Our Food TV SHOW Failed in 2015! What Happened??!

I don't know if you remember this or not, but we actually had our very own TV show with a million-dollar budget, and it completely failed. Now, we're here to tell you what we learned from the experience. Andrew, did we fumble the bag, or were we set up to fail from the start? Here, let's run a clip from Broke Bites, What the Fung, from FYI TV, just to show everybody this was a real show in 2015. We're the Fung Brothers. We'll show you how to eat like ballers on a budget. Let's go! Long story short, we were two Asian brothers doing a fish-out-of-water concept that was basically copying diners, drive-ins, and dives. We had a million-dollar budget or something like that on FYI TV, and it just failed. We got canceled after one season, and I guess you can just throw our names on that long list and pile of YouTubers who try to make the transition to TV, and it did not work. Obviously, most recently, the most high-profile one was Lilly Singh. Yeah, I mean, basically, in this video, I'm going to quickly go over how the structure of getting a TV show even works, who are the major players in it, and then our personal takeaways, because I think that this is a unique experience. Not every YouTuber gets to go through this, but yeah, there's a lot to take away from it. So, please, if you're interested in this video and you want to share with your friends or you want more people to see it, please hit that like button right now. Real quick, let's get into how the structure works. Just to break it down for people, Andrew, there's the network, the production company, you as the YouTuber, the talent. As far as it goes on the network side, Andrew, it was FYI TV, which was a subsidiary of A&E, which is one of the biggest, you know, TV stations out there. Andrew, actually, a lot of people don't remember FYI TV because it shut down, and then it turned into Viceland, and then Viceland shut down, but we were next to, what, Tiny House Nation, married at first sight? Yeah, and then the production company is in the middle. The production company is obviously the people who actually make the show. They bring in the camera crew. They get us in the car. They get us on the plane. They call up the restaurants and set up all the lights, and then they go edit the show afterwards, and then they have to take notes from the executives on what they like and don't like about the show. So, actually, even though the network comes up with, like, the million dollars, Andrew, it's on the production company how they want to split it up. Yeah. And, of course, at the bottom, Andrew, you've got the talent. And I think that this is the hardest thing for YouTubers to swallow because YouTubers are used to being one, two, three, four, five, everything in their own structure, and they end up, out of three levels, the bottom level three. Yeah, and so here's the thing about talent. Yes, you are the face. Yes, it is the glorious side. Yes, you get famous. You get clout, whatever, whatever. I get it. However, you pretty much have no say because you're basically listening from the top to the middle to the bottom, and you have the least amount of leverage, especially if you're just starting off your career. So, basically, as a talent, you kind of have to listen to what's going on because guess what? They're going to replace you. And that's the funny thing is, as a talent, sometimes you think you're irreplaceable, but actually, talent, sometimes the most replaceable. And, actually, I would say that that's the most difficult thing for an independent DIY YouTuber to swallow when you enter the machine. All right, Andrew, let's just get into, like, seven points that we took away from this whole experience. Obviously, it was in 2015. Since then, we've still done some mainstream stuff here and there, done some commercial work, but never again like this level of enmeshment. Andrew, we were part of the machine. I've been in the Matrix, and then I hopped back out so I could give you the inside scoop. We had 13 episodes, and they all got released. Actually, a few of them did get decent ratings and had maybe every episode gotten the ratings of the best episode. Dallas did the best, man. And Denver did really well, too. Dallas and Denver. However, overall, yeah, they didn't renew us. So, anyways, guys, here's things that we learned. First of all, number one, when it is your first contract, it is your first season of a new show, and you are the talent, you pretty much have no room to negotiate. Yeah, because you're just like coming in, and their kind of view on you, even as a YouTuber that's making your own money and your own brand deals and your own AdSense over here, is like, you need us to get to the mainstream. You need us to get in front of like 10 million viewers a month. You need us because we're gonna got Tiny House Nation, and everybody who watches Tiny House Nation is gonna watch you and Andrew have a chili cook-off. Yeah. I mean, you're basically on a rookie contract, and there's no way around it. Now, the only way you can make more money, and first of all, the first season, we didn't get paid that much money for our time, to be honest. But the first, if you get renewed for a second or third or fourth season, obviously, and the show does well, then you get to negotiate. You get paid more, and you get more creative control. Especially if it goes past season three, then you get syndicated. Moving on to number two, Andrew. In the contract, they will put things where basically they're trying to hedge against you getting super, super, super crazy big off the show and making a ton of money. They want a piece of it, and your lawyers will kind of like fight them on it. So basically, what they're afraid of sometimes, and they just gotta save themselves, is that, you know, sometimes some people get extremely popular off of a reality TV show. Right, they sell a product or something. They have a personal brand, and then they make millions of dollars on this product, right? And