When I teach content creation and distribution to students, there are some really simple maxims I use that help them do the job well:

• Tell me the most important stuff first.
• Nobody’s going to hang with you if you’re really damned long.
• Use the right tool for the right job.
• It’s not about you.

The epic TikTok series “Who The F— Did I Marry?” manages to break every one of those rules and more, but somehow has become a runaway success online. Let’s look at what it is, how it broke so many “rules”  we’ve come to associate with today’s media experiences and some reasons why it actually worked:

WHAT WE KNOW: The TikTok-er, ReesaTeesa, tells the story of how she met, dated, married and divorced a man she calls Legion during the pandemic times of 2020-2021. (ReesaTeesa relies on pseudonyms for many of her characters and she never reveals her own name during the story as well.)

She says Legion claimed to be a divorced man who played football at San Diego State University, made good money as an Arena League football player and became an executive at a condiment company. Over the course of the series, she said she found out that none of that was true, and even more, he had been divorced multiple times, he lied about his connections with family members, he had a criminal history and he didn’t have the money he said he did.

That’s about the best I can do in shrinking this down. If you want a bit more expansive view of the series, feel free to read this piece in Glamour that does a bit of a deeper dive.

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW: As is the case with a lot of content online, we have some “don’t know” elements that add to the oddity of this experience:

• We don’t know who this TikToker is: In most cases, we know the person who is telling the story, so we can get some background on them. In this case, she doesn’t identify herself and early media reports agree not to include her real name. (That said, TMZ has named both ReesaTeesa and Legion in its reporting, which came after the series blew up.)
• We don’t know how much is factually accurate: People often talk about things like content being “substantially true” or “emotionally true,” so I’m not doing the true/not true thing here. I have no doubt that this woman went through a lot. What I’m talking about are facts that we can verify the way we would with a reporting story. For example, you know my name and you could use records to prove when I got married, to whom and so forth. You could also check me out for any pending litigation, property ownership etc. We can’t do that here.  (For his part, Legion is threatening to sue over this series, claiming it had serious factual inaccuracies.)
• We don’t know the answers to things like “Why now?” for this story: For her part, ReesaTeesa has promised to do a “live” to answer all sorts of questions.

BREAKING THE RULES: Let’s walk through the maxims I outlined above and explain how this series doesn’t abide by any of them:

Tell me the most important stuff first: ReesaTeesa either never heard of the inverted pyramid or really didn’t care about it. Either way, she does this mega-series in pure chronological order.

Clearly, we know the situation isn’t going to be great for her, given the title of the series. I mean, nobody says “Who the f— did I marry?” and comes up with the conclusion “The best person ever!” That said, we have no idea of what depths of hell she’s going to face in this thing. In some cases, she’ll even tease future disasters with a “Don’t worry. We’ll get to that later.”

She does some brief recapping at various points, and she also does a few “resets” or “clarification” episodes when viewers have raised questions or asked about specific holes in her stories.

That said, if you decide to get into this, get ready to wait a long, long time to find out what happened. This leads to…

Nobody’s going to hang with you if you’re really damned long: ReesaTeesa is giving us a massive allegory, 10 minutes at a time. Think of the last time you actually sat down and watched something on social media that lasted 10 minutes. Then realize she did 50 of these things, which means it’s about 500 minutes long.

If you do the math on this, that means you are sitting through more than EIGHT HOURS of content to get to the end of the story. There are NetFlix mini-series that aren’t this long, and those things have actors and budgets and scenery and such. This is literally nothing but ReesaTeesa sitting in her home or her car and talking to the camera for that amount of time.

This thing is ridiculously long, and yet even the later pieces have upwards of 5-6 million views. That’s not counting the views of her videos that fans have reposted or the YouTube versions where people mercifully pulled multiple posts into one larger video.

I know people watch a lot of TikTok, but this seemed like a lot for this platform, leading to the next key point…

Use the right tool for the right job: The idea of using the right tool for the right job goes all the way back to my days as a “convergent journalism apostle.” In short, if you can tell the story best with a video, do that. If a graphic does the job better than a text story, do the graphic. If photos work better than graphics in conveying meaning, use the pictures.

In today’s era, we can expand that idea by saying that certain platforms do better than others for certain things. Blogs like mine that rely on text are set up a certain way while people who tell stories via photo tend to use Instagram etc.

In terms of TikTok, the average video ranges between about 38 and 50 SECONDS. People tend to think of “big” TikToks as close to three minutes.

ReesaTeesa has picked the absolute wrong platform for her story, as she maxes out the limit (10 minutes) 50 times to tell the tale of Legion. Doing this on TikTok is akin to writing the novel “Shogun” on Twitter/X in a thread of 280-character posts. A YouTube channel would be a better pick and even that’s a stretch.

It’s not about you: Whether someone was building a blog or doing a photo series, I’ve repeatedly explained that the audience has to come first. In short, you can’t make it about yourself. It has to be about them.

ReesaTeesa stated that she wanted to tell her story, with the goal of it helping at least one other person out there who might be experiencing something similar. In each episode, she repeats the idea that she’s trying to tell her story, and that we are all kind of just riding along with her.

WHY IT WORKS ANYWAY: Even with what should be a long list of fatal flaws, the series is a massive hit. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can tell you what I’ve observed in listening to all 8+ hours of this (I had a couple long drives with time to kill…):

• She’s a good storyteller: First and foremost, she tells the story well. Between emotional anguish and moments of levity, ReesaTeesa is just really good at weaving a yarn. If I had the option of editing this thing, I’m sure I could cut it down by one-third without batting an eyelash and not lose anything, but the excess content doesn’t come at the risk of losing the audience.
• She stays on point: As long as this thing is, she doesn’t drift into other random tales or bring in unrelated content. It literally is a single story told in 50+ parts.
• She connects with the audience: Her general vulnerability and unvarnished approach really makes her connect with people. I felt like I was part of a friend group, listening to a good friend bare her soul. She would often start parts of the series by answering questions people asked in the chat or clarifying things based on comments people had. In making this a two-way street of communication, she made it work.
• She’s honest: I distinguish this from factual accuracy, in that I can’t PROVE certain things she said, but I can tell she honestly believes what she says when she’s offering opinions or reflections. That’s never more true than when she describes parts of the story that don’t make her look great. She talked about how she wanted a specific car (it had a “cognac interior” is all I can recall) and how that made her sound really bougie. She said she fell into this mess because she wanted it to be “her turn” to get married. She admits to her faults, which make us feel like she doing more than throwing a pity party online.
• She gave a damn: When it came to telling the story, I could tell that she cared about telling it. Her approach, her content and everything else was so compelling because she felt so compelled to tell the story. Because SHE cared, WE cared.