Sydney Robinson is the showrunner, director, writer, cinematographer and star of the internet’s new favorite show: a series of TikToks about a girls’ group chat.
The first video, which Robinson, 27, posted March 30, introduces viewers to a set of roommates whose group text chain starts to blow up when another friend makes a controversial move: inviting her boyfriend to that night’s dinner reservation.
What ensues is a series of passive aggressive remarks and verbal spars exchanged between the group chat’s members.
Online, viewers can’t get enough of the drama.
As of Friday, April 11, the original “Group Chat” video has more than 30 million views, nearly 4 million likes and over 20,000 comments. Celebrities like Stassi Schroeder and Bethenny Frankel have posted their own videos weighing in on the drama, while Leslie Jones, Hailey Bieber and Charlie Puth (more on that later) have commented that they’re hooked on the plot’s twists and turns.
“I’ve been gaining around 100,000 (followers) every day, steady,” Robinson tells TODAY.com.
On April 11, Robinson appeared live on “TODAY” to share more about the videos, joking that she hasn’t slept much since the series went viral.
“I try to do it when I get home from work, or in the morning before I go, which I know sounds crazy,” she told Savannah Guthrie and Willie Geist. (She has a day job with an estate jewelry company.) “Setting up the camera and getting into the different outfits is what takes the most time. … Sometimes when people are like, ‘It’s been four days!’ People don’t realize I don’t do this full time.”
The TikToker, who has been posting content on the app since around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly about popular TV shows, says before posting the first “Group Chat” video she was “stuck” at around 260,000 followers.
She hit 1 million on Saturday, April 5.
The inspiration
Robinson says she’s been trying to write the “Group Chat” series for about a year.
It all started when she was watching an episode of “Jersey Shore: Family Vacation” while flying to Las Vegas in the summer of 2024, she tells TODAY.com.
In the episode, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino gets released from jail and alerts the rest of the cast via their group chat.
“He texts everyone that he’s out, and they’re all on a vacation in a house sleeping, and it just revives the group chat,” Robinson says. “It revives the entire group. Everyone’s like, waking up, looking at it, and just the very idea of his name popping up on their home screen sent shock waves through the house.
“I was like, ‘That. That feeling,’” she adds of what she wants to capture in her TikTok series.