Kareem Rahma, the artist who failed several times before creating ‘SubwayTakes,’ the first social media talk show nominated for an Emmy

Before social media, actors and musicians would make the rounds on television to promote their latest projects. These days, all it takes is a few scrolls through TikTok or Instagram to find them appearing on one of the many shows produced for social platforms.

Entertainment has changed: talk shows are now faster, more creative and designed for vertical screens. Kareem Rahma’s SubwayTakes asks celebrities to share their take, be it an unpopular opinion or a deeply personal theory. For example, Javier Bardem declared during his appearance on the show: “Hard rock and metal music are the best genre of music of them all, with the best fans and the best audience.”

Filmed on the New York subway, SubwayTakes has amassed 750 million views across roughly 760 episodes since its launch in 2023. The program has now made history by becoming the first social media show to earn an Emmy nomination in the category of Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama or Variety Series.

“So, what’s your take?” is the question that opens the talk show. Guests first answer with a single sentence and, before they can explain their reasoning, host Kareem Rahma, dressed in a blazer and sunglasses, has to decide if he either “100% agree” or “100% disagree” with said take.

The only time he declined to choose was when Zohran Mamdani declared, “I should be mayor,” during an interview recorded before he went on to win New York City’s mayoral election. “What are you going to do about the price of matcha lattes?” Rahma asked as he weighed Mamdani’s claim that he should be mayor. Mamdani replied: “100% not sure.”

The episode drew nearly seven million views on TikTok, where the show’s account has 1.5 million followers. It has another 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube and 2.3 million followers on Instagram.

Kareem Rahma is a 40-year-old journalist, comedian, actor and content creator. Born in Cairo, he grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis before moving to New York at age 26. There, he worked in marketing for Vice and The New York Times. But at 33, he quit his job to become a comedian and failed. He then tried to launch a podcast company and failed again.

Next, he invested his savings in professional camera equipment and created his first social media show, Keep the Meter Running. The concept was simple: he would hop into a taxi, let the meter run and chat with the driver while being taken to the driver’s favorite spots around New York. It proved very costly and failed as well.

With little money left, he came up with the idea of filming on the subway. It would cost only the price of a fare, and the setting would provide both an audience and potential guests. Bingo. “I bought all of that on a credit card. I said, ‘It’s zero interest for a year. If it doesn’t work out, I can always sell this stuff,’” he said last May in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

The show’s format is remarkably simple, which may be part of the reason for its success. The episodes are short, there is no scripted conversation, and Rahma never knows what a guest is going to say. There are no rehearsals. He simply gets on the subway and his crew starts filming.

“Sometimes we have to wait for seats to open up. Sometimes there’s a guy sleeping in the corner and I don’t want to disturb him. Sometimes we can’t sit down because it’s too packed, and sometimes the train’s delayed. We don’t get special treatment,” Rahma explained in the interview. In addition to the camera crew, the production includes a bodyguard, mainly to protect its more famous guests.

Actress Olivia Wilde was the first celebrity on the show. Her hot take: “Good singers shouldn’t do karaoke.”

Actor Austin Butler’s take was: “Embarrassment is an underexplored emotion.” “This idea of embarrassment being the thing that often keeps us from trying new things or from expressing ourselves, or the fear of embarrassment, the fear of being judged socially,” he said during his appearance on SubwayTakes.

Rosalía offered two takes: “Listening to music low volume, it gives you bad luck” and “We weren’t made to see ourselves this much and this easily.” “There are no perfect mirrors in nature,” she said, expanding on the latter idea.

Matt Damon argued that “water is underrated,” a fitting choice given that the Odyssey star co-founded a nonprofit organization in 2009 focused on addressing the global clean-water crisis.

But Rahma has yet to interview his dream celebrity: My dream guest would be Ben Affleck, living. I think he’s the most underrated actor, writer, producer, and director of all time,” he told Deadline in August.

“I call it the most sophisticated show about the stupidest topics … it should be fun, yet sophisticated. I don’t want to be a journalist. I want to be an entertainer. I just want to entertain. That’s my only goal in life: to entertain,” Rahma said in a recent interview with Variety.

Speaking about the Emmy nomination, he added: “That an original, independent show built online through YouTube, without a traditional streamer, is being recognized alongside television’s best is a milestone for the entire creator community — one we hope opens the door even wider in the years to come.”

On September 15, SubwayTakes will compete against Netflix’s Bad Thoughts and Colbert Before Air, the digital series tied to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

“I submitted for zero Webbys this year and the year before; I’m done with Webbys,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, referring to the honors often dubbed the “Oscars of the internet.”

“I’m in the entertainment industry. I’m not a creator, I’m not an influencer, I’m an entertainer. I’m a creator of a show, I’m a producer of a show, I’m a writer of a show, I’m a talent of a show,” he added.

And he’s not wrong. Despite regularly featuring A-list guests, Rahma has become something of a celebrity himself, at least on the New York subway.

“I actually put on the sunglasses as a disguise. Originally, I was like, ‘Oh, if I wear these sunglasses, I can be a civilian when I feel like it.’ But I think the hair gives it away, and maybe the voice. I have flat feet, and I walk kind of weird. [...] But people definitely know who I am on the subway, and honestly, I don’t mind,” he told Deadline.

“YouTube is TV as far as I’m concerned,” he also reflected in his conversation with Variety. “Why the show has resonated so much is that it feels real. Because it is real. We don’t block anything, people walk through all the time. People chime in. People talk to us while we’re shooting. It’s shot in front of a live audience. Sometimes that audience is going to work. Sometimes the audience is picking up their kids from school, but they’re watching.”

He continued: “In a landscape and an entertainment landscape where everything feels kind of fake or high gloss, this is super real, yet still high production value. We still use professional cinema cameras, professional sound equipment, and have a professional process when it comes to booking, post-production, pre-production, all of that stuff.”

Rahma also sees value in having his show live on social media because it is accessible to everyone, including his family in Egypt. “They don’t have HBO or Hulu or Peacock,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

“Everything that TV does, I’m going to do. I’m just going to do it in a new and interesting way,” said the man who may be the internet’s answer to Jimmy Fallon, James Corden or Jimmy Kimmel.

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