Good morning. ICYMI, the cover story for our latest print zine was a deep dive exploration of the creator economy’s collision course with Hollywood.

Part of that journey: A conversation with veteran comedy creators Rhett and Link about why they’ve decided to stop pitching films to traditional entertainment studios after a decade-plus of trying—opting instead to produce a new, TV-style show in-house and distribute it on their YouTube channel.

Read on for more from that trip to Rhett and Link’s studio in this special edition Sunday send. And when you’re done, the entire cover story is now available to read on our site here.

— Nate Graber-Lipperman

Inside Rhett and Link’s Journey Through Hollywood

I’ve made this stop-and-go trek to Burbank, California, once before.

The city—located 12 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles—houses some of the country’s most iconic movie studios, many of which I passed on a trip in 2022. I remember feeling the gravitas of these streets then , the concrete and steel entrenched firmly into the mythos of Hollywood. While grabbing coffee on Glenoaks Boulevard, I even stumbled upon the headquarters of Cartoon Network.

Just a year later, though, that same building was empty. Massive layoffs and restructures at Warner Bros. Discovery (Cartoon Network’s parent company) effectively killed the beloved kids’ channel overnight.

The nondescript brick building that I enter in Burbank this time around does not share a century’s worth of history like some of its neighboring studios, yet the company operating here is anything but oblivious to the challenging landscape (and perceptions) surrounding them. “We do not want to be seen as an architect of some downfall of broadcast or television,” Brian Flanagan, the president of Mythical, tells me on an overcast late February day. “We see ourselves as a bridge.”

There are two reasons why my journey begins here, at Mythical. The first is to get an up-close look at the company started by Rhett McLaughlin and Charles “Link” Neal, a towering comedy duo (six-foot-seven and six-foot, respectively) that turned online virality in the early days of YouTube into their uber-successful talk show Good Mythical Morning (GMM).

These days, Mythical has spun off several lucrative shows and products. At the time of my visit, the Mythical Kitchen team — led by Chef Josh Scherer — is prepping for their first cookbook launch (the Los Angeles Times would go on to describe the book as “every bit as colorful, personality-driven and flat-out deranged as its web-TV counterpart…[with] real culinary lessons to be learned”). 

Rhett and Link, therefore, aren’t the only aspect of their company that stands large in stature. Mythical has ballooned to 120 employees. Everyone from editors and videographers to cooks and business strategists populates several sets and two open rooms that could be mistaken for small airplane hangars.

This demonstrated investment is purposeful. “We’re in L.A. spending more money than most creators do,” Brian says. “We employ a much bigger team than most and have a huge studio space to be, like, in the mix in Burbank here — signaling that we’re ready to help companies that have lost audience.”

One graphic designer, Matthew Dwyer, has been with Mythical for eight years, beginning with a paid internship while in film school. “When I started, I was the only person with ‘design’ in my job title,” he tells me. ”Now, I’m the Vice President of Design.” Still, his parents didn’t believe he had a real job until they visited and saw the office for themselves.

The second reason why my journey begins here is because of a video Rhett and Link uploaded on February 6, titled “We’re Done.” After acknowledging the soft clickbait, the creators go on to proclaim that no, they’re not retiring from YouTube. Instead, they’re done trying to pitch their creative projects to gatekeepers at traditional studios. 

“How did we seem in that video? Like I seem right now?” Link asks me, uninterested in hiding his frustration when discussing their fraught history with Hollywood.

Here on the GMM set, Rhett and Link walk me through that odyssey for over an hour. We start with their first taste of Los Angeles, when The CW selected them to co-host a reality TV series called Online Nation in 2007.

The show lasted four episodes and has become something of an inside joke among Mythical fans. Nevertheless, flying out to L.A. for extended periods of time did have its perks. Rhett and Link hired a manager and took meetings—called “generals”—across town with the goal of pitching a TV pilot. Yet producers always seemed more interested in getting to know the internet funnymen from North Carolina rather than entertaining their creative ideas.

One time, while waiting in the lobby before a general, Rhett and Link hatched a film concept  about a group of aliens that falls in love with a human band. 30 years later, the band has to get back together in order to convince the aliens not to take over the world.

“The pitch left a good impression, I think,” Link says.

“Yeah, but we didn’t get another meeting after that!” Rhett replies.

They burned a lot of gas driving back and forth over the hills in those days, with not much to show for it. Production companies all seemed to have the same message: Why don’t you just go make these projects and upload them online?

There was a big difference between making “one-off internet videos” and “professional” movies with bigger budgets, though. At least, that’s what the pair told themselves. “Maybe there’s an imaginary wall we put up,” Rhett says. Producers wouldn’t greenlight any films without proof-of-concept first, though, so what choice did they have but to focus on their YouTube channel?

For the next four years, that’s what they did, returning to North Carolina and honing their comedy sketches. One series, I Love Local Commercials, saw them shoot low-cost ads for small businesses. The commercials began regularly reaching millions of viewers on YouTube; outlets like The New York Times and CNN even featured them. Their popularity led to sponsorships, and then profitability.

“It was so successful that television production companies started approaching us,” Link recalls. “Ironically, when we gave up on [generals]…that’s when our manager started getting those cold calls and emails.”

