YouTuber Colleen Ballinger’s (AKA Miranda Sings) Attempt at TV

Colleen Ballinger created a unique YouTube persona with legs in Miranda Sings. She’s also a likable personality. Sincerity works in the favor of most YouTubers as they create vlogs and tweet to authentically connect with fans and Miranda has succeeded in connecting to her fans outside of her character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxGzTehTSPw

Most of them know she’s a very talented singer in her own right. In sketch-sized bits, the Miranda Sings character is quite brilliant as Jimmy Fallon’s audience has gotten the chance to see a couple times. .

Still, this only buys a small amount of of goodwill when you have to transfer an unlikable character into a narrative format. In this version, Miranda Sings, a horrible singer whose flirtations with YouTube gives her delusions of grandeur, tries to achieve fame with her deluded uncle (Steve Little).

The show’s inherent weirdness also has a whiff of Tim Burtonesque suburbia (the framing of the house recalls “Edward Scissorhands”) and the uncle’s circuitously empty get-rich schemes recall Mike Judge.

Part of the origin of Colleen Ballinger’s idea was her perception as a classically-trained musician that YouTube was giving rise to a coddled generation of singers who thought they were stars simply because they are getting internet views. That commentary is definitely apparent here: Miranda Sings is bratty to sociopath levels here, but she has an army of enablers. Her mother (Angela Kinsey) is afraid to say…