then the TV network doesn't get anything of it, even though they were the ones who put them on TV first. Now, it does make sense to an extent that they get a cut if you blow up. But basically, the chances of you blowing up is very, very low. Right, so as a start-off guy, you know, you basically gotta sign it unless you got crazy leverage. It's a little bit like the recording contracts in the record industry or sort of like appearing on Shark Tank where like that NBC owns like part of your company, a small portion. Basically, people want a piece if you blow up crazy big. Number three, Andrew, for a YouTuber transitioning to television, especially back then because they would not let you talk about what you were doing at that time. That was just the thinking. Obviously, I think it's changed a lot since then. It was hard to maintain the certain YouTube flow and productivity while still filming this like diners and drive-ins and dive-style TV show. Yeah, think about it. We're in the 626 living in Los Angeles, and our YouTube system is banging on all cylinders, right? We're making a lot of videos, getting a lot of views, and we're loving the YouTube flow. But we take this opportunity, and then it takes us out of our homes, and we have to travel around the country and film content that is not for YouTube. So what we had to do is we brought our friend AB with us who was helping us film YouTube content at the time. Now, if you look at our channel back in 2014 and 2015, you'll just see us randomly pop up in San Antonio. Oh, we're doing a food video in San Antonio. Why are we doing a food video in Denver, Colorado? I was like, why are we in Nashville, North Carolina doing a food video? Why are we in New Orleans? That's because we were traveling to those cities to film the TV show, and we were just trying to also get some YouTube content out of it. Yeah, which will sort of lead us to our final question, and we'll answer it at the end of the video. Do we regret taking it or not? Moving on to number four, Andrew. A number of YouTubers over the past eight years have gotten a bunch of mainstream opportunities, and probably— I don't know, it's tough to say. I'm not aware of all of them, but maybe like 1 out of 15 or probably 19 out of 20, if not more, have failed. I can tell you this, guys, and this goes for almost any social media star. Transferring and converting social media stars and following onto TV has rarely worked. Let me just list some of them off. Andrew, What The Buck, Lilly Singh, Grace Helbig, Epic Meal Time. The list goes on and on. I mean, I'm sure, you know, I think Roy Wasabi had a little bit of show that was like successful more for the children market, but the transfer rate, Andrew, you would say has been pretty low in terms of success. Well, and I think people learn this like the companies did, but they're looking at your numbers on YouTube and being like, oh my gosh, you guys have millions of followers. You guys are getting millions of views per video. What's the chance that we can get a small percentage of that to watch the TV show? Yo, I remember the execs were always like, we're just looking for 10, 11, 12%. 10, 11, 12% would be great if you can just move that over. Andrew, I believe technically the conversion rates are closer to 1% if that. Not that, bro. I mean cable TV. A lot of our fans didn't even have cable and this networks on cable. So how are you going to watch a show? Anyways, basically what I'm saying is that it just does not work as well as people think. So point number five, David, what else did we learn? The game sort of just wants what it wants, you know, at that time where we were presented with the opportunity to do a TV show. FYI, TV broke by with the phone, right? We were not expecting that. I just wanted to like travel around Asia to be honest. I was waiting for an offer from like Singaporean TV or like English-speaking Southeast Asia TV, Dragon Phoenix TV, one of those English like Asian stations and I thought they're going to put subtitles on it. That's what I was waiting for to get an American TV show, which in a way in America is much more prestigious to have. That was not something I was expecting. However, in later years, Andrew, I would say maybe I don't want to say I felt entitled to it because I didn't but like I was more expecting more mainstream love later and it didn't come. So really the game is going to want what it wants at the time that it wants it, whether you expect it or not. Like because sometimes you expect it and you don't get it and sometimes you don't expect it and you get it. Yeah, it's funny. The game wanted us at one point and then at times the game don't want you. So that's why you kind of got a strike when the iron's hot. So, you know, you take the opportunities when they come. I just did a bunch of auditions off the piece with Ronnie on Netflix and you know, I'm still hit me up. I guess. Moving on to number six, Andrew. You can't put an independent YouTuber in a constrictive system and ask them to thrive, Andrew. I remember being on set. We're talking about so many hot lights on. The way they shot it was so old-school. We're shooting reverse. We're shooting like maybe even four or five angles, the wide, the close, reverse, everything and they're like, yeah, say this line with more enthusiasm for the seventh time and it's a line you didn't even write and it's a line about the food because we're eating a lot of food that I don't really like to be honest that you don't even agree with. Yeah. So here's the thing about here's a little secret about food media guys, is that when you're going around filming at restaurants, you don't always get to just only go to the best restaurant. Sometimes the absolute best restaurant doesn't even want your show to come in there, shut down the restaurant, shut down their kitchen and film it. So sometimes you just have to go with the restaurant that has the story and is cooperative. That's key. And that's what I don't like about food TV. Sometimes is because there's