I liked the show until my coworker and I did some research and literally the only thing that happened irl was the letters. No weird neighbors, no secret tunnels or break ins. So if they're going to make up that much stuff why not make up an ending
that’s what i’ve been saying! they took such creative liberties with the story itself but then decided to maintain an ambiguous, incomplete conclusion? it’s such a disappointment.
@@jbracq2008 you’re boring as hell. Anything can be interesting with good direction. Queens Gambit is literally chess matches. CHESS. But it’s absolutely captivating by the direction.
this bugged me so much lol. in a show about being watched it’s kinda important to have characters close the damn blinds and not have sheer curtains. it’s the least anyone would do if they knew they were being watched.
@@Gchildwarrior Or just any plain curtain, or blind… Hell I would’ve been at least a bit more satisfied even if the curtains were sheer. But they just leave the damn windows with nothing. Blows my mind, one of my biggest pet peeves on horror movies and TV series. lol
Can we also talk about how Ryan Murphy insists on including 700 plot lines in every single one of his shows??? Like this one had cheating, p****philia, blood cult, racism, underage dating, FERRET DEATH, and pottery
That's why I gave up AHS. Too many plot threads and his insistence that the sleaze factor is upped to 11. Why he needed to do it for a simple scary story about an unknown letter writer is beyond me. Sometimes less is more.
@@bree9272 lmao he even managed to do it in the dahmer show. I’m from milwaukee so maybe I’m more biased but the whole romance arc with the deaf person never happened it was an unnecessary story line to make us sympathize more with a real serial killer
i would say the craziest thing about the watcher (and i'm saying this as a ceramic artist) is that the wife was able to end up support her family selling pots in new york city galleries
Oh my goodness! I had the same thought. (I’m also a ceramic artist) it is insane that she just fully supported the family on selling her mediocre pots. Also, who has a ceramics studio in the attic? Almost everything for ceramics is heavy and would be a major pain to carry up and down 3 flights of stairs. Plus you need access to water.
@@learning2live_brokeninchro157 YES!! plus where is her kiln? the most logical place for the studio would be the basement not an attic! ... which could have been a great plot point (people messing with her pots/etc)
The thing that made it such a hard watch for me is that everyone in the family (save for the son, who's barely in it) is SO utterly undeserving of sympathy. How am I supposed to care about these characters when they all react to everything like they don't know what a consequence is??
The moment you said that the mother should have been pregnant, I imagined a scene where the Watcher sends a "congratulations" note with the positive test enclosed. Legitimately would be horrifying.
It's a legitimate congratulations note. Or make it worse, they wait and the watcher knows the gender of the baby and sends a pink/blue card and possibly has a copy of the ultra sound photo that they send along... Which the family realizes they still have all their copies they didn't quite send to family yet. They're all there. So how'd they manage to get a copy? Who do they know in town? If you're gonna go with escalating this for fictional methods, go all out.
@Grant Understanble but the direct families have openly stated how uncomfortable they are with the documentary and how much mental anguish they have to go through over and over again because of people turning these terrible situations into a source of entertainment. There is nothing wrong with true crime but when you are activity hurting the victims/victims families it then becomes a serious issue.
@Grant if the WW2 movie is going to have characters based on real people then, yeah it would probably be a good idea to get their family’s permission. However, a lot of WW2 movies just use fictional characters so I don’t see that being an issue
@Grant the families are alive and seeing their missing/horrifically murdered family members being profited off of without you knowing or being asked is terrible. How would you like if your sister/daughter/son was horrifically assaulted and murdered then someone made a tv series or documentary all about the killer who killed them and had someone act as your family member or show the crime scene photos without asking you first if it was ok. It’s traumatizing for families. Especially with any sort of narrative. Your child was murdered but someone made a documentary talked about how the killer was innocent or focuses on how the killer murdered your family member? Have some empathy for families, these aren’t fictional characters. They’re real people who have families who are still alive!!!!
