Fox Bets on Josh Richards to Build Gen Z’s ‘Frat Pack’ — Inside the Deal

Josh Richards became famous as a teenager, his swoopy hair and piercing blue eyes helping him attract an audience of nearly 1 million on the app Musical.ly, where he danced and lip-synched to hit pop songs. When Musical.ly was acquired by ByteDance and relaunched as TikTok, his fanbase ballooned to many millions of followers, and he started a collective of other well-coiffed young men who lived and made videos together at a mansion in Bel-Air called the Sway House.

@joshrichards

Holy shat! We are about to hit 20M! So grateful… also feel like Ik what’s about to come

♬ you thirsty or what – Lilie 💋

This is what most people know about Richards. When Fox executive Billy Parks was advised to meet with Richards this spring as he was looking for creators he could back through his newly formed Fox Creator Studios division, he did a little research and thought, “Okay, this is an influencer.”

But then Parks watched the first season of Read the Room, a sketch series that Richards personally financed and first released in 2024. When Parks sat down with Richards — now 24 with 24.8 million TikTok followers — and his business partner, Chris Sawtelle, he was blown away. “I was like, this is a young filmmaker, a young producer, a young storyteller,” Parks says, calling Richards “exactly the type of creator we’re excited about.”

In late August, Richards stood onstage at a theater on the Fox lot and introduced Read the Room’s second season, which Fox Creator Studios co-produced. And he’s already got the studio’s support for season three.

Richards’ evolution is exactly the bet Fox is making with Creator Studios: that the next generation of TV talent may already have built its audience online. Fox is now putting traditional Hollywood machinery — financing, ad sales and international distribution — behind Read the Room, while Richards tries to marry TV production values with the rhythms and instincts he learned on social media.

“This is really something that Gen Z is after,” Richards tells me.

Ahead, Richards and Parks reveal to me:

• What’s in the deal: financing, shared IP ownership and a push into international markets
• Why Richards wanted a legacy TV partner after financing Read the Room himself
• The show’scomedy-scene bona fides and how one of its writers is already breaking through with HBO
• The three internet-native skills Parks thinks traditional Hollywood needs to learn
• Richards’ ambitions to “get a little bit weird” with season three