Got ‘The Ick’? Meet the producers turning dating disasters into short film
20 March 2026 | Molly Lipson and Julia Black Jackson
“When he eats.”
“When he loves to ski.”
“When he has art.”
Seemingly innocuous, these statements in fact represent the height of reprehensibility, the pinnacle of disgust. They are all icks.
Specifically, they are icks submitted by members of the public and turned into micro-short films by The Ick, a vertical format from American Picture Company. An ‘ick’ is, “something someone does that is an instant turn-off for you, making you instantly hate the idea of being with them romantically.” One might get the ick, have the ick, catch the ick, or give the ick. It’s a versatile and agile addition to the English language, usually uttered with a satisfyingly onomatopoeic crunch.
The word made it to popular vernacular only in recent years, and is most often used by women to describe things men do on dates or during the course of dating that turns them off completely. As evidenced by the examples here, sometimes they can be as simple as acts of survival, like eating, or as nondescript as ‘having art’.
A 2023 poll of 2,000 people found that nearly half have ended a relationship because of an ick, and 56% have ghosted someone completely. The creators of The Ick, which currently has nearly 600,000 followers on Instagram, have clearly been paying attention. Launched in April 2025, a new episode of the vertical series releases weekly, high-production short scenes based on ick submissions from the public.
The company behind it, American Picture Company, was founded by Ari Cagan and John Hammond, and The Ick itself is the brainchild of Alex Berry. Here, Short Stuff sits down with the trio to discuss the success of the show and to find out how three cis-het men created a show from an idea that originated from women’s experiences.
John and Ari, centre back; Alex front right
Short Stuff: Can you share a bit about your creative backgrounds before The Ick and how you came together to make this show?
Alex Berry: I started out as a traditional producer on CSI: Vegas and then I met Ari at a bar, as one does, and for a year he and I were kind of ping ponging ideas back and forth to each other. He is the baron of short form, he really believes in this medium, but I was much more hesitant because I've never done it. It was very serendipitous that John and Ari were starting a company at that time that specialised in narrative short form. Eventually this idea came to me because I actually gave my girlfriend the ick and I thought, wow, that's such a funny vignette. I told Ari about it, and he was smart enough to say, I think that's a good idea.
SS: What was the ick?
AB: I came home from a run, I’m about to get in the shower so I start getting undressed and I'm trying to take off my sweaty hoodie, but I kind of get stuck in the neck. I’m fully naked from the waist down and I’m thrashing around and eventually, as I peel it off, my girlfriend looks at me and she’s like: “ick.”
SS: And is she still your girlfriend?
AB: Miraculously, yeah.
SS: So an ick is not always a deal breaker! John, what about you, what’s your connection to The Ick?
John Hammond: I started an illegal comedy club in my basement in Brooklyn when I first got out of college, and ended up meeting a lot of comedians doing that. I started directing and producing sketches for them that mainly lived on the internet in the early video days Twitter and Instagram. That led into commercial work, then I started an agency and a production company that was doing more traditional media, commercials and movies. I was working with Kareem Rama, who does Subway Takes, and at the time he was working with Ari on Keep the Metre Running. I thought it was really cool and I wanted to meet Ari so Kareem introduced us and and we got to talking about short form and the power of the internet to get things out there and build an audience. Eventually we started a company together and then I met Alex and everything’s been great from there!
Ari Cagan: I supposed it’s my turn now…I started out by making a bunch of YouTube videos, and then I got hired to make this podcast called Things You Don't Need to Know. I quit that and joined a company called Mad Realities and one of the series we made was Keep the Meter Running as John mentioned. I worked on a few other series as well, but in the end John and I knew that there was definitely opportunity for things that were a little bit more, shall we say, polished.
SS: We definitely share the same passion for short form. What’s your reason for that, why do you believe so much in shorts?
AC: There's a great Blaise Pascal quote that’s been co-opted by Mark Twain: “I didn't have time to write a short story so I wrote a long one instead.” I think that writing a short story is incredibly difficult, and is actually much more impactful, especially with these modern platforms, because you can get them out to so many people. Sometimes when people see a short film, they think of it as high art, which is often quite inaccessible. This really new, interesting time of entertaining short form is fascinating. I also really like that, because short form is, obviously, short, it can really easily lodge in people's heads. Great movies are generally three really good scenes and then a lot of stuff that makes those scenes meaningful. If you can pull that off in one minute, you create something that's incredibly impactful, well beyond its actual runtime. It's also a lot cheaper to make things that are short and look really good.
SS: Agreed.
AB: I would say that my love short form came through Ari. I don’t want to get sappy here, but both these guys opened my eyes to the power of short form.
AC: Aw, that’s nice Alex.
AB: It’s true, I’m not bullshitting!
JH: I’d also say, coming from a comedy background, a lot of short form that we watched, like SNL, we thought was amazing. Those things often exist in short snippets that leave you wanting more, so in that way it's a very natural progression of taste and format, just in a new place, a new platform.
