Teen Amish’ or something like that,” Delila interjected.
“The greatest thing about it is how cheap it will be to make,” Adam said. “We’ll contract freelancers to follow them around in their everyday lives. We collect all the footage and do the editing.”
Katie looked thoughtfully at the notebook in front of her. “How much footage would we get?”
Adam did some quick multiplication. “Tens of thousands of hours for sure. The toughest part will be cutting it all down to twenty episodes.”
The team began visualizing some of the inevitable drama they would capture. Delila chuckled to herself as she said, “Imagine the raging FOMO. All the fights with family and friends because someone felt left out. The emotional breakdown over the most trivial stuff. It’ll be like watching an addict coming off a drug.”
“But we need to keep it light. Mostly focus on the funny stuff,” Adam said. “That’s what people want to see.”
“How long do you think the winner would go?” Delila asked.
“We’re laughing about withdrawals and everything, but kids can adapt pretty quickly. I’m thinking at least six months,” Adam replied.
Katie acted surprised. “You really think so? Then we should get filming right away.”
“Shouldn’t we first pitch it to a channel?” Delia asked. “We kind of know people at E! and MTV.”
“I could see Nickelodeon being interested if the kids were young enough,” Katie added. “Or any of the streamers.”
Adam sighed and his shoulders slumped. “Think how long it might take before we get a green light. If we really think this is a killer idea, maybe we should go for it and worry about selling it while we’re in production.”
“Kind of risky,” Delila said.
“We aren’t going anywhere great without taking a risk. That’s why we’ve been saving up money.”
“I think Adam’s right,” said Katie. “By now, we know what people want to watch, right? And it’ll be easier to sell a show when we have actual content.”
All three partners looked around nervously. They decided to sleep on it before fully committing. The idea was obviously good, but they would be gambling their careers on it. Production costs, no matter how cheaply they worked, would eat up everything they saved for their first solo project.
They met the next day and shared inspirational quotes about risks and dreams. Then they clenched hands in a circle, closed their eyes, and dedicated their full hearts. In a matter of hours, their first advertisements for contestants went up on social media. They dangled the originally suggested $50,000 as a prize and heavily suggested any participant would be famous and influential.
The original plan was to have contestants from all over the United States. Katie, Adam, and Delila soon realized it was more cost effective to concentrate on a couple of areas. They chose Southern California, close to headquarters, and South Florida, where Delila grew up. They also cut back their participant total to eight, with four in each location. And to eliminate the liability and legal hassles of dealing with younger teens, they concentrated on applicants who had barely turned 18 and were graduating from high school.
In another move to save money, the producers assigned a single freelance camera operator to each contestant. They would collect eight hours of footage per day. Stationary cameras set up around contestants’ homes would collect everything else and monitor whether they were breaking any contest rules.
The producers debated whether to ask contestants to only give up smartphones. In the end, they made the list of exclusions more comprehensive. The only electronic device they were allowed was a radio.
“If anything, we have too many applicants,” Katie complained, after looking through the large collection of audition videos.
“I told you the $50,000 would do it,” Adam said.
“I don’t think any of these kids realize how hard this is going to be for them,” Delila added.
“I hope they don’t,” Adam said. “That’s where the drama will come from. As long as they don’t drop out too early. And remember when we’re looking at these, we need to pick people who look good on camera and won’t mind the invasion of privacy.”
After narrowing down their list of possibilities, the producers met each prospective contestant in their home. From there, they chose a final four from California and four from Florida. Along the way, they also screened and interviewed camera operators to make sure they would be reliable and stay emotionally detached. For most of them, it would be their first big video production job.
Filming began for all contestants on the same day in late May. It was a time near high school graduation and the producers hoped to capture plenty of drama around the big life event. Each videographer was given a list of background shots they were supposed to capture. Those shots would serve as an introduction to a contestant in their natural habitat, surrounded by family and friends. Each teenager was supposed to organize a kickoff party where they would explain to loved ones what was happening and predict how long they would last. Then they handed over their phones.
Before any video footage arrived, if Katie, Adam, and Delila had to pick a favorite contestant, they would have chosen Chloe from Glendale. She lived right down the freeway from their office and was naturally photogenic. They anticipated editing lots of Chloe footage and hoped she would turn into the face of the show.
During Chloe’s kickoff celebration, she said she could do anything she put her mind to. She dreamed of becoming a journalist or actress and would start college in the fall at Cal Poly.
“So how long can you go without a phone?” Chloe’s mom asked her on camera.
“As long as it takes to win. People will see how tough I am. Once I decide something, it’s practically done.”
Chloe turned off her phone at the prescribed moment, shrugged her shoulders, and smiled at the camera. Then she hugged her boyfriend. He knew about the contest, but he did not look happy.
“I still don’t understand how I’m supposed to reach you.”
“You just come over. Or I go and see you. Every time we’re together, we make a plan for the next time.”
“What if something comes up? Can I text your mom and have her tell you?”
“Only if it’s an emergency. Come on, we talked about this.”
The boyfriend acted like they had not talked about it. A little argument escalated until Chloe was crying. The boyfriend stormed away saying he did not think they could stay together. Chloe sobbed and panicked for the camera. Forty-three minutes into the contest, she asked for her phone back.
Adam described the Chloe footage as, “Only getting a tiny nibble of the biggest Thanksgiving feast you can imagine.”