Honestly I think all of the neighbors acting suspicious could've worked if they had started out normal then slowly amped up. Like as they received more letters without answers maybe they could have started noticing things about the neighbors that might just be a little strange, but because they were getting more and more desperate for answers they would start to see small things as proof of guilt. I think it could've given the show some sense of growing paranoia and suspense instead of trying to start everything off at 100.
And you, good friend, have just proven you are a better writer and have a better understanding of the basic building blocks of storytelling than the writers of this show's script.
This is probably how it should have been done. In my understanding of the real-life story, none of the neighbors (other than the Langstons) acted suspicious; they were simply suspects by proxy. So the show could have framed the "suspicious" neighbors as the paranoia of the family rather than how the neighbors actually were.
@@j.g.9045 I believe the issue in the real life story was that when the family was trying to sell the house and solve the problem, the neighborhood council unanimously voted against their plans to tear down the house and split the land to sell to a developer (so as to avoid the very public murder-stigma). Even worse, they allowed a different neighbor to do the exact same thing. So there is a reason to believe there was unexplained animus towards the family.
I got to be honest, I LOVED THE SERIE! I fell sleep in minutes whenever I put it, and it’s sooo slow it actually helped me sleep more than the usual. 10/10
I watched it in 102° F fever , and it made me bare with the discomfort of going through the fever pains, i wouldn't be able to watch it till the end if i hadn't had that fever.
@@goddammitalana look older, maybe, but at the end of the day they just wanna feel pretty. For me, sure I can do without it, but makeup is just an extra step of pampering that helps me feel I’m putting my best foot forward at the start of the day
@@goddammitalana How do you know a lot teen girls are trying to look older and thirst trap? Speaking as a former teen girl who wore makeup I liked wearing it for me. Idk, your comment is alarming in a way that is hard for me to explain. Maybe it's the assuming what their goal is with wearing makeup.
I didn't even make it past the point where they purchased the house. Their wardrobes kept making me think of the "sad beige clothes for sad beige kids" thing and I couldn't take it seriously.
the mom straight up always wore beige or cream colours, i kept watching and being like... surely she owns something in A Colour at least but no. the only time we see her in something other than beige is in the last episode when she is getting ready to go out in a sexy black dress and it basically signals her pulling away from her husband and entering her villain era or something. by the way her pottery was so boring and beige too!!! and she is supposed to be a prestigious Artiste? ok
I got the feeling that a lot of things in this show were meant to be artistic or metaphorical but the guy whose idea this was wasn't allowed to actually get it into the story
Yeah it’s a shame I feel like they just buy the rights and push it out quickly Cus they seem to value quantity over quality so rather than making something high quality they just push out numerous mediocre tv series and films with the same writing flaws
@@DavidKen878 yeah it's weird how people don't understand this That said, channels" have arcing purchase themes. I'd sum for some "is it A24?" In any situations
@@magickaldust1213 It was the “An Ode to a House“ lesson from a character that was kinda confirmed to be The Watcher for a short time (Roger Kaplan. In his past he was a teacher and his town-famous lesson was basically writing a poetic love letter to another house.
Yeah it was so weird. And sending it to the address! I could understand it as just a piece of creative writing for school only but he was insisting that they send it. Even if it's the nicest letter in the world, I can't imagine being happy to receive that letter. It is creepy to think of someone looking at and thinking about your house so much. So much of this story revolves around people being obsessed with houses for their own sake in a way I just don't think all that many people actually are. Historical societies who want to preserve old houses, sure I'll give them that, but I bet most people who love a house love it because they had loved ones who lived there once and lots of good memories there. Most poeple couldn't tell you much about a house they know no one in beyond 'I like going past that house, it's pretty'. And yet we're meant to buy that this is so many students' much remembered favourite lesson? It was all so fucking implausable.
