Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Biggey Bailey

Instagram: 1.8 Million Followers

Youtube: 783K Subscribers

Who is Biggy Bailey?

In the honor of the NFL season moving into high gear along with the MLB playoff’s kicking off, let’s dig into another sports creator.

Enter Biggy Bailey.

Biggy Bailey used to call himself Biggy Cook the Book, which tells you a lot about where this started.

Bailey is from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and his first audience came through sports betting. He talked football, odds, picks, and the usual arguments that keep sports fans occupied. In 2022, Cook the Book landed a spot in Underdog Fantasy’s creator incubator.

Bailey has become a sketch comedian who happens to know sports really well. College football and the NFL still give him plenty to work with, but the characters have spread into family, dating, Southern life, youth sports, pop culture, work, and whatever else catches his attention.

Knowing sports from the inside lets him move quickly without sounding like someone who just read the headline. When a player, coach, fan base, or college football storyline suddenly becomes the conversation, Bailey already knows the people he wants to make fun of.

Plenty of the videos have nothing to do with sports at all now, which is probably the clearest indication of where the account has gone. People may have first found him through football, but they stayed for Biggy.

He has recently started pushing into long-form YouTube videos. Bailey and videographer William McCutcheon released 17 longer videos in about six months and passed a million combined views.

His development is interesting because the sketches are still the entry point to Biggy’s world. TikTok and Instagram let him post quickly while YouTube lets the bigger ideas develop and breathe.

NBC tested that part before YouTube really did.

Bailey joined Destination X in 2025, where he was still being introduced as a sports bettor and content creator from Chattanooga. He had barely traveled internationally before signing up for a reality competition based largely on figuring out where in Europe you had been dropped.

He made the final three anyway.

The social accounts now live under Biggy Bailey. Sports are the heart, but the comedy kept expanding, television introduced him to people who had never seen the sketches and YouTube is giving him a bigger canvas to build out a world around him.

Three Things We Love About Biggy Bailey

He followed the comedy instead of protecting the niche: Bailey had a recognizable sports-betting brand and could have stayed there. Instead, he let the sketches get broader while keeping the sports knowledge that made the early work credible.

He is already working on the jump to long-form: The YouTube videos give Bailey more than sixty seconds to carry something. Trips, sports events, other personalities, and longer situations let the audience spend time with him instead of only the character in the sketch.

Destination X showed the guy underneath the account: Reality TV removed most of the tools Bailey controls online. He still made the final three with viewers watching him as himself.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: FantasyDocs

Instagram: 151K Followers

Youtube: 7.1K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 114K Followers

Who is FantasyDocs?

I don’t know about you, but this past Monday night was devastating for me as a Giants fan.

I care a lot about this team. I don’t occasionally turn on the New York Giants for a little fun. I’m a diehard, season-ticket-holding, tailgating, screaming, and quite possibly too passionate of a Giants fan.

So when Jaxson Dart went down on the opening drive, I did what every completely rational fan does in that situation. I immediately went online looking for someone to tell me how bad it was.

That’s when I found FantasyDocs, aka Dr. Nithin V Natwa.

Natwa is board-certified in family medicine and sports medicine and practices in Chicago. He completed his sports medicine fellowship through Michigan State and has also worked with athletes in esports.

He has been doing fantasy injury analysis for years. In 2019, he was already hosting the NatwaMD podcast, breaking down NFL injuries and talking through what they meant for fantasy owners.

That is useful because the team update rarely answers the question the fan is actually asking. “Week to week” does not tell me whether I should hold a player, trade him, draft his backup, or prepare for six miserable Sundays.

Natwa gets into the recovery timeline, previous injuries, how performance could be affected, and how much uncertainty still remains. He is also careful about the fact that watching a replay is not the same thing as examining the player.

FantasyDocs is now a full fantasy-football injury product. The site tracks hundreds of players with injury histories, risk grades and projected availability, alongside tools for trades, waivers, dynasty leagues and drafts. There is an app with alerts, an “Ask the Doc” feature, paid subscriptions, and data licensing.

Natwa found a narrow audience with a recurring problem, earned its trust by answering that problem consistently, then built products around what those people kept needing. The same person who finds him because a quarterback goes down on Sunday can end up using FantasyDocs before a draft, checking an injury grade during the week, or paying for access to the larger database.

I found FantasyDocs because my quarterback got hurt and I wanted an answer immediately. Natwa has built an entire company around the fact that millions of fantasy players have some version of that same panic every week.

Three Things We Love About FantasyDocs

The expertise is real: Natwa trained and practiced in sports medicine before building the fantasy audience. He is bringing an actual medical background into sports content, not learning enough terminology to sound convincing.

