Listen up, terrestrials. We know that, even if you like to think of yourself as the sort of person who wishes BBC Four broadcast all day long and claims to prefer the radio, you probably spend as much time watching YouTube as you do watching TV. We know this for sure now: YouTube overtook the BBC in audience share last week, and the broadcaster will now make programmes specifically for the platform. From 2029, the Oscars ceremony will be exclusively available on YouTube. Perhaps that’s where we’ll broadcast the King’s funeral and the next king’s coronation, where some future Chamberlain will declare some future war.
If you want to know what that future looks like, you should take a look at MrBeast. Perhaps some of you already do; perhaps some of you tuned in, as I did this week, to “30 Celebrities Fight for $1,000,000!” Some of you surely must have: when he featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2024, MrBeast was described as “the most watched person in the world”.
The output of Jimmy Donaldson (if it wasn’t clear, “Beast” is not his actual surname) constitutes a melange of challenges, competitions and stunts. He rose to prominence at the age of 18 by filming himself counting to 100,000 over 40 hours, in front of a grainy webcam. In a recent interview, he shared the logic behind the video: “What’s something dumb I could do that would get a lot of attention?” And while that remains the motto on his family crest, his ambition, budgets and cast have spiralled since then to produce a cinematic universe of arbitrary rewards, mindless philanthropy and adolescent giveaways: “$10,000 Every Day You Survive in a Grocery Store”, “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time”, “Would You Sit in Snakes for $10,000?” He has a gift for giving the game away in his video titles – in “I Put Ten Million Legos in Friend’s House”, that’s exactly what happens – because he knows you’ll watch it anyway. His biggest video has been seen 902,000,000 times.
When I loaded up “30 Celebrities Fight for $1,000,000!”, I was joining a mere 91,399,929 others. This 40-minute show followed the Beast format to perfection. He likes huge, extravagant, Lucasfilm sets, full of smoke and strobe. He likes working with celebrities who have enough name recognition to be famous, and enough desperation to say yes to him (Kevin Hart and Paris Hilton co-present, while various wash-ups from the NBA, WWE and American television compete). And he really likes making a show of displaying the cash prize to be won, normally in a glass trough of green dollars. Donaldson, who is the kind of overgrown American adolescent who says things are “so crazy” and “freaking awesome” a lot, doesn’t have a great deal to do. He just gangles and gambols around in relentless good cheer.
What is striking about the Beast output is how obvious and trite it is. Throwing balls through hoops to win supercars, teams of amateur chefs forced to cook together, celebrities clinging on to poles as a form of endurance test – you could have had the experience of watching what MrBeast thinks is fun on any weekday night in the 21st century, in any Western country. All he has done, with his self-evident nose for mindless diversion, is to boil down entertainment to its leanest, paciest formula, rolling the functions of the Big Brother producer, Total Wipeout presenter and Daily Star features editor into one, gormless, 6ft 5in body.
The only difference between Beast and those historic cultural powerbrokers is the glumness of the conclusion he leads us to. In the late Nineties, as commercial TV began its race to bottom, and Kelvin MacKenzie experimented with topless darts and weather forecasts presented by people with dwarfism, it was easy to pretend that the lust for inanity was being driven from the top. The organic nature of MrBeast’s rise – for him to grow from an American teenager in his bedroom to a global super-celebrity by producing more of what we’re already used to– shows it’s just what people like to watch. Perhaps television on YouTube won’t be that different to television on television. Perhaps it will be, as Michel Houellebecq said of life after the Covid pandemic, “the same, only a little worse”.
[Further reading: The world’s most powerful literary critic is on TikTok]
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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