Netflix’s ‘The Influencer’ Is Like Being Tortured At Length

Times have changed, and if you didn’t think so already, The Influencer, a South Korean “social survival” series streaming on Netflix, will change your mind by force.

The world is different now. TikTok is where people go for news; X frames cultural discourse; YouTube is a TV with limitless channels on every device you own. There are no news anchors, cultural commentators, or celebrities anymore, at least not in their traditional forms. They all fall under the nebulous catch-all umbrella of “influencer”, a terrible army of vacuous self-interested professional show-offs.

The Influencer rejoices in this idea and never seeks to challenge it. It introduces 77 – count ‘em! – influencers spanning every genre, from beauty and fashion to fitness and mukbang, a perplexingly popular sub-category in which people watch other people eat ridiculous quantities of food.

If there’s a television equivalent of being waterboarded, this is it.

The whole world’s a stage in The Influencer | Image via Netflix

The contestants in The Influencer wear collars that show their subscriber counts. It’s a reality show gimmick that sneakily reveals what’s so terrifying about this trend – that those numbers, whether they’re in the millions or the hundreds of thousands, are all these people are. Their identity is reduced to that figure. It’s a measure of their self-worth and external value. It can be bought and sold, as can they.

I would be better disposed toward The Influencer if it were a functional reality series, but it isn’t. The first episode is over an hour long and consists in large part of a flurry of introductions that becomes incomprehensible after five minutes. Several contestants are given their own video packages and intros, but several others are slipped in unannounced, often commenting on the bigger influencers. The hierarchy is clear immediately.

I know what I’m supposed to think. I know I’m supposed to be impressed by the sheer breadth of “influencer” as a concept, to marvel at how someone doing squats can be just as “influential” as someone sharing their skin-care routine or eating noodles by the kilo. But I didn’t think that. I wasn’t impressed. Instead, I quietly lamented how the idea of social media stardom has crept disease-like into every corner of contemporary culture.

These people – and I’m sure a lot of them are lovely – are a plague, and a show like this is a superspreading event, the cough in the classroom that infects a kid with asthma at the back.

Contestants wear collars showing their subscriber counts | Image via Netflix

There are two types of reality shows, essentially. There’s the vacuous stuff about catty beautiful people (almost every dating series ever falls into this category, as does stuff like Selling Sunset and Buying London) and then there’s the type that revolves around a particularly interesting subject, like Blown Away, Is It Cake?, and even Physical: 100, which The Influencer shares a lot of DNA with, including the woeful pacing.

The Influencer is the worst of the former type; facile nonsense in its purest form, divorced from even the fraudulent base of human connection that powers made-for-TV dating. The goal is to be the ultimate influencer, a concept that means nothing, since it’s not a measure of value, but of popularity. Battles are waged on the grounds of getting and maintaining attention by any means necessary. It is meaningless.

Netflix gets a lot of stick for its reality content, and often rightly so. There is also an undeniable market for such things, and where the attention goes, the money follows. The Influencer is the consequence of art and information being reduced down to purely supply and demand. It indulges the worst impulses of both its contestants and its audience, rewarding attention for attention’s sake without acknowledgment or understanding of the empty extremes that might lead to.

I have a professional obligation to watch this tripe. Warning people away from it feels like more of a personal responsibility.