70 new york | march 2–15, 2020a video of many colors of paint swirling to-
gether or a body leaping into a pool full of
foam.Endlessis a moving mosaic of the
most appealing images of McKeen and Jor-
dan’s lives. In a worrisome scene in which
Jordan starts drinking at a party, the build-
up is a run of beautiful establishing shots: a
stunning California day, Jordan pulling a
bottle of vodka from a cooler, hot dogs being
thrown on a grill. The effect is hypnotic.
Nowhere is it more so than in a visual
technique Snapchat calls “screenreality”—
essentially a phone’s-eye view that tells a
story through text messages and apps. It
sounds gimmicky, but it’s curiously effective
when you experience it. The best example is
Dead of Night,an unlikely show for the plat-
form. Snap Originals are terribly built for
the horror genre’s most familiar tropes.
Wide shots of the series’ zombie army don’t
read well. There’s no time for the slow-
building dread of a shot that pans around a
room. Vertical frames are not ideal for
showing a person fleeing from something.
The only place to run is toward or awayfrom the camera.
SoDead of Nightleans into its limitations.
The viewer’s phone becomes the protago-
nist’s phone, displaying exactly what she
sees in the early moments of the zombie out-
break. The pilot episode starts with the main
character receiving a link from a friend in
the iMessage app. She opens it to see a
grainy phone video of a zombie pounding on
the glass door of a restaurant. “WTF was
that?” she types. “Something scary is going
on,” her friend responds. But as the viewer,
you can’t see the main character. You don’t
see her hands or the room she’s sitting in. All
you see is a perfect replica of her phone
screen, which is playing on the phone you
hold in your hand. The only time you see her
face is a brief moment when she gets a Face-
Time call, which she quickly dismisses so
she can answer a text message instead. You
see her face the same way you’d see your ownThe CULTURE PAGESif you got a video call. You become her.
Snap Originals ask to be watched in a way
that reminds me most of spending time on
social-media apps: endlessly refreshing,
moving rapidly from one platform to the
next. “A scene isn’t necessarily moving fast,”
Endless producer Dave Henry explained,
“but for you to be able to do some active
work with your eyes, it gives the perception
that things are moving a little quicker.”
There’s a reason for that. Radios, theaters,
movies, TV screens—in each case, the start-
ing presumption was that audiences would
pay attention to the thing playing on them.
Even now, distractions come from the addi-
tion of a viewer’s second or third screen. On
Snapchat, the pull away from an original
series and toward something else comes
from inside the house: Audiences are bar-
raged with messages, notifications, calls,
emails, all on the same screen and likely
from within the same application. Snapchat
users open the app 20 or 30 times a day, and
it’s not because they’re returning to watch
original programming every time. It is firstand foremost a messaging platform. Any
brief gap when nothing happens on a Snap
Original is an invitation to stop viewing, so
the creators must aim to make you stay (or
at least come back when you inevitably leave
to answer a message).
It’s an aesthetic that suits the medium.
When you get notifications from outside the
show, they don’t feel like intrusions. The rest
of the phone is another layer of rapid-fire
information arriving constantly and simul-
taneously along with everything else. The
experience of the phone and the experience
of the video playing on the phone bleed into
each other. They make sense together. More
than anything I’ve seen, Snap Originals are
a form of storytelling that replicates the
rhythms of digital life.snap originals are so well suited to
the app they exist in it’s almost astonishinghow poorly their platform supports them.
When you open Snapchat, the entry point is
a forward-facing camera, an invitation to
join its messaging ecosystem. Hitting the
Discover button shuttles you out of the
world of content creation and into content
consumption. But the Discover page is an
impossible morass, an unending wash of
forms mixed together. There are original
series, stories from Snap’s publishing part-
ners, videos by popular users, all in one
stream. If you’re looking for a Snap Original,
there are two options: stumble upon it by
chance, or already know it exists so you can
type its title into the search bar.
Then there are the ads. A five-minute epi-
sode can’t support lengthy interstitials, so
Snapchat supplies brief, unskippable com-
mercials. They arrive abruptly in the middle
of a story, last for five to ten seconds, and
disappear. Take the docuseries While Black,
with MK Asante, which examines the expe-
rience of blackness in America. The first
episode is a conversation with a man whose
family was racially profiled by a store man-ager and police. “These are not isolated inci-
dents,” Asante explains. “We are racially
profiled all the time. They’re happening
even when you don’t see the footage, even
when there’s no video ...”—a pink, sparkling
ad for OkCupid cuts him off for five sec-
onds—“and even when there’s no body cam-
era,” he continues. How much can careful
editing matter when an advertisement can
shout about dating apps in the middle of a
sentence about police discrimination?
The company knows some of these things
are problems. Last year, CEO Evan Spiegel
compared the current state of the Discover
page to wandering through a grocery store
“without the aisles labeled.” Snapchat is test-
ing ways to rearrange the page. And Mills
insists Snapchat cares most about “engage-
ment.” He touts the stats for Two Sides, a
series about a breakup. (Of the viewers who
watched the first episode, about 20 percentMcKeen,
Jordan, and
friends in the
series premiere
of Endless.