D’Amelio, Charli

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    TikTok Made Them Famous. Figuring Out What’s Next Is Tough.

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    Before Charli D’Amelio became the most popular creator on TikTok — she currently has 132 million followers — she danced on the competitive contemporary-dance circuit in the Northeast, the sorts of theatrical styles you might know from “So You Think You Can Dance?” Once she began posting to TikTok in 2019, and especially after her videos began taking off and her family moved to Los Angeles to support the viral dreams of her and her older sister, Dixie (56 million followers), that sort of dance became an afterthought, a relic of an old life.The D’Amelios made a leap from the phone screen to the small screen this year with the Hulu docuseries “The D’Amelio Show,” which captures, in sometimes excruciating detail, the thrills and the wages of TikTok success. Its most curious subplot is about Charli’s side quest to return, at least temporarily, to her precapitalist self, squeezing in time to work with a coach to relearn what those old dances require of her body, and pushing herself to remaster them.For Charli, TikTok stardom is a rocket ship, and potentially a ceiling, too. The past year or so has been a kind of testing ground for what the app’s biggest creators — the D’Amelio sisters, Noah Beck (32 million followers), Chase Hudson (32 million followers), Addison Rae (86 million followers) and others — might do next, either voluntarily and enthusiastically, or simply to satisfy the insatiable maw of demand that their sheer existence occasions.It’s been a mixed bag, a chaotic blend of behind-the-scenes vulnerability, eager-to-please willingness, bro impudence and performed resistance. Navigating the chasm between the instinctual charisma that fuels the app and the long(er) form seriousness and vision that might make for a stable, sustainable career in entertainment has been playing out across reality television, pop music, film, books, other social media platforms — and even TikTok itself.What’s become clear is that the skill set that led to big-tent triumph on the app in 2019 and 2020 is, by and large, sized to the medium. Given more room to breathe in other formats, most of TikTok’s superstars are still figuring out how to create beyond the phone.Throughout many of these projects, what you sense is the offscreen number-crunchers hoping to hang potential franchises on the heads and necks of these young people, who are less fully formed creative thinkers than fan-aggregation platforms in desperate need of content.“Noah Beck Tries Things,” which appears on AwesomenessTV’s YouTube channel, is the ne plus ultra of this phenomenon — an entire series, two seasons deep, wholly devoted to figuring out what to do with this uncooked meal of a man.Beck, 20, is a deeply affable former soccer player who, of all of the current crop of TikTok crossover stars, appears most baffled about how to amplify it. “Noah Beck Tries Things” is a slapdash trifle of consequence-free content production. It simply winds Beck up, places him in unlikely scenarios — cooking a steak, dancing the tango, recording a dis track — and watches him gulp for air. In one episode, when someone shows him how to do a handstand on a hoverboard, his awe is genuine — not the practiced “gosh!” of someone used to being filmed for reactions, but more like the off-the-cuff “derp” of someone who understands he has landed somewhere near the deep end and has no idea how to swim.On his show, he’s mostly hapless, apart from the occasional athletic task. But what’s emerging as his calling card is his almost raging commitment to goodnaturedness. The only times Beck’s brow ever genuinely furrows are in scenes in the D’Amelios’ Hulu show when Dixie, his girlfriend — she refers to him as a “golden retriever,” a familiar TikTok good-boy archetype — can’t quite muster the optics of a reciprocative relationship. In those moments, he looks frazzled, as if an Apple IIc is being updated with this year’s operating system.Beck is genial and gentle — in short bursts on the app, he’s a palliative. But he never seems truly hungry. In stark contrast to that approach stands Addison Rae, or rather, revs Addison Rae. Of this generation of TikTok stars, she is the most intentional, the most iron-willed, the most determined. Off camera, she has been loosely adopted into the Kourtney Kardashian orbit. Her parents have been game TikTokers. (The D’Amelios play along, too, but much less so.) Even when Rae, 21, was focused more intently on her social media presentation — she’s now often comically late to trends on the app — she always appeared to have her eyes somewhere beyond the phone.Unsurprisingly, Rae’s star turn in “He’s All That,” the updating of the 1999 teen rom-com “She’s All That” (itself an update of “Pygmalion”/“My Fair Lady”) is the most vivid post-TikTok performance of the year. That’s because Rae understands viral stardom not just as a job, but as an archetype.Like “The D’Amelio Show,” “He’s All That” is a metacommentary about the falsity of viral fame, albeit fictionalized. Rae plays Padgett (pronounced, more or less, “pageant”), a social media influencer falsifying her bona fides. After a fall from grace, she sets about remaking a surly outcast classmate (who wears a G.G. Allin T-shirt) as her new hottie. High jinks ensue, followed by love.Beauty and popularity are inventions, and have been long before TikTok came along. “He’s All That” plays those constructions for chuckles and awws. And the end of the film savvily mimics the turn away from polished inaccessibility toward Emma Chamberlain-type relatability. Padgett returns to social media, but posting more naturalistic photos, taken by her new paramour: She found herself an Instagram boyfriend after all.