The Internet Ruined My Life - Poe's Law & Order: Professional Victims Unit

The Internet Ruined My Life is an American reality television series that was made by Atomic Entertainment and Left/Right Productions for Syfy that "exposes the unexpected perils of living in a social media obsessed world."

The first season consisting of six episodes aired from March 9, 2016 to April 13, 2016. Although the show's Twitter is still active (we'll come to that later), thus far it does not appear to have been renewed for a second season.

The show is of interest to us because several online train wrecks have been on it, with the show attempting to paint their story in a sympathetic light through use of overdramatic re-enactments. The first person featured was Suey Park who you may remember as the girl who started #CancelColbert in response to an out-of-context joke she interpreted as racist. Her episode featured her being targeted by a sniper in re-enactments:



Even more amusingly, epic lolcow Brianna Wu appeared on the show in a particularly infamous episode that featured the return of Jace and Tyce from Deagle Nation:



And last year, Chris himself tweeted the show to try and get featured on an episode. Unfortunately this won't happen for a number of reasons, primarily that the show's probably over now.



There's nothing like a show that brings internet lolcows into the mainstream. So if for no other reason, I'm glad this show existed.

 

This show had a lot of potential, and I mean a lot. It already has an audience, and it could have easily appealed to mainstream audiences. It's just a shame that television networks have no idea what to do with the concept.

 

The people they picked were kind of unsympathetic, Suey Park and Brianna Wu just come across as shrill killjoys and that typewriter guy looks like a hipster douche. They should have gone with people like Star Wars Kid who are just dorky and harmless.

 

Considering how the point of this show was to put a spotlight on supposed internet bullying, and all it did was make most of these people even more laughed at, esp. for the re-enactments, I would seriously be surprised if they made a second season. Not saying it's impossible- it IS SyFy after all - but I'm pretty sure they could have a show about lonely housewives lusting after Bigfoot and Mothman and it would be more substantial content-wise.

 

I would love to see Chris being on the show. The show being ended is expected though.

Would having viewers about around 500k being enough for the show to continue on though? If yes, maybe they're preparing for more episodes on the way.

 

If the budget is small enough to allow them to make money from that audience, then yes.

 

On KF, we analysed whether Chris would be likely to get on the show and there are several reasons why he wouldn't:

• Brianna Wu only got on the show because Frank knew someone who was involved with it. I'd assume the same is true of Suey Park. Chris doesn't know anyone which hinders his chances of getting on the show.
• In Brianna Wu and Suey Park's cases, there was stuff there that they could spin to make the subject look sympathetic. Of course, if someone were to do even cursory research into their stories, the whole thing would fall apart, but most people take this stuff at face value. With Chris, it's obvious pretty quickly he was in a bad situation before the internet came along, but only made things worse for himself. Putting a positive spin on Chris's story would be a real uphill battle.
• The subject has to look somewhat presentable. Even without copious amounts of makeup, Chris would still look a mess.
• Chris is exceptionally autistic and TV execs cannot leave themselves open to frivolous lawsuits with Chris and Barb claiming that he had no idea what he was signing because he's exceptional.
  
• Media Backlash - there are people that both hate and have sympathy for the retarded, so putting them on a show where they can act like idiots is a bad move.

 

Plus even telling Chris's story in the most sympathetic light would take a couple of hours. Time is money.

 

As I've said elsewhere, Chris really needs to be the subject of an Errol Morris documentary.

 

CWC would make a good documentary subject. There's certainly enough material to work with. One's already been made. I'm sure you can get an interview with the man himself.

 

Considering how Chris's had terrible internet encounters and all, he could no doubt make for an interesting episode, that is if he doesn't see the show or it's workers as trolls that want to bring him stress.

 

It would never work because the whole spin of the show is that the internet is full of evil people who want to ruin random people's lives for absolutely no reason. They would do much better if they just ditch the whole people on the internet are mean stick and just made fun of people who made asses of themselves online. But you're never going to see anything like that on Legacy Media.

 

I couldn't see him getting his own reality show, but I (and a lot of others) have been saying that a documentary about him would be cool.

Of course, when I say documentary, I mean mostly in the Anvil style. A tear jerking documentary with interviews with Chris, Barb and a few famous trolls, fans and people of interest would be awesome. The idea of making a Chris documentary to be shown in theatres is like the idea of making survival horror games a couple of years ago. Lots of potential to make money, but no one in the industry will bend down to pick up the money.

I mean, the CWC documentary made by a young guy as a project for school pretty much promoted itself and developed a following online using footage available online. I'm sure a documentary with a bigger budget and more promotion would become a hit.

 

How the internet ruined my life; or the incredible adventure of that time I tried to kill a very popular show and it completely blew up in my face.

I mean that's kind of odd thing about this. Like they picked people who sure, might not have deserved all the vitriol they got, but were generally pretty aggressive assholes themselves. There's people out there who've gotten obsessive fuckers after them online for just making goofy videos or generally being naive kids online, why wouldn't you go for those kinds of people for a series like this?

 

They want to put it behind them, or at least handle it as privately as possible.

 

Chris would have been appealing to the show if this was 2007 (maybe up to 2009) era of Christory. At that point he was still in his 20s and just came off as an autistic weird guy who made the Sonichu comics. He could have been painted in a very positive light. But after the 2011 arrest everything has just gone downhill and he's too weird for even that sort of television. He's at Jerry Springer level at this point, based on his appearance and history.