so much set up that it's actually comes to a point where it's almost unappealing to some restaurants to get that kind of media coverage. Anyways, we're eating out some restaurants where we don't really like the food. Do you remember that one time we were in Denver and there was like a white and there's nothing wrong with this, but there was a white-owned ramen restaurant and they that was San Antonio. Yeah, and they wanted us to say that's the best ramen I've ever had and I remember we looked and shout out to art because I feel producer was cool, but then we had a larger producer that was kind of difficult to work with and she was just like just say it. Can you just say it for me? That's what the that's what they wanted from up top and we're like, I'm not saying it. We held our ground guys. Listen, we did not say anything in that show was the best ever unless it was actually pretty good. Now this thing we could not possibly in our hearts as Asian. I'm not saying that's the best ramen I ever had man. I'm Asian man. It was you gotta be kidding me man. It was ramen from San Antonio cooked by a white-owned smokehouse. There's nothing wrong with white people and there's nothing wrong with white people cooking ramen if it's actually legit, but it wasn't legit ramen. So we just couldn't say it was the best ramen. We didn't want that on tape number 7 Andrew the final takeaway is that man through all this being a YouTuber that's been independent for 10 years. Obviously in that 10-year period had different flirtations or different like one foot in one foot out with mainstream media, whether that's Hollywood or TV. You just got to keep swimming. You just got to keep swimming to be honest. I didn't see everybody from our generation go mainstream that I thought was going to I think a lot of people have had a lot of chances. I haven't seen I mean some people more than others, but it's been difficult for a lot of Asian American YouTubers that started in 8 to 12 years ago to transition into the mainstream not saying that none of them have but it's been difficult. Yeah, I remember someone telling me this analogy of entertainment. It's kind of like you're going out to surf if you guys have ever surfed you go out and paddle towards the waves and you're paddling you're paddling you're paddling you're swimming towards the waves and then you wait for a wave to come and sometimes waves come and when you feel it coming you got to hop on that surfboard and ride it out. That's what I did in Bondi Beach, but basically and then once that wave runs out wave is our TV show, right? Oh, wow. Fun grows do this TV show. We want you. We want you want you blah blah blah. It runs out. Guess what? You don't just sit there waiting. What do you do when you surfing you go back out there and find another wave. That's yeah. So to sum it up Andrew do we regret doing broke bites? What the phone yes or no? I do not know. I don't regret of course not know if I could go back what I have been a little bit easier to work with. I think what I would have did is I would have just like not viewed the show as like an extension of myself. I would have been like yo man. Let's just get the bag. Let's just do this and you know say all the right things and play nice. Maybe I'll even say this is the best ramen I ever had and then we get the camera just to let people know that obviously OD I wasn't being serious, but like I think at that time we're so young in our careers. I was like treating it like man. This is my word and everybody's hanging on my words. So I won't say it. So I was fighting the execs fighting the network fighting the production company and do I think they could have handled it better too? Yeah, for sure. Don't book us at all those diners driving and driving spots to like make us talk about chicken fried steaks all day. So in a way are you saying you wish you didn't take the show almost as serious? Yeah, I wish I would have brought a bigger crew along to make bigger hits in each city on YouTube on the back end and then just like just treat it like whatever. Yeah, I'll say it overall guys. We do not regret getting the TV show. Obviously. I think most people would say they wouldn't regret it because it's the opportunities are so few and far between to get something like that, even though you got to enter a project that's super not perfect. You just hit the button. Yeah, listen, this was not our passion project because it didn't come from our heart. We didn't get to say everything we wanted to say. We had a lot of funny lines riffing on camera. But guess what? They didn't keep the footage because at the end of the day sometimes they just needed the phrase that they needed, you know, or at least they thought they did. I think looking back. I'm sure the production company they probably do things different too because the show ended up being if you guys get a chance to watch it. It's quite like boring the final. Yeah, it's not very good. But however, if you do want to spend your hard-earned money, you can buy it entirely on Amazon. We get no residuals off of it, but I wouldn't because we have a product that we're coming out with in a few months that you can actually buy which I would appreciate you if you look into it. But anyways guys, that's pretty much our lessons from the TV show world. Now we can go on and talk about this for hours and hours at a time and how low-key in a way you could say was groundbreaking that two Asian brothers were leading a TV show which hadn't technically been done before but probably by now it has been but anyways guys anyways, uh, it was a cool time in our lives and we learned a lot but yeah, that's it and let us know why you think a lot of YouTubers struggle when they transfer from the digital platform to the television platform because obviously there's like 20 examples and like a thousand videos about it on the internet. Let us know in the comment section below. Let us know if you watch broke bites. What the fun and until next time we to hop out boys. We out. Peace.