If you’ve never been stopped on the streets of New York City and asked what you do for a living, how much your outfit cost, or how you fell in love … just give it time.

New York has become an increasingly popular backdrop for content creators’ “man-on-the-street” videos, which attract viewers by exploring New Yorkers’ lives.

While the one- or two-minute TikToks are often shot by a single person using an iPhone, a growing number of these seemingly impromptu videos are actually filmed by professional studio crews.

“New York is the capital of TikTok right now,” producer Adam Faze said at his Midtown office.

He would know. The first season of his show “Boy Room,” which ended its 14-episode run in July, has been watched 25 million times on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter.

The show’s host Rachel Coster approaches twentysomething urban males’ bedrooms like an anthropologist, grimacing at their squalor, clambering over heaps of laundry, and recommending improvements like furniture or walls.

Despite its makeshift vibe, ”Boy Room” is produced by Faze’s fledgling television studio, Gymnasium. Episodes are about 90 seconds long – often too short for viewers to register the professional sheen of sharp edits, motion graphics, and pitch-perfect story beats and pacing.

Faze said people of all ages have been shocked to see that Coster has a crew.

“They’re like, we thought you were just doing this,” he said. “And I think it’s cute. I think it’s because these platforms are built around people and a personal connection.”

Gymnasium is part of a cottage industry of content companies betting that we’ll all be watching shows on our social media feeds soon enough.

“We’re not asking you to go somewhere, we’re coming to you,” Faze said. “We are creating what hopefully become your favorite shows in the place that you already are.”

‘Must have screen time of 8 hours+’

“New York is the greatest set of all time,” Faze said recently in his Midtown office.

Ironically, he was already on a set: a perfect recreation of a New York City bodega, replete with off-brand chips, balding creams, and stacked towers of Goya cans.

It’s the relic of a failed early concept for Gymnasium’s show “Bodega Run,” where contestants have 60 seconds to find three items in a New York City bodega and check out. The team piloted different versions of the show for months before killing it; now they’re stuck with a bodega in their office.

“It’s a great place to throw a party,” Faze said.

Hits are notoriously hard to discover, whether they’re on social media or the big screen. As the screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote in his industry tell-all: “Nobody knows anything.” Gymnasium has already piloted and scrapped several short-form shows that didn’t catch on, and without more wins, “Boy Room’s” success will be a fluke.

Following the model of traditional TV studios, Faze takes four or five meetings a day to field show pitches from writers and talents. He found “Boy Room” after its host, Coster, applied to be his assistant and then pitched him the idea. (She never took the assistant job.) He’s currently hoping to find a new hit by hiring an idea-generating intern via Instagram Story.

“Must be nyc,” the post reads. “Must live on TikTok. Must have screen time of 8 hours+.”

Faze’s own screen time averaged more than seven hours a day last week. If you have an iPhone, swipe down and search the term to find yours – every device comes with the built-in feature that breaks down how you spend your time together.

“The only bad part about being on my phone at all times is that no one can show me anything,” Faze said. “Anyone who tries to show me a tweet, or a TikTok – which is so sweet – I’ve seen it. I saw it yesterday, I’m sorry.”

‘I was spending hours watching TikTok on my phone’

“I have always wanted to be the biggest producer in the world,” Faze told me.

As a teenager on the west side of Los Angeles, Faze showed the signs of a mogul in the making. He started a film festival in high school, taking submissions from students across the country and attracting sponsors like Sony, the popular screenwriting software Final Draft, and the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA.

The New York Times covered it under the headline: “16-year-old Gets His Way on a High School Film Fest.”

From there, he landed a string of Hollywood jobs, including for producer John Lesher and at Annapurna Pictures (“Zero Dark Thirty,” “Phantom Thread”).

In 2022, he said he was “getting out of a relationship and falling out of love with Hollywood.” Angling for change, he moved to New York to work for the content startup Mad Realities, which was producing shows for social media.

TikTok had officially been in the United States for four years at that point and Faze was already hooked.

“I realized I was spending hours watching TikTok on my phone and I don’t know the last Netflix show I watched,” he said. “I think this is where Hollywood is going, so I moved to New York.”

New York has been steadily attracting creators and influencers, according to Influencity, a software company. Between 2020 and 2022, more than 189,000 influencers moved to the Big Apple.

Beyond the camera-ready pedestrians and backdrops, and the opportunity for endless filmable social interaction, New York is also the center of the marketing and advertising industries that are pouring billions into digital content.

“They’re not even clips, they’re episodes.”

Mad Realities gave Faze a small budget, and the first person he went to was Kareem Rahma, a comedian with a popular Instagram account who had been grinding out a career in New York media for over a decade.