“He’s All That” still valorizes and reinforces Big Algorithm, even converting the punk skeptic. But the some of the young men who thrived on the app in 2020 decided to pivot in the opposite direction: refusenik. Most notably, this has been the direction taken by two stars trying to transition into music careers — Chase Hudson, 19, who records music as Lilhuddy, and Jaden Hossler, 20, who records music as jxdn.Unlike Rae, who this year released a peppy club pop single, “Obsessed,” a perfectly textureless workout anthem, Hudson and Hossler (nine million followers) swerved hard into dissident territory, embracing pop-punk and, in places, the grittier textures that emerged from SoundCloud in the late 2010s. They’re heavily tattooed, wear haute mall-goth clothing and paint their fingernails — their pushback against TikTok’s centrism is highly aestheticized (as opposed to, say, Bryce Hall, he of the Covid-era partying, drug arrest and boxing match, whose post-TikTok direction seems inspired by Jake Paul).For creators determined to make it clear they are not bound by TikTok’s cutesy videos and algorithm, it is a purposeful choice. Hossler’s debut album, “Tell Me About Tomorrow,” traverses anxiety and addiction. He has a reedy voice, and when he’s singing self-lacerating lines like “I don’t like taking pills, but I took ’em anyway,” he still sounds like an accessible teddy bear, albeit one whose stuffing is coming undone.By contrast, Hudson comes off as if he’s spoiling for a fight on his debut album, “Teenage Heartbreak.” He’s a sneerer: “I’m not sorry that I crashed your party.” In “Downfalls High,” the surprisingly puckish long-form music video-film that accompanies Machine Gun Kelly’s latest album “Tickets to My Downfall,” Hudson plays Fenix, a ghoulish loner with punk charisma — basically, the kind of guy Padgett tries to clean up in “He’s All That.” When his girlfriend, who is popular and rich and slumming it, asks him what he wants to be when he grows up, he replies sullenly but not terribly convincingly, “Dead.” It all feels like one long elaborate Halloween performance. (Hudson is also one of several TikTokers featured in the long-simmering reality show “Hype House,” which will have its premiere on Netflix next month.)Hudson’s and Hossler’s albums kill two urges with one groan: the need for these TikTokers to find a viable path forward in music, and the music industry’s need to amplify and reinforce the still-emergent revival of pop-punk, the music of white rebellion most readily available to new arrivals with little history or experience.Given the apparent craving for safe spaces, it’s notable how, on both “The D’Amelio Show” and in “He’s All That,” nonwhite characters are deployed as foils who are far more knowing and worldly than the white protagonists. Deliberately or not, they serve as reminders that the world beyond the app is far more diverse and complex. “Noah Beck Tries Things” undertakes a version of this as well with queer collaborators, striking given that one of the most frequent critiques of Beck during his rise has been of queerbaiting. (That said, the show’s first episode, where Beck learned how to apply makeup from James Charles, appears to have disappeared from the internet.)This year TikTok stars tried their hands at Hulu shows, streaming series and music careers.Simoul AlvaIt’s tough to know how purposeful these indictments about privilege are — they generally serve the narratives of the shows while reifying their stars, who are presented as being open to personal growth.“The D’Amelio Show,” however, often comes off as quietly ruthless toward its stars, whether in its array of more-experienced secondary characters, its lingering on the excruciating challenges of growing up in public on the internet, or even in the fish-out-of-water talking head shots juxtaposing the relentlessly normal family members against their relentlessly grand Southern California mansion.Ultimately, “The D’Amelio Show” is about the toxicity of viral fame and also about child labor. (Charli is 17 now, and was 15 and 16 when the show was taping. Dixie is 20.) It is presented as a moral victory, near the end of the season, when after a period of deep decompression by Charli, it is determined that she will only work three days a week, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.On TikTok, though, life itself is labor. You feel that burden perhaps most acutely in how Dixie navigates the fame that has arrived at her feet in the wake of Charli’s breakthrough. Dixie is older, a little more cynical and a lot less comfortable. For her next step, she chooses music, and the show captures, with discomfiting intimacy, just how challenging that decision is, artistically and emotionally. Her voice is rough, her confidence is low and she is besieged by online naysayers. (The persistent Greek chorus of negative online comments, represented on the show in on-screen pop-up graphics, is both effective and perverse.) Her worldview is encapsulated in the opening lines of her first single, “Be Happy”: “Sometimes I don’t want to be happy/Don’t hold it against me/If I’m down just leave me there, let me be sad.”Perhaps this heartbreaking transparency will be the ultimate legacy of this era of TikTok crossover. It’s there in Charli’s book “Essentially Charli: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping It Real,” which came out in late 2020, which juxtaposes workbook-esque pages about friendship and style with confessions about anxiety and therapy. (An even more involved discussion of this fundamental viral-stardom tension is in “Backstory: My Life So Far,” the memoir of the TikTok superstar Avani Gregg, 19, a close friend of Charli’s (38 million followers). Gregg’s book is striking for its matter-of fact-conversations about self-doubt and mental health.)Charli’s anxiety is a recurrent topic on “The D’Amelio Show,” which can often feel like crisis footage: Charli having a panic attack in the car when she spies paparazzi waiting for her, or Dixie breaking down after being bullied online.But Charli’s most revealing content may well be in the form of her secondary TikTok account, @user4350486101671, which she began in April, during a trip to Las Vegas for, of all things, a Jake Paul boxing match. It has a mere 15 million followers, and Charli treats it far more casually. The videos are in general looser than those on her main account, with a broader range of emotions, from exuberance to exasperation. The dancing is a little smoother, a little less performed.Sometimes the gap between the two accounts is as vast as the one between burden and freedom, and sometimes it’s just enough for her to zestily lean into lip-syncing a curse word that might not fly on her main account. She might owe the most commodified version of herself to TikTok, but here she’s trying on different selves, and in nearly every video, her smile is broad and relaxed. She looks like someone fully at home. More

