The Format Becomes the Franchise: Inside American Picture Company’s Plan to Build Prestige TV for the Algorithm
In 2022, John Hammond and Ari Cagan applied the legacy playbook to the creator economy.
They developed and produced a scripted vertical series called Cobell Energy — an office sitcom set inside a Texas oil company.
When it launched, Variety called it the first Hollywood-backed scripted vertical series ever made. They got Adam McKay to executive produce. They were funded by a sustainability nonprofit called Yellow Dot Judd Apatow reposted the first episode. It looked exactly like it was supposed to.
Didn’t move the needle.
The twist of setting an office sitcom inside a Texas oil company — cowboy boots, southern accents, the whole thing — created enough confusion in the first three seconds that audiences scrolled before they understood what they were watching.
“The second the audience starts to feel confused,” said Hammond, “they’re like, I don’t know what this is, next thing.” The concept registered. The spin was one beat too many.
The McKay attachment was supposed to do work it couldn’t do here.
“When you’re on your phone looking at content,” said Hammond, “you’re not thinking about who produced this or who’s behind it. You’re asking, is this entertaining to me? Do I understand this?” The people who read Variety are not the audience for Cobell Energy.
Hollywood has spent fifty years building an infrastructure of credibility around festivals, trades, EP attachments… all of it designed to communicate value to other people inside the industry.
None of that work translates at the point of contact with a phone screen, where the only question being asked is whether the next three seconds are worth giving up. The system was built for a different distribution model.
Hammond studied film and graphic design at the New School, ran an illegal comedy club out of his Brooklyn basement after graduating, and spent years developing a TV pilot nobody would buy.
Cagan taught himself production, built social-native series at Mad Realities, then started Gymnasium with a few others , in less than a year they sold a show to Amazon. John and Ari met through Kareem Rahma, recognized they read the landscape the same way, and APC came out of that.
After Cobell, the question changed. Not how to launch a show the right way, but what a format would look like if it was designed for zero context — where a stranger landing on it cold could understand what they were watching inside the first three seconds.
There’s an entire category of media companies now built around exactly that problem — studios without a face, formats that don’t depend on a single talent to carry them.
The Wrap recently profiled some that have reached scale: Dropout, Jubilee, NowThis. Mad Realities, which we’ve written about before, is another version of this.
What those companies share is that they’re past the hard part. The infrastructure is in place. The model holds. APC is earlier in that process, which is exactly why it’s worth paying attention to.
The Pivot
The first meeting John and Ari took after starting APC took was with Alex Berry. The show was called The Ick.
The premise lands immediately. Community-submitted dating horror stories, dramatized as scripted short films, each built around the precise moment attraction disappears.
A viewer landing on the content for first time immediately understands what they’re watching. No onboarding required, no prior episode to have seen. Without a known creator at the center, the format has to do the work of orientation on its own. This one does.
Seven months after launch: 500,000 followers, more than 15,000 story submissions, an average of 1.8 million viewers per episode, and breakout episodes reaching five to ten million. No advertising spend. No collab posts.
In April 2026, The Ick won the Webby for Best Content Series in Social and Games at the 30th Annual Webby Awards, with additional nominations in Scripted Video and Comedy Video. Industry recognition for a show that has never been promoted by a single celebrity.
Underneath the visible part — the weekly episode — there’s an infrastructure most social content operations don’t have and would have a hard time replicating.
These guys made three moves that are worth noting…
The Operating System
Decision 1: Invent the Category
The default move in short-form is to find what’s working and make a version of it.
It’s rational, and it’s also a losing game over time. “If something is not cutting edge, there’s no point in us doing it,” said Cagan. “You can make good money very quickly from slop, maybe you’ve got a McMansion from your man-on-the-street shows. But what does it matter? All you did was man-on-the-street shows.”
The instinct at APC is to find the thing nobody has tried yet and figure out whether it can hold. The advantage of inventing a category is that there are no incumbents.
A format built around something people already feel doesn’t need to be explained. Anyone who has ever felt their attraction switch off in a single moment understood the premise the second a scene started.
This comes with a real cost. Studios can kill projects in script stage and never spend the production money.
APC kills them in market, after the production money has been spent. You learn things you can’t learn in development. Cobell Energy was part of that tuition.
Decision 2: Trust the Work
“It’s all about the writing,” said Hammond. “Not about who we can put in there to make the show good.” The Ick has no recurring host, no personality at the center, no collab posts. When an episode performs, they know exactly why.
Kareem Rahma — one of the most successful comedians — someone Hammond and Cagan genuinely respect — has appeared in The Ick. They don’t collab post with him.