He found a very specific problem to own: Fantasy players do not just want an injury diagnosis. They want to know what happens next and what they should do about it. FantasyDocs stays focused on that question.

The audience became a business: The social accounts led to subscriptions, an app, alerts, player databases, fantasy tools, and data licensing. Natwa did not need to leave the niche to grow. He kept building deeper into it.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Paid Vacation Comedy

Instagram: 288K Followers

Youtube: 85K Subscribers

What Is Paid Vacation Comedy?

Paid Vacation Comedy brings together stand-up Zac Townsend and Ali Shahriari, the writer/director behind years of viral sketch work with Zebra Corner.

Paid Vacation combines their two instincts. The account moves through fake commercials, workplace sketches, news, social satire, and recurring characters without depending on one performer or one format. The videos are written for the camera from the beginning rather than feeling like stand-up premises that happened to get filmed.

The parodies have also started reaching the people on the other side of the joke. Their Waffle House training video traveled well beyond the page, while a Kill Tony parody made its way to Tony Hinchcliffe and the show before Townsend eventually appeared there himself.

More recently, Paid Vacation has started giving some of those ideas more room.

COOKED is their new scripted restaurant comedy built around line cooks and the particular insanity of working in a kitchen. Instead of starting over with a new world every time they post, Townsend and Shahriari now have a workplace and characters they can keep returning to.

They are trying something completely different with My Pants, Your Pants. Paid Vacation asked followers to send in stories about the last time they pooped their pants and received more than 10,000 submissions. Townsend and producer Taylor Brown turned those voicemails into a podcast.

That response says quite a bit about the community they have built. Ten thousand people were willing to call a hotline and voluntarily tell Paid Vacation one of the more humiliating stories of their lives.

There is also a Patreon, merchandise, and live work around the account. Paid Vacation began with short sketches and parodies. Now one idea becomes a scripted series, another becomes a podcast, and the audience is starting to become part of what gets made.

Three Things We Love About Paid Vacation Comedy

They know the format they are parodying: The Waffle House training video, commercial spoofs, fake news, and Kill Tony game all work because Paid Vacation understands the thing well enough to reproduce its language before breaking it.

The two creators bring different skills: Townsend comes from stand-up and joke writing. Shahriari spent years making web sketches with Zebra Corner. Paid Vacation gets both the premise and the visual execution.

They are giving the sketches somewhere to grow: COOKED creates a recurring workplace, while My Pants, Your Pants turned an audience prompt into its own show. The page is starting to produce formats that can live longer than one upload.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: That Documentary Girl

Instagram: 2.1M Followers

Tik Tok: 1.3M Followers

Who Is That Documentary Girl?

Christie Boschman advises more than five million followers and subscribers what documentaries are worth watching.

Boschman has been obsessed with documentaries since she was young. She was nine when years old when she first she saw Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater. Then she eventually attended Toronto Film School, initially thinking she might work in fiction, but nonfiction kept her attention.

That Documentary Girl started with a simple observation. There were endless accounts recommending movies and television, but very few devoted entirely to documentaries. Boschman posted one recommendation, people responded, and she kept posting.

True crime is a big focus of the community, but the account stretches well beyond it into music, sports, nature, scams, cults, social justice, and independent films that barely registered when they were first released.

People are not following Boschman because they generally like pop culture. They are there because they like documentaries and need less obvious titles to watch. That makes her recommendation unusually powerful.

Boschman has talked about posting a documentary that had been sitting quietly on transactional platforms and seeing it climb to number one on Apple TV rentals the next day. Filmmakers now lobby her directly because her support can put a film in front of millions of people who already love to watch nonfiction.

For an independent documentary, that kind of concentrated attention can be hard to come by. A trailer might reach a larger random audience and do very little. Boschman can talk about a film to a smaller but far more relevant group and suddenly people are renting it, discussing it, and sending it to friends.

That Documentary Girl has become a curator in the typical sense of the word. Her followers trust in her taste and vision of non fiction works.

Boschman recently asked her community to put forwrad the best documentaries ever made. Nine of the top ten came from Netflix. Studios including Prime Video, Hulu, Lifetime, and Netflix have hired her for campaigns, while independent filmmakers use the same concentrated audience to give smaller documentaries a real shot at being seen.

Christie’s Movie Club runs through Patreon, where members watch and discuss documentaries together. The DocuList packages recommendations into guides organized around subjects like true crime, music, cults, nature, and scams. She also has merch, aimed squarely at people who have made watching documentaries part of their identity.

Boschman has spoken at Hot Docs about film marketing and is developing a television series and documentary coffee-table book.

For filmmakers, the value is big. Boschman does not simply have a large community. She has a concentrated group made up of the exact people a documentary producer is trying to reach.

