A new Netflix reality series about Alix Earle, the social media star and skin care brand founder, is full of revelatory moments.
But, contrary to promotions for the show and the slow drip of hints on social media, few of those moments are about the much-discussed feud between her and Alex Cooper, the “Call Her Daddy” podcast host. To be more precise, the so-called Lex vs. Lix feud that set the internet ablaze this year makes up only about 12 minutes of the eight-part “Earle Meets World.”
The show takes viewers inside Earle’s big, blended family, which includes her divorced parents, T.J., her “dadager,” and Alisa; her stepmother, Ashley, who was involved in a 2008 sex scandal that brought down New York’s governor at the time, Eliot Spitzer; as well as her sister Ashtin and three stepsiblings. (The show is produced by the same people behind “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” if the parallels seem uncanny).
And the bigger reveal of the show comes from inside the Earle gang. Alisa was diagnosed with breast cancer and tested positive for the BRCA gene last fall, when Earle was midway through her spin on “Dancing With the Stars.” So, while shooting the series, Earle, 25, and her sister Ashtin, 23, decide to get a genetic test. Both turn out to carry the BRCA mutation, which increases their lifetime risks of breast and ovarian cancers.
The genetic test may be the only truly vulnerable moment of the entire show. The heavy emotional charge of the scene is also a deviation from the kind of content that Earle posts regularly on social media, exposing an inherent tension of being a content creator, especially on a platform that ultimately flattens messy human experiences, said Kathryn Jezer-Morton, author of “The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything.”
“When you’re communicating with a huge audience, you internalize the idea that you need to make sense to them — you’re trying to create a cohesive narrative and our interiority is really hard to translate into a TikTok,” Jezer-Morton said. “That, in and of itself, really narrows the scope of what you can talk about.”
So obstacles or challenges that don’t have a redeeming, triumphant arc can be difficult to communicate online, she added. That applies to Earle too, even though her brand on social media is being your unfiltered, oversharing best friend.
The Earle girls, within the context of the reality series, can sit with the weight of negative health news for only a couple of minutes.
“It’s OK,” Alix replies, hugging her sister and wiping off tears. “At least we’re in it together and at least we know, and that’s such a privilege.” In the next scene, the girls are off to Coachella, and it’s back to regular programming.
Regular programming is, we come to learn, taxing too. Earle, who became famous for her “Get Ready With Me” videos, has the ability to consistently seem spontaneous, unscripted and forthright. That persona — or, to use marketing jargon, authenticity — is, in large part, why her product recommendations can have such an economic impact; her influence on product sales inspired the term Alix Earle Effect and has been studied in a Harvard Business School course.
Off-line, Earle is seen in the series as visibly stressed over the pressure to create content constantly. She frets and even gets into arguments over what she and her family members can and can’t share online. Her candor, it turns out, is anything but, and exposing that side of her highlights the impossible “relatable” standard that influencers are expected to meet, according to Carmen Vicente, a social media strategist.
“There is this paradox of effort. It is so much effort to be an influencer,” she said, “yet you have to make it seem as though it is effortless and that you’re just doing it spur of the moment.”
The goal is to sell the fantasy that anyone could post a video that may, by happenstance, receive bonkers viewership and then they, too, could wake up to a more fun and glamorous life. But the minute fans see how much work goes into that journey, they are turned off, Vicente said. It is part of what she calls the “influencer cliff.”
It isn’t until the finale of the Netflix show that Earle turns to the issue that seemingly the entire internet has been waiting for her to address (which, by the way, is not typically expected of two men in a business deal-gone-awry scenario).
In the months after Earle abruptly left Cooper’s podcast empire, Unwell Media, last February, their millions of fans parsed posts and comments for clues about what happened between the two women and pledged allegiances to one side or the other. Online speculation reached such a fever pitch earlier this year that the comedian Nikki Glaser described the situation to Jimmy Fallon on his show as “tough” and “intense.”
“The blondes are fighting, everyone’s affected,” she said, adding: “The pope just put out a statement.”
In the series, Earle describes Unwell as a dysfunctional company and casts Cooper as a toxic manager who “took advantage” of her and thrust her into the world of podcasting without any support or resources, though Earle admits she doesn’t have any concrete evidence of malpractice. This year, investigations by Bloomberg and Vanity Fair found that other employees seem to have similar complaints about the work environment at Unwell. Cooper declined to comment for this article, and representatives have denied allegations of malpractice in the past.
“It was constantly thing after thing,” Earle says in the series, the vagueness being the point. And then, in a scene that seemed to be cleverly lawyered from every direction, she reads out a text message to her family that she would like to have sent to Cooper.
“You are manipulative and toxic,” she says, reading off her phone while wearing eye patches under her eyes.
T.J. and Ashley interject, warning her not to say anything that could become a legal liability.
She nods and tries again.
“I feel that you are manipulative,” she says, the idea being that feelings can’t be litigated. “I feel that you are a bully.”
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