Doug Walker (TGWTG, Nostalgia Critic, Bum Reviews, and other projects)

Is it a documentary or a one-sided gleeful hate video?

Considering how things went down, most docs on the situation end up becoming that anyhow.

And i don't blame anyone for feelingng that way, unlike CA's management.

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Apr 18th 2019 at 12:05:03 PM

I don't either, but if I watch something regarding what went down, I want a report which is as unbiased as possible.

It pretty much run downs on everything, with a few pointed remarks at Dougs more recent assholish behavior in the beginning, but thats par for course at this rate.

unbiased reports don't exist,your just going to have to accept that there will always be a little bias somewhere

There's the thing about unbiased reporting. Unbiased report isn't 'Both sides have a point'. It isn't 'Group A is super racist but... like, Group B is super angry about it so they're bad too' either. Unbiased reporting is 'Here are the facts. Group A is terrible. Group B has every reason to be mad'.

Edited by InkDagger on Apr 18th 2019 at 10:18:04 AM

The documentary is pretty fair and even-handed.

They do condemn the actions that the Walkers and Michaud took. But any fair and even-handed reading of the situation would. This whole scenario is not a tragic miscommunication that spiraled out of control; some pretty awful people did some pretty awful shit.

The guy who did the video really goes out of his way to point out he didn’t have an axe to grind, praising To Boldly Flee and noting that the film’s goals were met. It makes him ripping into Demo Reel as an unfunny knockoff of Be Kind Rewind all the sharper.

Edited by Beatman1 on Apr 18th 2019 at 2:09:38 PM

In fairness (what very little is warranted), there is a certain irony to be had in Demo Reel, a series about shamelessly ripping off other people's work, being itself a shameless ripoff of another person's work.

Hence me saying "as possible". Meaning, if it is just the facts and I can trust that all the facts are there, no matter who looks good and who looks bad due to them, then I might watch it. There were some videos in the wake of the whole scandal going down which were more about the "hehe how the mighty have fallen" variety, which I felt just muddied the waters unnecessary.

It's mostly just a full following of internet drama, with a few minor errors. But basically it's good if you weren't closely following the drama.

I'm curious: Does the documentary go into whether the "Change the Channel" scandal significantly impacted the revenue of Doug's videos, or in general into how profitable the Nostalgia Critic currently is?

Because for all talk about Doug's fall from grace or his general stagnation, it seems rather unclear to me whether his viewer base has at any point declined or whether it's just held steady. Particularly since even many people who expressed outrage over the scandal continue to loyally watch every video he puts out anyway.

I think I've only watched... maybe one video of his in the last eight months or so? And more out of morbid curiosity than anything. I don't like to clog up my You Tube recommends with trash.

But I too want to know if there was actually anything significant to his base that happened.

Edited by InkDagger on Apr 18th 2019 at 12:52:34 PM

You can see the stats regarding CA's views and subscribers count here. Generally speaking, while CA did have a significant dip in subscribers when the Not So Awesome document dropped, now they have even more subs than before CTC. (They've lost a few today, probably in wake of the documentary, but it's still nothing compared to last year.) As for the views, from my observations, the NC videos generally get about half a million views within the first week from the release. And it seems the show is still popular enough, given that the videos get sponsors, the crew still get invited to cons, and CA even bought a new studio recently.

Edited by Motyka5 on Apr 18th 2019 at 1:36:31 AM

I'm kind of disappointed (yet unsurprised) to see that. I suppose hoping for people to fail isn't a great look for anyone, but it's disappointing to see confirmed my initial suspicions that the scandal would have no lasting consequence for Channel Awesome.

That said, I honestly do wonder what the demographics of Doug's viewership are like, and how they've changed in the past years. I have a sneaking suspicion that a healthy portion, if not an outright majority, of his current regular viewers are teenagers who were children when Doug started out and when much of the drama played out. Most of those viewers probably got introduced to the Nostalgia Critic post-revival and would have no strong emotional reaction to the complaints lobbied at him or Michaud by ex-contributors.

Yeah, I've seen theories that the majority of Doug's fanbase are maybe not all teenagers but mostly people who know him from YT rather than TGWTG and therefore, they don't really know about his connections with the former producers.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that Doug is and always was the star attraction for Channel Awesome. Most of his viewership don't really care about the other contributors or only know them from the anniversary movies.

Also a not-insignificant number of Americans wholeheartedly believe in F*ck You, Got Mine as an economic philosophy and would therefore not be turned off in the slightest by CA's awful deeds. If anything, some people are probably rushing to give the Walkers and Michaud a pat on the back for casting off the "parasites leeching on the Nostalgia Critic's success".

