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On the first episode of “Paul American,” a new reality-TV show currently streaming on Max, the YouTuber, influencer, and wrestler Logan Paul mounts a PowerPoint pitch for his fiancée, the Danish supermodel Nina Agdal, in order to convince her that being on reality television would benefit the couple. Logan and his younger brother, Jake Paul—himself a YouTuber and influencer, who has also turned to boxing—have been famous for more than a decade now, and reality television, Logan explains to Agdal, would be the apex of the pyramid that the siblings have been scaling. “This show is part of my natural evolution,” Logan says, pulling up a slide featuring a stock graphic of the step-by-step development from ape to Homo sapiens. Each figure in the chart is labelled for a stage in Logan’s career path, from the defunct short-form video-hosting platform Vine, on which the Paul brothers got their start, through vlogging, podcasting, and, finally, live-TV wrestling and boxing. The definitive stage in this years-long development, Logan concludes, is “the family reality-TV show.”
Agdal cracks up: the pitch is clearly tongue-in-cheek, and yet it nonetheless corresponds to the goal “Paul American” is trying to achieve, which is to present Logan and Jake, for the first time, as fully fledged human beings rather than half-baked Neanderthals. With all we know about reality television—its cunning edits, its cooked-up story lines, its behind-the-scenes manipulations—it might seem like a stretch to view the genre as an opportunity for the display of real, multidimensional individuality. Still, it’s all relative. Compared to the Pauls’ previous outputs, “Paul American” is practically “The Brothers Karamazov.”
Until now, authenticity and depth of character haven’t exactly been top of mind for either of the Pauls. They came up as teen-agers on the Wild West internet of the twenty-tens, which saw the lucrative explosion of social-media and self-produced-content platforms. Born in Ohio to Pam, a nurse, and Greg, a real-estate agent, roofer, and loose cannon, who often appears on the show with a hunting knife strapped to his forearm (“Cancel culture can suck my ass all day long,” he says at one point), the brothers each found early success in 2013 by making pratfall- and prank-filled six-second Vines. Within a couple of years, they had moved to Los Angeles and taken their enterprise to YouTube. Jake enacted physically risky, increasingly extravagant stunts at the Team 10 influencer house (erecting an enormous snow slide outside the mansion; turning the house into a trampoline park), while Logan developed a reputation in his own vlogs as a stunt-happy jokester bro (bringing sixty thousand pounds of snow to California; freaking out a new roommate with a live alligator).
As their careers grew, Logan’s and Jake’s brand building grew more and more cartoonish. Similarly blond and muscled—the two are alike enough to be twins, though Jake now wears a bushy, jutting beard, whereas Logan’s is more closely cropped—the brothers often beefed. Logan stole Jake’s love interest, and each released a diss track tearing the other down. (Logan’s: “I’m a savage, you are average / I’m a beast I’m going wild / This song will be the death of you / I’m ’bout to be an only child.” Jake’s: “You thirsty for the views, call it Kalahari / You the Karate Kid and I’m Mr. Miyagi / You just a Prius and I’m a Bugatti.”) They drove luxury vehicles and flashed fat stacks of bills; they wore iced-out watches worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and courted mayhem and controversy. (In a 2017 vlog, Logan filmed the body of a suicide victim in Japan, a decision for which he later apologized; in 2020, Jake’s Calabasas mansion was raided for firearms.) Even before entering the actual ring, they had already fashioned themselves as pugilistic, larger-than-life characters, with nicknames to match (Jake: the Problem Child; Logan: the Maverick). Unsurprisingly, their content resonated largely with young men, and after amassing around a hundred and fifty million followers across major platforms they began to turn their online reach into success in some real-world ventures. Logan, who is now thirty, became a W.W.E. champ with his own energy drink, Prime; Jake, twenty-eight, became a boxer with a body-care line for men, W. (“You probably smell . . . get W at Walmart.”)
In all their endeavors, the Pauls’ chief aim has been to attract the maximum number of viewers and likes, which the pair freely discuss on the show. “Having your content be received by a lot of eyeballs is success,” Logan says. Controversy has played well with the brothers’ target audience: Logan’s diss track of Jake, for instance, is his “most-viewed video of all time,” a fact that he now claims he regrets, and “Paul American” works to show the brothers as newly reflective, softer, and ready to make amends. (“[Logan]’s the only one that knows what I’ve been through and I’m the only one that knows what he’s been through, and there’s a trauma bond in that,” Jake says, sounding surprisingly touchy-feely.) In 2021, the brothers moved to Puerto Rico, which, starting in 2012, became a tax haven, especially for high-net-worth individuals who’ve become rich thanks to cryptocurrency. Since the move they have grown closer, and have taken to training together—Jake with the goal of being a world-champion boxer, and Logan to strengthen his position in the W.W.E., so that he can “become the face of one of the biggest media conglomerates in the entire world.”
The road toward brotherly love, however, is shown to be a bumpy one. At one point, we see Logan hosting the British influencer and rapper KSI, who is Jake’s sworn enemy, on his podcast, and the two joke on air about Jake’s upcoming fight against Mike Tyson, whom he hopes to best. “It’s just not what brothers should do,” an irate Jake says. (Logan brushes the complaint off. Jake is “sensitive and I’m an asshole,” he says.) But Jake, who went pro in 2020, is presumably tender about this slight because he wants to move past being an influencer-boxer, who fights for likes, and emerge as a real-world champ, like Tyson himself was in his prime. Being able to deal definitive blows in a ring, at some remove from the online world, is Jake’s heart’s desire. Can he be, as the podcaster Joe Rogan suggests, in a clip shared on the show, “for real”?
The question of realness is one that comes up repeatedly in “Paul American.” Jutta Leerdam, Jake’s Dutch girlfriend, who is an Olympic speed skater, chides him when he slips back into vlog-like bombast. On a private jet the pair take to Minnesota to visit the factory where the W body-care brand is produced, Jake clowns around, bellowing at the camera that Joe Biden—then still President—should use W because he’s “probably sweating through [his] suit.” But Leerdam is displeased by this performance. “Babe, this is reality. You are your character a lot,” she says. “So snap out of it . . . be a real person.” Jake throws his head back, as if considering this. “Boooring,” he finally brays. One of his employee friends, also on the flight, is heard saying off camera, “He’s a lost cause.”
Both Leerdam and Agdal seem to affect Jake and Logan as ameliorating agents, but even they can’t make these leopards completely change their spots. The Paul-brother act is a hard thing to shed, and, after all, it’s where the money is. “The thing that keeps people glued is the shit show,” Logan says. He notes that he loves to fight in the W.W.E. because “I get to be a showman, I get to tell stories, and use it as a vehicle even to just promote my brands. Most of all, get paid.” When he and Jake pitch their reality show to various networks, they present it as “the testosterone Kardashians . . . you know, true hardcore American family.” As a clip of Logan receiving a MAGA hat from Trump flashes on the screen, alongside other moments—Jake brawling after a fight, Logan shooting a rifle, Pam rolling around in a pile of twenty-dollar bills—we hear Jake explain that “this is America, and we are from the heart of America.” On the way to watch Logan fight at a WrestleMania event in Philadelphia, on yet another private jet ride, Leerdam, who has never attended such a match, tells Jake that she’s not sure what to expect. “Well, a bunch of men—” he begins, as Leerdam cuts in. “It’s so American! It’s the most American thing ever!” Jake chuckles. “Well, yes, indeed, brother,” he says. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