@@sadem1045 I think it was when the dad of the main family (who were getting stalked obv) accused his daughter's black boyfriend of grooming her + being the watcher
Its when the daughter got mad that the dad for SUSpecting her boyfriend of being a stalker so she creates a tiktok and claims that her parents are racist and her dad nearly loses his job. And then later she says sorry to her mum and they just hug it out. Im not making this shit up its that bad
The writers take it totally for granted that Dean's not racist, they push it so hard that everyone who knows Dean knows he's not racist. But how do they know that? It's out of nowhere. What about his character makes everyone believe that? It's all tell and no show.
I dunno if it's a like "oh he's a creep" or that most of his work is in the horror or horror-adjacent genres-American Horror Story, Ratched, American Crime Story, Dahmer, etc. and he WANTS his audience to feel uncomfortable about the daughter and knows that that's an easy way to do (also hes a gay man, so itd be weird to me if it was because it was something HE wanted to see-like why feet were a thing on iCarly or something)
@@FIRING_BLIND regardless of sexuality, Ryan Murphy is still capable of sexualizing young women/girls and using them as props, ie. using their sexualization as a plot device. Anyone is capable if they don’t respect that group.
@@FIRING_BLIND I certainly think his obsession with teens having sex is creepy- gay or not he does it for EVERY show even if it adds absolutely nothing for the story. It feels like he’s one of those “oh look at me I’m so edgy!!1!” people, but his “edge” is just shock humour that barely anyone but him finds funny. Kind of feels like Shame Dawson in a way. This is coming from someone who is a huge fan of American Horror story/ Glee/ Scream queens.
I do agree that nearly all of Ryan Murphy's shows have a profound and at times seemingly gratuitous emphasis on sex but I do think that's in part due to the close ties the horror genre has with sex, particularly sex between teenagers (like, think of all the old slasher films where a couple is making out and then they get butchered by the villain). Historically there was this idea that teens having sex = bad = deserving of horrible things, which is why the "virgin" character was usually the victor at the end of a slasher movie. In modern horror, a lot of creators try to subvert this idea because it's old-fashioned bs. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most famous examples of that but I think to some degree Ryan Murphy attempts it too. I realise I'm probably giving him way too much credit and it's possible that he just wants as much sex and violence in his shows as possible purely for shock factor, but it's something to think about 🤷♀️
@@nineteenfortyeight I decided to look up the actual filming location and it was built in 2016. Not that it matters too much, but they didn’t even TRY to make it not look like a McMansion lol
@Iris ik r?? I live (sorta) near where the original incident occurred. And my town in particular has a combination of actual historical homes and recently built ugly McMansions, and almost nothing in between. So I could NOT take it seriously AT ALL when they kept being like “this house is so old and beautiful 😊” like it drove me CRAZY.
See the thing about the teenage girl, for me i was a bit disgusted at the sexism. I mean is it still so bad we have to have a possessive dad screaming at his daughter and no one says anything? Thats the thing that irks me a bit. If he had a teen son i doubt he would even care.
I hated that. I assume they were trying to connect it to this case of the man who killed his whole family but his behaviour was so inappropriate and unlikable. I kept waiting for his wife to sit him down and be like hey fucking stop this it's very weird and creepy of you. I honestly thought they were setting up for him doing something horrible to her at times, but then it stopped going down that path and no one really reacts to his behaviour like it's bad, so maybe the show thinks it isn't???
Yeah I think there was supposed to be a link between him and John list who basically acted the same way, to show how he was slowly becoming just like him
The entire cast of characters seemed like they were written by AI or something. The entire time I was watching, all I could think was, "NO ONE acts like this in real life! Why is everyone so psycho?" It just felt so alien and inorganic.
This show could have been an incredible atmospheric slow burn horror about a family devolving into paranoia. Unfortunately Ryan Murphy got his sleazeball hands on it.
