On a spring day in Washington Square Park, the tripods spring up like little metal trees. Content creators are in full bloom: Everywhere, small teams huddle around their cameras, looking into the park but not seeing it, gesturing instructions for the ones about to be stars in the content, trying to envision the videos they're there to create. Chief among them is Davis Burleson, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed host of "What's Poppin? With Davis!" with boy band blonde hair and an implacable game show grin.
The video that you'll see will appear spontaneous, but I'm watching Burleson and his small team as they're still in the preliminary planning stages. They patrol the park like sharks in a reef, searching for photogenic park goers. Then when they've chosen their target, they huddle, not without a small amount of menace, conferring on camera angle and the geometry of how Davis will run up to them and ask them the day's question: "Can you describe your dream apartment to me?"
The girl that Davis approaches knows just how to act: Yappy and upbeat (she says, in clips that are cut out, that she's seen the videos and she loves them). Since the video is actually a brand deal with Zillow, Davis then segues into some talking points about the app's search tools. This, I find out, is the bread and butter of Fallen Media, the social media company whose flagship property is "What's Poppin?"
"Right now, that is pretty much exclusively how we're making any revenue," Rowan Winch, the co-founder of Fallen, told me in a phone call after the "What's Poppin?" shoot. Winch said that depending on the project, brand deals can range from $15,000 to $60,000. Fallen's website cites collaborations with companies like Nike, Amazon, and Mastercard. "But we also make money through creator programs, like AdSense."
Winch was 15 years old, running popular meme pages, and living in a suburb outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, when he was profiled in the New York Times by Taylor Lorenz in 2019. Now he's 20, and managing a roster of nine TikTok and Instagram native shows hosted by young content creators he found online. Together, the shows have about three million followers on TikTok, and about a million on Instagram.
Winch told me that the content creators he grew up watching, like FaZe House (where the pro gamer FaZe Clan once vlogged) and Casey Neistat, made him want to make content in New York. His hair is longer than it was when he was 15, but he still has a somewhat shy, adolescent demeanor. "I used to do memes and meme pages on Instagram, so it wasn't really like me talking to a camera," he said. "My face and my name wasn't necessarily attached to it." He told me he plans to move to New York, probably to Ridgewood, in the next year or two, but still lives with his parents in Pennsylvania. “It’s just because of my age,” he told me, but New York is the best, closest city, with the best energy, and the best people.
With Fallen, Winch has created a content business that is selling New York to a new generation of media consumers, one that, with the ubiquity of social media, will increasingly dominate New York's cultural image. Where a previous generation might have dreamt of being one of the "Friends," or living like Carrie Bradshaw, future transplants now can dream of being asked a question by Burleson or another of Fallen's hosts. Charli XCX, as part of the promotional run for her gritty, Dimes Square coded new album, made sure to make an appearance on "Whats Poppin?". Winch tells me that, in Fallen's DMs, content creators vie to be cast for a spot on Fallen's shows.
Clout is the real currency here, obviously. "We just had Jessica Alba on "What's Poppin'' yesterday," Winch told me. "We sent her a list of questions that Davis might ask her, and then we just kind of briefed her on what the video was. It really depends on who the talent is."
You'll see Fallen's style—content from a semi-reality, with fourth wall breaking injections of celebrity and celebrity aspiration—everywhere if you start looking: that guy Middle Part, with his name written on the wall in his irradiated-seeming bedroom on hit show "Boy Room", is inevitably also an aspiring pop punk musician plugging his new album in the comments, even as people decide whether or not they'd tolerate his lifestyle. (Boy Room's not on Fallen Media's roster—of these new competitors, Winch said, "Plenty of new short form shows pop up. It's only really a good thing. We love to see new creators just trying out new stuff.") Now, the man-on-the-street style is being co-opted by mortgage companies and would-be celebs, like Wé Ani, a Harlem-born American Idol contestant.
Winch said that New York is "definitely part of the identity of a lot of our shows," for reasons both creative and practical.
