Journalist and producer Taylor Patterson pokes at that idea in his satirical series ICONS. It follows the ins and outs of the fictional digital publication, “The Buzz Room” and its staff, giving audiences a peek into the “wizard behind the curtain.”

Patterson says the series explores "the moral and ethical compromises that define today’s digital culture” as characters are forced to navigate the absurdities and pitfalls of clickbait journalism.

The trailer will soon be released, but here's the opening scene.

Taylor: Okay. What do you got for me, Alicia?

Alicia: Looks like a plane crashed on the 404 this morning.

T: Oh my god…how many dead?

Patterson’s character says barely able to contain his excitement. 

A: Sounds like it crash landed. It didn’t actually…

T: Okay! Don’t care, okay? Don’t care about that. Let’s talk about things we do care about like monkey in a jacket. Have you guys seen this guy? … Doin numbers!

Taylor Patterson, creator of ICONS

Patterson says the show contains exaggerated, semi-fictionalized scenarios based on real news stories as well as his experiences working at fast-paced digital outlets and in the media industry broadly. The 28-year-old is well known as a host for BlogTo.

Every joke contains a kernel of truth. I have personally sat in story meetings and overheard conversations in newsrooms where a more “important” piece of news gets pushed aside in favour of another story “because that’s what people are talking about.”

Eden Graham in ICONS.

The inspiration for ICONS started in 2018, when Patterson experienced culture shock while working in the TV industry in Los Angeles. He says working at the production companies for reality TV shows was a "major eye opener to the industry" and inspired him to explore the relationship between viral fame and those who exploit it.

When he returned home to Toronto, what immediately stood out for him was a racy, unethical, gossip-focused digital publication outperforming traditional legacy news outlets like the Toronto Star and CBC. He was intrigued by the publication and the buzz it was gaining in Toronto, for better or worse, and described it as a character of its own.

“It’s saying so much about what it means to be a media company, about our society,” Patterson said. 

{https://youtu.be/z2uZZ_yBMsk}

Patterson continued, “Jerry Springer existed on daytime television, now it doesn't exist on cable, it exists on TikTok. The medium has changed, but the message is still there in the sense that the idea of racial and exploitive content has always existed. We're just digesting it at a faster pace now.”

Patterson argues that Black culture is at the root of much of what is thought to be cool and fuels a lot of internet culture—slang and the way people communicate, trends, and viral moments. He’s noticed that media outlets are attempting to appropriate elements of Black culture and incorporate them into their coverage. “Which is ironic because the media tends to marginalize Black voices a lot of the time,” Patterson quipped.  

Kwesi Kwarko-Fosu in ICONS.

Patterson says the objective of ICONS is to provide perspective and to examine how things have changed in the media landscape. From what I can see, where we are is bad and where we’re headed is worse.

During our conversation, Patterson explained how ICONS parodies local viral phenomena like “chair-throwing girl” and “pee-pee-poo-poo man.” We laughed at the fact that for us – and likely many people beyond Toronto – no further context was needed. We laughed at the fact that the former became so infamous she was featured in a Drake music video. 

It’s funny but absurd and kind of sad, truthfully. I’d be willing to bet more people know who those two are than Marit Stiles or Bonnie Crombie. The more I thought about the absurdity of the realities that inform ICONS, I thought not of Jerry Springer but Jerry Seinfeld.

Jewell Bowry in ICONS.

Seinfeld the sitcom is affectionately known as “a show about nothing” partially because of its unique take on everyday life and topics. The show’s guiding principle was “no hugging, no learning” and the main characters regularly dealt with delicate situations in an inappropriate or offensive way. I say this with respect, Seinfeld was a deeply unserious show. 

Some argue that Seinfeld, at its core, is a nihilistic and absurdist show, which reflects that life is meaningless so you should either accept or laugh at the suffering and chaos of existence. The show “about nothing” argues that “life is about nothing.” The things we assume matter, don’t.

That’s where I feel like we’re heading with the current digital news landscape; everything is absurd and nothing matters. The U.S. election is a great example.

There was a ton of media coverage about Trump in the lead-up to the election: his criminal convictions and ongoing legal cases, his flirtations with fascism (threatening to go after political opponents, manipulating democratic institutions in his favour, etc), his incessant lying, his poor behaviour. 

But the negative coverage highlighting the many reasons Trump or any regular politician would normally be disqualified didn’t matter as much as his personal appeal. In fact, research shows that the more media coverage there is of people seemingly going after Trump, the more people back him. 

At his rallies and in interviews, particularly ones with influencers and media figures from the so-called man-osphere, made voters feel like they could trust him, that he was on their side and that he’d be the kind of guy they’d like to grab a beer with. That may be an oversimplification but it’s not wrong. 

For all of Trump’s flaws, he is objectively pretty funny and watching the twists and turns of his political journey unfold over the last 9 years has been incredibly entertaining. He regularly does and says outlandish things and the people in the Trump orbit are a wacky cast of characters. It’s a slow-yet-erractic-moving train wreck we can’t take our eyes off. Trump seems to defy all political logic and it seems in his case, all publicity really is good publicity. 

Patterson says ICONS is “a critique on virality and clickbait journalism but also is a commentary on how this system works.”

Patterson spoke about the swipe economy, explaining that businesses of all stripes, including media outlets, are trying to get people to stop swiping and engage with their content. Through the topics they cover, how they cover them, media outlets are trying to capture people’s attention and garner positive sentiment towards their businesses. 

I think we saw this with the amount of Taylor Swift coverage in the last two weeks. If you were somehow unaware, Taylor Swift is closing her Era’s Tour in Canada with six shows in Toronto followed by three in Vancouver next week. The tour has broken records as the first to gross over a billion dollars. Thousands of fans paid eye-watering amounts to see the popstar perform, and the economic activity generated from those shows has been a huge boost to whichever city she’s rolled into. It is, by all means, a big story.

In the last two weeks Taylor Swift coverage has dominated news cycles. It’s been more prominent than the COP29 global climate change summit, the G20 meeting, a failed assassination attempt of a former Canadian justice minister and other foreign interference updates, the death of the former British Columbia premier, the 1000th day of the Russia-Ukraine war, and a volcano in Iceland erupting for the 7th time this year. 

But media seemed desperate to latch on to a story about something a lot people are paying attention to and feel positively towards, which feels like it happens less and less. 

The federal government’s efforts to help media outlets with their declining revenues by forcing Meta and Google to compensate outlets for displaying their content via Bill C-18, backfired spectacularly. Meta responded by blocking news on its platforms for Canadian users in July 2023. Online engagement for local news went down 58 per cent, 24 per cent for national news. That kind of dip in engagement is sure to hurt revenue. And because Meta’s ban doesn’t apply to misinformation, it now has larger market share. So, a plan intended to give media outlets more money, so they can reach a wider audience, instead limited news’ reach and hurt the outlets' finances.

It would be funny if it weren’t soul-crushingly sad. 

Both the federal government’s interventions in the media ecosystem and the media’s coverage of Trump came with unintended and somewhat counterintuitive consequences. I’m not blaming them for the outcomes, nor do I think it’s solely their responsibility to get us out of this mess—not just for my industry’s sake, but for all of us.  

ICONS will be released in the new year, but for now, you can keep up to date with Patterson by following his Instagram to see previews and sneak peeks.