When I started watching it I thought "why is everyone in this mental? No-one behaves normally!" and then began thinking that it was an hallucination the dad was having
I thought they were trying to portray some kind of subtle supernatural effect of the house that than snowballed via human interactions for a few episodes! Once I realized it probably wasn't that or anything that actually would hang together, I looked it up and discovered I was correct. :P
the storyline about the teenage daughter and the security guy. why? the whole time they were on screen i kept asking why?! maybe im silly but there was no real reason to include that storyline in the series. esp the way they did it disturbed me. they made the only Black male character look creepy, only humanizing him (showing his mom and him connecting for like two seconds and she never reappears) when he became “useful” to the dad when he had the security video footage (which also didn’t make sense cuz why wouldn’t the dad have access to the recordings in his own house??). and then the many shots of the teenage girl being in a bikini and bra and undressing - there’s ways to show that without lingering and zooming in on her chest/stomach/thigh areas. i literally had to look away cuz it felt so weird looking at her body from the guy’s pov. not only gross but insulting that they thought we as viewers wouldn’t understand he’s attracted to her without looking at her thru his eyes??
It completely slipped my mind that they don't have access to their own recordings. Also, couldn't the dad sue since the security guy installed a camera in their bedroom without their knowledge? I don't know how installing that type of system works but wouldn't they've signed something acknowledging what cameras have been installed and where? Assuming that they read it (which giving these people's IQ level, I doubt it). If they wanted to have the security guy as a suspect, they didn't have to include him and the teenage daughter subplot. HE'S THE GUY THAT INSTALLED THE SECURITY CAMERAS AND HAS ACCESS TO THEM! That's enough to make anyone look at him twice.
@@MsVampirestories exactly! the dad really didn’t bother to go check his recordings of the footage to see who the hell this woman was coming in his room at night? or he didn’t have access to them? then why did they have the camera system installed in the first place. this series has so many problems with the plot and characters. it’s ridiculous. this subplot alone has so many issues they would’ve been better leaving it out all together. a few other things that really bothered me about it was 1) they all kept calling her a 17yo girl when all they saw was her creeping in the room and wearing pigtails, pray tell how would they know shes 17 or even underage from that small amount of grainy ass footage?! & 2) the way the mom (nora? i don’t care to double check lol) saw that sketchy footage and, like Swell said, didn’t question why there’s a camera in the room and immediately just believes it and turns on her husband? like she really had no thoughts beyond “girl/woman in room w knocked out husband filmed on a creepy bedroom spy camera while we have an ongoing Watcher problem = husband cheating for sure” it’s not even a lack of attention to details, the whole story of this series just don’t work
Ryan Murphy is my enemy version of a parasocial relationship. I didn’t know he made this, I hadn’t heard of it at all actually, but the second you mentioned his name I had such a reaction of overwhelming anger.
As soon as I saw Ryan Murphy was involved I avoided this show like the plague. Not surprised-given the real facts and his role-that it turned into a dumpster fire
They repeatedly allude to this being a sudden thing, and even Dean himself asks Andrew (I think, maybe someone else), the man who lived in the house with his cellist wife who took her own life, whether he'd always had old-fashioned attitudes or only when he moved into the house. Andrew gives Dean no answer. They half-arsed some "This house makes me a stereotypical old-fashioned guy" subplot.
I agree that aging the kids up as much as they did totally changed the dynamic of the story and the letters. They totally could have had twins or one young child plus a pregnant mom, but a weirdo talking to your teenagers is very different than a weirdo talking to your 3-year-old.
i think there was a way to leave the story unresolved and still be satisfying, like a psychological horror movie, but that would take like. creativity.
In the interest of awareness, I think it's important to point out that Jasper was not fully mute, he was a selective mute. It's different. They can talk sometimes, but they do not choose when they're able to talk or not. It's different for each person when and where they can talk, or what can trigger the mutism.
