Leaving Television
Game One is dying. Not the kind of death where there’s a funeral and people say goodbye properly. The kind where the show gets moved to Comedy Central, then back, then forward again, each decision taking another year off its life until one day they just stop. Etienne Gardé, one of the creators, talks about how it’s not that they got worse—they filled every requirement, met every quota the network wanted. But it doesn’t matter. Somewhere in an office, someone decided the thing that made tens of thousands of people happy wasn’t worth the slot anymore.
This stings partly because Gardé and the others at Rocket Beans aren’t bitter about it in the cheap way. They’re not ranting about corporate gatekeepers, though plenty of that would be justified. They’re just clear-eyed: this is how television works. The money flows different ways now. The audience isn’t watching at 8:15 pm anymore. They’re watching when they feel like it, in formats that don’t exist on cable.
I’ve watched that show for years. Not religiously, but when I needed something that felt like actual people talking about actual things instead of whatever the broadcast people think I want. Game One was never trying to be a product. It was four guys who’d been together since GIGA, a channel most people have forgotten but which somehow shaped an entire generation of how to make entertainment. They’d be on camera for six hours sometimes, barely a script, just riffing. Now that’s unthinkable in broadcast. Now that gets you killed.
What’s compelling about Gardé in this interview is his refusal to pretend any of this has an easy fix. He knows YouTube is a dead end unless you’re making makeup tutorials or pulling faces at a camera for twelve-year-olds. The view counts don’t come with money. You need either massive audiences or you need people to actually pay. For a guy who spent twenty years building trust with an audience, that second path is the only one that makes sense. So they’re launching their own channel on Twitch. Not as a YouTube play. As a television station. A sender, which is the word they use and the right one. A thing that just runs.
The thing Gardé keeps circling back to is how much they refuse to sell. He won’t do the thing where you fake loving a product for sponsorship money. He won’t reshape what they make to chase clicks. He knows that would kill the only thing they have, which is that people genuinely care what they think. He’d rather have three thousand people paying three euros a month than three million people not paying and not caring. There’s something almost defiant about that right now.
What depresses me about German television—and Gardé names this directly—is how little it tries. Every successful format is a copy of something American or British. There’s no risk. The networks have public funding or they don’t, and if they do, they can waste it on anything because nobody’s really watching. So you get conservative programming that barely works. Meanwhile the internet kids are building stuff on the side, getting audiences the networks can’t reach, and then the networks don’t know what to do because they don’t speak that language.
The money situation is broken in a way that’s almost funny. The public broadcasters in Germany throw billions at programming. Most of it is forgettable. Meanwhile Rocket Beans—four guys with a camera and good taste—has to ask their audience to chip in. Gardé’s right that this is insane. You pay for everything—music, film, cable. But independent creators? They should work for free? The only reason the internet hasn’t completely collapsed under that logic is that some people have enough taste and stubbornness to make things anyway.
The crowdfunding setup matters though. He specifically didn’t use Patreon or Kickstarter. Didn’t promise specific deliverables. Just: if you want this to exist, help us build it. There’s something honest about that. It means the project lives or dies based on whether people actually want it, not based on some venture capital bet that it can be optimized into profitability.
I think about what it costs him—what it costs all of them. They spent a decade on broadcast, building something, and then the broadcast people slowly killed it by degrees. The sensible move would be to take a real job, work at some production company making corporate videos. Instead they’re betting everything on Twitch, which could collapse tomorrow, which has no history, which is just this thing that exists right now. Most people wouldn’t do that.
Later in the interview Gardé does the thing where you know you’re aging—complaining about students and their entitled attitudes. But what sticks is a story he tells, something he heard from Jerry Seinfeld about an orchestra trudging through rain to a gig. They stop to look through a window at a family decorating a Christmas tree, and one of them says how can anyone live like that. That’s the choice, isn’t it. Most people get the warm house. Most people don’t have the thing they care about getting rained on. Most people, sensibly, choose the house.
Gardé’s not choosing the house. He’s choosing the gig. And he knows nobody else has to care about that. The show will run or it won’t. The internet will watch or it won’t. But at least it’ll be theirs. That matters more than it probably should.