American Idol meets Zack Morris is Trash
First up, what is Zack Morris is Trash?
Zack Morris is Trash is a YouTube video series produced by Funny or Die which basically serve as parody reviews of Saved by the Bell.
Concept is sort of reviewing every episode from the point of view that the main character “Zack Morris” is a total sociopath.
Episodes are about 3-4 minutes long.
Done only with edits of the original series and narration over it.
Likely only taking the creator a few hours to do, including writing material.
And it’s a success.
Videos average 600,000 views on YouTube.
Best part, the creators and cast of Saved by the Bell loved it.
In fact, when the show was brought back by NBC for the streaming service Peacock, they hired the creator to be a producer of the show and even paid him to do a podcast with Mark Paul Gosselaar “Zack Morris” leading up to the new show.
It was a simple, but kind of bizarre idea that ultimately built a following.
Now, American Idol…
American Idol is huge on YouTube and the video clips of famous auditions have billions of views, which are mainly repost from random YouTube channels that don’t get reported.
Some are just compilation videos that have over 15 million views on YouTube channels that don’t even have 10,000 subscribers.
Pitch for how the show would work.
Fast intro pitching the show and give it a title like “The American Idol Hospital” or something like that, to sort of position the show as kind of a mentally ill group. Intro should take 3 seconds.
Episodes should just focus on cutting up American Idol auditions from complete idiots and narrating over the mistakes with jokes made.
Joke about how they walked in.
Joke about how they are dressed.
Joke about singing.
Joke about judges reactions.
Point out little things people wouldn’t notice.
Add a where they are now segment.
Do that well and keep videos to 3-4 minutes and a hit is basically promised.
Reasons
- There are auditions from this show which decades later still get over a million views a year on videos.
- The show is active on ABC with new content and those surge of videos on YouTube make it so older videos get new life in the algorithm.
- Many people type in names of people who were on years ago and only have a couple core videos. This makes it so it’d be really easy to make the top 5 for them on YouTube in search results.
And best part, this concept can probably move to some other places.
America’s Got Talent
Shark Tank
Kitchen Nightmares
Hell’s Kitchen
Celebrity Apprentice
Best proof of this came from two spin-off shows to Zack Morris is Trash from Funny or Die.
First was “A Very Special Episode”, which makes fun of 80s/90s family comedy shows that dealt with hard topics and making fun of the episodes.
Second was “Kid Nation: The Worst Reality Show Ever”, which made a parody review of the 2007 reality show “Kid Nation” which put 40 kids into a desert in New Mexico for 40 days and thought that’d not have any long term issues.
All of them are successful and have gotten the channel millions of views, but it’s still an underutilized comedy method people like online.
Really easy to make.
Really easy to market.
Would be an effective way to get a channel started fast for other comedy content.
It’s a method where I think almost every show in a few years will have some parody copying this format of parody reviews and American Idol is the perfect series to get someone started on it.