Entertainment
ExtraEmily Lands Solo Series on Hulu and Disney+
ExtraEmily’s Twitch streams just landed on Hulu and Disney+ as a 15-episode pocket.watch series, a live test of whether parasocial bonds survive a paywall.
ExtraEmily, the IRL Twitch streamer known off-platform as Emily Zhang, built her audience on the loose, unscripted rhythm of a live channel. On Saturday that channel got a rewrite. Fifteen of her past adventures now sit on Hulu, cut to length, cleared for teens, and slotted beside reality staples on a premium service.
The show is called ExtraEmily: Creator Essentials, a 15-episode solo season produced by pocket.watch, with every episode available August 1 on Hulu and the Hulu hub on Disney+. Zhang counts more than 950,000 Twitch followers, an audience that lived entirely inside a live window until this weekend.
Here is why the launch matters beyond one streamer’s resume. pocket.watch did not pull a polished, edit-ready YouTube act for one of its featured solo launches. It chose an IRL live streamer, whose value is the unscripted feel that a 22-minute VOD episode strips away. That choice is a test of whether the parasocial bond built in a live chat survives the trip behind a subscription paywall.
Zhang treated the whole thing with a shrug on stream the night before it went up. Speaking during her July 31 broadcast, she said, “I’m actually so curious how they’re gonna edit it but, basically, I was like ‘Yeah of course you can put my streams on Hulu. I think that would be fun.'”
She also named the scoreboard she is watching. “So if they do well on Hulu then that’s really good. And they will let me know if they end up doing well,” Zhang said. The episodes lean on collaborations, with titles built around cooking challenges, a skateboarding lesson, and food dares alongside fellow creators.
The Season Is a Repackaging Job, Not a New Shoot
None of this was filmed for television. The episodes assemble existing vlogs and streams, edited into a tidier episodic shape for a family audience. That is the pocket.watch model, and it is cheaper than an original production because the footage already exists.
The solo season is one arm of a much larger push. It arrives around the premiere of Rabbit Hole, a 10-episode variety series that landed on Disney+ and Hulu in July and gathered 36 creators with a combined 675 million followers, ExtraEmily among them. Zhang is one of three cast members, alongside Collins Key and Sofie Dossi, launching individual series timed to that premiere, while eight other Rabbit Hole creators already have shows streaming on Hulu.
Stacked together, the pocket.watch universe runs 240 half-hour episodes.
Disney Is Selling Access, Not Just a Show
The framing from the platform side is telling. Rabbit Hole was co-created by pocket.watch Chief Content Officer Albie Hecht and Head of Development Carin Davis, with CEO Chris M. Williams as executive producer. Williams described the plan as building “a true entertainment universe around the next generation of creator-driven stars.”
Disney’s language points the same direction. Lauren Tempest, the company’s Head of Content Planning and Partnerships for direct-to-consumer, said, “Rabbit Hole gives our subscribers access to 36 of the most followed creators for teens, all in one series.” That is a subscriber-acquisition pitch, aimed at the young viewers Disney+ and Hulu need to keep.
For Zhang, the trade is different but real. She keeps the Twitch channel that made her, and she gains a shelf on two of the largest streaming services in the country, reaching viewers who may never open a live stream. For pocket.watch, she is a data point in an experiment about whether live-platform audiences convert to premium VOD.
Zhang set her own benchmark plainly on stream: the platforms will tell her if the show performs. The next 14 episodes will answer her.
Entertainment
Eli Rallo Signs With iHeart for ‘Prose Society’ Podcast
The NYT bestselling creator turned 1.5 million book-obsessed followers into an iHeartPodcasts deal. ‘Prose Society’ premieres August 12, and its structure is a blueprint for literary creators chasing audio money.
Eli Rallo built a book club out of a TikTok following that never asked for one. The 1.5 million people who watch her review novels and litigate internet discourse across TikTok and Instagram now have a standing appointment on Wednesdays.
Rallo, the New York Times bestselling author, has signed with iHeartPodcasts to host Prose Society, a weekly literary-meets-pop-culture show premiering Wednesday, August 12. TheWrap first reported the deal on August 5. The show is a co-production distributed by iHeartPodcasts.
