TV Obsessive
Dope or Nope
Hawk: One of my favorite ways to decompress is to play video games with some YouTube in the background. I have a lot of channels to share, but the first one I love having on while game is the channel Dope or Nope. What this channel essentially boils down to is: three buddies buy random crap on the internet, and then try it out and rate it “dope” or “nope.” And that’s pretty much it. But there is a lot of mileage to be wrung out of this concept.
There is an inherent and pervasive sense of freewheeling goofiness between the hosts. These are clearly longtime friends that share a wonderful chemistry with each other. Every half hour-ish video is filled with improvised jokes, the friends giving each other crap, and coming up with increasing ridiculous ways to acquire and use weird accessories, toys and gadgets. Each video has a theme, such as kids’ toys that are wildly inappropriate, candy that looks like regular food, weird Minecraft-themed products, and so on. They’ll buy from Amazon, eBay, and Wish most commonly, with the latter usually resulting (as Wish is wont to do) in products hilariously divergent from what was actually on the store page. The channel and its sister channels clearly do quite well, since the group often spend ridiculous amounts of money on the dumbest things.
Other ways in which Dope or Nope will mix things up from time to time is to add additional rules to the video, such as only buying products with a certain delivery window, typing a single word into Wish and buying whatever comes up for spelling suggestions, seeing who can buy the most interesting stuff from discount stores like dd’s Discounts, or setting up “like to buy” or “like to dare” in which they’ll purchase and use a specific item they’ve chosen, and setting a certain like threshold on the video before using it.
I have no shortage of interesting channels to watch and talk about, but stuff like Dope or Nope scratch a specific kind of itch. It’s such a dumb idea, but the chemistry of the cast, incredibly contagious laughter, unpredictability of the products, and creative, aggressive editing make it a binge-worthy channel. I can easily spend a couple of hours with these just playing in the background.
