Dr Disrespect is the villain who could change the future of TV
Violence becomes him. Stalking through the wild grass and brutalistic concrete wilderness of Tarkov, he’s irreconcilable, the unstoppable force you’ve always wanted to see come up against an object that claims to be immovable. He sees an enemy unaware. He snaps. The sights instinctively emerge. In the break before the man falls, you can see the Doc smiling and his mouse shaking.
If you’ve ever seen an action movie, you know Dr. Disrespect though (no point, because if what I’ve heard is correct, the medical profession doesn’t like those outside who steal her courage). The army boots. A jet black mullet wig and a painted mustache. Mirrored sunglasses. A villain as famous as he threatens. We know him. We know what he wants. And that’s why he’s probably the most important persona in the vast streaming universe of the Internet: The Doc is the future of live entertainment.
Currently, the Doc is located in a nondescript building in Glendale, California. Over the course of two days, a helicopter’s cockpit took shape in the center of a very large soundstage, a collection of buttons and dials from the 1980s, and a generous amount of black paint. It’s all because Doc is here to shoot a hype video for his latest announcement: He’s been re-signed to Twitch for an exclusive two-year contract – for a a lot of of money.
The exact figures have not been disclosed. Here’s what he has to say about it: “Let’s just say that when I first started streaming, something like this was fathomable? If so, you’re really dreaming big. To me, it’s pretty shocking and it’s very clearly life-changing, rewarding. ”
When the mullet wig comes off, the man has fashionably trimmed pepper and salt hair underneath. This is Herschel “Guy” Beahm who is 6 feet, 8 inches, taller than a 2017 Toyota Sienna. Or a pony. Like Dr Disrespect, Beahm is somehow even bigger, although that could just be the army boots.
You could summarize Doc’s appeal with one of his slogan, “Violence! Speed! Momentum! Twitch, on the other hand, is more difficult to explain. It’s a platform that anyone can use to stream themselves and do just about anything that falls within the company’s terms of service – that is, if you follow all applicable local laws, you’re likely to be fine. (Although nudity, even if only partially, is frowned upon by the powers out there.)
But if you sign up with Twitch now, you will mostly see people playing video games. The number of views varies, but the basic visual format is much the same: most of the screen is occupied by the game. And then, in an inconspicuous angle, you can see the streamer live wherever they broadcast. Most people play themselves.
Beahm, on the other hand, plays the doctor, which means there is a real distance between the mustache and the man behind it. As a character, his broadcasts combine a mix of over-the-top CG graphics played across a series of green screens in his house; they show a nightmarish cyberpunk landscape, all black and gray and red, where Doc seems to live. There is a sinister sports stadium with a dressing room where Doc hangs out; he sometimes seems to be driving a 1990 Lamborghini Diablo VT, although he never goes anywhere, not really. The landscape is completely devoid of other people and it is always night. It looks like an adolescent boy’s id.
And as a character, Doc is pure id. It’s based on the bad guys, one bad guy more than the others: Fender Tremolo, the 1989 arch villa Cyborg. Fender leads a gang of pirates; he’s torn but not driven off, with dreadlocks and intense blue eyes peering from behind darkened sunglasses. He has Authority, and he uses it to literally crucify Jean-Claude van Damme. “It was like a post-apocalyptic world and he was the one who dominated this world. There was just something about him,” says Beahm.
Eventually, Fender dies from a meat hook on a pole. “I’ve always wanted a movie where the villain came out on top. It would shock the world.” Dr Disrespect is the villain who could finally win.
In the past four years, the Doc has risen through the Twitch charts to become one of the biggest streamers on the platform. He’s performing in front of a live audience of over 20,000 people on one of his regular streams, which is good enough to make him the 10th most watched channel on Twitch, according to Twitchmetrics, a site-wide stat tracker. He’s amassed nearly 4 million followers there since he came to the site about four years ago, and his streams have earned him a TV development deal with Skybound.
That makes Beahm and Steven “Stev” Lawson, Beahms manager and a business development manager at Boom.tv, dream of the character’s potential. “I think the brand will be the Batman of future generations in 10, 15, 20,” said Lawson. “Now I don’t know how long it will take to get there, but I see the brand going there.”