"We would not be able to do the kind of content that we do in like, LA for example, especially when it comes to doing interviews with random people," Winch said. "But the people in New York are so much more open and so much more interesting. Everybody is just so much more of a character that I don't think we'd be able to do this kind of content anywhere else."
One of those characters is Morris Cordewell, host of another man-on-the-street show, Subway Oracle, where Cordewell, it seems, runs up to strangers and asks them questions. "It's completely random," Cordewell told me. Subway Oracle is much like "What's Poppin?", but the tone is grittier, a little more SideTalk, as you might expect on the subway. Despite being the on-camera talent, on a Zoom interview, Cordewell is even more quiet and reserved than Winch is, with Winch jumping in to prod Cordewell when he's especially guarded. Winch told me Cordewell is the only one of Fallen's hosts that he personally manages—the rest, are contractors for Fallen, and have their own teams. Haltingly, Cordewell told me he grew up in Ridgewood, and went to Queens Community College in Bayside, where he started doing Instagram and YouTube videos in 2019. "I did Snapchat when it was popular," he said. "And then, um, I don't know what happened. I was in some situation and this girl stopped talking to me. And then I was like, damn, I'm going to just do YouTube."
After the pandemic began, Cordewell said he met filmmaker Drew Rosenthal, who also shot Crackhead Barney and Friends, and has shot Street Hearts for Fallen as well.
When I arrived at the Fulton Street subway station on a recent afternoon, the Subway Oracle shoot was easy to find: Cordewell was wearing his trademark devil-horned durag, this time in purple, there was a camera being held by an amused-looking Rosenthal, there was Winch, with his glasses and his black hoodie, and they were surrounded by the Teletubbies.
The group was in a somewhat heated discussion with two different security forces on each side of the turnstiles that separated the shopping center from the subway station. Fulton Street's security didn't seem to know what the hell to do; the crew apparently had not made any kind of prior arrangement to tell officials to expect the Teletubbies, though it wasn't clear why they'd need to, anyway. Outside the subway station, in the plaza, the private security for One World Trade seemed argumentative, insisting that they should have called ahead. (Winch told me that they've reached out multiple times to the MTA to try and get permission, but haven't gotten a response.)
Cordewell told me that for all the moral panic that has surrounded the New York subway system, in his time making content on the subway, he said the biggest shift he saw was gentrification in the outer boroughs. "If you go on the L train, you're going to see, like, people singing a song," he said, seeming to refer to other, cringier content creators. "You don't want to be…you know?"
Oh, and the cops. "That, Eric Adams did. You know, the National Guard. Yeah, it's pretty, like, weird." (Governor Kathy Hochul put the Guard in the subways, but yeah, it was weird.)
He said they've been kicked out of the subway by the cops a few times as their presence on the subway system has increased, but he learned to avoid them.
Eventually, Winch got the crew and the four larger-than-life costumed actors through the turnstiles to the station, where there weren't any cops, just MTA workers who seemed to find the whole thing funny.
Hey, I asked Winch, I thought you said everything on the show is unscripted, completely random. "Like," he caveated, "we work with a lot of like rappers and actors and whatnot." Obviously, they don't just run into G-Eazy on the New York subway, but, "When we do set it up, with talent, we try to just make it seem like we just ran into them in the subway. Everything else that we do is not staged."
Cordewell's question for the magical babies is, "What makes you a real New Yorker?" There's also a short skit where he tries to go band for band with the characters, but there seems to be a language barrier, and a translator has to convey Rosenthal's instructions over multiple takes. Predictably, a crowd began to form around the Teletubbies, including a woman in a black sweater embroidered with the Teletubbies on its front, who informed me that she works with the Teletubbies, and these aren't just any randos in Teletubbies costumes, these are the actual Teletubbies. She said that they had filmed a "What's Poppin'?" segment earlier in the day.
Surprisingly, Winch told me later that he didn't charge Teletubbies for the collab. "We really wanted to work with them," he explained. "We knew it would just be such a good moment. They had posted it on Subway Creatures, too."
This post has been updated to reflect that the hosts of Fallen Media's shows are contractors, not employees. Hell Gate regrets the error.
