Mike’s Mic

Rachel Chapuis

We all know and love the classic teen tv shows we watched in the early 2000s like Pretty Little Liars, Glee, and Gossip Girl. I would sell my soul to watch these shows for the first time again. Unfortunately, all these shows are hard to rewatch due to the cringe of the 2000s culture and the amount of time it takes. Mike’s Mic on YouTube is the next best thing to rewatch these shows.

 

Mike’s Mic is a YouTube channel where Mike Messineo covers various topics that focus mostly on pop culture, movies and tv shows. He gained popularity after he made a YouTube video named “An appropriately unhinged recap of Pretty Little Liars (Part 1)” which covered the first 60 episodes of Pretty Little Liars. He created two additional videos after Part 1 that covered the rest of the episodes.

 

His Pretty Little Liars videos each have over 2.5 million views. The way Mike describes the plots, characters and relationships are iconic. The humor he uses is very Gen Z. It is extremely entertaining, and he doesn’t hold back with his opinions of the show and characters.

Mike speaks at length about the plot holes in Pretty Little Liars and his disgust with Ezra Fitz. His honesty along with his humor makes these videos so unique and interesting to watch. 

In Mike’s Pretty Little Liars videos, he created a very in-depth plot board with lines connecting characters together because the show had very confusing plot lines with its characters. The effort he put into the visuals for these videos was incredible.

 

After the success of his Pretty Little Liars videos, Mike decided to make these videos a series. 

He then created two videos recapping Glee. In the first video, he wears a red tracksuit like Sue Selvester, the cheerleading coach in Glee, and in the second video he wears a Cheerios cheerleading uniform. I thought it was pretty iconic because the outfits were perfect. His tracksuit was exactly like the ones Sue Selvester wears and he even had a megaphone which Sue used in the show when coaching the Cheerios. The Cheerios uniform was identical to the ones in the show and Mike looked so good in it. 

 

The Glee videos were funny and one of my favorite things about Mike is that he has the best opinions of the characters. He does not hold back on his opinion of everything. I think most people have similar opinions of the character and plots like Santana is a queen and Will Schuester is creepy. 

 

Mike created a “best and worst hits” list for each character which included the songs they sang that he thought were the best and worst of their performances but also situations and plot lines that were best and worst for each character. This visual was a bit more confusing for me than the visual for the Pretty Little Liars videos because it was confusing how he decided which moments from the show to include though it was very creative and on-brand with the show.

 

My favorite tv show Mike’s Mic has covered so far is Gossip Girl. He has posted the first two videos covering Gossip Girl and will be posting one or two more about the last few seasons of the show. 

 

Mike addresses many of the Gossip Girl memes like “go piss girl” in the funniest ways. He has the unpopular opinion that Chuck Bass is trash. Honestly, all of us should hate Chuck for real because in the first episode alone he tried to assault two characters. But after a few seasons, you get lost in the relationships forming and his redemption arch. 

 

For the Gossip Girl videos, Mike created magazine covers for different situations and episodes as well as pictures of each character. He also created a chart showing which flip phone each main character had in different episodes and seasons. You can really see the effort Mike put into the creative for these videos.

 

Mike puts so much effort into the creation of each of these videos and makes them so entertaining to watch. Other types of videos he creates are movie reviews and rankings of different pop culture topics. 

 

If you are searching for videos to listen to while eating, getting ready, sitting or lying down, I highly recommend Mike’s Mic on YouTube.