What is it? A brutal and much-needed 15-minute takedown of vloggers.
Why you’ll love it: Between W1A, People Just Do Nothing and America’s Documentary Now series, the mockumentary is slowly and steadily staging a comeback. And the latest is arguably one of the best: BBC3’s new YouTuber comedy Pls Like.
It’s a tricky subject to get right. After all, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of crossover between people who watch YouTube stars and people who watch traditional TV. Plus, the nature of the YouTubers themselves – all grinning and scrubbed and so disgustingly, wretchedly young – can be a turn-off, even when the aim is to skewer them.
Fortunately, Pls Like succeeds because it has comedian Liam Williams at the helm. Grunting, scruffy and occupying the fragile midpoint between suspicion and annoyance, Williams is the perfect counterpoint to all the harrowing optimism of the show’s subjects.
The premise is this: desperate for money, Williams enters a So You Think You Can Vlog? competition that offers a £10,000 prize. When his jaundiced, embittered video captures the imagination of the British public, he is asked to complete six challenges, each relating to a popular genre of vlog. The rest of the series – so short that you can consume the entire thing in 90 minutes – is a breezy skip through some of the most popular vlogging subjects, such as beauty and fitness and technology.
Williams rubs up against a procession of gurning YouTubers throughout the series, all of whom are managed by Tim Key’s oily James Wirm. Although the promotional material claims that Key knows nothing about the world of YouTubers, his performance is note perfect. Wirm’s surface chumminess masks a bottomless pit of controlling greed, and he serves as a handy common enemy for everyone involved.
A show like Pls Like inherently runs the risk of sneering at people it assumes to be inferior, but, thankfully, the awkward holier-than-thou moments are limited to one especially toe-curling sequence, where Williams essentially breaks Zoella out of her superficial bubble by educating her with a Joni Mitchell song. It’s an awful moment, tone-deaf and sanctimonious and possibly sexist, but at least it passes quickly.
The show works much better when Williams allows himself to become the butt of the joke as an angry misery-guts adrift in a world he doesn’t fully understand. Sometimes this comes out in his embittered narration – at one point he calls the millennial whoop “the sound of all true hope dying” – and pops up in pointlessly angry interstitial bursts of text, such as: “The word ‘vlog’ is a blend of ‘video’ and ‘eulogy’ because some believe they represent the culture of death.”
YouTubers’ relentless torrent of artificial optimism is a ripe target for mockery, and Pls Like generally acquits itself well. I know little of the world myself, but recognised shots at Zoella, Alfie Deyes, Joe Wicks and Dapper Laughs. It also mercilessly captures the pointless challenges, the sinister product placements, the endless creepy insincerity, and the nonsensical enthusiasm of the form.
Hopefully, Pls Like will stage a Fleabag-style breakthrough, although the brevity of the episodes may prevent that. Either way, it deserves to be watched by as many people as possible. It may just go down as the Spinal Tap of vlogging.
Where: BBC Three.
Length: Six 15-minute episodes, available weekly from 11 February.
Stand-out episode: Episode two, which introduces the unlikely catchphrase “hogs”.
If you liked Pls Like, watch: Haters Back Off (Netflix), Mascots (Netflix).