This should have been better explained in the show. I don't want a doctor popping out and explaining it... but my little cousin has selective mutism. It's so upsetting to see this adorable little girl vibrant and laughing and then her anxiety stops her mid sentence. She doesn't really have a choice when her words can "turn on/turn off" and she tries so very hard. She's learned to find ways to communicate. She's very smart. Smarter than I'll ever be. But... we could really use with better depictions and explanations. If it means two sentences of someone saying they can talk, but sometimes it's difficult for the words to come out, then I'm happy enough for that rudimentary explanation. Ryan Murphy isn't great with disability and we're like show dogs and cats to him. I don't appreciate what he does to us as a whole community. We are vast and varied. He just kind of chucks us into a pile.
As someone who lives in the area, the only reason someone probably wanted this home is because of the area. It’s a good school district, 30 minutes from NYC, good place to raise a family, has train stations, and full of other multi million dollar homes.
The whole show I was so concerned about the younger son 😅 like this poor kid has to be going through it and the parents seem really uninterested in him
When you said you were in The Sahara I thought you meant the desert in Africa and I was like "you are closer to me! I can rescue you if you need!" But then I googled 'When We Were Young Fest' and it's in Las Vegas. Very different desert. Very different continent! Good luck to you! I will continue to enjoy your content from afar.
I'm in America and I thought she meant the desert at first too. I was like " ohhhh!I didn't realize they had nice hotels in the Sahara Desert! And then she mentioned the festival and I figured that probably wasn't what she meant 😅
when she said she was in the sahara i thought she meant the desert in africa too, which really confused me. like "wtf are you doing in the middle of a desert in africa?"
So my take on the "anger not fear" response from the parents was 100% that they were scared but wanted to put up a stoic front. I often find that anger masks fear, and our society absolutely values anger and views fear as weakness.
Firstly, when the detective (the cop, not the private eye) tells Dean and Nora he understands that they are afraid, they get defensive immediately. "We're not afraid, we're pissed" or something like that. Even if you don't want to come across as afraid/fearful, you can say that you're worried/concerned because of your children. It was odd. It seemed as if they felt attacked by the detective. Then it's Karen who tells Nora that she "should be angry". And Nora goes home and tells Dean "You know, I am angry". So odd.
I found Naomi Watt's beige and eggshell colored wardrobe throughout the series the most compelling thing about this show. Like how did they think a bunch of outfits that looked like upgraded Snuggies and blanket scarfs with some gold necklaces throw in for variety was visually exciting?
The two absolutely funniest parts are how they make a twist about the neighbours being murdered and then just bring them back and don’t know how to explain it so their crazy son actually found two homeless people that looked like them and shot them. And then the “hacking scene” where some guy just intercepts a wi-fi connection and somehow ends up in his online game then, game pops up on their laptop and everything.
And most of all, the security guy installing a friggin camera inside their bedroom facing their bed, and then confronts him like "yeah I did it to prove a point, and I'm going to call the cops" which is super illegal to secretly install a camera like that, the other guys like "Oh, well yeah I kinda deserved that, please don't tell my wife" I was like WHAT! dudes been watching you with your wife in bed, and you don't even consider calling the cops on HIM? That movie just plain ran out of ideas too early.
@@lissettelopez8331 that was hilarious. “Oh I just happened to install a camera for no reason but then it turns out the villains sent someone to get into bed with you so I can blackmail you”
I don't understand why Hollywood feels a need to change real historical events when the unchanged, real story is so interesting/scary/fascinating. Why??? Just tell the story as is with incredible writing and acting, change it at little as you have to to make it legal or whatever but don't rewrite it completely! Truth is stranger than fiction. It's so frustrating. Thanks for covering this so I didn't have to expose myself to more garbage.
@@goddammitalana PC? Seriously? She literally pointed out that the real children were little and the show went out of its way to sexualize the daughter by turning her into a teenager and taking skimpy photos. Real life was definitely more “PC” than that.
