03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Get Your Phones Ready, ‘The Group Chat' Is Coming Back
In late March, the internet and the media were in a flurry about a classified group chat. There was drama about who was in the group chat, what was said and who agreed or disagreed with the high-stakes plans that were brewing, setting off a reckoning of sorts about how we communicate in supposedly private forums.
It would be easy to confuse the situation with some other notable news at the time, but these debates centered around Sydney Jo Robinson, who had just posted the first episode of 'The Group Chat,' a TikTok series in which audiences are thrown into the middle of a spat among girlfriends that plays out in real time over text.
The first episode started with a character bursting through the door of her roommate's bedroom. 'Read the group chat,' a character who would come to be known only as Black Dress, says to her friend, White Dress. Their friend Hailey had texted the group saying she wanted to bring her boyfriend, Justin, to their painstakingly planned girl's night that evening.
'Is she kidding?' White Dress asks. No one else in the chat — seven members in total, each played by Ms. Robinson — is pleased with the idea either. Passive aggressive girl drama ensues, spanning 13 episodes and two seasons.
Each minutes-long episode has been viewed tens of millions of times and, within a week of releasing the first episode, Ms. Robinson went from 260,000 followers on TikTok to more than a million. 'Today' called 'The Group Chat' the 'internet's current favorite show' and Rolling Stone labeled it the 'latest TV binge.' Other TikTok users posted videos of themselves watching, reacting and depicting each plot twist, as though they were commenting on a high-budget TV series.
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