OG: Approved - The Ick
Featuring the Next Generation of Storytellers Rising from the Creator Economy
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 Ick
Instagram: 582K Followers
Tik Tok: 5.8K Followers
What Is The Ick?
The Ick takes a piece of internet slang and treats it like the premise for a show.
Most people already know the idea. An “ick” is the moment attraction disappears because of something small. A strange habit, a comment that lands wrong, a behavior that suddenly reframes the person sitting across the table.
The internet has been cataloging those moments for years, usually in the form of confession posts or quick videos. What the creators behind The Ick did was turn that behavior into a repeatable series.
The project was created by Alex Berry and produced by American Picture Company, the production company run by filmmaker John Connor Hammond and Ari Cagan. Instead of leaning on commentary or personality, the team approaches the idea like a short scripted comedy.
The engine behind the series is the submission box.
People send in their own stories about the moment a date or partner suddenly became impossible to look at the same way. Thousands of these arrive describing the exact point when attraction collapses. The team reads through them and looks for the ones that have a clear pivot.
Once they find one, the anecdote becomes a starting point rather than the final product. The story is rewritten into a short scene, actors step in, and the situation is staged so the moment of realization lands clearly on camera. If you watch a few episodes in a row you begin to notice the rhythm. The setup feels normal, a detail slips in, and then something happens that flips the entire interaction.
That discipline is what keeps the series from feeling like recycled internet jokes.
The audience supplies the raw experiences, but the production team treats those experiences like material that needs shaping. Performances are directed, the framing stays consistent, and the editing lands the turn rather than letting the moment drift. The result feels closer to a miniature anthology series than a typical social account.
At the same time the show never loses its connection to the community that feeds it. New stories keep arriving, which means the premise refreshes itself constantly. As long as people keep dating and embarrassing themselves in small, memorable ways, the writers’ room never really closes.
The most interesting part is that the format works because of that balance. The internet supplies the chaos. The creators provide the structure. Somewhere between those two things a show emerges.
Three Things We Love About The Ick
The audience is part of the writing process: Viewer submissions are not decoration. They are the raw material that the series is built from.
Every episode hinges on a clean emotional turn: The moment when attraction flips into discomfort gives the format its structure and keeps the stories focused.
The format can keep going without exhausting itself: Because the stories come from real experiences, the premise keeps renewing itself while the visual language of the show stays consistent.
