Main Character Energy Was a Lie — The Supporting Cast Is Eating Right Now

I need to say something that would've been heresy about three years ago: I'm exhausted by main character energy, and judging by my feed, so is everyone else.

You know the aesthetic. The slow-motion walk toward the camera. The voiceover about choosing yourself. The cinematic solo coffee date shot like a Sofia Coppola movie, captioned with something about romanticizing your life. For a stretch of the last decade, this was the entire playbook. Be the protagonist. Treat everyone else as a side quest. Make your morning routine a character study.

And look — I get where it came from. For a lot of people, especially people who'd spent their whole lives shrinking, 'I'm the main character' was a genuinely liberating idea. Fine. Good, even. But like everything the internet touches, it calcified into a performance, and performances this uniform start to feel like a uniform.

Everyone Is a Protagonist, So Nobody Is

Here's the structural problem nobody wants to admit: a story can't have fifty main characters. When every creator in your orbit is framing themselves as the lead of their own show, the whole thing stops reading as a story and starts reading as fifty separate pitch decks. Nobody's watching each other's show. Everyone's just waiting for their turn to talk.

And audiences can smell it. Watch what's actually working in 2025: the podcast where the host is clearly delighted to be outshone by their co-host twice an episode. The YouTuber who built a bigger following playing second banana on a friend's channel than they ever did solo. The creator who shows up in everyone else's vlogs as the reliably hilarious friend and turned that into a career without ever needing to be the lead.

We've all met a person like this in real life. Not the flashiest one in the room — the one who makes the room better. Turns out that translates on camera better than any amount of slow-motion walking.

The Supporting Role Is a Skill, Not a Demotion

I want to be careful here, because this argument gets twisted fast. This isn't 'know your place' or 'stop dreaming big.' It's the opposite. Some of the most confident people in entertainment are supporting players who chose the role. Think about the great character actors, the beloved sidekicks, the ensemble shows where the chemistry was the whole product. That takes enormous security. Insecurity can't play second fiddle. Insecurity has to be the fiddle.

There's also a practical argument the hustle crowd keeps missing: ensemble work scales better. A solo main-character brand is a one-person show that dies when the person burns out — and they always burn out, because they're carrying every scene. A creator who's built genuine chemistry with a circle of collaborators has a structure that survives bad months, shared workloads, and the simple fact that humans get tired of talking to a camera alone in a room.

What the Backlash Is Really About

I don't think this is really about content strategy. I think the shift tracks with something bigger in the culture — a fatigue with the relentless self, the personal brand as a second full-time job, the sense that we've all been cast in a one-person show nobody asked for. After a few years of 'build in public' and 'document, don't create' and every meal photographed like evidence, 'I was just happy to be there' has become transgressive. Which is, frankly, hilarious.

The most relatable creators right now are the ones who admit they're not the protagonist of everything. Who hype their friends harder than they hype themselves. Who can be in a video for ninety seconds, steal it completely, and then leave, instead of stretching it into their own series.

So here's my pitch for the rest of the year: stop auditioning for lead. Some of the best scenes in television are two people in a car talking, and only one of them is the main character. Be the person people want in their scene. It turns out the supporting cast has been having the most fun this whole time — and in 2025, the fun is finally showing.