Juan-Carlo, from Ft. Lauderdale, seemed set to go much longer. At his kickoff celebration, he was surrounded by a large family who promised to give him all the help he needed. He worked as a cook in a restaurant close to his home.
“I know my job. I work with my hands. I like talking to people in person. I don’t really need a phone,” Juan-Carlo concluded.
His first day went okay. He had to avoid the family TV but seemed content with visiting friends and playing soccer.
On his second day untethered from his phone, Juan-Carlo had to navigate on his own to a cousin’s pre-wedding party. He was unfamiliar with the location but thought he could follow some written instructions and a paper map instead of listening to live directions from Siri. When he made a wrong turn and could not find his location on the map, he freaked out.
“What do I do? What do I do?” he cried at the camera pointed in his face.
Juan-Carlo calmed down long enough to drive to a gas station looking for help. When he got out of his car, he realized one of his tires was flat.
“I can’t handle this right now. I’m already late and have no idea where I am!” Juan-Carlo shouted to his cameraman. “Let me use your phone.”
“You’ll be out of the contest,” the cameraman replied.
“I don’t care. This is an emergency.”
He lasted a little more than 35 hours. The contest was down to six teenagers, three Californians and three Floridians. Within a week, the next four would be out. Gabrielle, Ty, Kepa, and Cera each made a strong start. They sounded confident and defiant during their kickoff party. Each had a plan for how they would communicate with friends and spend their free time.
During the first few days, the contest was a fresh challenge. Each of the four contestants was able to motivate themselves to make sacrifices and ignore what might be happening around them. But as the days repeated and a new reality set it, winning lost its appeal. Everyone reached a breaking point. For Gabrielle and Ty, it was all about missing their friends. Kepa felt like the world was passing him by and if he ignored it too long, he would never catch up. Cera was simply bored. Mind numbingly bored.
Seven days after the kickoff parties, the contest was down to Braden in Orange County, California and Annelise in Homestead, Florida. Braden struggled from the start but was making it work. His friends liked the idea of a camera following him around. Braden tried to feed on the idea he was doing something special. He spent time in his backyard and driving to the beach. He built a hammock from twine and spent hours twisting the lines and talking to the camera about people he knew and places he visited.
Annelise was different from the other competitors. After seeing some of her footage, Katie asked her fellow producers, “How did we ever pick her?” Annelise exaggerated on her audition video about how much time she spent with electronics. She also exaggerated her friend count. In reality, she was a happy recluse. She had a job at a plant nursery putting seeds into pots, but she was perfectly content to spend the rest of her time reading books, playing solitaire, and walking alone in parks.
“The good news is she could last forever,” Adam concluded after watching more of her videos. “The bad news is that she’s totally boring. I think I’d rather stare at a wall.”
“Now this all comes down to Braden,” Katie said. “He’s got to hang in there. At least he’s kind of interesting.”
Braden dropped out on day 16. He could no longer handle the open-endedness of the contest. His last statement before picking up his phone was, “If I knew exactly how long I had to go, I could do it. If I knew it was going to be 30 days or 60 days. But this could last forever.”
Katie, Adam, and Delila met in their little office after they heard the Braden news. The contest had not gone even close to plan. They expected to edit thousands of hours of video. Instead, they got a few hundred. And a lot of it was Annelise sitting in silence, reading a book.
“This is a disaster,” Katie said with a moan. “I knew we should have put more thought into it.”
“We can’t second guess ourselves or start blaming each other,” Adam said defensively.
“On the bright side, we don’t have to spend much on the camera people,” said Delila. “We were paying them by the hour. If only we could get out of paying the prize money.”
The producers re-read the contract they signed with each contestant, hoping there was some loophole. They could not find one and decided the ethical thing to do was to pay Annelise.
“So what do we do with the video?” Katie asked her partners. “Can we salvage it into any kind of show?”
“There’s not enough action. Not much happens until people decide to quit,” Adam said. “At the most, there’s one or two hours’ worth of decent stuff.”
“Then we scrap the whole thing?” Delila asked. “It’s a total loss?”
All three producers leaned back in their chairs and stared despairingly at the ceiling. Five silent minutes passed. Then Katie had an idea.
“If we truly don’t think we can sell it, we could put it on YouTube. Upload it in 30-minute chunks. Minimal editing. If people will watch it, we could monetize a channel.”
“Why would people watch it?” Adam asked.
Katie shrugged her shoulders and said, “Kids spend hours watching someone else play video games.”
No one had a better plan. They had intended to call their show “Teen Alone” but decided “Teens Unplugged” sounded rawer for the YouTube channel. Before every segment, they included a video explanation about their social experiment and added some graphics to explain what was happening in the clips. But they mostly kept it uncut and uploaded something every day.
To nearly everyone’s surprise, “Teens Unplugged” caught on quickly. Viewers enjoyed watching Juan-Carlo shopping and paying with cash. Braden and his twine hammock gained a huge following. By the end, even boring thirty-minute segments of Annelise strolling through the woods got 10 million views.
YouTube did not pay much per view, but the money quickly accumulated. After two months of uploading, the producers made back their $50,000. Then they made back everything they paid for the camera work. Eventually they reached the same amount they had anticipated one of the TV channels would pay for twenty episodes.
Katie, Adam, and Delila sat down for another brainstorming session to decide what to do next. Adam spoke first. “I take back everything I said the first time we tried this. We should start by admitting we have no idea what we’re doing or what people want to watch.”
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