@thatdocumentarygirlWatch on Paramount + #fyp #documentaries #documentary #whattowatch #mustwatch #truecrime #doctok #paramount

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Three Things We Love About That Documentary Girl

Her recommendations can help a documentary become widely known: Boschman has seen films climb rental charts after she posts about them. Her community arrives looking for documentaries, which gives an independent filmmaker access to viewers who are already interested.

She keeps digging after release weekend: A documentary can vanish quickly if nobody knows where to find it. Boschman regularly pulls older, independent, international, and overlooked films back in front of people.

She has concentrated on the documentary world: The recommendations, movie club, DocuList, polls, and conversations all serve nonfiction fans. For a documentary filmmaker, very little of that reach is wasted.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Arianna Papalexopoulos

Instagram: 276K Followers

Youtube: 30.5K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 297.1K Followers

Who Is Arianna Papalexopoulos?

As I write this from Athens, it felt appropriate to feature a creator who has built an audience on both sides of the Atlantic.

Enter Arianna Papalexopoulos.

Arianna built her audience playing the Greek mothers, aunts, cousins, and family friends she grew up around. Greek Mom is the character most people know. She is loud, loving, intrusive, and suspicious of anything that did not come from a Greek kitchen.

Papalexopoulos grew up in San Francisco with a Greek father from Kalavryta and an Italian-American mother. As a teenager, she spent summers in her father’s hometown, staying with relatives who did not speak English. She knows the family dynamics well enough to exaggerate them without turning them into generic ethnic comedy.

After graduating from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, Papalexopoulos and actress Megan Timpane started the YouTube channel TwinGirlPeeks because neither had much of an acting reel. They stopped waiting for roles and started writing and shooting their own sketches.

She later earned a master’s degree in Digital Media from USC and worked in influencer marketing. During the pandemic, she started putting more time into her own videos and writing more directly about Greek-American life.

One early sketch followed an American guy on a date with a Greek-American woman. Papalexopoulos wondered if something that specific would mean much outside her own circle. It did. Greeks in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, the U.K., and Greece began finding the videos.

More family characters followed, along with sketches about dating, church, food, language, soccer, and the small cultural battles that happen when immigrant families raise American kids.

She has kept one foot in scripted work. Papalexopoulos wrote, produced, and acted in It’s a Greek Thing, an eight-episode comedy series that played the San Francisco Greek Film Festival. She co-wrote Greek Enough and has produced and acted in shorts including Como, Ti Amo and The Curious Case of the Sacred Lamb.

She also produced and acted in Jaunt, the debut feature from her brother, filmmaker Alexi Papalexopoulos.

Stand-up came later. After making videos with Greek-Canadian comedian Angelo Tsarouchas in 2023, Papalexopoulos began opening for him.

Papalexopoulos still describes herself as an actor and producer. She just does not have to wait for an audition to perform anymore. She can write something, shoot it, put it online, and find out directly whether her Greek followers recognize themselves in it.

Three Things We Love About Arianna Papalexopoulos

She never watered down the Greek stuff: Kalavryta, theias, Orthodox holidays, Greek mothers, food, language, and family expectations gave the comedy its audience rather than limiting it. People recognize the details because she leaves them in.

She started by making the reel herself: TwinGirlPeeks existed because Papalexopoulos and Megan Timpane needed acting footage and decided to shoot their own. That same instinct carried into It’s a Greek Thing, Greek Enough, the shorts, and Jaunt.

She can move from character work into straight performance: Greek Mom may be the entry point, but Papalexopoulos has also built scripted projects, produced features, and taken stand-up on the road. The character gets attention without boxing her into one kind of work.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Blake Webber

Instagram: 1.7 Million Followers

Youtube: 114K Subscribers

Who Is Blake Webber?

Blake Webber started as a vape-obsessed bro people were not entirely sure was real. More than a decade later, the vape is mostly gone and the character is still here.

Webber is the alter ego of comedian Aristotle Georgeson, who began posting as Blake Vapes in 2015. Georgeson had done stand-up, trained at UCB, and worked in marketing and social media before landing on a character with a mullet, a strange voice, total confidence, and an almost spiritual devotion to blowing clouds.

By 2017, Georgeson had moved away from vaping and renamed the character Blake Webber. The character started dubbing celebrity clips, reality television, public freakouts, rappers, influencers, and whatever else happened to be moving through the feed.

Blake eventually moved beyond Instagram. Georgeson built a live show around the character, including a fake motivational TED Talk, music, visuals, and crowd work. He has DJed as Blake and appeared on Netflix’s Cooking on High and Viceland’s Flophouse.

