In late March, the internet and the media were in a flurry about a classified group chat. There was drama about who was in the group chat, what was said and who agreed or disagreed with the high-stakes plans that were brewing, setting off a reckoning of sorts about how we communicate in supposedly private forums.
It would be easy to confuse the situation with some other notable news at the time, but these debates centered around Sydney Jo Robinson, who had just posted the first episode of “The Group Chat,” a TikTok series in which audiences are thrown into the middle of a spat among girlfriends that plays out in real time over text.
The first episode started with a character bursting through the door of her roommate’s bedroom. “Read the group chat,” a character who would come to be known only as Black Dress, says to her friend, White Dress. Their friend Hailey had texted the group saying she wanted to bring her boyfriend, Justin, to their painstakingly planned girl’s night that evening.
“Is she kidding?” White Dress asks. No one else in the chat — seven members in total, each played by Ms. Robinson — is pleased with the idea either. Passive aggressive girl drama ensues, spanning 13 episodes and two seasons.
Each minutes-long episode has been viewed tens of millions of times and, within a week of releasing the first episode, Ms. Robinson went from 260,000 followers on TikTok to more than a million. “Today” called “The Group Chat” the “internet’s current favorite show” and Rolling Stone labeled it the “latest TV binge.” Other TikTok users posted videos of themselves watching, reacting and depicting each plot twist, as though they were commenting on a high-budget TV series.
“You can tell a lot about a person by their phone, the group chats they’re in and how often they respond in that group chat,” Ms. Robinson, 27, said in an interview before the release of the show’s third season. “Some people will even have certain group chats on mute and not other ones. Like, that’s tea.”
The timing, by the way, of dropping her series the same week news broke that national security personnel had shared war plans in a group text was entirely coincidental, she added.
But as the concept of group chats was being picked apart, the series tapped into the universal delights and anxieties of being in asynchronous, constant conversation with friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers (and, sometimes, national security personnel).
The series also served as “an illustration of modern female friendship,” said Kate Lindsay, a co-host of the internet culture podcast “ICYMI.” The fact that, for example, there were often “two layers of conversation happening” — the conversation in the group chat and the conversation happening around it — reflects the reality of so many friendship groups.
“So much of our inner personal struggles these days do happen digitally and that can be really hard to portray but very real to experience,” Ms. Lindsay said, “and she does a great job of showing that.”
The popularity of the show has opened up some “absolutely insane” opportunities for Ms. Robinson that have enabled her to quit her day job in antique jewelry and move out of her parents’ home in Westchester County, N.Y. Case in point: Ms. Robinson was speaking from Costa Rica thanks to a sponsorship agreement with Hilton Hotels and TripAdvisor that allowed her to travel there to film the third season of “The Group Chat.” As fans of the show know, Costa Rica is a crucial location for the plot.
“It was a joke in the second season, like, ‘Oh, the bachelorette’s in Costa Rica’” Ms. Robinson said. “But actually getting to come here and film a season and give that to the audience? It’s so fun.”
The first episode of Season 3 will be released on Friday. And, she added, all the cliffhangers from the previous season will be resolved.
That will be welcome news for notable fans of the series, like the singer-songwriter Charlie Puth, who jumped into Ms. Robinson’s comments section and declared he was “so invested.” He ended up voicing one of the characters, Justin, in a later episode. At the time, he was traveling and so he recorded his lines on his phone at an airport lounge.
In May, a few weeks after Ms. Robinson posted the Season 1 finale, she heard from another notable figure in the form of an email with the subject line: “Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds.”
“It obviously caught my attention because I’ve been watching Ryan Reynolds since I was a kid,” Ms. Robinson said. “It was a Saturday night and I texted my managers and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I know it’s Saturday night, but like, what is this?’”
It was an invite to film a social media commercial with Mr. Reynolds. Her so-called managers at the time were her friends, helping her navigate her new, rapidly growing popularity — also, as it happens, in a group chat.
The idea for “The Group Chat” came to Ms. Robinson about a year ago while watching episodes of “Jersey Shore: Family Vacation.” In one episode, Mike Sorrentino, better known as The Situation, gets out of jail and texts the other members of the cast that he is free. They all happened to be at the same house when they received the message, leading to them running into one another’s rooms and freaking out.
“When I saw it, I was just like, ‘That’s it, that’s what I’m trying to capture,’” she said. “This idea that there can be so many feel-good moments and so much drama just from one text popping up on everyone’s phone.”
Each plotline of “The Group Chat” is mapped out and scripted, which Ms. Robinson will often brainstorm with her sister and brother-in-law. Then, each episode takes four to eight hours to film, with all the outfit changes, shifting to the different locations in her home and editing.
Ms. Robinson said she had always wanted to be in the entertainment industry. In college, she was a theater major and eventually took up writing as a minor. After college, she worked in costuming at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the amusement park shuttered and she moved back in with her parents, taking up a job at a jewelry boutique in Westchester. Bored and listless, she decided to try her hand at creating TikTok content.
Throughout this journey, her family group chat of six members, she said, has been the most active of her groups. “It’s just like we’re all kind of on the ride together, keeping our hands and feet inside,” she said.
But, she added, her pinned chat — the one she turns to first and most frequently — is a subgroup of that chat. The only other members are her mother and her sister.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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