Here is the part that matters for anyone tracking where creator money moves next. Rallo did not pitch a network from the outside. She arrived with a community already built, funded, and reading on schedule. A niche literary creator converting an engaged social audience into a major audio partnership is the template book-content creators have been circling for years.
The format is deliberately small before it is big. On the show’s iHeart listing, each month listeners pick one featured book together, then spend the weeks that follow on the ideas, characters, and culture around it. New episodes land every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.
The premiere brings a working writer to the table. Rallo’s first confirmed guest is author Amy Chozick, discussing her novel With Friends Like You. It is a book conversation with a book person, not a celebrity drop-in, which is the whole point.
The Community Came First
Rallo has done a version of this before, at a smaller scale and behind a paywall. In January 2025 she launched Prose Hoes, a Patreon-hosted literary salon and book club for serious readers who wanted the reading without the stuffiness. Prose Society, the community, grows out of that. The podcast is the front door to it.
That stacking is the story. Social following, then a paid subscription community, then a network podcast deal. Each layer feeds the next, and each one is owned or co-owned by the creator rather than rented from a middleman.
Her credibility as a book person is not borrowed. Rallo’s second essay collection, Does Anyone Else Feel This Way?, published in October 2025 and became an instant New York Times bestseller. In December, Forbes named her to its 2026 30 Under 30 list and called her a Gen Z Carrie Bradshaw. She earned a master’s in journalism from Columbia in 2021.
A Return She Planned For
This is not Rallo’s first microphone. She hosted a lifestyle and culture podcast, Miss Congeniality with Eli Rallo, before stepping away in July 2024 to concentrate on writing. She left with a plan to come back on her own terms.
“I started a podcast after getting my masters in journalism in 2022, and when I stopped that podcast, I told myself that I’d come back to podcasting one day when the time and partner felt right, and I could really deliver the best possible content to my audience,” she said in a statement to TheWrap. “Three years later, ‘Prose Society’ really feels like the perfect fresh start.”
iHeartPodcasts brings distribution reach that a Patreon feed cannot. What Rallo brings is an audience that already treats her reading list as an event. That is the trade every network is now chasing, and book creators have quietly become one of the most reliable places to find it.
The first episode posts Wednesday. The featured book of the month decides the rest.
Entertainment
Phil Rosenthal Bridges Netflix Exit With a YouTube Episode
Before Somebody Feed Phil leaves Netflix for a full YouTube run in 2027, Phil Rosenthal dropped a mini-episode to keep his audience warm through the gap. Inside a rare premium show walking the platform migration in the opposite direction.
Phil Rosenthal spent eight seasons flying to Bangkok, Lisbon, and Rio to find the best bite in the room. This week he stayed home, in a 40-seat diner in Larchmont Village named for his late parents.
On July 27, Rosenthal premiered a special Somebody Feed Phil mini-episode, an inside look at Max and Helen’s, on his Phil Rosenthal World YouTube channel. It was the first original content on the channel tied to the show’s coming platform move, and Rosenthal himself watched along with fans as it went live at noon Pacific.
The timing is the point. Somebody Feed Phil left Netflix after Season 8, and the next full season does not arrive until early 2027. This mini-episode fills the gap. It keeps a traditional-TV audience engaged on the platform where the show plans to live, months before Season 9 gives them a reason to subscribe.
That gap-filler is the creator-economy tell. A premium unscripted host is treating a standalone free episode as a warm-up act for a whole audience migration, the kind of retention move built for a channel, not a network. Other traditional-media names watching this transition may borrow the playbook.
A Show Walking the Migration in Reverse
Variety reported the underlying move in March: new episodes of Somebody Feed Phil shift to YouTube in 2027 under a strategic global deal between Rosenthal’s Lucky Bastards banner and Banijay Americas and Banijay Rights. Prior seasons stay on Netflix.
The direction of travel is what makes it unusual. Deadline called it the rare premium series, unscripted or otherwise, to go the opposite way, noting Netflix has historically pulled shows up from YouTube rather than sending them down to it. Rosenthal is running that pipeline backward.
His reasons trace to the sitcom that made him. “One of the things I always loved about Everybody Loves Raymond was that it was free to watch everywhere,” Rosenthal said at the March announcement. YouTube gives him that reach, plus direct control of the channel and the audience.
