Why Reality Series “The Bedford Stop” Went Viral One Year Late

Last week, The Internet discovered—and then wrote about—the reality web series The Bedford Stop, which chronicles the unremarkable lives of 20-something female friends who work in nebulous fashion jobs and live in Williamsburg. Can you imagine.

Nobody could stop saying things about the exceptionally loud and swaddled-in-black-pleather-and-white-T-shirts youths who seemed fundamentally boring. Of course, everybody understands why that is true: You might despise eating brunch next to them in real life, but you might simultaneously wish yourself inside a parallel brunch reality that lets you swim inside all their cringe-inducing thoughts, because it feels great to be a hater. What was truly confusing, IMHO, was why on Earth it took more than a year for anyone to notice and then consume that parallel brunch reality, even when it was available for consumption on the Internet last fall.

The answer, Bedford & Bowery tells us, in a long and fascinating exclusive, is that the girls’ lives—which are revealed to be as unremarkable as they seem—have been turned into irresistible Internet TV by one 25-year-old guy named Mikey, who produced, shot, and edited the entire show. Basically, Mikey, despite knowing on some level that marketing and social media are the only truly effective tools to promote anything these days, has a day job, so Mikey, bless his heart, was too busy supporting himself to dedicate any additional time to telling people about the fantastic work he was making.

But now, Mikey’s project is out there, and we’ve got to hand it to him, because he’s made legitimate entertainment out of a group of loud talkers he met one fateful night at Union Pool. We are just thankful that other people with more time on their hands than Mikey have gotten around to spreading news of its vapid riches, so that we may spend more time not sleeping, or working, but consuming the fruits of his labor, at long last.