The Colin and Samir Show · Colin and Samir

Adam Faze: How TikTok Reinvented the TV Pilot

October 30, 2025·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

TikTok producer Adam Faze reveals how he's building a studio that discovers talent and creates shows for a new generation of viewers.

TikTok is acting like television's test kitchen. Adam explains how Gymnasium launches unscripted shows on brand-new accounts, then lets TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts find the first real audience. Zero followers can still mean lift-off. The hosts push on what that does to Hollywood, because a first episode can hit roughly 40 million views across TikTok and YouTube without the old machinery that made a credit feel official. That is the uneasy part. Adam is not saying craft disappeared. He is saying discovery has moved closer to the feed, where comments and sudden view jumps tell you quickly whether a show idea has heat. Fresh accounts become live pilots. He talks about watching numbers move at midnight, seeing the right comments come in, and getting that addictive confirmation that something people worked on might actually be good. The conversation stays thoughtful instead of hypey. The hosts move from one studio tactic into fame dilution, audience churn, and whether Hollywood still gets to decide what counts. Nobody lands on a tidy answer. Adam talks through unscripted formats, host fit, and the odd confidence that comes from seeing someone with a small Instagram following become an obvious screen presence. Michael is the example: a New York City, Brooklyn comedy scene figure with 2,000 Instagram followers, but Adam reads the pilot as proof that the format can make him bigger. Scale is not only celebrity. The conversation keeps coming back to signals: fresh accounts, hashtags, comments, cross-posting, and whether Gymnasium should become a hub instead of launching everything separately. There is platform skepticism under all of it. Nobody treats the algorithm as permanent, and Adam admits he does not know how much longer this launch window stays this generous. That uncertainty makes the opening feel sharper. The useful read is a creator economy framework: TikTok did not just create stars faster, it made the feedback loop for show ideas cheaper and much quicker.

As heard by us

A sharp creator-economy read on how cheap social pilots can test demand before traditional TV enters the picture.

The Colin and Samir Show frames Adam Faze's Gymnasium as a studio built for a platform-first media market: find talent online, make inexpensive unscripted shows, and let TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts test whether the audience is there.

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Why you'd press play

TikTok is where this episode's guest finds talent, launches shows on fresh accounts, and tests what sticks.

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