Whether first seeing these brothers on Vine, the Disney comedy “Bizaardvark,” YouTube during the nostalgic diss-track trend or in the news for filming a dead body, many members of Generation Z have heard of Logan and Jake Paul.
After living their lives solely for the purpose of making content and garnering attention, they have branched out into reality TV with their new show, “Paul American,” on Max.
Jake and Logan started making content on Vine, starting their separate accounts in 2013 and obtaining an impressive number of two billion overall views. Their Vines fit the early 2010s humor perfectly.
Despite Logan being in college at the time and Jake being in high school, they moved to Los Angeles in 2014 to focus on their rapidly growing YouTube and Vine careers.
They were easy targets for commentary YouTubers. Still, nobody was claiming they were truly bad people until more things came to light in mid-2017, when the controversies kept coming.
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“Paul American” is mildly entertaining, exploring themes of family dysfunction, complex emotions, navigating romantic relationships and life changes. Throughout the show, however, an alarming cycle begins to repeat over and over.
The cycle starts with the Pauls being overtly obnoxious and unlikeable. An example of this is shown in the opening scene, which shows Jake stumbling out of a car almost tripping over himself. He turns to the camera and says, “Sorry, just trading crypto.”
This is followed by Logan exiting the car, adding, “This dude just made like 2 million dollars on a crypto transaction this morning.”
This is super relatable to the average American, right? The cycle starts with them acting predictably — the obnoxiously successful, tone-deaf, annoying brothers that they have the reputation of being.
The next step in the cycle is them deepening this view, and going even lower than the viewer expects — almost impossibly so. When Logan discovers that he and his fiancée, Sports Illustrated model Nina Agdal, are having a child, there is the “horrifying” possibility that the child may be a girl.
Logan and his openly traditionalist father being so concerned about this is extremely bizarre behavior. They act as though Logan needs a firstborn male heir, as if he is a king, and if he has a girl — “he’s f—ed” as his father puts it.
But the Pauls make a slight slip in their extremist views. This is shown at the gender reveal party of Logan’s baby, when they go up to different family members and ask what gender they think the baby will be. The people at the party are dressed up in blue or pink, based on whether they want the baby to be a girl or a boy.
After all the talk about how terrible it would be to have a girl, and how both Logan and his dad want his baby to be a boy so badly, guess who shows up in all pink suits? None other than Logan and his father.
When recorded, they both say the baby will be a girl. And the seeds of doubt are planted — it just needs one tiny push — and the viewers might feel bad for these terrible people.
The final step, that push, is strategically littered throughout the entire show. The push is that this family explicitly states multiple times throughout the show that they will say and do anything — absolutely anything — for content.
Even if what they are promoting is not what they truly believe, and is harmful on levels that they themselves fail to comprehend, if the viewer still watches, they will continue to create the content. And the cycle repeats.
Jake, when talking to his Dutch girlfriend Jutta Leerdam, says the Dutch “say what’s on their mind,” unlike Americans, who are “low-key fake” — an ironic point considering the show’s name.
The show has vulnerability, interesting topics and tense moments. Despite claiming to be a “reality” tv show, it is anything but. “Paul American” is simply a showcase of bad people who are willing to spread harmful values that they themselves do not entirely believe in.
In a time that is already so unforgiving to those who are not willing to submit to the Paul brothers’ values, they will do anything in the name of money, fame and attention. They do not care about the real impact of their show — all they care about is that it is watched.
