Stream It Or Skip It?

In the six-part docuseries Born To Be Viral: The Real Lives Of Kidfluencers, director Ines Novačić and her crew follow four different families over the span of five years, from 2019-2024. All four families put their lives on social media, whether it’s YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or all of the above. Three of the families are huge successes, and one is trying to follow in those families’ footsteps.

Opening Shot: A producer asks Lexi McClure, who’s about 8, how long she’s been doing videos with her family. After a bit of counting, she says, “Seven and a half years.”

The Gist: The first episode concentrates on the Fisher family in Utah, whose YouTube page is called Fishfam. Madison and Kyler Fisher consider themselves the “OGs” of family vloggers; they have millions of subscribers, with some of the most popular videos being the births of their five children (twins Taytum and Oakley, younger sister Halston, younger brother Oliver and new baby Cohen). They have lots of brand deals, and the kids participate in the videos that promote them. Of course, there’s pressure to constantly pump out content, and of course that leads to tension.

The other hugely successful family vlogging family is the McClures in Georgia. Identical twins Ava and Alexis have been the draw since a video of the two of them talking with their mother Ami about being twins went viral when they were around 3. Since then Ami and Justin McClure have taken this venture seriously, hiring a videographer and trying to make the videos as wholesome and fun for the kids as possible — though the twins’ younger brother Jersey wants no part of it. Justin McClure, a former stand-up comedian, took flak in 2018 for inappropriate (and unfunny) tweets he put out in his pre-family-vlogging days.

The other two families are Nastya and her mother Anna, who run the Like Nastya YouTube channel, which has an astonishing 129 million subscribers. Finally, there is Daisy Rodriguez and her son Ethan; she’s struggling to get a channel featuring Ethan to get views and subscriptions.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Born To Be Viral: The Real Lives Of Kidfluencers is just the latest in docuseries about family vloggers. We’ve got Bad Influence: The Dark Side Of Kidfluencing, An Update On Our Family, and Devil In The Family: The Fall Of Ruby Franke.

Our Take: What we’ve seen through all of these shows about kidfluencers and family vlogging is that the perception that something just isn’t right about it is unavoidable. Born To Be Viral takes a bit sunnier of an approach than the other three series we cited above, but there is still too much a creeping element of exploitation and loss of childhood innocence to ignore.

Let’s face it: Family vlogging always starts out to be cute, with cute kids saying or doing cute things. But once money gets involved, especially when that money is tied to brand deals, these kids become pitchpeople without their consent. They’re working for someone, whether it’s their parents, the companies that have the ad money, or both. It’s actually has the potential to be far more destructive to the kids than acting, because at least with acting, the kids are protected by child labor laws.

At times during this fast-paced docuseries (six episodes that are each a basic-cable-friendly 21 minutes, since the series originally ran on Freeform in June) Novačić tries to have it both ways, showing the kids having fun with these videos and talking about being with their families while doing them, but then showing the tense moments where the pressure to produce gets to one or both parents.

There is absolutely acknowledgement, usually through interviews with experts that float across the screen in vertical app-like windows, that this is big business and these kids are basically young workers. But in the episodes we watched, there seemed to be less of an emphasis on how the parents’ choices when it comes to vlogging impact the kids. Perhaps as Novačić’s cameras return to each family over the five years of filming, we’ll get to see that more.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Madison Fisher talks about negative comments on the family’s videos and says, “I don’t know where the negativity’s coming from and why people are so worried about kids being online. There’s no way of going back We’re kind of just already in it.” Then she tells baby Cohen, who is on her lap, that he already has 196,000 followers.

Sleeper Star: As always in these scenarios, the kids are the sleeper stars, mainly because a) they’re all cute, and b) we really hope to see them grow older and rebel against being on camera all the time.

Most Pilot-y Line: So Jersey McClure got his name because his mother Ami and her family settled in New Jersey after immigrating to the U.S. from Nigeria when Ami was 4. Every time we heard his name we wondered what age he was going to be when he decides to legally change it to something that’s not a state (or one of the Channel Islands).

Our Call: STREAM IT. Born To Be Viral: The Real Lives Of Kidfluencers doesn’t get too deep in the weeds about the advantages and disadvantages of kids being on social media channels with millions of fans. But it does manage to point out, even in a sunny and breezy way, that it’s far too easy for the kids to come out on the emotional short end of this arrangement.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.