Jordan Matter rewrites Salish and Nidal's first meeting
A scripted high-school story marks a change from giant games and secret rooms, alongside an unusually large subscriber jump.
Why this story? The channel is adding 100,035 subscribers a day, 26 times a normal day (3,873).
The giant board game has made way for a high-school what-if. Jordan Matter's "What If They Never Met?" imagines Salish and Nidal meeting later in life, turning familiar faces from the channel into the leads of a scripted show.
The experiment arrives alongside a jump of about 100,000 subscribers in a day, compared with the channel's usual few thousand. The new show has already passed five million views, though the subscriber increase belongs to the channel as a whole, not necessarily to this upload alone.
This is fiction, not an account of Salish and Nidal's actual first meeting. They play versions of themselves in a cast that also includes teachers, a counselor and classmates. Rohan Thompson is credited as head writer and director, with Matter serving as a writer and second director.
Matter names two distinct inspirations: Dhar Mann for the show's style, and the movie Sliding Doors for its concept. He says the team wrote and filmed it in five days, and asks viewers whether they want more scripted shows.
That is a different proposition from the channel's preceding adventures: a giant board game with borrowed Ben Azelart tiles and a secret mall built inside a house. Here, the central invention isn't something Salish can walk into. It's a different beginning for two people viewers already know.
Published on Trari
Where next?
- Channel
- Jordan Matter
- Subscribers
- 38,300,000 ▲ 100,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 66,036,750
- Channel views, pace per day
- 13,676,995 (on a normal day: 10,041,425)
The numbers
The subscriber increase is far above Jordan Matter's usual daily pace. Channel-wide views are also higher than usual.
💡 Test your knowledge
Which movie does Jordan Matter credit as a concept inspiration for the scripted show?
The video's description names Sliding Doors as an inspiration for its alternate-meeting premise.