“I remember I was with Alex Hartman, a.k.a. [popular NYC memelord] Nolita Dirtbag, and he was like ‘Have you heard about this weird guy Adam Faze?’” Rahma, whose average screen time is 8.2 hours, he said. Faze got in touch the next day.

“He’s a power networker,” Rahma said.

Rahma threw out an idea he’d wanted to make forever but that hadn’t been picked up: “I want to hail a cab in New York and I want to tell the driver to take me to his favorite place in the city and to keep the meter running.”

“Keep the Meter Running” changed both of their lives. The first episode, which dropped on TikTok in October 2022, has 2.1 million views; popular recent installments have hit 3.6 million. Rahma has become a New York media powerhouse, a brand in his own right.

Popular episodes of Rahma’s newest hit, “Subway Takes,” where he clips a microphone to a MetroCard and fields provocative 90-second opinions on the subway, have tens of millions of views.

People who grew up on traditional television can sometimes find the concept of two-minute TV shows to be yet another bleak sign of our waning attention spans. Rahma found the format a revelation.

After the success of “Keep the Meter Running,” people kept asking him to start a podcast, he said. When he asked others why they wanted to start a podcast, they answered: to generate clips for their Instagram. That got him thinking.

“What if there was no podcast, and the clips were the podcast?” Rahma said. “Like they’re not even clips, they’re episodes. Episodes are the clips are the podcast.”

As shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show” are increasingly consumed in chunks on social media, every episode becomes effectively a multimillion-dollar attempt to generate clips for Instagram and TikTok. Short-form television aims to cut the overhead along with the runtime.

For Faze, the success of “Keep the Meter Running” convinced him to strike out on his own in 2023. He called his studio FazeWorld, which rebranded as Gymnasium after a rights dispute over the original name. “Boy Room” debuted in March 2024.

The venture raised $750,000 by selling equity to a group of investors who believe it’s worth $7.5 million, including Behance co-founder Scott Belsky, ATTN: co-founder Matthew Segal, and Jeremy Zimmer, the CEO of United Talent Agency.

Several creator economy experts interviewed for this story said that studios like Gymnasium are increasingly common. What’s uncommon is the strategic acumen Faze brings to the table.

“You don’t often see folks with a first-rate creative mind married to a first-rate business mind,” said Megan Lightcap (screen time: 5.5 hours), who leads the creator investments team at Slow Ventures, a private equity venture capital firm which stewards more than $750 million of investments. “Adam Faze certainly has both.” (She is not an investor in Gymnasium.)

Virality is not a business model

Most creators try to go viral first and make money later, usually through brand sponsorships – think of all the beauty influencers who flog the products in their morning makeup routines.

But Faze contends that virality is not a business model. Views, likes, and followers are useless if they can’t be monetized – Boy Room’s millions of views have earned maybe $3,000 from TikTok itself, he said.

For the next season of “Boy Room,” Gymnasium is teaming up with an online e-commerce furniture giant to actually renovate the boys’ rooms.

“We’re essentially co-creating an entire series of television with them,” Faze said.

The deal will fund Gymnasium for the next 12 months, Faze said. He envisions growing the audience by recreating the show with local hosts in other countries.

“There are messy rooms all over the world,” Faze said.

The real money, if they can get it, will not only come from brand integration but also brand creation, or turning new talent into stars who can launch their own empires of products and merchandise.

Gymnasium is preparing to launch a nail salon talk show with the NYC nail tech Ameya Okamoto, whose elaborate designs are popular on social media.

“We think that if people see how talented she is, there’s a world in which we can go create a nail line together,” Faze said.

He sees the entire history of television being recreated in short-form. Although some might think that selling products can’t create art, Faze points to the 1940s and ‘50s, when all of television was paid for by the biggest brands in America.

It’s the first show that Gymnasium will film horizontally as well as vertically; they plan to try a 20-minute version on YouTube as well as the usual 90-second short-form content they’re known for on social media.

Faze is aware that skeptics might dismiss that idea as just short form, fast-paced advertisements.

Faze is well aware that making long-form shows that look good on televisions starts to feel like traditional television. He doesn’t rule out taking Gymnasium into scripted content, long or short, phone or TV – as long as the audience is there. He’s taken early meetings with legacy studios about activating their libraries of dormant intellectual property, which are worth billions of dollars.

“Every year they don’t produce a new piece of content with that IP, it loses value,” Faze said.

He said his Los Angeles friends tease him about leaving Hollywood when they run into each other at film festivals and industry events. How’s TikTok? they ask.

“I’m like, it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened in my life,” Faze said. “I have to ask for zero permission, I actually get to make things, and they connect with millions of people in a span of weeks. In what world would I ever give that up to do anything else?”