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Try Guys Getty 1.jpg

The Try Guys Drama and Analysis by an Actual Try Guys Fan

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | September 28, 2022 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | September 28, 2022 |


Try Guys Getty 1.jpg

I love the Try Guys. I have seen every single video they’ve ever made. I’ve forced more than one of my friends to check them out. I’ve had to talk myself out of buying their merchandise more times than I care to admit as an adult in her 30s. It’s fair to say that I’m a fan. So, when recent drama engulfed social media, and many people, including several of my dear colleagues, started asking what the f**k a Try Guy is, I felt prepared to offer a far-too-dense explanation. Brace yourselves.

The Try Guys are a quartet of vloggers who were first grouped together by Buzzfeed for a series of videos: Ned Fulmer, Keith Habersberger, Zach Kornfeld, and Eugene Lee Yang. They first appeared in a video of men trying on women’s underwear for the first time and quickly became a sensation for the site. In the early 2010s, it’s hard to overstate the chokehold Buzzfeed had on the internet, both as a website and as a creator of YouTube content. Their videos were inescapable and turned many of their employees into viral sensations through a strategy of ceaseless content overload. The Try Guys may have been the biggest example of that, becoming the de facto faces of the company at its audience and cultural zenith. After a few years, they decided to leave Buzzfeed and strike it out on their own, and they continued to build upon their success. They landed major endorsement deals, various side projects, even a Food Network show.



All of this was built on a simple premise: four friends try fun, silly, and challenging stuff, and have a good time. It’s not especially ground-breaking but that was never the point. The appeal was in its simplicity, the sheer amiability not only of these four guys but everyone around them, including their employees and their families. This is where we dive into Ned Fulmer. All of the guys play up certain aspects of their personalities for the #content, but none more so than Ned, a Florida bro turned Wife Guy. Since the very beginning of the Try Guys, his thing has been how much he adores his wife, Ariel Fulmer, an interior designer who appears frequently in their videos. They have two children together, whose lives have been documented extensively in their videos. Ariel has headlined several videos with other women in the company. She co-hosts a podcast, You Can Sit with Us, with the other spouses, and that podcast is more popular than the one hosted by the guys themselves. If you knew nothing else about the Try Guys or Ned Fulmer, you knew that he was extremely into being a husband and father.

So, of course he’s the one who cheated.

Yesterday, social media swarmed with images of Fulmer engaging in what seemed to be public canoodling with another woman, who turned out to be one of the Try Guys producers, Alexandria Herring. She’s also a regular star of their videos, being one half of the Food Babies with YB Chang. Later in the day, the Try Guys social media channels announced that Fulmer would no longer be a part of the company following an internal review. Fulmer then released his own very half-arsed non-apology in which he claimed he ‘lost focus and had a consensual workplace relationship.’ One wonders what his focus had to do with any of it.

It seems that this change was not instantaneous. Earlier in the week, the Try Guys had announced that they would slow down their release schedule to one video a week for now, and eagle-eyed fans noticed Fulmer’s absence from videos, including ones where he seemed to be present in the background. Clearly, they’ve been working overtime to edit him from future content, which includes ads for their merch. The viral posts of him and Herring getting close just forced them to speed up the process. All things considered, I think they’ve handled it as maturely and clearly as they could have.

The thing about the Try Guys is that they’re not usually a source for scandal. They were never featured on the drama channels. They didn’t get into fights with other YouTubers or build their brand on that kind of messiness that has made so many vloggers semi-infamous. They always seemed like a highly professional organization. That’s in large part due to the fact that their biggest asset was their image as four close friends who went independent and held it together. Of course, with that comes problems. Turning your very self into #content seldom ends well, regardless of how careful you are about the process. One of the reasons they left Buzzfeed in the first place was so that they would have complete ownership over their work, including candid videos about issues like sexuality, disability, and parenthood. And few did this as full-on as the Fulmers.



