Paul American Wants You to Know the Paul Brothers Work Really, Really Hard

“Look, we’re polarizing, man,” Logan Paul says in reference to himself and his content creator, podcaster, and boxer brother Jake Paul on Good Morning America. “It’s either ‘I’m rocking with those guys, I see the hustle, I respect it,’ or ‘screw them.’” The Paul brothers know they’re controversial: their new show, Paul American, hinges on the fact that the audience may change allegiances from Logan to Jake to Logan to Jake to Logan to no one at all over the course of each 40-something-minute episode. Paul American, and the Paul brothers’ press tour around the show, doesn’t really care about something as wimpy as feelings so much as they want the audience to know they work — hard. Can you really hate two people with a good work ethic?

The first few seconds of the series premiere features Jake hopping out of a big car and holding up his phone as an apology for being late. “I’m trading crypto!” is his big excuse. As the Paul family tumbles out of the car like clowns do at the circus, Logic and Marshmello’s song “Everyday” kicks in with the apt opening refrain “I work hard every motherfuckin’ day.” What does “work” consist of for these two guys, former Vine fixtures turned YouTubers turned fighters (professionally and against each other) turned podcasters turned reality-TV stars? That would be the net public good that is “content.” We watch them train, we watch them bicker, we watch them riff, and we watch them post. “Those guys going out to L.A., we were like, ‘Fuck, they’re going to end up doing fucking porn because their shit didn’t work out,’ and all the worst things, but luckily they’re just working hard,” their dad, Greg, says of their Ohio exodus.

It’s tricky to know what the point of Paul American is. For longtime fans of the Paul brothers, the show is yet another way to engage with them beyond watching their Instagram Reels or their fights or buying their merch. But there’s a kind of artfulness to Paul American, a vague primer on the last decade or so of internet culture, that suggests it’s hoping to bring in skeptics by showcasing the brothers’ pain and gain. “I’d say he’s a genius creator with one of the best work ethics in the world,” Jake says about Logan when forced to compliment his brother during promo. They’re trying to push the show as a culmination of effort as a form of legitimacy — these are two guys who work so hard they got to meet the president! — but it’s the least interesting stuff on screen. Jake Paul telling Mike Tyson they have to fight because an ayahuasca journey showed him that happening? Well, that’s closer to something resembling compelling television. Paul American is at its best when it buys into its own mythology that this is an American fairytale.

There are those moments, but mostly the show wants you to know that the Pauls have earned everything that’s come their way. To hate them would be to deny their efforts, their strategies, their knowledge of the internet playing field. “Having your content be received by a lot of eyeballs is success,” Logan says. Though they protest that they’ve changed from the guys who once filmed a dead body or had their house raided by the FBI, the one thing that matters above everything else are those viewing metrics. The metrics mean more than hard-earned cash — the metrics are the cash. Earning views and dollars is representative of all that this country stands for: that your job can be anything you want so long as you bully people into believing it is so.

“He’s very dedicated,” Jake’s girlfriend, Jutta Leerdam, says when they’re sitting around their kitchen table. There’s a rare moment of silence that follows, as though the work that Jake’s put in is worth holding dear, before the peanut gallery of random guys in the kitchen off to the side start booing. “Boring!” one of them yells. He’s not wrong; this legitimacy ploy gets tedious. Work ethic is not what’s wrong with the Paul brothers, and no one is denying the sheer number of years they’ve dedicated to putting their lives online. But framing Paul American as a retrospection on labor, with the boys and their family and their lackeys gassing them up over and over, just isn’t that interesting. For that, they’re going to have to work a little harder.

• [good morning america]

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