Web Series Wednesday – Sibs

By: Kathryn Trammell

By:  Broster Productions

What? Sibs (@SibsWebSeries)

Who? Created by and starring Kimberly Niccole and Bryan Scamman.

Why Should I Watch?

The humor shared between siblings and other people with whom we’ve grown up is special.  It has history.  It remembers and builds off every hug and every fight, family grievances and joys, inside jokes and secrets.  It’s a reflection on the past best revisited through side-splitting laughter and jaw-dropping jokes. But it’s also the kind of humor that, regardless of how far apart your adulthood moves you from each other, persists every time we think to share something we know our siblings would find hysterical (similar to ourselves), which is exactly why I shared with my two sisters the web series Sibs right after I finished watching it.  Not only is the series honest-to-goodness, laugh out loud comedic gold, it is also extremely representative of a specific bond laughter creates between the closest of siblings/friends.

Perhaps this is because the two creators of Sibs, Kimberly Niccole and Bryan Scamman, are brother and sister in real life allowing the chemistry already inherent in their relationship to permeate their performances.  And when it’s sibling rivalry that is meant to be the butt of the show’s jokes, who better to write and perform that rivalry than two siblings who have experienced it in real life?  Who better to reference the immature behaviors we carry with us from childhood into adulthood than two people who witnessed each other’s immaturities first hand as they grew up?  Sibs gives us this exact understanding of a sibling relationship and while we know it’s a performance – an exaggeration of real life played for laughs – we also know the performance is genuine in the same way that Lilly Singh performing humorous versions of her parents or Mamrie Hart performing an exaggerated version of herself in her YDAD videos.  For these YouTubers, Youtube is used not just as a platform for telling a story. I’s a portfolio to showcase both one’s comic and writing talents, and Kimberly and Bryan have done just that with Sibs.

This showcase is only strengthened by their choice to shoot the entire series with an iPhone 7 and to edit each episode using only iMovie.  This allows the show’s creators to tap into millennial and social media-centric storytelling in which the cameras of their phones become central to each episode’s plot as the mode through which they communicate to us, their audience of maybe six or seven family members who subscribe to their Facebook Live streams or Instagram feeds.  Shot from stationary dashboard mounts, selfie sticks and their own hands, each video is edited for the same effect that made Vine an art form and multiple daily vloggers “InstaFamous.”  As with Vines and vlogs, quick edits and quick wit are responsible for the series laugh out loud moments, but as I’ve said before it is the relatability of Bryan and Kimberly’s relationship/jokes that will make you want to share the laughs Sibs gives you with the people who know you best.

Where Can I Watch?  The series first three episodes can be viewed on its YouTube channel and Facebook page.  New episodes release every Sunday at 8:00 PT (5:00 ET).