It's like someone watched the 2019 HBO Theranos documentary and tried to do the same thing with JUUL but worse in every aspect.
Episodes of The New York Times Presents (and its precursor The Weekly) are very hit and miss (more so the latter) and not really having any stand-out episodes (even its biggest hit the Britney Spears episode felt so copy-pasted from prior reporting that even someone with only cursory knowledge of the FreeBritney campaign would find little new or enlightening) but I'd never been as frustrated watching an episode as this. Why why why did they spend SO much time with the one teenage(?) girl??? If there was a 'teen smoking/vaping epidemic' as the episode repeatedly mentioned, it'd be useful to back it up with more stats & figures (other than the 3 charts they showed) instead of repeatedly coming back to a total of ~15-20 minutes on one anecdotal story so patently portrayed to pull at heart strings. So she ended up smoking 2-3 pods a day (with the episode saying one pod ≈ 1 pack of cigs)...how is that the fault of JUUL? JUUL was not saying go out and smoke multiple pods a day (or was it? the episode doesn't dig into it!). Taking one extreme example to represent a larger problem undercuts the position the episode is trying to put out there (or WAS it an extreme outlier? the episode doesn't dig into it!). Digging deeper into the company's advertising practices and comparing how it's different/more insidious than other companies (especially ones that are restricted from advertising to youth) would bolster the story's case a lot more (and when the girl's mom starts crying 'cause she found e-cigs in her teenage daughter's room was...not as big of a bombshell as the episode's director/editor thought it was...lingering on the shot long after it was obvious the episode was trying to hit you over the head with a Big Emotional Scene). The story was told from a generalist point of view when someone from the digital advertisement/tech beat would be better suited to add a lot more background and details around companies skirting age-restrictions in advertising as more money & focus flows towards digital.
This episode, more so than others in the series, was clearly trying to make a case against JUUL instead of a more objective documentary, and there probably is a case to be made against them, but this was so sloppily made I finished the episode with frustration, not at JUUL but at NYTP for wasting an hour of my time on such a scatterbrained, unfocused, poorly-argued episode. It flits from subject to subject instead of building its case brick by brick, it spent a decent amount of time on Monsees's childhood and education, but sort of just flits past Monsees's demotion to CPO (why? did other co-workers see any problems with him? he gave one bad performance at a congressional hearing but WHY was he so unprepared? the story barely delves into what he did day-to-day)? Every speaker feels like they're in on a hatchet job on JUUL which actually makes it less effective. There's a lot more meat in the story of the way JUUL presented itself as better than smoking and how much worse the health effects are than what it originally put out there, and the episode touches on that but more science and more breaking that down was needed to drive the point home than how it was conveyed (talking head of someone slanted against the company, footage of health official's dry press conferences). And again, Instead of covering any of that it spent almost half the bloody episode on one anecdotal human-interest-angle interview that was a lot less effective than the reporter seemed to think.
At the end of the day, the tone (quickly) devolves into Helen Lovejoy shouting "won't somebody please think of the children!" and being shocked that teenagers smoke. Not that teenagers smoking is a good thing, but your argument is made much less effective and causes the audience to instinctively tune out when your tone (for a whole hour!!! this could've been 45 minutes!!) is so strongly of paternalistic moral shock. Shoddily directed, shoddily edited, falls well short of the strong long-form video journalism being put out there by other outlets.
Review by BobDole12BlockedParent2021-09-24T20:21:09Z
It's like someone watched the 2019 HBO Theranos documentary and tried to do the same thing with JUUL but worse in every aspect.
Episodes of The New York Times Presents (and its precursor The Weekly) are very hit and miss (more so the latter) and not really having any stand-out episodes (even its biggest hit the Britney Spears episode felt so copy-pasted from prior reporting that even someone with only cursory knowledge of the FreeBritney campaign would find little new or enlightening) but I'd never been as frustrated watching an episode as this.
Why why why did they spend SO much time with the one teenage(?) girl??? If there was a 'teen smoking/vaping epidemic' as the episode repeatedly mentioned, it'd be useful to back it up with more stats & figures (other than the 3 charts they showed) instead of repeatedly coming back to a total of ~15-20 minutes on one anecdotal story so patently portrayed to pull at heart strings. So she ended up smoking 2-3 pods a day (with the episode saying one pod ≈ 1 pack of cigs)...how is that the fault of JUUL? JUUL was not saying go out and smoke multiple pods a day (or was it? the episode doesn't dig into it!). Taking one extreme example to represent a larger problem undercuts the position the episode is trying to put out there (or WAS it an extreme outlier? the episode doesn't dig into it!). Digging deeper into the company's advertising practices and comparing how it's different/more insidious than other companies (especially ones that are restricted from advertising to youth) would bolster the story's case a lot more (and when the girl's mom starts crying 'cause she found e-cigs in her teenage daughter's room was...not as big of a bombshell as the episode's director/editor thought it was...lingering on the shot long after it was obvious the episode was trying to hit you over the head with a Big Emotional Scene). The story was told from a generalist point of view when someone from the digital advertisement/tech beat would be better suited to add a lot more background and details around companies skirting age-restrictions in advertising as more money & focus flows towards digital.
This episode, more so than others in the series, was clearly trying to make a case against JUUL instead of a more objective documentary, and there probably is a case to be made against them, but this was so sloppily made I finished the episode with frustration, not at JUUL but at NYTP for wasting an hour of my time on such a scatterbrained, unfocused, poorly-argued episode. It flits from subject to subject instead of building its case brick by brick, it spent a decent amount of time on Monsees's childhood and education, but sort of just flits past Monsees's demotion to CPO (why? did other co-workers see any problems with him? he gave one bad performance at a congressional hearing but WHY was he so unprepared? the story barely delves into what he did day-to-day)? Every speaker feels like they're in on a hatchet job on JUUL which actually makes it less effective. There's a lot more meat in the story of the way JUUL presented itself as better than smoking and how much worse the health effects are than what it originally put out there, and the episode touches on that but more science and more breaking that down was needed to drive the point home than how it was conveyed (talking head of someone slanted against the company, footage of health official's dry press conferences). And again, Instead of covering any of that it spent almost half the bloody episode on one anecdotal human-interest-angle interview that was a lot less effective than the reporter seemed to think.
At the end of the day, the tone (quickly) devolves into Helen Lovejoy shouting "won't somebody please think of the children!" and being shocked that teenagers smoke. Not that teenagers smoking is a good thing, but your argument is made much less effective and causes the audience to instinctively tune out when your tone (for a whole hour!!! this could've been 45 minutes!!) is so strongly of paternalistic moral shock.
Shoddily directed, shoddily edited, falls well short of the strong long-form video journalism being put out there by other outlets.