Those who live in the actual mansion include Alex Warren, a 20-year-old who says he spends between $50,000 to $70,000 a month on YouTube prank videos his girlfriend Kouvr Annon, who absolutely hates being the butt of said pranks Vinnie Hacker, an 18-year-old thirst trap TikToker who’s the buzziest of the bunch but also seems to have a pretty serious anger issue and three other sweatshirted, floppy-haired white guys who fill the roles of “just happy to be included” despite never actually contributing. The problem here is that the Hype House has been hemorrhaging its most famous members since practically the beginning, and at this point (filming took place in early 2021) most of what’s left are the members who haven’t become famous enough to break out on their own. In fact, the only ambition they seem to share is having a Netflix show, and ironically, being in the Hype House is the only way to get one.
This, ultimately, is the overarching dramatic tension of the series: Petrou versus the handful of other members who are either too complacent or too focused on their own projects to film the content that makes the collective money. He’s the self-described “dad” of the group, and also the only one who seems to care about the fate of the Hype House at all. And when you get a taste of fame and decide you want more of it, you move to LA.Ī post shared by Hype House whole goal with this house in the first place was: Why can’t people who hit millions of other people be as famous as A-list celebrities?” says Thomas Petrou, the 22-year-old co-founder of the collective, in his first moment on screen. TikTok, at that point, only had a handful of stars to break out beyond the app - the Hype House’s Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, and D’Amelio’s boyfriend Chase Hudson among them - but within the app itself, more and more teenagers started growing their audiences to hundreds of thousands, then millions, of followers.
It was part of a wave of Los Angeles social media mansions to pop up in the first half of 2020, all with the same purpose: to use each other’s clout to build more of it.
Almost exactly two years ago, a splashy feature in the New York Times introduced the arrival of the Hype House, a collective of mostly white, attractive teenagers who had recently become famous on an app that was only just beginning to be part of the national lexicon. To understand what’s going on in this bizarre, entirely-uneventful-but-also-sort-of-fascinating television show, it’s important to know why it exists in the first place.
Hype house show plus#
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