Shane Dawson’s series: “The Mind of Jake Paul”

Shane Dawson, one of the most prominent “Youtube Creators” in the platform, has drastically changed his content style in the past few months. It is hard to believe that Shane has videos titled “Weird Cat Products I Bought Online” and “Tasting Pregnancy Craving Foods”, now that he has created long and researched documentaries, mostly focusing on the lives of other YouTubers. The most recent of his documentaries is called “The Mind of Jake Paul”, where he investigates the mind of YouTube creator Jake Paul who is notorious for being an overall destructive and outright disrespectful person. Unsurprisingly, this eight-part series has gotten a lot of criticism since it was released in September.

One of the reasons why I, like many others, did not like the series was because of the first three episodes uploaded. Overedited, overdramatized, and focused more on trying to diagnose Jake Paul as a “sociopath” without even consulting him first, these episodes were just one big conjecture. The series is also dislikable for its lack of “uncovering the truth”. The fakeness of Jake’s pranks and his toxic relationship with his ex-girlfriend Alissa were no surprise to anyone, yet Shane brought these topics up multiple times throughout the series, dramatizing them as if to reveal something we did not already know. Shane’s purpose of creating the series was to inform his audience of the “truth”, but unfortunately, he did not succeed in doing so.

Is Shane Dawson a fantastic content creator? Yes. Was the Jake Paul series any good? NO. You can’t always make the “perfect” video or docu-series; creators have bad days too. Therefore, it is understandable that Shane would make some poorly produced videos here and there. After all, he has just started delving into a new era of content.