I’ll admit I was probably a little irrational in my personal hype for BattleBots Pro League, which kicked off last week on YouTube. I mean, it’s not like I was counting down the days to the premiere, but BattleBots is a serious guilty pleasure of mine, and I love YouTube shows because of the freeform opportunities on the streaming platform. Instead, I ended up being severely disappointed by the debut of the new reboot of the long-running robot fighting competition.
The Biggest Problem Is Not Adapting To The Format
The thing I love the most about YouTube is that there are no constraints, especially when it comes to the length of a video. A video can be two minutes long, or it can be eight hours long. On linear TV, shows are boxed into (generally) 30-minute or 1-hour time blocks, and that doesn’t account for commercial time. A 30-minute show on a regular cable network, like on the Discovery Channel, BattleBots‘ most recent TV home, is really more like 22 minutes, give or take. On YouTube, there is no reason to stay contained to that.
That’s not what the new BattleBots Pro League did. Instead, at least the show’s first episode is 21 minutes and 37 seconds. About the same length as a typical episode on Discovery would have been. What’s worse is that the editing is exactly the same. Instead of adapting the show to the streamer, they simply made the same show and posted it on YouTube. Why not give us more? Big Brother has figured it out. More battles, more backstory, more behind-the-scenes of the teams and their robots? Instead, it’s basically the same show that has been canceled three different times in the past.
The sky is the limit with YouTube, but we got the same format as before.
I’m Holding Out Hope That Things Could Adjust
I’m not ready to give up on the show right away. It’s perfectly plausible that the producers made the show with the intention of selling it to a linear cable network or a more traditional streamer like Netflix. Now that they have the show on YouTube, there is still time to adjust. Give us more time with the teams, and a greater understanding of the robots and how they work. Produce shorts of behind-the-scenes action of the teams building and rebuilding their bots.
As I said, the sky is the limit here. The show doesn’t have to be 22 minutes. Make it 35. Or 43. Pepper in some more backstory. Give us some ancillary videos with deep dives on the teams and the bots. Heck, with YouTube, you can make different videos for each aspect of the show. One that is just the battle, one that is the backstory for each team, and one that shows the aftermath.
I stopped watching cable TV because of how formulaic much of the content got, and I’ll never give up my YouTube Premium subscription because so many videos upend industry norms (among other reasons). Throwing what is essentially a mid-2000s-style cable show on YouTube doesn’t make it hip; it just shows how tired the format is.