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      in Television

      The D’Amelios Are Coming for All of Your Screens

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      TikTok’s most famous family wants to reintroduce itself on TV. Whatever that means now.Peak screen was achieved this spring, beaming into a business meeting with Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, social media’s starriest sisters, and their parents, Marc and Heidi.Three D’Amelios idly thumbed their devices as a masked cameraman swung in for a close-up, gathering footage for the family’s upcoming documentary series on Hulu. With my own phone, I snapped a photo of the scene on my laptop’s display. Four layers of looking-glass: Marshall McLuhan would have turned cartwheels.Celebrity has changed radically since McLuhan declared “the medium is the message,” and Exhibits A and B are C and D, Charli and Dixie. The sisters’ names might elicit either eye rolls of over-familiarity — perhaps you followed along online as their wisdom teeth were removed? — or blank stares, depending on one’s proximity to TikTok.

      @charlidamelio Stay home & do the #distancedance. Tag me & the hashtag in your video. P&G will donate to Feeding America & Matthew 25 for first 3M videos #PGPartner ♬ Big Up’s (feat. Yung Nnelg) – Jordyn, Nic Da Kid In 2019, Charli and Dixie began posting short, playful videos from their bedrooms (bathrooms, too) and accumulating enormous, unexpected internet followings. This has led to deals selling iced coffee and hummus and social-distancing messages (Charli); several song releases, some quite raunchy (Dixie); dancing with J. Lo before the Super Bowl (Charli); hosting a talk show (Dixie) and sitting front row at Prada in Milan (Charli).Together they have joined and left the Hype House, a content-making collective in Los Angeles; weathered periodic torrents of scorn from commenters; started a podcast; worked on a makeup collection that they daub on each other’s faces with Michelangelo-like care; and through it all frequently updated their fans. In the popular imagination, they are very much a unit, even if it was not always so.Dixie and Charli, who practically overnight became TikTok sensations, have spun that success into sponsorship deals, a music career, an appearance at the Super Bowl and a social distancing campaign.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesOn this video call, they were discussing marketing plans for a line of clothing called Social Tourist: crop tops and pleated miniskirts and items for the dog (the D’Amelios have four). The name refers not to ethical globe-trotting but to online interaction and identity exploration. “We thought about space travel, about digital versus organic and reflecting what life was like prior to having a cellphone in your hand all the time,” said Nathalie Kossek, the brand’s art director.Remember life before cellphones, when everyone could hum the jingles for Cheerios and Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms learned from commercials? To conjure that nostalgia, one white crew neck sweatshirt priced at $60 would be delivered in a Social Tourist cereal-like box to the 100 fastest-clicking customers.Marc was focused on practical matters. “How is this getting shipped?” he asked. “It should be packaged well — within the package — so it gets there looking good.” Besides being TikTok’s First Father, he has worked in the apparel business for 30 years. Now, he is packaging his family. Having seen hundreds of household names become yesterday’s news, “I want them both to appreciate the fact that nothing’s promised, and chances are it won’t last forever,” he told me later.The D’Amelios were joining the call from Los Angeles, where they moved in the summer of 2020 from Norwalk, Conn., to pursue the many business opportunities that arose after their online fame mushroomed. I was languishing in New York. Downstairs, my 13-year-old was screaming at a video game.“Ask her about the Dino nuggets,” he’d instructed, referring to how Charli, during a dinner catered by a private chef and filmed for the family’s YouTube channel, had suggested breaded chicken as a substitute for the escargot that had triggered Dixie’s gag reflex.The gaffe, or the adolescent ingratitude and entitlement it seemed to punctuate, had cost Charli a million-odd followers on TikTok — a minor setback on the way to her current total of 123 million, the highest number on the platform. A freckled and shiny-haired trained competitive dancer, she is 17. In an earlier era she might have been a cover model for the magazine of that name, which at this time of year would be selling many copies of a 300-page back-to-school print issue filled with ads for concealer and tampons and Famolares.