When I say that Ned Fulmer’s personality is Wife Guy, that almost feels like an understatement. It was his primary business plan. There’s a crap-ton of monetised content under the 2nd Try banner that’s some variation of ‘Ned loves his wife.’ She’s in so many of his videos and he played up the shtick a lot. They documented both of her pregnancies, including some of their struggles with miscarriage. They released a cookbook together centered on the concept of date nights. All the stuff we got at John Mulaney for regarding his commodifying of his marriage is way more potent with Fulmer.

Not that Fulmer’s the only one to do this. It’s a regular part of celebrity and a major component of online fame. Consider how many YouTube channels there are dedicated to the concept of happy families or couples documenting their relationships from beginning to end. Magazines pay big money for the exclusive rights to celeb weddings. We constantly want to know about who’s pregnant, who’s divorcing, and who cheated on who. None of this is new. Fulmer’s case just feels so forceful because it was at the center of his entire image as a public figure, as well as his chief brand quality.

I’ve already seen some people claiming that this is a private matter and that sacking someone for infidelity seems puritanical, but this wasn’t a mere affair: this was a boss sleeping with an employee. That opens up both Fulmer and the company to some major legal problems. Besides, we have no idea what else that internal review revealed and frankly, I’m not sure we need to. It already seems unfair to Ariel Fulmer and her kids that this became the viral gossip story du jour. But it is true that him turning out to be a cheating cheat who cheats has done irreparable damage to his image and the very thing that made him famous. It’d be like finding out that John Cena hates sick kids. The company was at a real peak, working with Food Network and landing major deals, and allowing the four of them new opportunities that took many years to develop. Fulmer could have endangered all of that, and we don’t even know how deep his potential sh*ttiness runs.

There will be a major change within the Try Guys. Fulmer is a co-owner of the company so he’ll have to be bought out. They may bring in new members or stick to a threesome (the Tri Guys?) It’s going to be awkward for a while, but I think things are relatively more even-keeled than you’d think. The comments on the YouTube channel regarding the news have been very understanding and supportive of the decision. The drama is mostly coming from people who just want some new scandal to meme now that Don’t Worry Darling is out. This would have happened more seamlessly had those pictures not gone viral, although I’m sure the truth would have come out at some point. I wonder if the remaining team will pull back on some of that more parasocial-friendly content regarding their partners and private lives. They didn’t push it as extensively as Fulmer did but their candor about their personal lives is still a crucial part of the brand.

I’ve seen more than a few snarkers and skeptics wonder what the big deal is with the Try Guys and how silly it is to care about something like this. That kind of cynicism has always seemed pretty selective to me. Everyone cares about something, and no matter how much you preface your fandom choices with insistence that you’re above all the drama, there’s a reason you’re sucked into it. I didn’t have any sort of parasocial fetishizing of the Fulmer’s marriage, but I won’t deny that I enjoyed seeing them together in videos, even if I was aware that it was being played up for my pleasure.

We engage in the game of celebrity, some more aware than others of its artifice, and our consumption of it fuels the fires for another cycle. Just because you knew that John Mulaney’s comedic style was part of his job, that didn’t mean you weren’t kind of bummed when he split from his wife and met someone else very quickly. Sure, it’s none of our business, but such is the ecosystem of fame, and it thrives on our emotional input. This is doubly so for the world of online celebrity, where the barriers between subject and fan are far more liminal and there’s a heavier reliance on strengthening that image of relatability. Nobody is exempt. If you think you are, wait until your favorite celebrity does something Problematic. Hell, I’m contributing to the cycle by writing about it, both as a fan and as a cultural critic.

This story will become old news soon and the Try Guys brand will try to move on in a newish form while dealing with the elephant in the room. As a fan, I still want to follow this company. I enjoy what they do and want to see them succeed. I’m not sure what the lessons are here. Don’t cheat on your wife with an employee and potentially tank your own company? Wife Guys are always to be viewed with suspicion? Never try to explain internet celebrities as part of your job? The content cycle moves on, forever and ever.