“It all comes down to audience, the algorithms whole job is to keep you on the platform as long as possible, which means they have to serve things you will love. We have a lot of talent on our series, and that talent often doesn’t have the same audience as ours.” said Hammond.
With no face carrying the show, the production has to do the trust-building that celebrity usually handles. The framing, the sound, the writing, the edit — that’s what earns a stranger’s attention when there’s no recognizable face to do it. “You can copy someone’s format in an afternoon,” said Cagan. “You can’t copy their standard.”
Hammond’s read on the broader medium is that you can count on one hand those actually elevating the form. When he came up, the conventional wisdom was that rough content performed better — shoot on an iPhone, keep things raw.
“I remember hearing that and thinking, what the fuck am I doing in an industry where everyone is telling you makes things worse,” said Hammond. “surprise, surprise, that was wrong.”
Decision 3: Turn the Audience Into Infrastructure
This one started as an accident.
Hammond, Cagan, and Berry were in development on The Ick, writing their own ick stories, telling people about the concept. Every time they did, the conversation broke open.
Cagan was at a friends Easter dinner when it crystallized — the host mentioned what Ari was making, the cousin had a story, then the uncle, then everyone at the table. “At that point we realized, okay, wait, this would be a really cool way to add another element, another layer to this thing,” said Cagan.
Stories come in through Submityourick.com — hundreds per day. The team filters for a clean narrative turn, the precise moment the ick lands, because without that turn there isn’t a scene to build. By the time it hits production, what’s being shot is a script, not someone’s testimony.
They shoot four to five episodes in a single day, once a month. That batch cadence creates a backlog of around twenty episodes at any given moment. They can hold an episode, sequence releases strategically, absorb a busy month without breaking the feed.
The release rhythm is consistent: episode on Sunday, submission callouts on Monday, runner-ups on Thursday. That structure is what compounds when you’re trying to build a brand.
The submissions are also the data layer underneath everything else. APC keeps a searchable database of every story ever received.
When Reformation came in for a Valentine’s Day campaign with a dump-him angle, APC searched the database for matching stories and scripted around them. When Verizon wanted a Wi-Fi angle, same process.
The integration feels organic to the audience because it actually is, and APC holds a hard line on what brands can ask for in return.
“We’re telling true stories and we can’t just be like, oh, this story you submitted, you actually say you love Exxon now,” said Hammond. “That would just be, what the fuck. You never said that.”
Fifteen thousand submissions in, the show will only stop working if the community stops feeding it. The audience has skin in the game in a way the algorithm can’t replicate. When your story gets picked, you see it on screen and you share it.
Someone who submitted a story watches differently than someone who stumbled onto the feed. These people showed up with something. That’s a relationship that doesn’t get built by ad spend. The audience didn’t just give APC stories. They gave APC infrastructure.
The Lemonade Stand
Cagan describes the short form show landscape with precision rather than modesty. “I don’t think this is a real business yet,” he said. “It’s kind of like a lemonade stand. Its great for a single creator or a few kids, but our aspiration is something much larger.”
That candor is useful. What makes it interesting is what APC is choosing to build toward in the meantime.
Hammond reaches for the HBO comparison. “The Ick right now is basically that thing for us. We do this show, it is not a profitable show, but all the things that come along with it are.” Succession wasn’t profitable on its own — it existed to signal what HBO meant, while the economics of their library ran underneath on subscriptions.
90% of revenue in their first year came from client projects, white label shows, advertising and consulting.
Mid-conversation, Hammond raised TBPN — the podcast that recently sold to OpenAI for roughly $200 million. TBPN wasn’t the biggest podcast in tech. What it was was a vehicle for reaching a very high-value audience that brands were willing to pay a premium to access. The ceiling wasn’t total audience size but audience value.
The playbook could be find the high-value audience and own that space, a smaller audience in the right niche is worth more than a larger one somewhere else. Cagan put it simply “We are in the billboard business, a billboard in Beverly Hills is worth more than one in Glendale. The brilliant thing about the internet is that all land costs the same.”
What They Built and What It Means
Start with a format that doesn’t exist yet. Not a better version of what’s working — an entirely new category with no incumbent. Design it so a stranger understands what they’re watching inside three seconds.
Hold a high production standard.
Find the submission loop. Whatever turns passive viewers into active participants. Let the participation become the data layer. Let the data layer become the brand integration logic. The community doesn’t just produce raw material. It produces infrastructure.
Decide early which audience you’re building for, and make that decision based on value, not size.
Build the audience and the craft first. The money follows what you’ve built, not the other way around.
“I would love to be known as the company that makes the best stuff on the internet,” said Hammond. “And I would even go as far as to say the internet includes Netflix.”Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
This was great to read and learn from! Thanks for this.