Georgeson later joined Jake Adams, Griff Pippin, and Mark Smalls on Country Club Adjacent. The golf podcast and video series has logged nearly 200 episodes and built its own lane around tournaments, players, press conferences, and a sport that has become increasingly comfortable with creator media.

His newer work with Brent Pella has opened another pair of characters.

Georgeson and Pella created Grik and Carl, two blue aliens trying to understand humans. They walk around Earth asking ordinary people questions and treating everyday behavior like something that deserves serious investigation.

The characters are now the basis for We Out Here, a scripted TV comedy Georgeson and Pella are developing with Happy Madison Productions.

Blake Webber has lasted because Georgeson never treated the character like a one-joke account. The vape disappeared, the voice stayed, and the work kept changing around it. Country Club Adjacent gave him another world to play in, while Grik and Carl opened the door to something much bigger with We Out Here.

Three Things We Love About Blake Webber

He turned the feed into source material: Once Blake moved beyond vaping, Georgeson could drop the character into celebrity clips, reality TV, public freakouts, and whatever else the internet was talking about that week. The format kept Blake current without rebuilding the character every time culture moved.

He keeps finding new homes for the character: Voiceovers, live shows, DJ sets, television appearances, podcasting, golf content, and collaborations all grew from the same comic brain without feeling like forced extensions.

Grik and Carl already proved themselves before the pitch: Georgeson and Brent Pella built the community for the blue aliens online first. We Out Here enters development with Happy Madison after billions of views rather than a deck explaining why people might care.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: The Bomar Brothers (Cult Of Vision)

Instagram: 171K Followers

Website

*We are expanding the OG: Approved section! We’ve decided to interview creators. To understand the many ways creators are pushing forward, we have to get under the hood with them one on one (or in this case one on two) and find out exactly what their goals are and how they plan to achieve them. So, without further adieu we are happy to present our first OG: Approved Interview…

When I discovered the Bomar Brothers, it wasn’t through traditional channels or a film festival. My algorithm blessed me with a video that many may misidentify as AI slop.

The title? Fluff Fiction. It’s a parody of Pulp Fiction cast entirely with Muppets. After some digging, I found that these videos were not just basic AI outputs by a couple AI whiz kids. They were marketing missiles built by two twentysomething filmmakers trying to get their names out there. When I eventually got the chance to speak to Grant and Dean, I felt like I was in the garage with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the 70’s.

This story is about two young filmmakers working out how to break in. They haven’t yet, and that’s part of why it’s worth telling now. What follows is the tools they’re using and the way they read the landscape. For me, it’s just a hunch. But it feels like a new age of indie filmmaking, and the door is wider than people think.

The Bomars were homeschooled and started making shorts on their dad’s iPad at eight and ten. The family was the studio: parents producing and mentoring, kids directing. American Gothic got made in thirteen days when Grant was seventeen. The brothers are also master-rated chess players. Grant has two national titles.

The Account

Fluff Fiction drops the Muppets into the grimiest corner of nineties crime cinema, and by the brothers’ account the work has drawn notice from inside the films themselves, including a blessing from one of the actors they parody. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have second thoughts.

Grant answers with art history. Picasso could paint like an old master years before he broke a single rule. Warhol turned printmaking into mass production and called his studio the Factory. The point being that the greats learned the fundamentals, then used whatever was new. Their film heroes did the same thing.

To him, AI is what CGI was when George Lucas first bet on it.

You can take or leave the lineage they’re claiming. The operation underneath the account is harder to argue with.

A flagship episode is about twenty hours of work between two or three people. Grant handles the cut. He watches the source film, lays down the structure, then writes change notes for Dean. Dean builds whatever doesn’t exist yet. That part runs eight to twelve hours of rendering and editing, and when the tools can’t reach the image in his head, he sketches it himself or digs up references until they get there. Every episode gets a poster designed from scratch. And they release weekly, no matter what.

Grant and his father keep spreadsheets on every video. Skip rate, share rate, retention broken out second by second. It sounds like overkill until you remember studios pay testing houses real money for this. The Bomars get it off a puppet video, every week, and write it down.

A video with no visible seam gets watched two or three times before you realize it. The retention hack and the Pulp Fiction homage are the same edit.

The community work gets done by hand too. The brothers and their dad answer comments and DMs for hours a day. The account earns about enough from Meta’s monetization programs to cover the compute bill, and they keep it there on purpose. They’ll tell you the work is protected as transformative parody, that they’ve done their research. That’s their reading. The law around AI-generated derivative work hasn’t caught up far enough for anyone to check it, and they know it, which is part of why the account was never meant to be the business.

