Anita Sarkeesian wants to talk about That Time When.
And by That Time When, we mean her new web series–an original production by creator-owned streaming service Nebula and Sarkeesian’s first show since her 2013-2017 YouTube series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.
For those unfamiliar, Tropes vs. examined the prevalence of common tropes like the stereotypical damsel in distress in video games, and making it catapulted Sarkeesian into the spotlight as a central target of the misogynist Gamergate movement. Like other women in Gamergate’s crosshairs, Sarkeesian was swamped with rape and death threats, and understandably has been leery of returning to making videos on the internet at all, let alone on YouTube.
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That’s why she decided to make them on Nebula instead, she says. Nebula is a $5-a-month streaming service founded in 2019 by creator network Standard. It hosts content from around 160 self-described “education-y” creators, including Lindsay Ellis, Kat Blaque, Real Life Lore, LegalEagle, and Real Science, and currently has more than 600,000 users.
It’s been producing original, exclusive series and standalones for years, but Sarkeesian’s new nine-episode series is its biggest undertaking yet.
“That Time When looks at the moments when pop culture and politics collide in modern history,” Sarkeesian tells Tubefilter. “As my writer and I were in the research and writing phase, reviewing moments in history such as the Satanic Panic hysteria that swept through the 1980s or the Hollywood Blacklist in the 1950s it became apparent that so many of these moments occur when regressive, conservative, and often puritanical forces, push back against anything that might challenge the status quo and their powerful grip on society.”
Sarkeesian hopes dissecting these moments can help us “understand how these cycles happen again and again throughout time and can even prepare us for the next time they transpire,” she says.
That Time When‘s debut episode, which dropped Oct. 20, examines the reaction to Janet Jackson‘s infamous halftime performance at Super Bowl XXXVIII. Other topics include the aforementioned Hollywood Blacklist, the Dixie Chicks‘ criticism of former president George W. Bush, and Gamergate.
Sarkeesian says she chose to make That Time When with Nebula instead of YouTube because “there is comfort in knowing that I get to make work for an audience that will give me the benefit of the doubt off the bat instead of an audience that is already primed to react to anything I do with antagonism.”
Dave Wiskus, Standard’s founder and CEO, says there are “very toxic forces in the world that make making YouTube videos a very unattractive gig.”
“We built Nebula to be a marketplace for creators and the things they want to make,” he says. “Because of the kind of crowd we attract and the kind of creators who make up the governing body of how Nebula runs, we have culturally built a thing that incentivizes and disincentivizes in such a way that the end result is there’s not a lot of room to be toxic on Nebula.”
Part of that incentivizing and disincentivizing is not allowing comments directly on videos, Wiskus says. If people want to talk about Nebula or its content, they’ve got to go off-platform, to the service’s dedicated subreddit. That means creators like Sarkeesian don’t have to see responses from people–positive or negative–unless they want to.
“Given the abuse and vitriol I receive whenever I create media online, releasing my show as a Nebula Original allowed me to make a series that felt more sincere, more playful, and less bogged down with endless counterarguments,” Sarkeesian says. “I got to have a lot more fun with this one.”
New episodes of That Time When will release every Thursday.
