Thoughts on Channel Awesome

Maybe it's late for me to start talking about this, but this is how long it's taken me to absorb what's been going on and decide how I feel about it.

That subject is the controversy surrounding Channel Awesome right now. For anyone who doesn't know, Channel Awesome is an online review site that was founded roughly ten years ago under the name of That Guy With The Glasses. It featured video reviews of movies, video games, and other forms of popular media, and while it featured the work of numerous critics, its first and most famous one was Doug Walker, who played a character called the Nostalgia Critic. Walker and his brother Rob were the channel's founders while a man named Mike Michaud was its CEO.

The controversy is that several critics, artists, and employees who had left Channel Awesome for various reasons over the years recently released a Google document that details their experiences with the site. Released on April 2nd (perhaps so people wouldn't mistake it for an April Fool's joke) the 74-page document is called "Not So Awesome" and gives countless examples of how the people in charge of the site mistreated these former contributors. Practically everything under the sun is listed, including misogyny, sexual harassment, bullying, negligence on set, forcing people to sign waivers after getting injured, failure to use Indigogo earnings for their intended purpose, and even a claim that Channel Awesome knew of an alleged child groomer/rapist among its content producers for over a year before taking action. The release of this document subsequently led to an entire online movement known as "Change the Channel," which has led to much discussion among fans of Channel Awesome.

Here's a link to the full "Not So Awesome" document if you'd like to read it:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WZFkR__B3Mk9EYQglvislMUx9HWvWhOaBP820UBa4dA/preview#

Channel Awesome issued two written responses to this document. The first was a brief non-apology that literally said "We're sorry you felt that way." The second listed the document's most heinous accusations and gave somewhat questionable evidence against each one. This included the accusation of them knowing about the alleged child groomer/rapist for over a year, and the site's evidence against that was a screencap of two chat conversations from 2013 where the Walkers, Michaud, and HR Manager Holly Brown discussed what to do about this individual.

The purpose of this was to show that they fired him three weeks after hearing the allegations, although they show no documentation of exactly when they first learned of his behavior. What's more, despite attempting to white out the man's name in the screencaps, they did a poor enough job that viewers were still able to decipher the first letter, a "J," and figure out who had left the site around those dates. They eventually realized that it was a critic named Justin Carmical, known to fans as JewWario, who had been a beloved inspiration to many people and was deeply and widely mourned after his suicide in 2014.

Nearly all of the critics working for Channel Awesome, including Doug and Rob Walker apparently, have resigned since April 2nd, hundreds of thousands of viewers have unsubscribed, and the site is now effectively dead.

So what are my thoughts on all of this?

I discovered That Guy With The Glasses pretty much at the start of its run in 2008, when my college roommate showed me the first few Nostalgia Critic reviews. I became hooked and watched the show every week, along with a few others like The Spoony Experiment, Todd In The Shadows, and Renegade Cut. I'll admit that the Nostalgia Critic's work has been diminishing in quality for a while now, and I have yet to watch a lot of his more recent reviews, but he and his colleagues have been some of my greatest creative and analytical influences. To this day, I imagine their voices saying the words when I read certain parts of my blog in my head.

I think if this scandal had come out six years ago, before the site became Channel Awesome and Doug Walker changed up the format of his reviews, I would have been very upset. Today though, seeing this happen just has me feeling distant and disappointed. It's not a loss so much as a bitter awakening, and the only critic I've watched that those feelings are aimed at is Doug Walker. I don't think I'd ever heard of CEO Mike Michaud before this, and although he seems to be the main villain in this story, he doesn't have the same "fall from grace" stigma as Doug Walker.

As for Justin Carmical, I never watched any of his videos, not even after he died, and I'm glad I didn't. I've met quite enough people like him in my life, even if the number is very small, and it disgusts me like nothing else that such terrible human beings can trick so many into admiring them. I can't imagine what his widow, who knew nothing about this, or any of his victims is going through since his accidental outing, but I can only offer them my sympathies and hope that they're left in peace to recover from what's happened. I even offer my sympathies to the people he inspired, who now have to separate him from his uplifting words in order for those words to still have meaning.

I'm not clear on how much authority Doug Walker actually had at Channel Awesome since he wasn't the CEO, so I don't know how much to blame him for withholding the truth about Carmical. I also don't know how much more could've been done about Carmical at the time of his firing, since the only evidence back then was an allegation from someone who wished to remain anonymous. However, if that allegation was compelling enough for Channel Awesome to fire him, then it should've been compelling enough for them to alert the other websites that featured his reviews and especially the conventions that he attended. They didn't even announce that they fired him, let alone why. They just said that he left the site, and almost no one questioned the circumstances.

Several more grooming cases involving Carmical have apparently come to light in these past three weeks. Had Channel Awesome told anyone about his behavior when they first learned of it, they could've prevented a lot of those cases from occurring, but because the site was afraid of bad publicity, they kept that information to themselves. For that reason alone, I can't support Channel Awesome or Doug Walker in any of their future endeavors. Even if I feel the urge to watch an old Nostalgia Critic review on YouTube some day, I'll only watch a reposted version on someone else's channel. I'm not giving any more views to That Guy With The Glasses or Channel Awesome.

My final thoughts are these: like a lot of Nostalgia Critic fans, there was a time when I dreamed about becoming a video reviewer as well and maybe someday making it onto the Channel Awesome site. I never pursued that because of all the technical and copyright issues involved in using clips from movies in such reviews, so I took up blogging about movies instead. Now that these revelations about Channel Awesome have come out, I'm glad I never tried to pursue my original dream.

Channel Awesome made me glad that I didn't try. That's a sentiment that no one should ever have about anything, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels that way right now. Maybe a lot of aspiring reviewers will get over that feeling and become more determined to make their own videos in the future. Maybe I'll even decide to do it too. Until then though, I can only feel some hollow relief that I never ended up having a hand in this mess or a story to tell in the "Not So Awesome" document.

Goodbye Channel Awesome, and Goodbye Nostalgia Critic. I wish you well moving forward, but I think I can remember things for myself from now on.