Best Channels of 2017
Levni Yilmaz’s Tales of Mere Existence series is the kind of slice-of-life humor that makes you feel less alone with your own foibles and insecurities.
Good places to start: “I Didn’t Go Out”, “Good Deeds Are Bulls**t”
CGP Grey makes detailed, well-thought-out videos on everything from politics to psychology to history to technology. The theme that links these disparate interests is systems, be it voting systems, systems of treaties, systems of thought, etc. He doesn’t post very often, but his videos are consistently well-produced, interesting, and, especially in recent years, thought-provoking.
Good places to start: “This Video Will Make You Angry”, Politics in the Animal Kingdom (5-part series), “The (Secret) City of London” (2-part series)
Basically all the same kind of stuff you know and love from Cracked.com but now in video format: pop culture, history, new, pop science, etc. all delivered with a whopping wallup of wit. Highlights include After Hours, Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder, and the recently launched Some News which delivers news commentary to rival Samantha Bee in sharpness of insight (and insults).
Good places to start: “14 Super Powers That Every Movie Character Apparently Has”, “4 Movies That Are Horrifying From Another Character’s POV”, “Why Carmen Sandiego Is Better Than Indiana Jones”
Extra Credits delivers accessible, informative videos about video game design. It’s an area that a lot of people, even people who play video games, don’t often think too much about, and it’s really interesting. If that’s not your thing, they also deliver history lessons in bite-sized chunks in their Extra History series, and recently started Extra Sci-Fi to explore the development of the science fiction genre.
Good places to start: “How Games Speak – Learn the Language of Design”, “Ned Kelly – I: Becoming a Bushranger”, “Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus”
- FilmJoy (formerly Chainsawsuit Original)
Though they produce other content, the highlight of the FilmJoy channel is Movies With Mikey, longform film analysis delivered with an idiosyncratic sense of humor. Like the best arts analysis, Movies With Mikey helps you see what’s going on beneath the surface of that movie you love, or maybe even gets you to appreciate something you didn’t particularly like before.
Good places to start: “Stranger Things”, “Pan’s Labyrinth”
Folding Ideas is (by design) hard to pin down. Mostly it’s about cinematic techniques, either analyzing their use in a particular film or explaining how they are used generally. There are also videos analyzing video games and YouTube as a medium. The common thread is a focus on narrative theory and how we communicate (or are communicated to) through popular culture.
Good places to start: “The Kuleshov Effect”, “Ludonarrative Dissonance”, “Vlogs and the Hyperreal”
La Blogothèque shares intimate musical experiences that takes musicians out of the studio or venue and into the streets (or sometimes people’s houses).
Good places to start: “San Fermin – Sonsick & Oh Darling”, “Benjamin Booker – Happy Homes”
Similar to Movies With Mikey, Lindsay Ellis’s main content is longform video essays on film with a solid helping of humor, though with a focus more on critique than analysis and with a solid grounding in cinematic history.
Good places to start: “The Case for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, “Mel Brooks, the Producers, and the Ethics of Satire About Nazis”, “The Whole Plate: Film Studies Through a Lens of Transformers” (7-part series)
A web-series adaptation of George Eliot’s novel. I can’t say how accurate an adaption it is (despite having definitely read all of the novel for class, and not stopping after 18 pages and just faking my way through discussion for the next three weeks), but it works on its own terms, and on the charms of its characters.
Good places to start: You kind of have to start at the beginning (embedded above).
Sick of pop culture analysis and critique yet? No? Good! Nerdwriter, he does that, he’s good at it. Slicker production than some of the other ones.
Good places to start: “Jack Nicholson: The Art of Anger”, “Norm Macdonald is a Comic Genius”, “Westworld: What Makes Anthony Hopkins Great”, “Holocene: How Bon Iver Creates a Mood”
- PBS Idea Channel (R.I.P.)
This year we bade a teary farewell to Idea Channel, the show that said, “Here’s an idea,” and then presented an idea and talked about it. Ok, it’s more pop culture analysis, but it’s different from all the others I swear. Often using creator Mike Rugnetta’s background in philosophy, Idea Channel made its name by making you think about things in a whole new way: how might Mario be a surrealist masterpiece? How is Magic: The Gathering like jazz? Idea Channel asked questions, and glorified the act of questioning. It is also how I discovered a bunch of the other people on this list (and what inspired many of them to start their own channels). You shall be missed, dear friend.
Good places to start: Honestly, trying to pick out 2-5 videos from 5 years of Idea Channel is a Herculean task; I’d just end up watching all of them all over again and be no closer to choosing any. So I suggest looking at the list of videos and just scrolling through until something jumps out at you—it probably won’t take very long. Or start where I did, with this playlist about GIF-like music videos.
Want to watch people play D&D for 2-3 hours? Ok, don’t answer that right away. Give it, like, 10 minutes before you decide; you might be surprised.
Good places to start: “Acquisitions Incorporated: The Series” (10-part series)(for pre- and post-“The Series” chronology, see this page), “Acquisitions Incorporated: The C Team” (a-lot-more-part series)(for summaries of some of the earlier episodes, see this playlist. If you wanna get right to the good stuff I would recommend watching the first two recaps and then starting at episode 6, “Doomgate Inn, Part 1”)
This is kind of cheating because peopleWatching is technically part of Cracked’s channel, but I felt like I should separate it out since Cracked is only the distributor for the show and has no creative role in it (though creator Winston Rowntree is a long-time Cracked collaborator). peopleWatching is an unapologetically empathetic (leaning towards cheesy) examination of the human condition. If you need to take a break from the nihilism and cynicism that is (not inappropriately) the majority of shows these days, you might want to check it out.
Good places to start: “Why Speed Dating is Terrible”, “Why Non-Religious Confessionals Should Be a Thing”
Learn about philosophy for free. Delivering relatively short, digestible chunks (with some obvious exceptions) on everything from atheism to Zizek.
Good places to start: “Knowledge Explained”, “Berkeley’s Idealism”, “Mad Marx” (4-part series), “What Was Liberalism?” (4-part series)
Shipwrecked made waves last year with their excellent literary romp, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party.” This year they followed it up with a slightly less dazzling but still quite enjoyable comic take on the noir genre.
Good places to start: “The Case of the Gilded Lily” (Short film), “Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party” (11-part series)
Steven Bridges is a really good magician, so if you like really good magic you should watch his videos.
Good places to start: “Keep your eyes on the pen…”, “They are not imagining it”
The Art Assignment used to do interviews with working artists who would then “assign” an art project based on their work. Though they have since stopped doing that, they still produce videos exploring various artists, art movements, and works of art.
Good places to start: “Better Know the Great Wave”, “Copy a Copy a Copy – Molly Springfield”, “The Case for Surrealism”
Tom Scott goes to Amazing Places, tells you Things You Might Not Know, looks at things that are Built For Science, and sometimes just hangs out with his friends playing invented game shows, especially Citation Needed. Also he used to do Language Files but he stopped.
Good places to start: “The Collapsed Dam That Stopped Los Angeles”, “Connectome Scanning: Looking at the Brain’s Wiring”, “Acoustic Kitty and Bat-bombs”, “What Counts as a Word?”, “2030: Privacy’s Dead. What Happens Next?”
Honorable Mentions: The Film Theorists, The Game Theorists, Vsauce (1, 2, and 3), Wisecrack
Certain of Eventual Failure 