This is not his first switch. The series began as I’ll Have What Phil’s Having on PBS in 2015. When the public broadcaster could not fund a second season, Netflix took it over and retitled it Somebody Feed Phil, where it ran eight seasons from 2018 to 2025.
Why the Diner Is the Right Bridge
Max and Helen’s opened in November 2025 with chef Nancy Silverton, named for the parents whose kitchen-table humor anchored the early seasons of the show. It earned raves and long lines for its comfort food.
The choice of subject is deliberate. Rosenthal is not sending fans a trailer; he is sending them a place they can visit, tied to the family story that built the series in the first place.
His pitch for the diner is as plain as his pitch for the channel. “Our mission is simple. We want to elevate comfort food,” he told Variety.
Season 9 lands on the Phil Rosenthal World channel in early 2027. Until then, the diner episode is the only new Somebody Feed Phil most fans will get, and it is sitting on the exact channel Rosenthal needs them to find first.
Entertainment
Gossip Goblin Brings a Fully AI Feature to Theaters
A YouTuber with 1.4 million subscribers is skipping the greenlight entirely. Gossip Goblin’s fully AI-generated anthology ‘Gods Don’t Give Gifts’ hits several hundred U.S. theaters October 30.
Zack London made a feature film in two months with ten people. Now he wants you to buy a ticket to see it on a real theater screen.
The YouTube creator known as Gossip Goblin will release Gods Don’t Give Gifts, a fully AI-generated science fiction anthology, in several hundred U.S. theaters on October 30. Fable, the AI studio co-producing the film, calls it the first feature built with AI and aimed at a ticket-buying public. London wrote and directed it.
That framing is the story’s stake for anyone watching where creator power is heading. A solo YouTuber with 1.4 million subscribers and more than a billion Shorts views is skipping the greenlight process entirely, and an Amazon-backed studio is betting exhibitors will hand him screens. The barrier between creator and studio is not lowering. It is dissolving.
London put the economics of it plainly to Variety. “I don’t think this would ever get made any other way. This would not get greenlit. It would be too expensive, and it would be too weird, and it would be too out there, and not palatable enough to justify how expensive it would be to make something of this caliber.”
The film is a collection of four shorts tracing the fallout of humanity besting earthly limits like death and memory through technology. London described the throughline as ordinary human hungers surviving the erasure of physical constraints. The pictures are AI. The voices are not. London hired real voice actors rather than synthetic dialogue, and the film went through post with a human team of ten artists over two months.
On July 22, the day of the announcement, Gossip Goblin dropped a preview short called Pomegranate on YouTube.
The Iron Lung Math Behind the Bet
London and Fable are copying a playbook that already worked. They are modeling the release on Markiplier’s Iron Lung, which grossed $51 million on a $3 million budget from more than 4,000 screens. That return, roughly seventeen times its cost, is the number every creator eyeing a theater run now memorizes.
The team is working with a distributor Fable would not name and targeting an opening in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. The goal is not the box office alone. Fable CEO Edward Saatchi framed the release as a statement rather than a windfall.
“We’re not trying to have some massive financial windfall here. This is about just psychologically saying, ‘No. This is a work of art, works of art play in theaters.’”
The AI question is the one that makes people nervous, and Saatchi knows it. He argues the YouTube following is what gets exhibitors past that hesitation.
Where the Creator Pipeline Points Next
Fable sits inside a larger shift. Amazon’s Alexa Fund invested an undisclosed sum in Saatchi’s San Francisco startup, and Saatchi has spent the past year pitching a “Netflix of AI.” A theatrical run for a YouTuber’s anthology is the most public test yet of whether that vision converts an online audience into paying seats.
Saatchi told IndieWire the wave is bigger than one film. “We are at an incredible moment where ‘internet IP’ and a generation of YouTube filmmakers are on the verge of taking over Hollywood.”
Whether audiences show up for AI-native storytelling is genuinely untested. London is not treating the release as a war with the industry. He sees it as proof that stories can be told with these tools at a cost no studio would approve.
The film opens October 30 in cities where London’s audience already lives online. The screen count grows from there if the tickets sell.
