You probably think that The Chicken Girls are way too mainstream for 1900hotdog to cover, and I completely agree with you. After all, Chicken Girls The Movie currently has over forty million views on YouTube. As we all know, it was the flagship program of Brat TV, a YouTube channel aimed at teen girls who wish The Disney Channel included more product placement and less talent.
The creator of Brat TV recruited a bunch of young influencers with built-in audiences to star in his YouTube shows. They got real acting experience and some sort of paycheck, and Brat TV got to make soap operas for babies. You might be wondering, is this Brat TV related to the Bratz dolls? No, the word Brat is legally unaffiliated with everything they are doing at Brat TV. You can tell Brat TV apart from the Bratz YouTube channel because Brat TV has 4.5 Million more subscribers.
Chicken Girls was so wildly popular it spawned multiple spinoffs and launched many of the Chicken Girls from social media stardom into actual C-list fame! One even got her own Nickelodeon show about a teenager who accidentally sets her principal’s boat on fire and has to work off the boat debt. It’s called Side Hustle, and that is the real plot. So, for Chicken Girls The College Years we were left with Rooney (she’s the artistic one) and Birdie (she’s also the artistic one). It feels a little bit like a Gumby spinoff starring two Pokeys, and unlike the wildly popular Chicken Girls The Movie, it’s obscure enough to be featured on 1900hotdog.
As we all know, The Chicken Girls is the name of a friendship/dance troupe. They battle an evil dance troupe called Power Surge and learn lessons about life, love, and products that teenagers can buy along the way. This season, it’s Takis. At the fictional Providence college life revolves around Takis.
I’ve been through so many feelings about Chicken Girl fandom in the last forty-eight hours. I went from, “What is The Chicken Girls?” to “The Chicken Girls are a criminal organization,” and somehow ended on, “Oh no do I kind of love The Chicken Girls The College Years: Presented By Takis?” Come along on that journey with me.
You see, it’s generally agreed upon by the Chicken Girl fandom that after season six, Chicken Girls really took a dive. However, Chicken Girls College Years was a rebirth of a quality series. The actresses portraying Rooney and Birdie were billed as also Executive Producing and these girls have that scary Gen Z confidence that allows them to do things like post this picture on Instagram to their 6.1 million followers with the caption “sit down, be humble,” and tag the Visa cash app. Birdie will never regret this picture, even when she’s no longer 21 and dating a guy who looks like he played Archie’s peyote guy on Riverdale.
How will that confidence translate into art? I wondered. For one thing, the product placement is absolutely shameless. These ladies would French kiss a bag of Takis for the full twelve-minute episode if that’s what Daddy Taki requested. They are getting that bag, the bag being held tightly by Takis corporate. In the first episode, it takes a full eight minutes to get into the Taki’s conversation, but here’s how it goes: Rooney is jealous of Haven, a trans girl in her photography class whom the teacher heavily praises for her point of view. Very cool that they included a trans character, and most of her storylines have nothing to do with her gender identity. Uncool that that made her say, “Want some Takis waves? Come on? They’re wavy potato chips with delicious flavor.”
“Oh wow, these are amazing…I think it’s the intense crunch you get when you bite in,” Rooney replied normally; how a girl would normally say that she loves the intense crunch of new Takis waves even if Takis wasn’t paying her any money. A little investigative journalism on my part has led me to believe Rooney isn’t actually a huge fan of Takis. After this episode they mainly focus on Birdie eating the Takis, and she does NOT eat the spicy ones.
The executives at Takis wanted to get to the Takis quicker, so in episode two, at one minute and forty seconds, Birdie learns that Takis are the best-selling product at the coffee shop where she works because there’s nothing like washing down a spicy chip with a hot cup of coffee. If I were Birdie, I would have quit immediately after learning these Takis statistics. She has to clean that coffee shop’s bathroom! Instead, she just says, “I love these Takis intense Nacho Roll chips. They’re not hot and insanely cheesy. So good, but still so intense even without the spice!”
After the first two episodes they just stuck a skit at the beginning of each episode where Rooney is trying to come up with a photography project and gets inspired by Birdie eating Takis. She decides to photograph her friends eating Takis and call the project “face the intensity.” I’m sure she got a solid D plus.
