Split Screen: There Goes My Childhood – Détails, épisodes et analyse

What ever happened to some of the first girls to grow up – and blow up – on the internet? 

In the late 2000s, YouTube gave rise to a new profession: kid-fluencer – kids making content for other kids, earning millions-strong audiences and massive paycheques. And for years, some of the most popular YouTube videos for girls lived on one channel: Seven Super Girls.

It featured a rotating cast of tween and teen girls uploading sketches, skits and vlogs daily. Host Lauren White was one of them. Over time, they gained billions of views, big-name sponsors, lineups of screaming fans and more money than a child would know what to do with.

But with their growing success, came new rules from the man in charge: their manager. He began as a mentor, a kind of father figure. Then, he began dictating how the girls had to look, dress and behave. Above all, they had to look as young as they could for as long as they could. And for years, the girls did as he said… until he was put behind bars for hurting one of their own.

Almost a decade after the YouTube empire they built collapsed, the girls are now old enough to tell their own stories for the first time – the fame, the fortune, the friendships and the man they trusted for far too long.

About Split Screen

Welcome to Split Screen, an examination of the utterly captivating, sometimes unsettling world of entertainment and pop culture. From reality TV gone awry, to the cult of celebrity, each season of Split Screen takes listeners on an evocative journey inside the world of showbiz. Ex-contestants, producers, and cultural critics uncover complicated truths behind TV’s carefully curated facades, and question what our entertainment reveals about us. Split Screen: sometimes reality is twisted.

Season 1 | Kid Nation: The true story behind one of reality TV’s most controversial experiments.

Season 2 | Thrill Seekers: A multi-million dollar media experiment. Would you fall for it?

Season 3 | Who Replaced Avril Lavigne? Was the Canadian punk pop sensation replaced by a look-alike?

Season 4 | Bachelor of Buckingham Palace: The story behind one of the world’s most bizarre reality dating shows.