The Bomar Brothers Playbook

1. Borrow the Attention, Keep the Audience

Recognizable IP does the hook work for free. A stranger scrolling past needs no introduction when the characters show up already loved, and that buys the first three seconds, which on these platforms is most of the battle. Everything those seconds earn belongs to the Bomars, though, not the IP. The follows and DM relationships are theirs, and so are the commenters asking who’s playing which character next week. That community is the real asset, and they treat it like one. Nobody trying to scale a page efficiently would spend their hours the way these two do, and they know it. “We don’t use chatbots,” Grant says. “We write all of our followers directly.” It’s a family operation, too, and the brothers want that on the record.)

2. Every Video Is a Rep

The twenty hours an episode is doing double duty. The content is the visible half. The rest is school. Dean started out close to anti-AI and got fluent in months because the account forces daily reps in Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, and every model they can get their hands on. The spreadsheets do the same job for storytelling. Most filmmakers guess at where an audience checks out. These two get told, in numbers, after every post.

They’re explicit that this education is earmarked for the features.

3. Final Authorship

The tools flatten everyone to the same starting point. What separates you is whatever you learned before you touched them. The Bomars learned a lot. They can draw at near-realism. They direct actors through improv, Cassavetes-style. They design their own posters and know how to structure an edit. All of it shows up in the AI work. Shots get planned on paper first, sketched out or pulled from references. Characters carry over from episode to episode on purpose, like a cast. Environments get designed, not generated. Grant talks about the tools the way he talks about improv, throw out a broad idea and work with what comes back. With one rule he won’t bend on.

That’s the gap between what they make and what the feed is drowning in. It’s why their stuff gets mistaken for original work by people who should know better. I know because I sent it to one.

4. Catching the Big Fish

Lynch wrote films by collecting scene ideas on cards until a feature assembled itself. He called it catching the big fish. Grant treats it as an instruction manual.

Every video is a scene idea getting tested on a live audience. The account is the card stack, and the poll questions and comment threads do the job a development exec used to pretend to do.

5. The Fusion

There’s no plan here to do AI content until they’ve earned the right to make real films, then drop it at the door. Nothing gets abandoned.

Dean’s reference point is Bruce Lee. Jeet Kune Do took the useful piece of every fighting style and threw the rest away. And the test case is already running. They’re remastering American Gothic with AI-assisted color and VFX, and Korey Pereira, the Emmy-winning sound designer from Stranger Things, is polishing the audio for a fall festival re-release. A film shot the old way, proven at festivals, going back out on the circuit with the new tools worked in. The whole plan, sitting in one movie.

Mid-Game

Everything above describes a position, not a victory. To their credit, the brothers know the difference.

The audience has never been tested on a Bomar original. Everyone who follows Cult of Vision signed up for the parodies. The plan is to start slipping original work in between them, stuff with the same creative DNA, until the audience’s taste comes along for the ride. It’s sensible and completely unproven. Grant expects a slight hit when the original content starts arriving. Nobody knows yet if it stays slight.

The legal foundation is a good-faith reading of fair use in a territory where the law hasn’t finished forming. A platform policy change or a studio enforcement wave could take the account down tomorrow, and it wouldn’t matter how well they’d run it. They’ve built with that in mind. The account is skills and audience. The revenue was never the point. The risk is still sitting there either way.

And a following doesn’t pay for a movie, at least not yet. Watching Katarina is half shot and waiting on a grant decision.

Their answer to all of it is the chess. Grant plays in a school built around what’s called the imbalances, the slow accumulation of small advantages across the whole board.

That’s the company doctrine, stated as a game. The festival track, the audience, the tool mastery, the school, the producer relationships, the local ties to Texas classical musicians and the UT dance departments they make dance films for. No single file wins the game. They all just improve the position. Worst case, they keep growing the audience, keep sending shorts to festivals, keep their education going at UT, and wait.

The Way Forward

I asked them at the end what they’d say to the people watching from the sidelines. And there are a lot of them right now. Writers, directors, and actors with real credits who can’t get work. Film students staring at a pipeline that no longer leads anywhere in particular.

Grant’s answer starts with the obvious part, create constantly, then gets specific. Build your mastermind group. Find the people who think like you and work like you, and develop the goal together. The lone-genius thing is mostly a story people tell after the fact. The Bomars came with theirs built in. Two brothers, their dad producing, their mom in the mix. But the principle doesn’t require sharing a last name.

Dean’s answer is the one I keep thinking about.

None of it required permission, and almost none of it required money, which makes it the oldest tradition in independent film wearing new materials. Look at what’s lying around and build with it.

Does it work? Nobody knows yet, including them. But two brothers with half a feature in the can are playing the long game in public, and I plan on checking back in on the board.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Michael Somerville

Instagram: 297K Followers

Youtube: 2.6K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 94K Followers

Who Is Michael Somerville?

