Adam McKay Takes His New Oil-Company Sitcom Straight to Social Media, Hoping the Kids Will Give a Frack

Adam McKay has spent his filmmaking career crafting big-ticket Hollywood productions that bring the fight to capitalism's doorstep. He went after Wall Street with The Other Guys and The Big Short, pilloried the political system with Vice, and made a satire about climate change with Don’t Look Up. But after two decades attempting to channel his activism through slow-gestating projects, he realized he needed to break through to a younger audience at a much nimbler pace—and on a more mainstream platform.

In effect, he turned to social media. On Tuesday, McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios released Cobell Energy, a weekly short-form series that will live on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. The office comedy, co-written and directed by Ari Cagan, takes a satirical jab at the oil industry and marks one of the first Hollywood-backed, scripted shows to be made directly for the phone. As he leads the charge, McKay hopes the show’s environmental messaging and familiar comedic flourishes will find its targeted Gen-Z audience and cut through the social media clutter.

“It’s hard for people to get their heads around how monstrous the oil companies are,” McKay said in an email to GQ. “I don’t throw around the ‘E’ word lightly but it’s an almost incomprehensible level of evil. They know full well they are actively destroying the whole livable climate and they’re like, ‘Cool, what’s for lunch?’”

Shot and edited entirely vertically, the 15-part first season follows a family-owned company that scrambles to maintain its wealth and influence after one of its offshore rigs explodes and produces one of the worst-recorded oil spills. Leaning on narrative and visual cues from The Office, its bite-sized episodes—mostly ranging from one to four minutes—will aim to compete for attention against dance videos and other bite-sized “For You” content by highlighting the planet’s biggest challenges with a humorous bent.

“This is definitely a problem that Gen-Z is more aware of than any generation before it,” Cagan says of the climate crisis. “Continuing to inform them on what's happening is really important for the future of the earth.”

The series also marks the next step for Yellow Dot, the non-profit climate media company that McKay founded last May. Since launching, the production wing has mostly posted an ecosystem of memes and one-off online comedy videos, highlighting the causes behind natural disasters and dirty fossil fuel secrets. But with Cobell Energy, it’s hoping to ramp up even more awareness. As teenagers spend 56 percent of their media time watching user-generated content, and TikTokers are posting and consuming full-length movies and television on the platform, Cagan believes building a series specifically for mobile was a no-brainer. “If everyone is watching this, this is the new premium entertainment,” Cagan says. “We may as well make stuff for it.”

Cagan isn’t a stranger to crafting short-form content. After meeting McKay on the set of HBO’s Winning Time in 2019, he eventually collaborated with the director on a 40-episode podcast series called “Things You Don’t Need to Know.” As that wrapped production, he and Adam Faze then developed Keep the Meter Running, an unscripted TikTok series in which host Kareem Rahma interviews New York City taxi drivers while they take him to their favorite restaurants. As he built up an audience, though, Cagan became determined to create something more impactful. “I just came to the realization that I should be focusing a lot more on the climate in my work,” he says.

When Yellow Dot launched, he immediately called Adam McKay and began brainstorming climate ideas. Three weeks later, he pitched a mockumentary-style comedy around the suits in charge of the energy business, centering three siblings (much like Succession) as they jump into crisis management. “We can shoot it all in the office, we can do it in a relatively short amount of time, and we tell just as impactful a story,” Cagan remembers thinking. The concept aligned with McKay’s ultimate goals. As Yellow Dot managing director Staci Roberts-Steele says, “Doing a one-off video can be great, but people come back for characters.”

The jump into short-form content isn’t entirely new. In 2020, Hollywood tried it with Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s failed mobile streaming service that invested in well-known creators and actors. Other social media companies—such as Meta and Snap—have also failed to sustain their own original programming. But the appetite has remained strong. Meanwhile, within the last year, anonymous TikTok accounts have begun posting full-length movies and TV shows one snippet at a time, slightly sped-up to avoid copyright laws, inspiring some major studios and streamers to upload their own content, even if it’s awkwardly cropped.

The Cobell Energy team believes they’ve counteracted some of these issues. Cagan and his writing team—including Jack Reichert and John Connor Hammond—have drafted scripts that ground their comedy in obscure reality. In one episode, an executive has an affair with a Department of Interior member just to secure the company a tax break, a true story they found in research. “That was always our guiding light when we were writing,” says Hammond, who also produces and acts in the show. “Let's say the truth, and use that as the funniest thing we can to put into a script.”

Over a rapid six-day shoot, cinematographer Matt Klahn and Cagan also dispensed with iPhones for more reliable FX3’s, using a three-camera set-up to professionally light and capture each protagonist within the frame. Cagan also made sure to record a series of interstitials and bonus features that will drop between episodes, knowing the challenge of presenting dual storylines in such a small dose. “We tried one episode with two storylines, and that was our toughest episode by far,” Cagan says. “We're writing a story that’s four minutes long. We're not trying to cut a 30-minute story into three 10-minute parts.”

Outside of the show, Cagan has conceived a number of Cobell Energy-themed surprises and stunts, including a company website, phone number, investor call, and fossil-fuel propaganda on Instagram. It’s an experiment that works for Yellow Dot, which doesn’t have the same economic incentives as a standard production company. “We're throwing things out there to see what's working,” Roberts-Steele says. “I think the really challenging thing with trying to attack climate is you're speaking to everyone who is affected by climate, which is the entire world. There’s so many things to cover.”

In a similar vein, Roberts-Steele says the series has more anecdotal—rather than statistical—goals with the series. The Yellow Dot team will monitor views and shares, but it’s more interested in finding new audiences and engaging with and replying to users through the Cobell Energy Instagram account. “One of our biggest metrics of success is getting people who haven't been involved in the conversation involved,” Roberts-Steele says, noting the sometimes helpless feeling of combating climate change. “You feel like you’re the fifth character of the show, sitting on the sidelines like, ‘Wow these people are crazy. What can I do?’”

On the precipice of a potential watershed moment in short-form media, both Roberts-Steele and Cagan know it won’t be easy capturing attention through the phone. They also think they’ve got a hit. “It's a really fun experiment,” Roberts-Steele says. “If we're going to put our faith in someone and in a particular show, this is the one we're going to do it on.”

Originally Appeared on GQ