Every Succession fan has seen them: the video of almost the entire cast singing Weezer’s Say it ain’t so; the other video in which Kieran Culkin (Roman) and Sarah Snook (Shiv) rap their fictional brother, Jeremy Strong (Kendall), and smash an egg on his crown; Culkin singing a Joy Division song at karaoke; the entire cast, including patriarch Brian Cox, dancing to the modern classic Call me maybe with arms in the air and the exalted attitude of the best/worst company dinners.
The end of the Jesse Armstrong series has been accompanied by an avalanche of parallel content that somehow demystifies the coldness and sense of moral orphanhood that the series radiates, an enormous amount of home videos and photos that pretend show that the cast, despite the well-known tensions between Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong, had a great time playing the most unhappily wealthy family on television.
The fans will decide which cast made her fatter, if that of Succession or that of the second season of The white lotus, which was filmed in Sicily and also left a trail of photos and videos on social networks and captions in many of the specific podcasts, official and unofficial, that now accompany these kinds of products on a large scale. The cast of Mike White’s series also sang karaoke and shared long tables with lots of Sicilian wine. The images posted by, among others, Aubrey Plaza on Instagram, in which her colleagues Haley Lu Richardson, Megan Fahy and Adam de Marco were seen eating pasta with hangover glasses or the raunchy TikTok videos edited by Eleonora Romadini (who plays the receptionist Isabella) made it clear that this was a memorable shoot.
This is not new. There have always been films and series where it was perceived that there was a lot to tell about what happened behind the cameras. The photos of the Mamma Mia end-of-filming party, with an unleashed Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried and Pierce Brosnan giving it their all on the runway, are a network classic that resurfaces every now and then, accompanied by captions from the style of goals (‘objectives’). And from pre-network times it is known that the filming of Mutiny on Board, The Blues Brothers and Ocean’s Twelve, to name just three films that included real locations and large casts, were not exactly gathering places.
The difference with the current content that circulates on the networks is that now these good vibes, which are perfectly authentic, are packaged, spread and distributed through established channels and become part of the marketing of the product. The fun may be spontaneous, but the use of it not so much. And the existence of fan accounts on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter (yes, while The Last of Us was airing and becoming a phenomenon episode by episode, we saw viral videos circulating that touched on the tender and adorable relationship between its protagonists, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, it was also because someone decided that this was excellent content, emotional and, here’s the key concept, authentic. The word that every brand wants in its description).
“These videos are part of the marketing content plan, I would put my hand in the fire and not get burned. They may be spontaneous, but their viralization is written in a marketing plan”, says Janira Planes, expert in digital culture. She is now the communications director of the Wuolah agency, but in her previous job, at an agency specializing in TikTok, one of her tasks was to ensure that certain songs went viral by collaborating with influencers.
In networks, almost everything that seems organic usually isn’t, or not so much. According to Planes, the triumph of behind the scenes (‘behind the cameras’), which is how these contents are usually labeled, is directly related to the Tiktokization of cultural consumption. “In TikTok everything that is behind the scenes works very well, applied to anything. A year and a half ago there was a trend that was recorded with the song Love Story by Taylor Swift. We realized that the videos on their own had 200,000 views, but when we did one behind the cameras, it got to two million. It is also noticeable in the number of videos of photographers who show how they do sessions at home with few resources but with spectacular results, and it is also very common in the world of fashionâ€. In the world of pop, explains Planes, it is already planned that if a star shoots a video clip, 4 or 5 videos will be recorded for the networks of the making of, using a mobile phone and with a more homemade look.
The analyst compares these materials to what has always been fake footage, which began to be included as extras during the DVD era. “It’s about seeing the actors as people and it gives you more content about your favorite series.” The series that have the most life on TikTok are the ones where the cast keeps producing and posting videos about their life on set. The first video of The Bridgerton cast dancing to a pop song in period clothing may have been semi-spontaneous, but video number 15 clearly isn’t. Optimizing these good vibes is taking place in the shoot to saturate the networks with items related to a franchise and associate them with positivity and fun, even if (and precisely) sometimes this goes in the opposite direction aesthetics of the series.
The entire advertising campaign related to the Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, is worthy of study. “The film opens in July and we’ve been talking about it non-stop since November,” says Planes. Actually from before, when every photo taken on set became news. In the case of Barbie, photos and videos of the large cast having fun behind the cameras have yet to be seen – they will come – but the advertising department has worked hard to convey this idea of party and community.
In a lengthy cover story in the summer issue of the US edition of Vogue , the film’s star and producer, Margot Robbie, makes sure it’s known that all the Barbies in the film (Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Kate McKinnon and Dua Lipa, among others) had a slumber party at Clarides’s Hotel in London and that, while filming lasted, they went to a cinema in the English capital every Sunday to comply with what they called “cinema mass”, and watched Technicolor musicals that served as inspiration for the film, titles such as The Red Slippers and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. In addition, the same article explains that Robbie left a gift wrapped in pink paper for his co-star, Ryan Gosling, every day of filming.
Selling chemistry between a leading couple has been a staple of the movie business since Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, though now it’s a science involving algorithmic calculations. No one wants a repeat of a situation like the one that took place a few months ago during the promotion of the Netflix romantic comedy En tu casa o en la mÃa, in which it was clear that there was no kind of spark between its protagonists , Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher. Surely no one went karaoke in this shoot.