IFC won a bidding war with MTV for the rights to adapt the web series, and the first season of Commercial Kings premiered in 2011. The show was “the most viral thing IFC made that year,” (Rhett’s words), and TIME included one of the commercials in its “Top Ten Memes of the Year.” Rhett and Link were convinced IFC would order a second season.

It didn’t.

“What it amounted to was, ‘Okay, some people in a small room make this decision about what they want their network to look like, and they really have our fate in their hands,’” Rhett says. “Looking back, it’s so easy to see how asinine it is. What we didn’t realize — because we hadn’t done it yet — [was that] you can put your fate in the hands of a much larger group of people.”

Rhett and Link — in their early 30s, married, with young children — had uprooted their lives and moved to Los Angeles for the show. The duo had no choice but to get back to work and figure out the next step themselves. With their backs against the wall and chips on their shoulders, they launched their morning talk show, GMM, out of Rhett’s garage in 2012.

After a year of uploading GMM every weekday, YouTube (the company) funded The Mythical Show, a half-hour, weekly version filmed in front of a live studio audience—the platform’s take on SNL. That show only lasted one season, but the budget allowed Rhett and Link to bring on a small team, including Stevie Levine as producer.

Stevie is now the Chief Creative Officer of Mythical. Back then, she was a recent film school grad and L.A. transplant trying to make a name for herself in Hollywood. So, following The Mythical Show, the trio had a heart-to-heart. Creating episodes of GMM had become a “to-do list” no one really enjoyed, but everyone recognized its potential. 

“The three of us sat down and were like, ‘We should elevate the creative and we should elevate the look, and we should build a team that does all those things,’” Stevie tells me. “‘And if we do that, we’re all going to be creatively fulfilled by it.’”

The rest, as they say, is history.

That early buy-in unlocked everything. It was a gradual process, adding parts to the airplane as they were flying it daily. Slowly but surely, everything grew: the headcount, the episodes (over 2,500), and the revenue (over $35 million in 2023, according to Forbes). Celebrities including Post Malone, Amy Schumer, and Kobe Bryant have appeared on GMM; the overall business has diversified through products, podcasts, premium subscriptions, and live tours.

At this stage — and amid the overall entertainment industry’s struggles—Mythical presents the type of flywheel media executives salivate over. And yet…

“Whenever we had time, it was still always a priority to try to make something—a television show, or a movie,” Link tells me. “That was always our original desire as kids: to be filmmakers.”

Doors did open as their star power increased online, and they kept having the “right” conversations. Adam Sandler, Jack Black, Ben Stiller — name a comedian, and there’s a good chance Rhett and Link pitched that comedian’s production company on a project. What disheartened the duo was that the big names never actually sat in on the meetings. “We even met with Andy Samberg’s company, and he was in the other room,” Link says.

They tried everything: scripted, non-scripted, docu-reality, reality competition. They offered to direct and star; when that didn’t work, they agreed to write and bring in younger cast members. They penned a bestselling mystery novel, The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek, in 2019, which they thought would naturally lend itself to a silver-screen adaptation (no dice).

One of the final straws was a full-circle moment, mirroring their first experiences taking generals around town a decade earlier. Rhett and Link brought in a well-connected screenwriter for a last-ditch effort to adapt Bleak Creek, and Peacock, NBC’s then-fledgling streaming service, had shown some interest. Yet Rhett and Link knew things were trending in the wrong direction by the time they arrived at the meeting.

“We’re sitting in the lobby with our Hollywood writer-collaborator,” Link says. “And I remember we’re about to go into the meeting, and I turn to him and say, ‘Well, this may be the last time we see or talk to you again.’”

“You manifested it,” Rhett adds.

Which brings us back to “We’re Done,” where they announced their next big project: a scripted, TV-esque series made with the resources at Mythical’s disposal. They’re releasing it in August to the over five million people subscribed to their original “Rhett and Link” YouTube channel.

The duo is mum on plot details for now, but they do mention that they’re focused on process over profit. As creators, they (and their team) are used to wearing many hats. Everyone involved in the project has contributed to writing, directing, starring, and producing, in one way or another.

“Our entire lives, we’ve run up against the rules of the way things are supposed to go,” Rhett says. “If any sort of traditional outfit showed up and watched the way that we work on set, they would be like, ‘I don’t really know who’s in charge here.’

“[But what] we’ve cultivated works for us…it doesn’t fit a mold we’ve ever seen before, because we just can’t fit in now,” he concludes. “We can’t. We just don’t fit.”

After years and years of searching for approval from Hollywood bigwigs, Rhett and Link are finally taking the wheel, channeling their creative energies into simply doing the thing themselves. They tell me they’re feeling invigorated by this revelation, excited for any and all opportunities that will follow.

I think I believe them.

To read more from “The Year Creators Went Hollywood,” including:

• A trip to Lilly Singh’s SXSW movie premiere

• A conversation with prank creator Steezy Kane

• And an on-set look at Wendover Productions’ new show

Check out the full story on our site here.

Rather read it in print? We still have a limited number of physical zines left—pick up your copy of The Publish Paper: Volume 2 here.