Michael Somerville was making sketches for YouTube eighteen years ago, back when most comedians used the site to upload shaky clips from the back of a comedy club.

He opened his channel in 2006. By 2008, he was starring in two original web shows, Lunch Break with Somerville and Love, Somerville. He was already writing recurring formats for the internet before anyone had settled on what web comedy was supposed to look like.

Somerville started stand-up on a dare while attending Notre Dame. After graduation, he briefly worked in advertising before moving to New York and pursuing comedy full time. His career includes four appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, several albums, years of touring, and more than 100 million views across his digital shorts.

Somerville releases three scripted sketch series each week on Instagram.

The Monday bar sketches pair Somerville with Adam Ferrara. The bar gives them a reason to keep meeting, while Ferrara and Somerville find a new way to irritate each other every Monday. Ferrara is not dropping in for a cameo. He is part of the series, and the videos rely on the rhythm between the pair.

Wednesday brings relationship sketches. Somerville has been writing about men, women, dating, and marriage for most of his career, but the newer videos come from a different stage of life. The fights are smaller, the history is longer, and both people usually know exactly which nerve they are touching.

Friday belongs to the dad sketches. Somerville has spoken about raising children while continuing to tour, and the videos stay close to the daily confusion of parenting. His dads want to look prepared, maintain authority, and get through a normal afternoon without exposing how much they are improvising.

The schedule keeps the page from feeling like a pile of unrelated reels. Monday has Ferrara at the bar, Wednesday returns to couples, and Friday goes back to the dads. He does not need one recurring character to connect the videos. The bar, relationship, and dad sketches all sound like him.

The habit goes back to Lunch Break with Somerville and Love, Somerville. Those early shows gave his comedy a form beyond the stage. Instagram offers a different screen and a faster release schedule, but Somerville is still writing recurring shows for an audience watching online.

Three Things We Love About Michael Somerville

He was making web shows before there was a playbook: Somerville was creating original online comedy in 2008, long before social video became an expected part of a comedian’s career. He kept working in the form while the platforms caught up.

The week has a real schedule: Bar sketches arrive Monday, relationship sketches Wednesday, and dad sketches Friday. Each series has its own subject, while Somerville’s point of view holds the page together.

He did not freeze the act in his thirties: The relationship jokes grew into marriage jokes, and fatherhood gave him an entirely new weekly series. Somerville kept the same comic voice without pretending his life had stayed the same.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Timothy Thatcher

Instagram: 82.4K Followers

Youtube: 38.5K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 126.4K Followers

Who Is Timothy Thatcher?

Timothy Thatcher is a Minnesota comic working across stand-up, short films, and online sketch.

His YouTube bio reads, “Sketch comedy from my buddies and I,” and the channel follows through on it. Thatcher works with a regular group of performers instead of playing every role himself. He leaves room for someone else to interrupt him, undercut the scene, or land the final joke.

His sketches pull from work, dating, friendship, and people lying to save themselves from minor embarrassment. Nobody needs an elaborate costume or a long introduction. The characters usually make their problems worse by talking longer than they should.

Thatcher performs stand-up across the West Coast, but his videos are written as scenes rather than monologues broken into camera angles. The jokes pass between people. One character starts the problem, another misunderstands it, and someone in the background realizes how badly the conversation is going before the person speaking does.

His longest-running idea on Instagram is Public Relations Co., an Instagram-native show about “the world’s premier PR firm for the publicly hated.” The agency takes on clients whose reputations are already wrecked and tries to make the disaster presentable. Every new scandal gives the staff another impossible assignment, while the same office and employees hold the series together.

His other sketches move through awkward dates, friendships, jobs, and men working too hard to look smarter or tougher than they are. Thatcher rarely pushes the characters into cartoon territory. They still believe they are behaving normally, which makes the failure easier to recognize.

His screen credits include The Mosquito Effect, Living Dead, Student Affairs, Cinco de Mayo Is Not a Thing, and the 2026 comedy series Casen Pointe: True Crime Detective (Shout out ). He continues acting in other projects while writing and directing material for his own pages.

Thatcher does not dress the sketches up much. He relies on timing, blocking, and the performers sharing the frame. Someone can enter at the wrong moment, overhear the last sentence of a lie, or sit silently while another character keeps making the situation worse.

Instagram has brought Thatcher the larger audience, while YouTube holds years of sketches in one place. Across both pages, the same group of collaborators keeps returning, and Public Relations Co. gives them a recurring world without swallowing everything else he makes..

