I cover creators at Like & Subscribe, an Ankler Media newsletter that’s being sampled today for subscribers to The Ankler. I wrote about Netflix’s podcast ambitions and Spotify’s pivot to video. My Creator Spotlight series has featured Financial Audit’s Caleb Hammer, Amelia Dimoldenberg and The Drey Dossier’s Audrey Henson. I’m natalie@theankler.com
In a spacious Taekwondo studio off a gritty stretch of Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, Michelle Khare is crouched in a fighting pose, sweat glistening on her forehead. A Pitbull song plays on the speakers over the rhythmic thwack, thwack, thwack as she follows her training partner around the mat, landing kick after kick into a practice pad.
A buzzer sounds, signaling the end of the drill, and her coach, world silver medalist Damian Villa, gives her a short water break before he checks in: “Are you ready?” Khare is breathing hard but replies quickly, “Of course, always ready” — then gets back into position.
Since January, Villa’s Taekwondo has been Khare’s second home, where the 33-year-old has spent countless hours training for the National Taekwondo Championships at the end of June.
With just six months of training, Khare’s going for the gold. Can she grab it? Win or lose, her journey is what will entice her 5 million-plus YouTube subscribers to tune in to Challenge Accepted, the series where she gamely learns — and ideally masters — a difficult and often risky new skill or stunt. Since Khare started her channel 10 years ago, she’s trained at the FBI Academy, taught herself Houdini’s most dangerous trick, driven an F1 racecar and recreated the death-defying stunt from Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation where Tom Cruise hung off the side of a moving airplane.
But as Khare pushes her body to new extremes in front of the camera, she’s set an even trickier challenge for herself behind the scenes: a quest for Hollywood legitimacy. In the last few years, YouTube has taken over American living rooms thanks in large part to programming from creators like Khare, who with a team of just six full-time employees produces a season’s worth of TV-length docuseries each year — Challenge Accepted is a MythBusters-meets-Parts Unknown for the YouTube generation. But entertainment industry respect, and the ad dollars that come with it, have been slow to catch up.
That’s why, for the second year in a row, Khare is campaigning for a seat at the Emmys. Because, as my Ankler Media colleague Katey Rich recently wrote, opening the eyes of her peers in Hollywood is half the battle. Khare is one of six creators — alongside Hot Ones host Sean Evans, Subway Takes’ Kareem Rahma, Huge If True’s Cleo Abram, Celebrity Substitute’s Julian Shapiro-Barnum and Royal Court’s Brittany Broski — whose Emmy campaigns are being backed by YouTube.
A nomination might be a long shot, but this is the type of test that energizes Khare. “I feel most comfortable as the underdog in any challenge I take on,” she tells me as she navigates her white Tesla out of Villa’s parking lot. “There’s nothing to lose.”
‘The Most Anxious Daredevil in the World’
Last year, Khare embarked on one of the most ambitious productions she’d ever attempted, a three-part series that follows her through The Great World Race — seven marathons on seven continents over seven days. The videos, released in April and May, have amassed more than 5 million views, and she’s hoping they’re compelling enough to land her a nomination in the Emmys’ hosted nonfiction category (she submitted in the same category last year, with her feature-length episode “I Trained Like a Black Belt for 90 Days”).
To prepare for the global race, Khare trained for months with support from Red Bull, where she’s signed to a long-term sponsorship, and an elite team of coaches. But when it came time to shoot “I Ran 7 Marathons in 7 Days on 7 Continents,” she had to do it with a bare-bones crew of just four. The plane that would fly her from Wolf’s Fang, Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa to Perth, Australia and beyond had room for Khare plus two camera operators, a sound engineer and a producer.
“Anyone can make a documentary on running seven marathons,” Khare says, “but I think that our team’s ability to storytell with varying resources available is really, really impressive.”
While many of her peers are facing down the YouTube gauntlet, uploading videos weekly as they work to feed the algorithm, Khare takes a prestige approach, releasing just eight to 10 videos a year. “That’s the most we can do at the scale and production value we’re delivering,” Khare says as she pulls up to Challenge Accepted headquarters on a leafy residential street in Burbank. “To do any more, we feel, would lose quality, which is our competitive advantage.”
Challenge Accepted videos can take months to produce, and Khare often starts planning new challenges more than a year in advance with the help of head of production Nick Hurt and her husband of four years, Garrett Kennell, who directs most of the videos and also serves as the company’s chief creative officer.
“Michelle is one of the creators we mean when we say, ‘YouTube creators are defining the future of media and entertainment,’” Kim Larson, YouTube’s global head of creators, emails. She calls Challenge Accepted “smart, entertaining and inspirational.”
Challenge Accepted videos can take several months to produce, including multi-day shoots and weeks of post-production led by a team of in-house editors. Khare has said the cost of the average video is around $30,000. But a big production like the Mission: Impossible stunt — which involved strapping herself to the side of a plane as it took off, accelerating to 175 miles per hour and climbing 5,000 feet — can require a crew of up to 50, and the budget to match.
