Whether you love or hate social media, Amazon Prime Video’s satirical series The Influencers might be for you.
The series, whose first season is currently streaming on Prime, is about ” Six social media influencers compete for an exclusive brand deal with the latest millennial juice craze: Jücytox. As cameras capture each influencer IRL, the manicured versions they present to the world online begin to not just crumble, but implode before our eyes.”
Recently, I had the honor of interviewing creator Mike Heslin and learning all the details behind the new show.
In case our readers are unfamiliar: what is The Influencers about?
The Influencers is a new mockumentary series that follows six social media “stars” who are selected to live together and compete for an exclusive brand deal in a series of creative challenges. As cameras capture each influencer in real life, the manicured version they present to the world online not only crumbles but implodes before our eyes.
You’ve previously mentioned Big Brother as one source of inspiration for this show. Where else did you get your inspiration from?
I combined my love of mockumentaries with my love of reality TV. I pulled inspiration from the style and format of shows like The Real Housewives and Vanderpump Rules, incorporating off-screen producer prompts and diary room confessionals, along with the brilliant complexity of characters such as Valerie Cherish in The Comeback. Working on The Influencers has given me even more respect for people like Michael Patrick King and Christopher Guest who really established and excel at the genre. Pulling off satire/a mockumentary is very difficult! It’s a tricky thing to navigate balancing larger than life characters with the show’s overall self-awareness and requires intelligent writing and crafty direction.
You wrote, directed, and starred in the show, and there were a lot of fun moments throughout the episodes. Was there one part that stood out to you as the most enjoyable?
I’m particularly proud of the Fyre Festival mention and the way that was incorporated into the first two episodes. I still just can’t believe or compute that that happened…so it was a ton of fun to poke fun at. We’ve also received a lot of feedback that episode three tends to be a fan favorite in terms of fun moments and laughs…but I can’t say too much without revealing some spoilers, so people will have to check it out for themselves!
What has your experience been like as an independent queer creator in the digital age?
As a gay filmmaker, representation is of the utmost importance and something I strive to bring to all of my work. Everyone needs to see themselves reflected on the screen and see their stories told. If you don’t see yourself represented in the stories being told in TV and Film, it perpetuates a narrative that you are less than or singular. There are so many different layers, faces, stories, and representations that still have yet to be told in a mainstream way for the LGBTQ+ community. It’s something my business partner (Noam Ash who co-founded our production company Well-Versed Entertainment with me) and I talk about on a daily basis and seek to incorporate into our work: normalizing LGBTQ+ characters and stories so that having a gay character on your show isn’t about checking off a diversity box. We’ve made great strides in the past few years, but I think that that’s the next step.
What do you think about the progress made regarding LGBTQ+ characters onscreen?
When I was young there was literally no representation on screen, but thanks to queer creators like Ryan Murphy and Greg Berlanti who have been paving the way, that certainly has changed. Watching Jack and
Will and Jack on Will & Grace are two of the only queer characters I can recall seeing on TV when I was a teen, and now it seems like every show has at least one token LGBTQ+ character. That being said, while there has been significant progress, there is still a lot of work to be done. I think the next step is true normalization and authentic integration of LGBTQ+ characters versus it coming off as a bunch of execs and showrunners trying to check off some sort of diversity box. And I think we’re well on our way toward that!
If your viewers take away one message from The Influencers, what do you hope that is?
From the beginning of time, comparison has been a huge foe of humanity. Comparing your status, success, beauty, etc., to others has rarely led anywhere good, and this game of comparison (or compare-and-despair) has only been exacerbated by the birth of social media over the last decade. While the show delivers its message with plenty of laughs, it’s ultimately a reminder that what you see online or in the press is rarely what you get in real life and to not let it influence our sense of self-worth.
