“Jake and I wanted to be the biggest entertainers in the world,” the YouTube personality Logan Paul tells us at the start of the new series “Paul American.” A montage shows Logan and his brother, Jake, swarmed by fans, intercut with images of money and of Logan fighting in a WWE match. “And then, to actually kind of make it happen — it blew my mind.”
Viewers of “Paul American” will come to understand, if they don’t already, that Logan (like his brother) has a more than healthy self-regard. But he’s not completely wrong. Having risen to fame creating videos, Logan and Jake Paul are now famous enough to appear in a television show about the making of a television show. It’s an unbearable watch for anyone outside the Pauls’ core fandom. And, to those viewers, the fact and the size of that fandom will move from quirky fact to something that will, indeed, blow your mind. Repellent and noxiously loud, “Paul American” confuses volume — ostentatiousness, relentlessness, shamelessness — for star quality, in precisely the same way YouTube culture does. What it’s doing on Max is at once obvious, as the streamer chases the user-generated app’s success, and, from a quality-control perspective, anyone’s guess.
The series follows the Pauls, who are at once figures of adulation and of scandal, through the various small triumphs and petty humiliations of trying to cement their place in the culture. Both have been the subject of various criticisms over the years, from Logan’s streaming from Japan’s so-called “suicide forest” and broadcasting the image of a dead body to allegations against Jake ranging from sexual assault to crypto fraud. (Jake has denied the former and settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission for over $400,000 regarding the latter.) And rather than clean up their act, whatever that would even mean, both seem determined to lean into a bad boy image that rings false because of how carefully curated it is. “Fuck that shit, it’s fucking wack,” Jake says at one point, speculating that a trans woman boxer, if allowed to compete, might someday kill a cis woman boxer. “Be mad at me,” he says, putting Beats headphones on the sides of his skull, like an expensive hat. “I’m uncancellable.”
That much seems evident — here he is, on one of the biggest platforms of his career, after all that’s come before. “Paul American” comes to seem like a perfect show for a crass, ugly moment in American life, and not merely because its stars, guests at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, have MAGA leanings. (The Pauls’ father, whom Jake said in a Netflix documentary physically abused him in childhood, is a major part of the show; at one point, he derails a conversation about Logan’s expected baby with fiancée Nina Agdal, spewing a line of invective about how trans parents are “perverted men having their adopted kids sucking on their nipples.”) What makes it feel so 2025, in part, is its stars’ utter refusal to censor themselves — not for the sake of so-called “political correctness” but for the sake of coherence, or sanity, or just a moment of quiet. In one strange moment, Jake says something unclear about how Joe Biden should buy Jake’s own proprietary brand of personal-care products because he is “sweating through his suit”; his girlfriend, the Dutch speed skater Jutta Leerdam, asks him to “be a real person. Remember how that was?” Jake pretends to contemplate this, stroking his chin, before shouting “Boring!,” in the voice of a community-theater actor playing the Joker. The Pauls have, to this point, achieved a fame that is quantifiable in view count. No wonder they can’t stop themselves from seeking attention.
The entire series is designed to distract from the absence at its center. Logan and Jake Paul, noted streamers who have pursued other endeavors — Logan as a wrestler, Jake as a boxer who, late last year, achieved breakthrough virality in his Netflix fight with Mike Tyson — are fairly uncompelling figures. They speak in monotones, as if they themselves are bored with what they’re saying, and no wonder: Everything they have to say has the rote quality of two professional attention-getters running through their bag of tricks for a new audience. If a pivotal argument the pair have, about Logan’s purported “sociopathic lack of empathy” for Jake as he prepares for the Tyson fight, isn’t staged, it’s certainly done with the cameras at the very top of mind. The only moment of real-feeling emotion it elicits is when Logan melts down afterward. He’s upset, he says, because he got in a fight, “and we’re pitching a show about being loving brothers!”
They make up, and make it work; there’s a show to put on. This meta aspect of “Paul American,” the show being about the show, hardly feels novel. “The Kardashians,” since its central clan moved to Hulu and left the fake-family-sitcom trappings of E! behind, is similarly self-reflexive, and the series finale of “The Hills,” all the way back in 2010, made clear that the show’s true subject was what it was like to work on a television production. But there’s a difference here. Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt — these people are stars, if of a sort that might not have been legible in the past. Watching them work to secure and keep their fame has a pleasantly ASMR effect, because, even when they’re not being likable, their charisma holds us. Logan and Jake Paul lack some fundamental charm. Even by the standards of the genre, giving them the notice they seek feels like consuming empty calories. The takeaway from time spent with them is one that anyone who’s spent time with very young children already knows — that it’s inherently human to want to be the center of attention. But most small children eventually outgrow the impulse to act out.
Not so with the Pauls, whose series recalls the darkest of YouTube culture. As a parent of young children myself, the platform is currently banned in our household, consequent to my older daughter’s discovery of a series, “Vlad and Niki,” that features two kids playing rude and obnoxious pranks on their mom. (Coincidentally enough, this series has been licensed to Max, which seems determined to make its broad remit clear by hosting both the very best and the very worst of filmed entertainment.) “Having your content be received by a lot of eyeballs,” Logan tells us near the start of the series, “is success.” Getting there via a self-consciously provocative need to shock makes them the men for a particularly sad moment, one in which the leadership of this country acts according to a similarly childlike impulse. In part for their refusal to spend even a moment thinking that being as obnoxious as possible might not always be a growth proposition, the Pauls really are uncancellable; it doesn’t seem to bother them or anyone in their orbit that they’re unwatchable, too.
The premiere of “Paul American” is now streaming on Max, with new episodes dropping weekly on Thursdays.