“We just keep raising the bar,” says Hurt, who spent three years at Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video before joining his longtime friend Kennell and Khare at Challenge Accepted.
We’re sitting around a conference table in Khare’s office, where a whiteboard on the wall records all the ways the team continues to challenge itself. Their latest hare-brained idea is a whimsical and wildly far-fetched plan to recreate the house from the Pixar movie Up and fly it across California using helium balloons.
But first, Khare has her sights on another daring stunt: She wants to tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon. If the challenge comes together — and it’s still a big if — the video would likely be released in summer 2027.
Hurt says he’s already emailing the Navajo Nation about the idea. And he has a circus ringmaster’s contact in his phone that should come in handy as he searches for a tightrope walker who can guide Khare through her training.
“You hear something like tightrope walking across the Grand Canyon and think, ‘Where do you even begin?’ This is the part of the ideation process that I think scares a lot of people — but that I have the most fun with,” says Khare.
Which isn’t to say Khare is fearless. “Challenge Accepted is me facing my fears over and over and over again,” she tells me. “I’m probably the most anxious daredevil in the world.”
The Business of Being Michelle Khare
The seeds of Challenge Accepted were sown in Shreveport, La., where Khare grew up watching action movies with her dad, an immigrant from India who used the films to brush up on his English. A natural athlete, she qualified for the Junior Olympics in fencing while in high school. Later, at Dartmouth, she joined the cycling team and went on to win the U23 nationals in a closed-circuit bike race known as criterium.
When she moved to Los Angeles for a full-time job at BuzzFeed after graduation, she also joined a professional women’s cycling team, but soon quit both — turning her focus instead to building her YouTube channel. She quickly gained traction with videos that saw her take on increasingly outlandish stunts, from eating the Victoria’s Secret model diet for a week to trying Chris Hemsworth’s Thor workout.
“Going into Challenge Accepted, I dreamed of the ability to reach more young women” and inspire them to be brave in life, she says. As views on her channel mounted, she began to realize, “No matter how good I got at cycling, I actually could impact a lot more people — and more young women — by being a jack of all trades rather than a master of one.”
Now, fans show up to cheer Khare on at competitions around the world, buy Challenge Accepted merch and pay $14.99 per month to join her fitness app. It’s largely thanks to them that Khare can fund the production of new videos. She also has relationships with brands like McDonald’s and says she regularly pitches potential sponsors on her upcoming slate of challenges.
On the day we meet, she tells me she’s not just gearing up for the Taekwondo Nationals; she’s also putting the finishing touches on a video about working in the ER (it drops a few days after our interview), prepping for an upcoming K-pop themed challenge, negotiating multiple deals and conducting one-on-one meetings with her team. “I wouldn’t be able to sit back if I was only an athlete or only a business owner,” she says.
When I ask how long Khare — or, more realistically, her body — can keep up with such a demanding schedule, she tells me, “I am going to keep making the show for as long as humanly possible.”
‘When I Am Hurting, Impact Is Made’
“Michelle is a really mentally and physically tough person,” says Kennell, who’s often filming when his wife reaches her highest highs and lowest lows. “The best stories that we have are often when Michelle is experiencing external or internal turmoil or pressure. As the director of the video, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is a great story. This is going to inspire somebody.’ But as the husband, I’m internally panicking and freaking out.”
But her vulnerability is arguably as powerful as her determination — Khare continues to put herself out there, trying new, increasingly outrageous stunts and knowing that her millions of fans might watch her fail. Appearing in public, she wears her signature fitted metallic jackets like armor, but in front of Challenge Accepted’s cameras she’s learned to drop her guard.
“Failure is painful to experience, but I learned very early on in Challenge Accepted that when I include those moments of failure, that is what everyone attaches to,” she says. “When I feel that way, I have to turn the personal part of myself off and the producer part of myself on. When I am hurting, this is when impact is made.”
Khare transformed one of her biggest onscreen failures into one of her most joyous triumphs. At the end of her 90-day Taekwondo black belt challenge, she was unable to break a brick with her hand, the final requirement. But she continued training, without the cameras — and six months later, on day 264, she broke the brick and earned her belt.
“She’s willing to go out there and do it, and she doesn’t give up,” her coach, Villa, says. “If I ask her to do 500 push-ups, she’ll do them. If I ask her to train for three hours, she’ll do it. You can’t teach work ethic, and you can’t teach that fighter mentality.”
It’s what has pushed Khare along the Emmy campaign trail too.
An Emmy nomination would help attract bigger brand deals and Hollywood-caliber talent. But it would also mean true recognition for what Challenge Accepted is — a meticulously produced docuseries that stands up against anything airing on Netflix or HBO. “It would be really meaningful to get that recognition not just from our fans on the platform but also recognition from our peers across the industry saying that yes… you have broken through,” says Hurt.
But the Emmys have been slow to recognize the increasing quality and diversity of digital-first programming — and YouTube’s breakthrough may still take time. Khare, unsurprisingly, is comfortable with the long odds. “Around here we like to speak into existence goals that seem impossible,” she says. “We really enjoy going after them and seeing what happens.”