      @dixiedamelio skinnn thx to my #hideandpeekconcealer now at @ultabeauty 🤍 ps my NEW @morphe2 limited edition personalized bag drops tmrw 4/27! #morphepartner ♬ original sound – MorpheOfficial Mothers then thought those magazines were trash. Now mothers are themselves on TikTok, performing herky-jerky duets and trios with their daughters, wearing loungewear and sheepish grins. That includes Heidi, 49, a former model and personal trainer whose own following is 9.5 million. Marc, 52, a onetime candidate for Connecticut’s State Senate, has a million more. Dixie, 20, has more than 54 million. Belle, Cali, Codi and Rebel, the dogs, are collectively lagging at 850,000.The D’Amelios are not, to use the old showbiz cliché, bigger than the Beatles. But in their toggle between suburban rooms and gleaming event venues, on the moving sidewalk of Instagram and amid the rotten eggs of Twitter, they might well be surpassing the Partridges. The question is, can they sustain the attention of America for more than one-minute online chunks? Can anything?“The D’Amelio Show,” which captures the family’s life at home, follows a well-worn format but with a focus on mental health.Philip Cheung for The New York Times‘A Living Social Experiment’TV no longer really “airs,” the oxygen we all breathe, but “streams” in little rivulets onto computers, phones and other devices. Nor is there really a water-cooler conversation, but rather many little individually filled Hydro Flasks.The electronic hearth of the middle 20th century is now a multitude of electronic hand and lap warmers.But in a way “The D’Amelio Show,” which arrives in a gush of eight episodes on Sept. 3, is a throwback: the latest iteration of a now well-established genre exposing the fights and flaws and foibles of famous families in their habitats. There were the Osbournes; there were the Gottis; and most inescapably there have been the Kardashians, who ended their show after 14 years in June, creating an opening.Sisters sell: the Olsens, the Hiltons, the Hadids and so on. Stabbing at a soup can with a knife in one episode as her boyfriend, Noah Beck, watches dismayed, the dimple-chinned, goofy Dixie conjures Jessica Simpson in “Newlyweds,” wondering if her Chicken of the Sea tuna was chicken. (Also when she wears a glittery cowboy hat and falls off a mechanical bull in the video for a song she released to some censure in May, “F***Boy.”)Like Ms. Simpson’s younger sibling, Ashlee, Charli underwent nose surgery — but in public, for medical rather than cosmetic reasons. And while Ashlee was pilloried after being exposed for lip-syncing her own songs on “Saturday Night Live,” this generation lip-syncs on social media overtly, ironically, often before breaking into self-deprecating laughter and tumbling out of frame.Charli, with her dancing, and Dixie, who studied violin and piano, were naturals at these casual pastiches. Issued MacBooks and smartphones early and sans much parental angst — “something told me this is going to be the future,” Marc said — they grew up watching and imitating YouTube personalities. (“I don’t know if I was a sucker, or what,” Heidi said of Charli’s insistence on doing homework with background entertainment flowing into her headphones.)

