Steven Suptic is an “alternative lifestyle” vlogger. He video tapes his day to day life, chronicling his adventures with Sugar Pine 7 and their sometimes crazy, other times mundane, adventures. What makes his content different than other popular YouTube vloggers like Jake Paul is that most of Suptic’s videos are fake. They’re improv comedy meant to look as real as possible, with stupid jokes intertwined with real-world situations. To his fans, Suptic’s videos are an experience you can’t get anywhere else on YouTube. In the flashy world of Casey Neistat’s drones and gorgeous vistas, it’s a look at what someone’s real (if not highly polarized) life might be.
In Suptic’s newest video “Akrasia”, we see all of that work culminate in an epic finale nobody saw coming. Spoilers for Suptic’s vlogs past this point , so don’t say I didn’t warn you. Over the past couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of tension forming between two members of the Sugar Pine 7 gang: Parker and Cib. Parker claims to like Cib’s girlfriend, Sami Jo, which causes the two of them to stop being friends. It’s been a major plot line throughout the week’s episodes, creating tension in a format that’s best known for only sharing the good parts of someone’s day. Cib’s jealousy over the situation, and his distaste for a friend having feelings for his girlfriend, creates so much animosity and tension that it ends his relationship
In “Akrasia,” Cib goes on an alcoholic bender, driving his car to Parker’s house, beating him senseless and eventually knocking his head on a table. A pool of blood forms around Parker’s head as a screen of black with “end of chapter one” appears on screen. Even the title of the video means something – akrasia’s definition is “the state of mind in which someone acts against their better judgment through weakness of will.”
For fans who have been watching these Sugar Pine 7 videos of friends hanging out and trying to start a YouTube empire, the serious tone is a huge departure from the norm. Suptic is doing something entirely new here, subverting the genre and creating what I believe to be one of YouTube’s best docu-series. The humor can be a bit childish at points. Cib is naked enough to make their audience of teenage girls happy, but it just creeps me out.
In an interview with Tubefilter , Suptic says that he’s “a firm believer that if you talk about any big plans you have, you’ll be less likely to commit to them.” That said, Suptic has bigger ideas.
“We have a two year plan right now and are hoping to fund an “off-of-YouTube” episodic project,” Suptic says. If this YouTube series shows us anything, it’s that Suptic is a great indie film maker and loves to tell a story.
After leaving SourceFed, Philip Defranco’s defunct YouTube network that Maker Studios shut down, he could have done anything. With his massive audience, he could have just made normal vlogs like everyone else, rolling in cash with the rest of the ex-Vine stars. Instead, he decided to parody the experience in a way that’s never been done before.
In the same Tubefilter interview, Suptic says: “We’re indirectly satirizing both vlogging and the LA lifestyle. We’re satirizing vlogging because we take the, ‘people care about our lives so we’ll film every waking moment of them,’ aspect and intercut that with stories that have been created solely for entertainment. We’re satirizing the LA lifestyle by embracing it full throttle and hating how much we love it.”
Suptic will continue to make videos and I’ll continue to watch them, alongside his million subscribers. Give Autumn a raise, she deserves it.
