“You’re gonna see everything on this show,” Alix Earle assures viewers in the voiceover that opens her Netflix reality series Earle Meets World. But if the show made a genuine effort to fulfill the 25-year-old social media star’s vow to reveal the rawest, most intimate aspects of her life, then the only reasonable conclusion to draw from it would be that there just isn’t much to see.
As her fans (she has 8.5 million on TikTok alone) will anticipate, “everything” refers specifically to ongoing drama around Earle’s parents’ divorce, her own breakup with NFL player Braxton Berrios, and her mysterious falling-out with fellow creator and former boss Alex Cooper. All of this does indeed come up in the eight-episode series, now streaming in full, which tries mightily to position the large, blended Earle family as the Kardashian-Jenners for a new generation. Yet the bombshells teased in months’ worth of promotional materials aren’t especially explosive. Nor is there a breakout personality among a cast that, understandably enough, seems either too chill or too concerned with appearing likable to really entertain. Earle Meets World plays less like a juicy docusoap than like a tediously extended version of the Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos that made its subject famous—one that suggests less overlap than you might expect between the qualities of a successful influencer and those required for reality TV stardom.
Earle is one of those celebrities who are universally known to people under 30 but barely on the radar of anyone much older. (I’ll admit to having confused her with Cooper, another all-American blonde who parlayed internet fame into a Netflix series, and I know I’m not the only one.) Though I wouldn’t recommend making the show your first trip down the Alix Earle rabbit hole, here is a quick intro for the unfamiliar: Conventionally beautiful yet plagued by cystic acne, Earle grew her following as a University of Miami undergrad with mirror-facing GRWM TikToks, eventually going viral with a vulnerable post about her skin troubles. Then came the brand deals and new platforms. Cooper signed Earle, an obvious heir, to her podcast network; they abruptly parted ways in early 2025 and have been vaguely but publicly feuding ever since. Meanwhile, Earle has continued her ascent, launching a skincare brand, Reale Actives, and introducing herself to people elderly enough to watch network TV on Dancing With the Stars.
Synergistically positioned to bring her social media followers to a streaming platform that needs young subscribers to maintain its dominance while filling gaps in her own reach, Earle Meets World is a multigenerational family soap. Alix and 23-year-old Ashtin—a less-extroverted brunette whose TikTok audience still tops a million—are the It-girl sisters who constantly squabble but consider each other best friends. Their mom, Alisa, and dad, TJ, have been divorced for more than a decade, their split catalyzed by TJ’s affair with Ashley Dupré, a key character in the prostitution scandal that sank former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. Now Dupré is Ashley Earle, TJ’s wife and the mother of their three kids; the eldest, Izabel, is, at 13, already cranking out Outfit of the Day videos like the Gen Alpha Kylie Jenner she has the pedigree to become. A recent breast cancer survivor, Alisa has her own longtime partner, Todd. Her messy separation from TJ has evidently given way to a tenuous friendship between the couples, although it seems doubtful they spend as much time together off-camera as on. These relationships are further complicated by the role TJ, who made his fortune in construction, has assumed as Alix and Ashtin’s “dadager.”
All the raw material for an unscripted family drama is present. Somehow, though, the fireworks tend to fizzle as soon as they’re lit. With the divorce so far in the past, a season’s worth of halfhearted conflict among the parents is wrung out of TJ joking that Alisa could be a “young piece of ass” on The Golden Bachelor. Ashley’s friction with Alix is framed as fallout from the latter’s history of oversharing about the former but feels more like standard stepfamily tension, heightened by reality-TV producers’ prodding and Alix’s hypervigilance about her stepmom’s sometimes-awkward social media presence. Ironically, we only really witness the self-centered, control-freak behavior relatives are always attributing to Alix when she’s struggling to manage her image and brand identity. As a result, the most intense moments of the series tend to involve cringey TikToks or premature glimpses of Reale Actives packaging. You probably have to be a diehard Earle girl to find this stuff compelling. And even if you are, you might be disappointed by how many climactic Earle Meets World scenes, from Ashtin kicking Alix out of her New York apartment to Cooper goading Alix to come at her, unfold in now-ancient vertical videos that already have millions of views.
It doesn’t help the show that the two people with whom Alix seems most preoccupied throughout the season—Cooper and Berrios—aren’t present. Instead, we get her side of these stories, conveyed in interviews and stiff conversations over cocktails at trendy, jewel-toned lounges, often so stripped of details that they come off as, respectively, a generic exploitative mentorship and your typical ambivalent breakup. A scene in the premiere that seems even more staged than the average docusoap grievance dump has Alix talking with TJ about Cooper in sentences that could’ve been scripted by a crisis-PR pro: “I definitely feel betrayed by Alex Cooper.” “She took advantage of my admiration for her.” Neither this storyline nor the Berrios one advances until the very end of the season, and even those late developments are anticlimactic. (Tabloid headlines linking Earle and Tom Brady, meanwhile, get coy winks but no substantive context.)
Much of the blame for Earle Meets World’s slightness and superficiality, as well as the shapelessness of episodes that drag despite running less than 40 minutes apiece, should fall on the show’s producers. Not only have they failed to identify entertaining narratives within this family’s daily life; they’ve also made their desperation to do so too apparent in the final product. To be fair, they had a difficult assignment. As eager as they look to be on screen together, the Earles are—or act—too calm and conciliatory to drive reality-soap plots. No one wants to look unhinged, least of all Alix, who talks about being unstable but can’t risk her credibility as an entrepreneur, pitchwoman, and parasocial companion to millions by getting truly ugly on camera. Which is precisely what natural born reality stars have always done. Compare Alix and Ashtin’s nights at the club to the sloppy-drunk violence and infidelity of the 20-somethings on Jersey Shore and Vanderpump Rules, or her parents’ relationships to chaotic Real Housewives marriages, and it all looks rather tame. No one here can quip like the best Bravo scrappers and Traitors debaters, either, so the show lacks the element of humor that suffuses every classic of the genre.
Influencers fall into a cultural gray area between entertainment and entrepreneurship; most excel at one more than the other. Both fields demand storytelling skills. But that doesn’t mean a person with a preternatural ability to sell people the products they watch her apply to her face as she scatters breadcrumbs about her personal life necessarily has the makings of an unscripted drama’s protagonist. Earle might be too shrewd a businesswoman to have unadulterated main character energy.
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