Three Things We Love About Timothy Thatcher

Public Relations Co. has a repeatable premise: “The world’s premier PR firm for the publicly hated” can take on a new reputational disaster every episode, while the agency and its employees give the series continuity.

He writes for the entire group: Thatcher does not treat the other performers like props waiting for his punchline. The laugh can come from the person speaking, the person listening, or the person quietly realizing the conversation has gone completely sideways.

He knows how to use the room: A late entrance, a background reaction, or someone overhearing the wrong sentence can change the sketch. Thatcher does not have to cut away from the scene to find the next joke.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: CrackerMilk

Instagram: 566K Followers

Youtube: 1.8M Subscribers

Tik Tok: 280K Followers

What Is CrackerMilk?

CrackerMilk has spent more than a decade making short Australian sketches that rarely waste a second.

The channel began with Connor McDuff, a Brisbane filmmaker who started uploading videos in high school. He later attended Griffith Film School, where he made the three-part web series F**ed Fairytales as his graduate project rather than the usual standalone short. The series earned an Australian Online Video Award nomination and showed where McDuff’s attention already was. He wanted to make comedy for the internet, not use the internet as a place to store student films.

CrackerMilk’s sketches usually begin with an ordinary situation and one bad rule. The characters accept the absurdity long enough for it to escalate, and the sketch ends before everyone has time to settle into the premise. CrackerMilk does not spend thirty seconds preparing a joke the audience understood in five.

The channel gradually grew into an ensemble. Elias de Weger became one of its central writers and performers. Chris Slater’s Dad developed into one of the most durable characters. Tamara McLaughlin joined with acting credits that include independent films and Thor: Ragnarok. Lachlan “Goob” Kristofer produces the podcast and appears throughout the wider CrackerMilk world.

Viewers now follow the cast as much as the characters. The CrackerMilk Podcast regularly puts Connor, Elias, Chris, Tamara, and Goob around the same table to talk through their work, friendships, arguments, and whatever humiliation followed them into the studio that week.

The podcast has passed 120 episodes, with titles such as “Dad Takes Over the Podcast,” “How Tamara Joined CrackerMilk,” and “Goob Crashes Out.” The sketches introduce the cast through performance, while the podcast lets the audience spend time with the people underneath it.

Patreon members receive weekly exclusive sketches, uncut podcast episodes, and production material. A recent post followed the team on a writers’ retreat, giving paying fans access to the process that produces the next round of videos.

The merchandise is built around characters and references from the channel rather than a generic logo. Tamara Pigeon, Tinder Fish, Take Chair, and other inside jokes have become shirts, hats, and tote bags. Anyone outside the audience would probably be confused, which is part of the appeal.

In 2023, the team raised money and produced a 20-minute Halloween pilot directed by McDuff. Chris Slater’s Dad character anchored a longer story with more production, a larger cast, and enough time for the ensemble to share one narrative.

The operation now resembles a small Brisbane sketch studio. The channel supplies a constant stream of new ideas, the podcast strengthens the audience’s connection to the cast, Patreon supports extra production, and the pilot gives the team a longer form to pursue.

CrackerMilk did not wait for Australian television to decide whether the group deserved a show. They made one minute at a time until the longer version became possible.

Three Things We Love About CrackerMilk

The cast became the franchise: CrackerMilk began as Connor McDuff’s channel, but the audience now follows Elias, Chris, Tamara, and Goob as closely as the characters they play. The podcast made the chemistry between them part of the appeal.

They built a working sketch room on YouTube: More than 1,500 uploads do not come from waiting around for inspiration. CrackerMilk has writers, recurring performers, production roles, and a steady process for turning new premises into finished sketches.

The sketches do not disappear after the upload: Dad, Tamara Pigeon, Tinder Fish, and Take Chair keep resurfacing in podcast stories, merchandise, and longer projects. CrackerMilk has taught the audience to remember the bits instead of simply scrolling past them.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Tyler Bender

Instagram: 261K Followers

Youtube: 283K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 590.5K Followers

Who Is Tyler Bender?

Tyler Bender became nationally known by playing a version of her own mother.

In July 2022, she filmed a grocery-store video satirizing skinny moms on diets. Bender walked over to a bulk dispenser, removed a single nut, and tied it inside a little plastic sack. She expected people to find it strange and move on. Instead, viewers recognized their mothers, their childhood kitchens, and the food rules they had absorbed without anyone naming them.

The Almond Mom character became a hashtag and a national conversation about diet culture. Good Morning America covered Bender twice, and Hulu’s Impact x Nightline devoted an episode to the phenomenon. Bender appeared with her mother, Sara, and the two spoke openly about the behavior behind the parody.

