I recently posted this sentence, and it's been bugging me:

"The dramatic outbursts and facial expressions are what make this show so awesome."

It sounds funny to me, because it sounds more right if it's written as

"The dramatic outbursts and facial expressions are what makes this show so awesome."

It "feels" right, but "dramatic outbursts and facial expressions" are two things, and so thinking-cap tells me the same rules as "They make this show so awesome" applies, and that it only sounded right because the part "What makes this show so awesome?" is the case in a standalone question.

So pretty much, what I can make of it is that "What" in a question is either singular, or a collective noun of all the possible answers, and hence the usage of "makes".

In my original sentence, the presence of "are" seems to suggest that "outbursts and expressions" are plural and require the plural form "make". However, the presence of "what" throws me off, thinking that they answer the "what" if the question was actually asked.

So dies the verb "make" follow "outbursts and expressions" or "what"?