      @heididamelio My guy @marcdamelio ##EpicRecordsPartner ♬ Beat It – Michael Jackson But broadcasting from the comfort of home has its peril. Where do you retreat when the calls for cancellation come — when the audience feedback is instant, constant, pinging in your palm?Weirdly, TV, the erstwhile idiot box, has become not the place for further exposure, but a safe — or at least safer — space, where professionals set boundaries, supply context and order the chaos of online interaction. In the show, negative comments the sisters receive on social media pop up onscreen like the annotations of VH1’s music video heyday, taking the audience into the psychic cage of the phone; each episode is bracketed with public service announcements about mental health.“Inside a phone, on an app, people can be dehumanized — not just us, everybody,” Marc said. The television show, he hopes, will give people “a fair assessment of who we really are.”Belisa Balaban, the vice president of original documentaries at Hulu, said she hoped “the show inspires dialogue between parents and kids about social media. It’s evolving so fast. They are a tight-knit family, and we know a lot of kids aren’t lucky enough to have that.”Sara Reddy, the showrunner and an executive producer who previously worked on “Toddlers and Tiaras” and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” assembled a small crew that filmed from four to eight hours on weekdays and stayed out of the girls’ therapy sessions — though they were allowed in when Dixie broke down in convulsive tears over negative reactions to a video diary she did for Vogue. “Wanting to not be part of the problem, that was really important to me, because I could see that the girls were struggling with all the scrutiny,” Ms. Reddy said.When first pitched the D’Amelios, Ms. Reddy “had no clue who they were, none,” she said. “I’m not a teenager. I really found it easy to roll my eyes at social media during Covid. Then I dug in, and what really struck me was I felt like the family was a living social experiment that they didn’t necessarily sign up for. I came into their life right as fame was changing for them. They had the fun rise up — and as we do to people we put on a pedestal, people were starting to take them down. And I thought this can be a much more complete, interesting story than just, ‘Hey, this family’s famous.’”“I felt like the family was a living social experiment that they didn’t necessarily sign up for,” said Sara Reddy, the showrunner.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesCharli and Dixie, IRLWhen they aren’t dolled up for something like Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards, where Charli in a strapless formal gown was doused in green slime like a latter-day Carrie, the sisters seem to recede into soft, blurry situations: dipping into ice cream, disappearing into hoodies and under blankets, hugging Squishmallows. Charli is scared to drive. “Curbs, curbs, curbs, curbs, curbs,” she mutters on the show, practicing. “Every time I’m free, I just want to be in bed on my phone, which is so bad,” Dixie says. The only sign that they might be ready to fight back is their manicures, which are incongruously sharp and pointy — talons, really.These they waggled at me in person one morning after rainstorms flooded the subways of Manhattan, in an enormous penthouse apartment with views of the Hudson River — and, Dixie noted, dramatic lightning strikes. The obvious metaphor hung in the air.Asked not about Dino nuggets but the moment when it all changed, Charli said, “I don’t know. It wasn’t like a snap that happened. More like, ‘This is happening, but I still feel the same.’ And now it’s happening on a much bigger scale, and I still feel the same, so I don’t know.”Dixie would like eventually to settle in New York, where her parents courted a quarter-century ago, before cellphones became commonplace, rollerblading in Central Park. “I want to be here,” she said.As for Charli: “I have no idea. I like everywhere. I kind of want to live in the middle of nowhere.” she said. “On a farm. Or like in the middle of L.A. Who knows. I go back and forth.”Any anxious parent of quaran-teens, sequestered for so many months with their portals to heaven-knows-what — their temporary avatars out there for all eternity like so much space junk — could sympathize with this impulse to vanish into the pastoral. And also not hold her to it, on the eve of a Hollywood debut.

      @charlidamelio @dixiedamelio ♬ Be Happy – Dixie “I think people are going to be surprised about the maturity of the show,” Dixie said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh my God, watch us do TikToks all day.’ It’s very deep, it’s very true, it shows our emotions, it’s caught us in real time having breakdowns and not wanting to do social media anymore. And the thing is, I don’t want people to be like, ‘Oh, they’re doing this for sympathy or attention.’ We just want you to take a look into our lives and take what you want from it.”“I’ve heard that people like to come to our pages for a little bit of an escape,” Charli said dryly.And should that escape feels like a trap, the most popular girl on TikTok offers the simplest of solutions. “I feel like it’s very important to take some time off whenever you feel like you need it,” she said. “You don’t even tell yourself, ‘Time to take a break.’ You kind of just let it go.” She waggled her fingers again, as if sprinkling magic dust. “Drop your phone for a little bit.” More