Broey Deschanel Also Thinks Video Essays Are Oversaturated

Maia (pronounced “like Maria without the ‘R’” she says) Wyman, didn’t always envision becoming a video essayist or even a film critic. As a teen, she went to an art school where she says she “saw how the sausage was made” in regards to filmmaking. It wasn’t until she went to college, however, and took a course called “Weimar Cinema” that her interest in film writing began. 

Today, she is known by her many followers as Broey Deschanel on her podcast Rehash but most notably on her YouTube where she has amassed nearly 500k followers from her video essays on everything from her cynical feelings on the Barbie film to recent videos on why she thinks the character Anora is “the Disney princess we need.”

I spoke with the video essayist about her feelings on the format, her thoughts on what some have called the “oversaturation” of video essays, and also what movie she thought was overrated. 

It seems like your career started to take off during this sort of “golden age” of video essays, but in recent months, a lot of people have been saying that the form is now dead because of oversaturation. What are your thoughts about that?  

Yeah, I think I definitely came up in a boom of video essays. Myself and Mina Le and … this girl Yhara Zayd … but we all kind of came up like in the wave after the original video essayists. I think my video blew up right before the pandemic happened, unfortunately, and it helped to bolster my career because everyone went online and everyone was on Youtube and you can see the numbers declining since then. Obviously people's videos still blow up but it's harder to sustain high numbers these days. Maybe I'm just falling off content wise, but I don't think my content has changed that much. 

I do think a lot of people want to make video essays now. I feel like it's a standard. It's like taught in school. It's becoming a bit more legitimized.  Many of my videos have been taught and incorporated into curriculum in university and high school, which has been amazing. I wish I could see the lectures happening, but like a lot of people have reached out and been like, they taught your video today. But because of that, I think everyone wants to do it now. 

And that's really awesome but it's a lot of people who want to do it because they want to do it and not because they want to talk about something in particular, I find. I think with careers like this, it's like you kind of have to start from a place of nerdery and be like, I just need to say this thing, and kind of start it as a hobby.

I did not start this because I wanted it to be a career that came after the fact. So I think a lot of people are making videos that I think will get them a lot of views really quickly.  And so it ends up being a lot of videos about the same really buzzy topic over and over again. And I think that people are getting tired of the format because of that. So I would agree with that, But I don't think it's necessarily dead. I think everyone still wants to learn. And I think you have a good video, and you have a good hook, and it's something that people haven't heard talked about yet people will want to watch. So I think the demand is still there. It's just a bit more exhausting for people.

You said that your videos have been featured in universities. Before that, did you feel like  you weren't seen as a “legitimate critic?”

Definitely. I still have feelings that I'm not a legitimate critic, mainly just because I think getting validated by the institution is what so many people have been taught to aspire to and so I think  to go rogue and just make your own career, you're like, do I have the qualifications? My people like my stuff, but is it just because of the crowd mentality? So I think there is a lot of imposter syndrome there.

I still have the desire to get reviews out In publications and like in print because I feel like that'll legitimize me more although I don't necessarily think that that's the truth anymore  But yeah, I think I think there are struggles to be legitimized As a YouTuber. I get embarrassed to tell people I'm a YouTuber in person, like people will ask me what I do and I kind of just lie.

I have seen your reviews in other publications as well. Is that something that you just started?  

Yeah, it's something I just started. I have been planning for quite a while because I've always really been interested in writing and felt strongly about it. That is where my main passion is. Ideally, I would love to not be in the public eye eventually, and just do my little writing without having a public face. I think slowly I'm trying to kind of build a name for myself in those spheres as well. YouTube won't be around forever, or maybe it will, but video essays — people are already ringing the death knell on them. So, you know, it's good to kind of spread yourself elsewhere. 

 I watched an interview you did, and you were talking about how polarized people were by your Barbie video. Was that your most polarizing one?

Barbie was one of the most polarizing... I think any video that's about a movie that just came out that everyone still loves, like it hasn't gone through the cycles of discourse yet so it's still kind of in the hype category is when people get really mad at me because sometimes I'll come out with an opinion that's just not the majority opinion. And people are like: why do you hate things that people love? Which is fair, but it's just my feelings.

And has there ever been a subject that you started writing on and then you're like it's not worth the backlash?

Yeah, oh my god, so many. I had wanted to make one about — people would hate me for this opinion — but I didn't like Everything Everywhere All At Once. And I was like, maybe the time has come where I can talk about why I didn't like it. But then I was like, honestly, I just feel like sometimes you just don't want to hate on something. I can dislike the movie, but I don't know if I want to make an entire video being like, “here's why I don't like this movie,” because it just feels lame.

So that was one recently that I kind of canned because I was like what's the point?

What was it that you didn't like?  

Okay you're getting my take in here.  I just kind of felt like it was a bit of an attention economy film. I don't think it's a bad film by any means. I think it's a really well made film and the performances are great. I think they were conceiving of it during a similar time that like the Marvel Cinematic Universe was happening, but it just felt like the indie version of an MCU movie a little bit.

I don't know. I just don't think it resonated with me the way a lot of it resonated with a lot of other people. I found it really repetitive, and just kind of exhausting to watch, or like a bit bloated, but it was fun. I think it's fun, I was just shocked by how much praise it got because I was like, okay, it's like a fun movie but. That's my personal take.