However, the rise of the Doc couldn’t have happened without online streaming. He has a long history with Twitch; he joined as a viewer when it was called Justin.TV to watch Duty pros throw down. (The name change took place in February 2014.) Historically, Twitch has been the best place for people to live stream themselves by playing video games – “twitch,” referring to the term “twitch gameplay,” a game that changes the response time of a player tests – and also their life. At first, Justin.TV was a place where its founder, Justin Kan, streamed itself live almost every minute of every day. By the time of Amazon’s acquisition in August 2014 for nearly a billion dollars, Twitch had fully focused on conquering the burgeoning live-streaming market.
Twitch isn’t the only live streaming platform, of course, and real competition has emerged lately. There’s Mixer, a streaming service that Microsoft acquired in 2016 when it was called Beam. There is Facebook, which is starting to make its way into Facebook Gaming; Fox has supported another competitor called Caffeine. DLive is a blockchain-based platform that doesn’t make sense yet – as a company, a creators value proposition, or a place for the public – that seems to go behind the audience segment that likes to hodl. And then there’s the real elephant in the room: YouTube Gaming, which already gets most of the live streamed content from creators while VODs are uploaded to those creators’ channels.
The demand for streamers has soared, of course, which has started a war for talent. And Microsoft shot the first shot.
In August 2019, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the most famous gamer in the world, announced that he would stream exclusively on Mixer, Reportedly between $ 20 million and $ 30 million. Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, the world’s most famous YouTuber with 103,000,000 subscribers, signed a exclusive deal with DLive in April 2019. YouTube Gaming stole Jack ‘CourageJD’ Dunlop from Twitch in early November and Facebook Gaming picked up Jeremy ‘DisguisedToast’ Wang at the end of the month.
Streamers are valuable because they make everything people want to consume on a platform. That means that the deployment is existential for platforms. Twitch’s standard partner contract has an exclusivity clause, but if those contracts expire, anything goes. Many of the biggest names on Twitch have moved to greener pastures – literally. In addition to Ninja, Cory “KingGothalion” Michael, Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek and Soleil “Ewok” Wheeler also left after receiving extravagant sums of money.
In January, report in Kotaku broke some of the secrecy surrounding these deals. For Blevins, Twitch offered $ 15 million for a three-year commitment; Mixer and Facebook, on the other hand, reached about $ 20 million a year. Grzesiek’s deal was worth less than Blevins’, but still worth tens of millions. In response, Twitch has re-signed its own streamers, including Doc. Imane “Pokimane” Anys, one of the most popular variety streamers on the entire site, has re-signed to the platform for a reported $ 4.5 million. They also kept Ben “DrLupo” Lupo, Timothy “TimTheTatman” Betar and Saqib “Lirik” Zahid – all big names that draw large crowds when they are live.
Sometimes it seems like anyone who has gathered a following can get themselves to the negotiating table, and then to win – or at least pay out. Which brings us to Beahm: if Dr Disrespect had not re-signed with Twitch, it would have been a real sign of the company’s vulnerability.
Beahm is important to Twitch because it is important to millions of people around the world, making his decisions worth millions of dollars. Twitch is also important to Beahm. “It’s the platform of my choice simply because it’s embedded,” he says. Beahm was approached with a partnership relatively early, in February 2016, just under a year since his first stream on Twitch, which was the previous May. He calls it a sign of mutual respect. “They’ve just seen this man’s potential,” he says, meaning his cheerful alter ego. “Because, again, he’s such a different type of streamer. It’s unique, it’s over the top and can feel a little threatening or dangerous in terms of an investment.”
That’s true; the character feels dangerous, even if that danger is mainly for the flow of brand dollars on the platform. Last year, the Doc was banned from Twitch for two weeks and his E3 pass was withdrawn after venturing into a bathroom while living live on Twitch. While he was live, it never even occurred to him that live streaming from a bathroom was wrong; now Beahm says he understands why what he did was wrong, even if he had no intention of doing anything wrong. “If my kid was in there, I wouldn’t want him filmed by this guy and his camera crew, and it’s really going out, it’s a live stream. It could have been a lot worse.” It could have been. on-brand for the Disrespect persona, breaking is something fans love about the character, and it’s their feelings that drive the character.
