march 2–15, 2020 | new york 71went on to watch the season in one day.) But
users come to the app mostly for its social-
media functions. Ultimately, Snapchat is
relying on its audience’s desire to share sto-
ries to overcome the platform’s deficits.
T
here are no great Snap
Original shows—not yet.
The form is full of promise,
but watching it can feel like
observing the construction
of a beautiful, trendy box. The walls are
there, and it’s a distinctive shape; you can
see why lots of people would like this box.
But nothing inside it feels indispensable.
It’s still early. When televisions were pop-
ularized, it took time before the storytelling
solidified into what we now recognize as a
“TV show.” Those first days were rocky. Plot
timing, what visually worked onscreen, how
many cameras to use, how to incorporate
sponsorships, what genres worked best—all
of it took years of development. I Love Lucy
is widely credited with inventing the three-
camera setup, but that didn’t happen until
1951, four years after sitcoms like Mary Kay
and Johnny blazed a trail. It takes time for a
form to become itself.
Snapchat is hoping that, as its profile
grows, more storytellers will be curious to
play in the box the company has created.
Their curiosity may be sparked by other
platforms, however. Even before its release,
Quibi has used an immense marketing bud-
get and high-profile names to produce the
kind of buzz Snap Originals has never had.
Mills hopes that, rather than being a zero-
sum game, Quibi will make all mobile shows
more visible, Snapchat’s included. “We’ve
been a pioneer in mobile-only storytelling,
and to the degree that they’re doing that, it’s
going to be to our benefit,” he said.
There are crucial differences between the
ways Snap and Quibi approach storytelling.
Whereas Quibi is aimed at traditional TV
viewers, who tend to skew older, Snapchat is
the aesthetic design of the work. People in
novels had boring conversations; they went
on errands and did chores. This helped
make the novel remarkable. More than
other literary forms, it could be a closer
reflection of lives as they were lived.
TV and film have whittled away at the role
of filler or have found more efficient ways to
represent it than the pages-long descrip-
tions of making a canoe inRobinson Crusoe,
for example. A minute-long montage may
get the same idea across, but the experience
of watching it feels quite different from bat-
tling through the many paragraphs of Cru-
soe’s trials. For a TV showrunner or film
director who wants to, though, there’s noth-
ing in the form of a movie or TV series that
prevents him or her from dedicating many
minutes to purposelessness. David Simon’s
TV work is full of plotless snippets that
slowly build into something bigger. There’s
an entire genre of hangout comedy, from
Cheersonward, predicated entirely on the
resistance to narrative momentum.
Snapchat doesn’t have that luxury. Backat the office, showrunner Andrea Metz and
the rest of the creative team knew they’d
need a few more seconds to letEndless’s
Times Square scene play out. To get that
space, they would probably cut a sweet, ulti-
mately unnecessary scene in which McKeen
and Matis place orders at a Wafels & Dinges
stand. Matis asks for whipped cream on her
almond-milk latte until McKeen reminds
her she’s supposed to be “dairy free, beetch!”
How much could be lost without sacrificing
something essential, they wondered? It’s
easy to cut a story down to a skeletal frame
for the sake of peak mobile performance.
But like so much of life in the digital age, it’s
hard to find a balance between ruthless op-
timization and messy humanity. This is the
most crucial task for this new art form. “The
dance” of editing a Snap show, Metz said, is
about “not cutting too much where you’re
not feeling any emotion.” ■laser focused on its primary under-34 audi-
ence, especially teenagers. Quibi’s shows will
be viewable horizontally and clock in at
seven to ten minutes—practically longform
for mobile. It calls some of its titles, like the
thriller The Stranger, “Movies in Chapters”
and sound closer to what’s already out there
than Snap’s reimagining of the form.
But both are interested in bringing au-
teurs to their platforms. Quibi has a head
start ; it will offer programming from Steven
Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh, and Ridley
Scott, while Mills cited Donald Glover as a
creator Snapchat would like to partner with.
What could someone like Glover, whose
work exploits the boundaries of TV, do with
this form? The metacommentary that has
defined his work on Atlanta could work
here, too—a Snap show about race in online
communities, maybe, or a series that turns a
piratical eye back onto the privileged white
digital voices that so often co-opt the lan-
guage, style, and creativity of young black
talent online. What might it look like when
the rules for mobile storytelling are familiarenough that artists can begin to mess with
them? The claustrophobic space of a phone
screen could be an inspiring box for a Jordan
Peele–style horror series. But it could also be
a window of freedom in a Ramy Youssef
show about Muslim teens using their
phones to find one another. What stories
about life online can you tell when you’re
working with a form designed to reflect it?
Any new medium is a system of gains and
losses, and while the potential gains of Snap
Originals are huge (truly harnessing phones
as a storytelling platform would be a mas-
sive industrial sea change), there are also
losses. Critical theorist Franco Moretti wrote
that when the novel coalesced into its own
form, sometime during the 18th century,
“filler” was one of its defining features.
Unlike theater or poetry, novels made space
for scenes that didn’t directly move the plot
forward, make moral arguments, or advance