SS: How many episodes do you shoot at once?
AC: When we originally started making the show, we shot 13 episodes up front, which was a mistake because we really didn't know what the secret sauce was going to be. Luckily we figured that out pretty quickly, and then we had about eight duds that we knew weren't going to work. But our 14th episode got about 5 million views. I think if we were to do this again, we'd only shoot four to launch the show, and then we’d do another shoot day. At the moment we do one shoot day a month and an additional day if we have a brand partner or something. We try to have a good backlog of episodes – right now I think we're 20 episodes ahead, and that's the only way that we've been able to do this so consistently.
AB: We try to always post at noon on Sunday and there have been a lot of times when it's 11:35 and I'm in the edit and we're all on FaceTime, we're yelling, and we're like, we gotta post it! I've lost years over Instagram reels, which is kind of funny to think about.
AC: We have a joke on set: all this for Instagram.
SS: Are you involved in the shoot or do you have a whole crew now to do it for you?
AB: Until two months ago, it was one of us holding the boom pole, we’re doing the fake clap…at times it felt like a student film. You can make something look pretty good with just two or three people. My favourite compliment is people asking, how big is your set?
AC: The funniest thing is when predominant influencers come to set – they often star in an episode – they're like, “Oh my god, this is like a real movie!” It’s not, obviously, but to them it seems it. We have some really nice gear, and we have some very talented people working on the show, but we try to keep it as light as possible, and that allows us to shoot four to five episodes a day.
SS: Are the brand partnerships the primary source of funding for the show?
AC: We raised a little bit of money to start the company, and now with The Ick we’ve broken even – well, it’s technically still in the red because we made a Christmas movie, but had we not done that, we'd be break-even. It's very quickly catching up, and the brand partner money is pretty good. We obviously don't want to do too many of them, because we do want the show to have a really good, authentic base, which it does, but we also need to keep making it, and it's not a cheap show to make. We try to be really particular about who our partners are as well, and make sure to do things that will integrate very seamlessly.
SS: How many people have submitted stories to The Ick so far?
AC: We’ve had 15,000 story submissions…
SS: Wow.
AC: Yeah. When we did the Christmas movie last year, we wanted to make sure everyone who shared a story got the movie for free first, and we want to try and do that with all things going forward for anyone who contributes to the show.
SS: The ick as a concept seems to have come from women’s dating disasters with men – you are three men, how does that play into the show?
AB: 85-90% of our audience and our submissions are from women, so we make episodes based on the content we receive. But you're totally right – it's very funny when a lot of my female friends find out that I'm behind this. They're like, why are three, white, straight guys creating The Ick? Like, fuck off, this is our thing, you guys have just completely stolen it! But I think the ick is a universally more female thing, and that’s what we’re seeing in the submissions we get.
JH: In the episodes it’s usualy the men who are the butt of the joke. They do something that's so stupid or so oh my god, how could they do that? it's almost laughable. And I think as men, we're able to look at those as almost a version of ourselves and be like, okay, that's ridiculous. We can find the humour in these situations, sort of like holding the mirror up to ourselves. Also, we have plenty of women working on the show, helping us out, giving their input.
SS: Have you been taking notes from the show then?
JH: I think I learned a lot from the show.
AB: How? Like what?
JH: Well it makes me think about my own actions more in front of my girlfriend – like, what am I doing in front of her, how am I behaving in front of her? It just makes you think about decorum around other people.
AB: My favourite moment of this whole show has been the no-show socks episode, because Ari was hell bent on being like, that is not an ick.
AC: Yeah, turns out I was really wrong. We have a friend who's definitely an inspiration for some of these episodes, and he's seen them and been like, man, I gotta stop doing that.
SS: When was the last time you got the ick and what was it?
AC: I actually wrote the cherry episode. I went on this date, I picked her up and asked her how her day was going and she was like, “Good. I just tried a cherry for the first time today.” And for the rest of the night. I was like, what else has she not tried? And as a food-lover I was like, this isn't gonna work out.
AB: I once – and this is really harsh – I was once on a lunch date with a girl, and the way she shook her salad…I was like, like, I can't unsee that.
JH: I mean, I’ve experienced personality red flags but the ick from shaking a salad?! Wow, that’s…
AB: You're just a good guy at heart.
JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m sure I’ve given the ick plenty of times!
AB: I’m trying to think if I’ve ever given someone the ick…It’s a great question because you’re like, no of course I could never. But there must be girls out there who didn’t like the way I shook a salad…
SS: Has anyone ever told you that you’ve given them the ick?
JH: …Never to my face, but I’ve definitely done it. It’s pervasive, it’s everywhere!
SS: Wouldn’t it be amazing if you got a submission from someone and it was actually about you.
AB: That’s honestly my dream.
AC: Yes, me too! It would really come full circle. I once went on a date with someone who didn’t believe in d/Deaf people.
SS: ….what?
AC: Yeah. That was more than an ick.