Despite their sponsorship, Chicken Girls The College Years will look you right in the eyes and say, “We did not have the budget for that.” One scene requires two frat boys to have a conversation while weightlifting, but this show has five sets total, and none of them are gyms. So, the frat boys lift five pounds in the living room of the frat house, where they film all of the party scenes.
You know how sometimes guys get together to chat and bench ten. They also sleep next to each other on lawn chairs in the same frat living room, in front of a decorative banner that says “TEAM Alkohol.” A boy bedroom was simply not in the budget. The two person frat exists in this one room. If they leave it, they die. These characters might be ghosts?
The show is a soap opera, so most of the storylines follow the girls’ social and dating lives. Rooney goes to photography class, and Birdie, who dropped out of college in season one, works at a coffee shop on campus. However, the Takis sponsorship only lasts through episode six of the nine episodes, and episodes seven through nine are wildly more interesting and ironically spicier than the Takis-sponsored episodes.
There is a very special episode that I’m so glad they tackled. It’s about pretty privilege. You see, Rooney is so hot that everyone thinks she can’t also be a talented photographer. If you or someone you love isn’t being taken seriously because of how very hot they are, that shit sucks. Remember, hot people can also be fun and talented too! That’s why we hate them.
Haven also gets her most robust solo storyline, which is about her stepbrother apologizing for outing her to her family before she was ready, and there’s a half-decent episode about consent that heavily involves the frat guys. It’s the culmination of the show’s main storyline that really converted me to a Chicken Girl The College Years fan. A major plotline throughout the season is that Rooney and Birdie are both casually dating the same guy. His name is Miles, and he’s into artistic rock tumbling. Rooney calls him “hot art guy,” I call him Cactus Shirt Boy.
The boy wardrobe on this show was zero dollars total and the girl wardrobe was ten grand per outfit. The disrespect this show treats their male actors with is kind of inspiring? I feel like this show treats men how most shows treated women until 2010. The casting call for Miles probably said, “Cactus Shirt Boy – likes rocks and lying to women. No other motivation. Name subject to change if we can’t find a cactus shirt.”
The thing about Cactus Shirt is he’s so noticeably dull and has no romantic tension at all with either lead character. He’s a rock tumbler? That’s his cool art? Everyone watching had to be like, what is the deal with Cactus Shirt? Then you come to episode seven, a mere one-episode separation from the tyranny of Takis. It’s called “The Kiss.” There are no will they/won’t they couples that could kiss in this episode, so you might be a little baffled by the dramatic title. You might also notice that at the end of the episode, there’s an enormous replay spike in the YouTube timeline:
What could the teens be replaying so voraciously? It’s the episode after Rooney and Birdie find out they are both dating Cactus Shirt. Cactus Shirt has decided he wants to tumble rocks with only Birdie from now on and goes to tell Rooney when Birdie walks in on them. The girls aren’t mad at each other, but they are both deeply troubled. They spend the episode avoiding each other and panicking until they meet up at the coffee shop, and they KIIIIIIISS. The Chicken Girls fall in love!
As someone who grew up seeing LGBT representation in teen shows as the occasional flamboyant Disney villain, I’m just so psyched for The Chicken Girls. It turns out this show is not JUST a shallow cash grab; it’s a slow burn friends-to-lovers lesbian drama that was extremely sponsored by Takis? How can I not love that? If you go back and rewatch it, knowing this is the ending, everything makes so much sense. The Takis represent the fire of their unrequited love for each other. It’s all Blue Heat Hot Chili Rolled Tortilla Chip subtext.
Chicken Girls The College Years Season 2: Presented by Takis, sadly wasn’t as successful as Chicken Girls The College Years Season 1: Presented by Eos Lip Balm. Season 1 premiered with 1.2 million views and ended with less than half that. Season 2 premiered with 898K views and finished with 363K, a far cry from the forty million amassed by The Chicken Girls Movie. This may be the end of Rooney and Birdie’s story, much to the disappointment of Birooney shippers. Brat TV is more focused on their slate of other popular shows, including Chicken Girls Season 11, and Charmers, a legally not Charmed show about young witches who love lip balm.
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