Snapchat’s Bitmoji TV premiere was fittingly weird (and ironic)

The premiere of Snap’s newest brainchild, an absurdist Saturday morning-style cartoon called Bitmoji TV, started out like any other. Popcorn, wine, and red armchairs abounded in a Soho House screening room high above LA’s Sunset Boulevard. 

But things devolved devilishly from there. 

“We’re all gonna have our own experience,” Ba Blackstock, Bitmoji’s co-founder, said. “But we’re all gonna have it together.”

The premiere would be low-tech, somewhat awkward, and deeply ironic: We would watch the show in a fancy Hollywood room all together, but each watch it individually on our personal smartphones while wearing headphones. 

Bitmoji TV, which debuts Saturday in the Discover section, is based on the premise that every episode simulates the experience of flipping channels while watching Saturday morning cartoons. But your Bitmoji, and the Bitmoji of the last friend you snapped with, are the characters in all of the imagined shows and ads. That means that every Snapchat user is watching the same cartoon episode, but the characters are personalized to them — so no one’s show looks the same as someone else’s.

At the screening Thursday, Snap premiered the first three episodes for press.

After Snap executives filtered in alongside teenage influencers wearing sweatpants and tiny backpacks, Blackstock took the stage. He gave a deranged but sentimental powerpoint presentation on how the project was a “preposterous odyssey” 25 years in the making. It was the only time the screen would be used (during the presentation, Blackstock said, “We’re celebrating the death of television.”). 

Next, Blackstock and Snap personnel made sure everyone had Snapchat and their Bitmoji characters dressed and at the ready; Bitmoji is integrated in Snapchat, so you can design your avatar within the app, where it shows up in multiple forms of media.

 We were then directed to the headphones slung over the back of our chairs, making sure we all had the appropriate dongles to connect.

“I have to warn you, this is an extremely experimental form of media, which is why it’s an extremely experimental screening,” Blackstock said before we began.

After scanning an access code and being warned profusely by Blackstock to not touch our screens once the show started lest we got out of sync, we began a countdown, guided by an old timey, black and white countdown clock on the screen. 

Five, four, three, two, one… showtime.

The experience that followed was as silly as the show itself. We sat wearing headphones and staring at our smartphones with the same-but-different shows all playing before us. Laughter would erupt in cascades, with some getting the joke a few seconds behind or ahead of others. Blackstock referred to the spectacle as a “silent disco screening,” which was accurate.

It was weird, but it worked. Every once in a while, I glanced over at my date’s screen, where I saw him watching the same part of the show, but flipped from mine: His Bitmoji was the protagonist and mine the supporting character. At the conclusion of every episode, we clapped, while Snap personnel gestured to us with large hand circles to keep going. At the end, we all took off our headphones and emerged back into the physical realm. 

“This show is basically the future eating the past,” Blackstock sarcastically remarked, dead-pan.

A joke, sure. Or was it..?