It’s almost time to enter Rhett & Link‘s Wonderhole.
Back in February, the longtime creator duo behind Good Mythical Morning (18.7 million subscribers, 50 million views per month) gave fans an update on their shared personal channel. In it, they revealed they’d spent years trying to carry the success of GMM forward into something more.
“Once Good Mythical Morning started taking off, it became harder and harder to justify taking all this time and these resources and putting it into one solitary video that might just get a little bit more views than an episode of Good Mythical Morning,” Rhett explained. “And we didn’t stop having big, ambitious ideas, we just convinced ourselves that we needed to take those big, ambitious ideas and we needed to drive across town and try to talk some TV network executive into letting us make the big, ambitious thing that we wanted to make.”
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They wrote multiple TV show scripts, a movie script, and a novel that ended up getting published and becoming a New York Times bestseller. But even that was bittersweet, because they’d hoped to parlay the novel’s story into a TV or film production, and it never went anywhere. They kept hearing things like “You aren’t the right fit” or “It’s not the right time,” Rhett says.
And when they did land a TV show deal with Food Network in 2022, they found themselves struggling against the network’s expectations. The show they wanted to make had to “morph” for that audience, Link said, and in the end, it wasn’t their show at all. It ran for four episodes, and went off the air.
Which left Rhett and Link with a dilemma: What to do next? Hollywood is becoming increasingly interested in creators, and streaming services like Netflix are talking about how it and YouTube “feed each other pretty nicely.” But executives were still rejecting their ideas.
So, they decided to stop bothering with execs and make the thing themselves. That thing is Wonderhole, a scripted comedy show that takes Rhett and Link to new heights (literally–there’s skydiving) and to new levels of production.
Wonderhole, unlike some other creators’ premium content endeavors, is being posted in its entirety for free, and its first big trailer is out now:
The show will post every Friday at 6 p.m. EST beginning Aug. 23.
Like we mentioned above, there’s been lots of news lately about content creators bagging Hollywood deals, or renting out–and selling out–theaters to screen their own productions. Hollywood and streaming services are paying more attention to creators than ever before, but Rhett and Link’s case shows that we’re not fully there yet, and sometimes, to get something important made, you have to make it yourself.