His fans send Doc donations on Twitch with attached notes; some tell him he helped with their depression, anxiety and PTSD, he says. “I think they see a lot of confidence in him. I think they feel empowered by him, ”says Beahm. “There is something there where they see this man and he is so stubborn, so confident, so exaggerated, but he can still relate to you.” The streams are a safe space. However, Beahm seems to be surprised at the reality that the doctor’s character means a lot to many people. “It is difficult to estimate, because I am all alone in my room … screaming.”
Among the fans of the Doc are two of the actors on the set, Mike Ferguson – whose card calls him a “scumbag for Hire” – and Will Mann. Ferguson, a gray, tattooed old man, plays the “seasoned PILOT (1950s);” Mann, with a fresh face and seraph, is his ‘CO-PILOT with starry sky (1930s)’.
After lunch, Ferguson steps outside for a pre-take cigarette. This isn’t the first time he’s working with the Doc: in a commercial for G-Fuel, an energy drink that sponsors many major streamers, he loses an arm-wrestling match against Disrespect. His children are also fans of the Doc character. Ferguson about Dr. Disrespect: “He’s the goddamn man. He doesn’t care. You know what I mean? Literally, he doesn’t care.”
Mann likes Twitch because he grew up watching his brother and friends play video games and find watching gameplay reassuring. The 26-year-old is also a Disrespect fan. “I think he offers Twitch a bit more escapism, because you often watch a real guy play a game, which is great,” he says. “But when you go in there, it’s kind of like, oh there’s a character guy, that’s clearly a character. But you can watch him watch for five hours and do his thing and invest a little bit in that.”
On the set everything is built around Dr Disrespect. Lena Lollis, the red-haired costume designer, has bought each piece of Doc’s costume individually – apart from the wig, sunglasses and custom headset, which the Doc himself generously provided. The hardest thing to find, however, was a copy of Doc’s red anti-aircraft vest. As Lollis points out, red isn’t a popular color, as you generally don’t want your camouflage or armor to be seen by the enemy.
Once Doc has left her and makeup, he goes to the part of the cavernous studio where he is rigged in armor. (The Doc does his own stunts.) He floats above a blanket-covered crash pad in a fake wingsuit that Lollis has handcrafted from neoprene, black with red elastic detailing. He looks relaxed; it looks like he did this before. Tim Hendrix has instructed the photography director of the shoot, Powell Robinson, to take a closer look at Doc’s snarling face after punching a hole in the helicopter’s roof and then hopping out while floating through the night sky.
Hendrix got the job because he got an email out of nowhere from a creative consultant at Twitch in mid-December. “I didn’t know much about the doctor or Twitch,” he says. As Hendrix describes it, Doc’s idea was creatively creative – the character would jump out of a helicopter and fly to a purple-hued city – so his job was to figure out the performance.
It seemed an interesting challenge for Hendrix, whose background is mainly in music videos. (He is best known for directing the video clip panic! At The Disco’s “Don’t Threaten Me With A Good Time,” with an interesting take on tentacle porn.) Directing music videos and directing hype video for a streamer are similar in that they’re about artists with known amounts and they show in a new light.
However, there is one crucial difference: Twitch pays better. “It is very different from music videos because it really allows me to eat,” says Hendrix. One person in the room points out that Brendon Urie, the singer for Panic! At The Disco, also streams on Twitch. “Oh,” says Hendrix. “Maybe one day he will also pay me a living wage.”
The next day, Beahm plays the Dr Disrespect character in 90-second pieces, over and over, over and over again, because Hendrix wants cover, but also because it’s hard to get everything right. The character feels undiluted when he looks at him on the monitors behind the helicopter’s cockpit. I understand why his manager compares him to Batman: it may be that the character’s real essence is for the big screen – not many little ones.
Guy Beahm, the man behind the harder and the mustache, is 37 and his first two loves are sports and video games. His grandfather gave him his first computer when he was in the second or third grade. At the time, his favorite game was Asteroids, which changed after his grandfather bought him an NES. He was online at a young age, an only child who looked up Prodigy’s cheat codes while not interacting with his parents and their friends. Beahm went to college because he wanted to play basketball, and the team he played with at Cal Poly Pomona was good. (Education, he says, was secondary, although he studied business and marketing.) After graduating, he took a few random jobs because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He was a temporary clerk at Stanford, a roof tile salesman and mortgage advisor, all in quick succession after graduation.
Dr. Disrespect was born as a bodyless voice at the time Halo 2s lobbies and chat nearby. Even then it was clear that he had hit something special; other players wanted to be on his team after seeing him scratching around through his enemies and then roasting them when they died.
