Last week, a woman who goes by the name Reesa Teesa posted a series of 50 videos to her TikTok page hoping to find the answer to one question: “Who TF did I marry?” Spanning over eight hours, the entire saga is now challenging the notion that TikTok is only a video platform.
Unless you had the time to watch a woman speak directly to her phone camera for hours on end, you probably just listened to her playlist in the background.
For those who haven’t sat through all 50 installments of “Who TF Did I Marry?”, here’s what you need to know: User @reesamtees details her relationship with an ex whom she accuses of a bevy of lies and questionable behavior. There are a bunch of more comprehensive summaries out there — here’s one from USA Today and another from Rolling Stone — but the long story alleges the ex lied about money, their job, legal documents, and much more. It has been described as an IRL LifeTime movie.
In short: It’s a doozy. But here’s the thing: It’s anything but short. There are 52 parts, and most of them are around 8-10 minutes long. No detail is spared, and @reesamteesa has a way of stretching the story out, for better or worse.
Somehow, some way, this thing has really caught on. ReesaTeesa has racked up more than 2.5 million followers and countless millions of views in the span of a week. Seriously, each video in the super-long series has multiples of millions of views.
And that raises a simple question: How? How do so many people have so much time to watch all those videos? And, in all honesty, the answer is they don’t. Both my wife and mother-in-law, for instance, played some or all of the series like a podcast, meaning as an audio experience while also doing something else. I’ve heard of folks at Mashable doing the same.
It actually makes a lot of sense. There is really nothing all that visually interesting about the “Who TF Did I Marry?” It’s just ReesaTeesa talking to the camera in various settings. It is definitely an audio-first experience. So why not just listen to it? While searching around online, it seems like a lot of folks had the same idea.
Basically, this is TikTok’s first viral podcast — and they did it totally by accident. Longer videos mean folks can listen to 8- to 10-minute segments uninterrupted, then scroll to the next in the playlist or save their spot for later. And it’s reasonable that this saga, in particular, would go viral as a TikTok podcast of sorts.
True crime and scammer stories are perhaps the most popular genres in the pod world. A mystery, scammer story like “Who TF Did I Marry?” is perfect for a podcast.
It remains to be seen if this format is repeatable on TikTok. For one thing, there are not many folks who can hold an audience’s attention over 52 long segments. For that, ReesaTeesa should be commended. But it’s a safe bet that someone out there is sure as hell going to at least try to copy her success.
Who knows, maybe soon enough we’ll all be regularly listening to TikToks instead of watching them. It worked for the record labels.
