With an impossible amount of programs uploaded everyday, limiting a “What’s on YouTube” article to a one-off phenomenon is foolish. With that in mind, here are four more YouTube shows/channels worth subscribing to and viewing on a regular basis.
Check out What’s On YouTube: Part I
Binging With Babish
Combining the host’s love of food and film, Binging With Babish was conceived by filmmaker Andrew Rea and depicts the home cook recreating delectable—and occasionally disgusting—foods from various works of fiction. As of this month, the channel has 3.5 million subscribers and 378 million total views, with videos featuring Rea’s take on dishes like The Moistmaker and Rachel’s English Trifle from Friends, Dessert Breakfast Pasta from Elf and entire episodes dedicated to foods from Seinfeld, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Game of Thrones and much more. With videos shot from the neck down and including Rea’s soothing voiceover, each episode reverse-engineers these recipes to examine exactly how fictional foods would be concocted if in fact TV and film existed in the real world.
Occasionally, after faithfully recreating some of the stranger—and more horrible—dishes, Rea will include his own, more palatable interpretation.
Hot Ones
The celebrity-interview formatted show has grown staid and boring. Late night talk shows all ask the same questions, with their interview subjects barely breaking a sweat. That all changed when Hot Ones premiered on the online food-culture magazine and YouTube channel First We Feast in 2015. The basic premise involves celebrities from film, TV, music, sports and the Internet being interviewed by host Sean Evans over platters of increasingly spicy chicken wings, slathered in some of the most notorious hot sauces on the market.
The show is currently in its seventh season and during its run, it has featured the likes of Jeff Goldblum, Charlize Theron, Michael B. Jordan and Blake Griffin facing off, not only against the spicy wings of death, but also Evans’ adept interviewing skills. And the host isn’t sitting comfortably on the sidelines, instead, Evans partakes in an identical platter of mouth and butt-burning wings. It is, indeed, the future of interview shows happening right now on YouTube.
Honest Trailers
Created in 2012 by Screen Junkies, Honest Trailers consists of parody movie trailers that seek to tell the terrible truth of the movies they portray, featuring the all-important “deep voice narration guy.” The series boasts more than 300 million views on the Screen Junkies channel and is written by what is basically a collection of sarcastic comedians who gleefully make fun of the hard work of filmmakers—and it is absolutely beautiful.
One of the most popular Honest Trailers, the one produced for the horrible, awful, so-bad-it’s-hilarious superhero misfire, 1997’s Batman & Robin, starts, “In a world full of crime, one man is determined to kill Batman once and for all. His name, is director Joel Schumacher.” It is one of the more deserved digs and spells out perfectly why Honest Trailers is one of the more crucial comedic commentaries on the Internet.
PBS Eons
With PBS Eons, the fine folks at the Public Broadcasting Service want everyone to know that yes, it is OK to be well-informed about the deep history of our planet. With hosts Hank Green, Kallie Moore and Blake de Pastino, Eons is a journey through the history of life on Earth. From the dawn of life in the Archaean Eon through the Mesozoic Era—the Age of Dinosaurs—right up to the end of the most recent Ice Age, Eons deliveries amazing facts and eye-popping stats with engaging commentary from the hosts, all of whom are well-regarded individuals in the world of science writing and paleontology. Series topics include “What Color Were Dinosaurs (And How Do We Know)?,” “The Story of Saber Teeth,” “The Biggest Thing That Ever Flew” and “Why Triassic Animals Were Just The Weirdest.”