Bender later turned to tradwife content. Her parodies put her in a frilly dress narrating domestic perfection while store packaging remains visible in the kitchen. She bakes fresh bread because “it’s the yeast I could do,” delivering every pun with unnerving cheerfulness.

Her longer YouTube videos separate homemaking from the ideology wrapped around it, tracing the political messages, historical fantasies, and gender rules underneath the aesthetic. Bender can play the character and then explain where the joke came from.

She grew up Mormon outside Salt Lake City and studied musical theater at the University of Utah before leaving the program. Almond Mom has her own posture, gestures, and relationship with food. The tradwife has a costume, vocal register, and fixed smile. Bender holds a character through a full scene rather than relying on a wig and one repeated line.

In 2025, she launched Tyler’s Kitschen, a YouTube show and podcast where she bakes with uneven results while talking through pop culture, internet drama, and feminism. Episodes have covered the Tea app data breach, Cracker Barrel’s logo controversy, teenage tradwives, the manosphere, and the move from girlboss culture toward domestic submission.

Her channel also includes The Content Bunker, reality television breakdowns, audience questions, and longer scripted pieces, including a Christmas musical parody and comedy involving AI girlfriends.

Her Substack covers growing up Mormon, dating, reality television, feminism, health, and her first year in Los Angeles.

The broader business runs under the On A Benderr name. She sells merchandise through Fourthwall and distributes Tyler’s Kitschen as a podcast while continuing to make the characters that introduced her.

Bender has said she wants to create and star in her own television series. She already has recurring characters, several formats, a show with its own set, scripted experiments, and an audience willing to follow her from a short parody into a researched cultural argument.

Three Things We Love About Tyler Bender

She knows the women she parodies: The Almond Mom came from behavior Bender saw inside her own family, and she sat beside her mother on national television to discuss it. The characters are exaggerated, but the recognition comes from somewhere real.

Tyler’s Kitschen has an actual format: Bender is not just talking at a camera. She is baking badly, moving around the set, and letting the recipe compete with the argument. The episode still has somewhere to go after the first joke.

She stays funny when the costume comes off: The tradwife material works as character comedy, long-form criticism, and personal writing without turning into three different versions of Tyler. The point gets sharper, but the comedy never disappears.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Tom McGovern

Instagram: 555K Followers

Youtube: 41.6K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 623.2K Followers

Who Is Tom McGovern?

Tom McGovern is a musical comedian who treats small, ridiculous premises like they deserve a full arrangement.

He is best known as one third of Wolves of Glendale, the Los Angeles comedy band with Ethan Edenburg and Eric Jackowitz. Tom plays keys and sings, and his work sits somewhere between sketch, theater, and pop songwriting. The music usually goes bigger than the premise has any right to.

Before Wolves of Glendale, McGovern was making solo comedy music in New York. He later moved to Los Angeles, reached out to Edenburg and Jackowitz, and the three wrote “Vapin’ in Vegas” the first day they were all in the same room. The band came together fast, but the fit was not random. Three musicians, one silly title, and enough craft to turn it into a song people remembered.

McGovern’s personal sketches show the smaller version of the same skill set. He does not need a complicated setup. A phrase, a type of person, an awkward mood, or one strange musical choice can carry the bit. A lot of the comedy comes from how seriously he commits to something that should not be sung with that much confidence.

Wolves of Glendale take that impulse and make it louder. The band’s songs are not sketches with instruments underneath them. They are real songs pointed at deeply unserious subjects. “The Gym”, “Loud Ass Car”, “Just Give Me Cash”, “Vapin’ in Vegas”, “Donkey On The Edge.” The titles sound like throwaways until the band gives them hooks, harmonies, structure, and enough musical force to make the premise stick.

The musicianship is not decoration. Wolves of Glendale can play, and that changes the joke. If the song were sloppy, the premise would feel cheap. If the song were too pleased with itself, the joke would collapse. The band lands in the middle: straight-faced, well-built, and committed long enough for the dumb subject to become weirdly emotional.

McGovern understands musical comedy as songwriting first. The laugh comes later because the song has already done its job.

Three Things We Love About Tom McGovern

The songs are built properly: McGovern and Wolves of Glendale do not treat the music as decoration. The hooks, arrangements, and harmonies are strong enough to make the premise last past the first laugh.

The solo sketches and the band share a brain: The personal feed and the Wolves songs both come from tiny social observations, overcommitted performance, and the pleasure of taking an unserious idea too seriously.

He brings stage muscle to internet comedy: McGovern is not only making clips. The work is built to live in rooms, with a band, an audience, and a chorus people can sing even when the subject is ridiculous.

@tommcgovern27What the f is happening here??? #fyp #musicalcomedy #sax

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Leave a comment

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more