In his first video – Posted a decade ago – Doc’s first words, spoken directly to the camera, show an unpolished disrespect, although the character is known anyway: “People have to understand … you have to attack. Attack. Attack. But don’t get it wrong. Certain individuals you don’t attack. You run away. Aggression radiates from behind his mirrored sunglasses. The video lets him play Duty.
The YouTube videos continued and subscriptions started to arrive. First it was one or two videos a month; Beahm’s real goal was to get into game development. Eventually he found a role as a community manager at Sledgehammer Games, a studio that had just finished developing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, and from then on he became a multiplayer designer Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
After the game’s release in 2014, Beahm started the next one Duty game – and then had a moment of clarity. From there, the future, as he saw it, was pretty much mapped out: he would go from associate level designer to level designer to senior level designer. It was certainly a career, but one he wasn’t so sure he wanted to pursue. “I saw the path for the next five, ten, fifteen years. I was like, I don’t know if this is it. I decided to just like it, you know what? Let me look elsewhere. Beahm quit and started looking for other jobs in the industry. In the end, he managed to dispute an offer from another major game developer.
That was when his current business partner, Sumit Gupta, came to him with an offer to work at his startup – Boom.tv – where he developed a new streaming technology around VR. But it wouldn’t be a desk job; Beahm would help Gupta figure out the streaming landscape, starting with letting him stream on Twitch. And so Gupta said, “Hey, how about reviving your old Doctor character?”
He was in his thirties; he was no longer a child. He chose between a different Triple-A job and hitherto unknown momentum, and the week Sumit Gupta gave him to decide was over. I have already offered this. Whether you are on board or not, Beahm remembered saying. “And so it is, fuck all right.”
The gamble worked and the fans started to trickle in, which is the hardest thing to do on the internet; that goes double for Twitch. Finding an audience there is a mysterious business, perhaps more than anywhere else online. Part of that is because you have to convey the strength and depth of your personality to other people, live, and part of it is because it is extremely difficult to get people to take care of what you do until you are already far enough that it doesn’t matter . You have to bet on yourself, time and time again. And even then it may not work. You can hardly ever quit your day job.
Considering what he has achieved so far, Beahm says he feels he is getting closer to what he wants to do. “The pistons are moving. The momentum is … you feel it, well, but we’re not there yet, ” he says.
The problem with being a villain is that the hero always wins. Look, after Doc punches a hole in the roof of the helicopter and jumps through the glass while the pilots are itching in a downward spiral, the rotorcraft would crash.
A few weeks after Doc left the soundstage, Kobe Bryant flew with his daughter to his youth basketball academy in a helicopter that never reached its destination. The day after the tragedy, I receive a call from Doc’s publicist: the announcement continues, but his original video will never see the light of day. (Eventually, months later, a modified version comes out with a “military spacecraft.”) No one wants to expose a real death.
This makes sense. Beahm is also a father. And while Disrespect is what he’s famous for, Beahm’s alter ego exists to make him do things he can’t do like himself. “Personally, I absolutely cannot sit here as Guy Beahm and sit in front of a camera and stream,” he says. “Not that I can’t; I’m not interested in it.” If he’s not a character, Beahm is a bit restless and his voice is a little higher. The doctor, on the other hand, does not fidget; he is almost unnaturally quiet, except when he shows his teeth. There is hardly any repressed anger in him, as if he is waiting to be beaten or beaten.
On his stream that day, the day after Kobe Bryant died, the first time I never know who’s in front of the camera – was whether the guy speaking on stream was Guy Beahm or Dr Disrespect. He treats the situation obliquely with his hype video shoot, while not playing anything at all: “I don’t even know if that video will ever come up because of the content involved. But that made me trippin ‘, man,’ he says, although it’s clear that the ultimate fate of the video isn’t what’s bothering him. “I’m a little upset today. I’m upset. I’m sad and I’m upset.”
Donations keep pouring in, all $ 8.24 in honor of the figures Bryant wore while playing for the Los Angeles Lakers, and he reads almost everyone: they’re all about people who are now gone, both lovers and celebrities. Doc’s stream that day is a place of collective grief. He finally boots up Escape from Tarkov. His boots creak on the screen as he steps into the savagery of the map. And then his figure goes silent as he starts to perform.