Not to mention his fandom. Doug's famous enough to have a pedestal to roost on. This guarantees that many fans will go out of their way to make excuses for him so that they can continue thinking he's the coolest dude who ever walked the Earth. There is a certain threshold of popularity above which one can, as Trump once put it, shoot someone in the streets of New York on-camera and still never lose an ounce of popularity. Fame is self-sustaining.

I refuse to watch any of his stuff either before or since, but in the big picture, this was never going to affect him too heavily. When it comes to corporate misdeeds, the unfortunate fact is that crime does pay. In pretty heavy dividends, too.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 18th 2019 at 3:57:53 AM

They don't really touch on the revenue, but given how Doug has been on a non-changing, consistent schedule for a year since, I highly doubt it has affected it.

.... here's an idea. If they always wanted it to be about Doug and his friends only, why did they open up the site to other creators to begin with? If Michaud acted that way, why doesn't he just open up to Doug and say at the beginning of his contract, "Hey, we're only gonna focus on you"? If they did such a poor job paying them, why pay them at all? Yes, they could still appear in collabs once in a while, but don't damn make them seem like they're a family.

Edited by kyun on Apr 18th 2019 at 5:25:52 AM

Welp. Glad I don't watch Doug anymore. Fuck him, Rob, and CA to the deepest bowels of hell and fuck anyone who still supports or defends them. Utter blights upon this earth, the lot of them.

Edited by AyyItsMidnight on Apr 18th 2019 at 11:49:39 AM

I think because what Doug dreamed about didn't match the reality of actually being responsible for other people and their work.

Or, to put it differently: Having a business isn't easy, having a business with employees is even more difficult, and this weird "self employed but I set the rules for everyone else" set-up is made for abuse.

Basically, what it boils down to is that the other content creators signed on because they thought this was going to be a cooperative partnership of critics working together to uplift each other.

But what the Walkers and Michaud envisioned was more along the lines of "The Nostalgia Critic and his amazing friends". Doug first and foremost, plus an entourage of background characters to support him.

The worst part of all of this is.....

Well, the worst part is all the atrocities committed against various members of Team Awesome coupled with the rampant misogyny and unapologetic rape culture. Let's not detract from how terrible this shit is.

But next to the great amounts of human suffering, what also sucks about this is that what Channel Awesome seemed like it was trying to do and what many fans believed it was supposed to be was pretty f*cking cool. That kind of cooperative network of internet reviewers is a pretty awesome dynamic.

And it's probably going to be a good, long while before we ever see anything like it ever attempted again. Most of the people involved were burned too hard by Channel Awesome. I doubt anybody's in any hurry to try "Version 2.0, this time without the Walkers and Michaud". It really is the end of an era, albeit one that was secretly terrible for all the people involved.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 19th 2019 at 11:08:29 AM

There's reason they're known as Channel Awful

I have to say, one thing in particular that's odd is that I didn't even know Michaud existed until near the end of 2015 when I heard about Lupa's firing {I never really kept up with TGWTG and have never been a fan of her content, so I didn't hear about it when it actually happened}, let alone that Doug was stupid enough to sell the NC IP to him. All that time I thought it was just Doug and Rob running the site, so his existence and crucial involvement with the company's issues kinda came out of nowhere for me.

For what it's worth I'm not too hung up about it anymore. I can separate the work from the creator, so I still rewatch old, pre-reboot NC episodes when I'm in the mood {Albeit not watching them on any of CA's official uploads} and also cause I grew up with that era. The crossovers and especially the anniversary movies are hard to watch in light of what really happened behind the scenes though, I'll admit that. I'm just commenting because it's been a year since all that chaos was revealed and I figured I'd share a bit of my perspective.

Agreed with all these points. The video, while informative, is still Michael Moore levels of biased.

Even so, it's really disappointing what CA turned out to be. Until Doug Walker's balls arrive and/or Michaud causes another public fuck-up, it'll linger on for a while.

I'll still look back on the old NC episodes with fondness (and quote them time-to-time).

Edited by PSColdFire on Apr 19th 2019 at 12:11:16 PM

I kind of get the impression that Michaud's low profile was/is very much intentional. He's evidently not a showman and doesn't want to be perceived as the boss even when he clearly is.

Dumbledore: He has never wanted to occupy the throne himself. He prefers the back-seat; there is more room to spread out.

I have no confidence that Doug's balls will ever arrive, and I can't separate him as a person from his work as a performer. I already had mostly stopped watching his videos before the scandal. However, the scandal and Doug's silence on it and his continued association with Michaud very much destroyed whatever lingering respect I had for him.