TikTok's Latest Viral Superstar Is Teresa Reesa, a Georgia woman who posted 50 videos, each just under 10 minutes long, chronicling her tumultuous relationship with her ex-husband. It's over six hours of content, all about the experience of a stranger living with a compulsive liar. But millions of viewers are eating it up, hanging on to Reesa's every last word on a platform with a reputation for ruining our attention spans.
I can't go for a walk without headphones (so as not to be left alone with my own thoughts), so I constantly listen to podcasts and audiobooks. But Reesa's videos marked the first time I went for a walk while she listened to TikToks, with my phone tucked away in my pocket. And apparently, that's what the narrator intended.
“The 'Who the Hell Did I Marry' series is not something you have to sit and hold your phone and watch,” Reesa said in a tiktok On Wednesday. “I did it the way I did it, that way, you can listen to it as an audiobook, chapter by chapter, in order.”
This format may be unconventional, but it's working. Even by TikTok standards, Reesa's rise is meteoric. He had 50,000 followers on Friday; now, less than a week later, it is about to reach 2 million. AND Google Trends says that “who I married” is the most searched item related to marriage this week.
TikTok inherently demands our attention. You can't view TikToks picture-in-picture on your phone, and on the For You page, the same video will play over and over again until you scroll to the next one, so you have to manually swipe to see more content. But Reesa is taking advantage of TikTok's playlist feature, which cycles from one video to the next in order.
“I let all 50 parts play while I was washing dishes, cooking, everything,” one commenter wrote on TikTok. “My son said, part 38, are you still looking at the lady?”
Confessional and journalistic videos have been popular since the early days of YouTube. But the genre has evolved from bedroom vlogs to storytime TikToks, which are often filmed in the car – a neutral, quiet location with good lighting. However, these types of vlogs are typically posted in real time as full diaries, and subscribers tune in and catch up when a new video is posted. But Reesa posted 50 videos of her, all in the span of a few days, talking about an experience she had a couple of years ago, which gave her a little more time to process the events. We see her at various stages throughout the day: she drives to work with her curlers in, shoots a few more videos with her hair and makeup done, then goes home to tell more of the story in her pajamas. It is a memory with two sides: she talks about the past, calmly, coherently and in chronological order, but the videos themselves show us her present, her day-to-day life.
When we watch Reesa do mundane things in her TikTok “audiobook,” it subtly tells us that no matter how bad things have gotten with her ex-husband, she's still standing.