As some fans have suspected due to its recent break from content-making, Sugar Pine 7 is no more.
The YouTube vlogging channel-turned-entertainment company founded in 2017 by Steven Suptic, James DeAngelis, and Clayton James announced it’s disbanding and ceasing production on Alternative Lifestyle, its long-running mockumentary web series.
Suptic, DeAngelis, and James made a separate video (the latest and possibly last episode of their behind-the-scenes podcast, Beyond the Pine) to talk about what happened.
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For those who don’t know, Sugar Pine 7 was made up of former SourceFed employees Suptic, DeAngelis, and James, along with their friends Allen McCune, Mimi Torres, Vicky Pham, and Autumn Farrell. McCune and Torres served as Alternative Lifestyle’s producers, while Pham and Farrell were editors. Alternative Lifestyle originally started airing on a dedicated
YouTube channel in March 2017, designed as a mockumentary web series showing Suptic, DeAngelis, and James’ reactions to SourceFed shutting down. The trio played exaggerated versions of themselves.
The Sugar Pine 7 channel — which currently has 1.1 million subscribers — was getting between 4 and 7 million views per month (and had won a ‘Show of the Year’ Streamy) when digital giant Rooster Teeth scooped it up in January 2018. Rooster Teeth hired on the Sugar Pine 7 folks as official employees and paid them to continue producing Alternative Lifestyle.
But that situation has changed. Suptic, DeAngelis, and James revealed today that the entire team was fired from Rooster Teeth in recent months, and were under a nondisclosure agreement preventing them from talking about it (hence the break). It’s not clear why the team was fired; their channel’s monthly view count remained fairly steady until they stopped making new content.
“Sugar Pine 7 are awesomely talented,” Rooster Teeth tells Tubefilter. “We look forward to supporting their next chapter through our creator network.”
The group’s separation from Rooster Teeth, however, isn’t the sole reason Sugar Pine 7 is breaking up and ceasing production of Alternative Lifestyle.
“We felt stale about the content we were making, even when we were with Rooster Teeth,” James says in Beyond the Pine’s 92nd episode (above). “We weren’t really enjoying it to the fullest. Sure, it’s fun in the moment when the camera’s on and you’re recording and you’re laughing and having fun, but that’s 5% of the whole process. And that other 95%, we were all just kind of sick and tired of.”
The trio says that for the past 18 months, they were making up to six videos per week, and suffered from severe creative burnout.
“Part of me wants to forget this whole past year-and-a-half happened, and then the other part of me doesn’t want to let it go,” Suptic says. “I had a good time with you guys, but I didn’t have a good time doing it. It was too much.”
There are no hard feelings, though, they insist. They have a “good relationship with Rooster Teeth still,” James says, and as Rooster Teeth mentioned in its comment, all three of them are continuing to work with the company in other capacities — just not as official employees.
“What a life we got to live,” James adds. “What a f-cking incredible thing we got to do. […] We got to do the coolest thing in the world, and be employed to do it by arguably one of the best people to employ us to do that on YouTube.”
Separately, Farrell tweeted her own statement about the situation, saying she already knew she was going to leave Sugar Pine 7 at the end of 2018. She appears to have quit before Rooster Teeth let the rest of the seven go. “The ending was a slow burn, and I was there for a lot of it,” she wrote. “I didn’t know it was gonna end so soon when I quit, and that makes me immeasurably sad.”
— Autumn Farrell (@_rufhaus) June 3, 2019
You can watch the very last episode of Alternative Lifestyle below.
Update, June 5, 1:30 p.m.: This story has been updated to include a comment from Rooster Teeth.