Because the real story is pretty boring, they got a couple letters with on-the-nose "threatening" writing with details about them that anyone could have easily heard or seen from outside.
The looking through the photos thing is so creepy to me too. Like my father wouldn't even enter my room without knocking and loudly announcing he was coming in because he didn't want to accidentally walk in on anything. Like the only proof you could find in photos is NUDES. As opposed to seeing flirty texts or something. What father who isn't creepy would thing to first look through photos???
Just an excuse for the creepy people involved to show pics of the daughter in a sexualizing way to please the creeps they know will watch hoping for something. It’s so gross!
The most creepy thing about this whole show was the dad and him sexualizing the daughter. Me and my partner couldn't stand him and his horrible comments on her looks, that was just disgusting. He was the problem.
they literally could have made her character 3 years old and had her running around in the yard and making friends with strangers she found in the woods or something 💀
The internet tells this story better as like a ten minute creepy pasta I can’t believe how bad Netflix messed it up - like the writing was bad and convoluted + no ending (wish I didn’t watch it)
I laughed very very hard at “I don’t know who’s funeral I went to” and then realized I was finishing the show out of principle not bc it was actually any good lmao
What's weird to me though is, if the watcher sent the letters because they wanted the home, then why not buy it once they put it up for sale? They were desperate to sell that house and no one wanted it ( at least not after seeing the letters.) So either the watcher never wanted the house or they must have changed their mind. Idk which is worse
@@dontbefatuousjeffrey2494 Yes I read the cut article that Amanda put in the description. Def worth the read! Are you saying that you think the watcher is who eventually bought the house in 2019? It's an interesting possibility but that's a long time to wait and risk someone else buying it first
Ugh I just read that entire article. It's definitely worth the read but it's just such a sad story. All of the neighbors at the town meeting complaining for hours so that they couldn't split the land, when someone around the corner who was even farther under the zone limit was allowed to. Not to mention the other properties that were also already under the zone limit. People can really just be down right awful sometimes. To me that's even worse than the letters in the first place; being treated terribly by so many people around you. Everyone seemingly assuming you're a bad person and making your life as difficult as possible when you're struggling. I pray their family is doing much better now after selling to Netflix, especially those kiddos. Even if it means we get a shitty show haha
That’s just how central jersey is. Petty disputes about zoning and property values. When it came up that none of the towns met their low income housing requirements, the classist racist WASP types came out in droves to make sure poor people didn’t have the right to exist in their presence.
@@emmarosestrong i'd say westfield is more north jersey, but regardless you're right. all the high-earning nyc expats who live in the surrounding areas sure like to brew up a toxic environment for the ppl that have been living there for years
Okay so here is the tea: The house didn’t sell because of the Watcher stuff. It’s mainly because the kitchen was in bad shape and no one wanted to spend 1.3 million dollars on a house with a shitty kitchen. (I found this out from talking to an architect in the area).
Yeah, as soon as I saw Ryan Murphy was attached, I said "they are going to ruin everything compelling about this story". I first read about this in 2017 and it STILL creeps me out. That's the thing about being targeted by an unknown attacker - the Watcher only has to do very little, because you'll drive your own self crazy.
I regret reading the actual watcher article, I ended up scaring myself. That’s just terrifying, all you wanted was a nice house to raise your kids. Instead you wind up in debt, with a fucked emotional & mental well-being and the whole town against you. I don’t know whether it was a true threat or a hoax.
I love this kind of creepy, unsolved mysteries and the Watcher is one of my favourites, mainly because its one of the few I honestly can’t say whether it was a hoax, a cruel prank, or a genuinely unhinged person watching the house. This show seems to ruin all the spooky, terrifying, unanswerable parts about the real story that makes it so compelling and fascinating
My husband was so excited for me to watch it. I hated it so much that I introduced myself to him at the end and told him him I look forward to us getting to know each other. I have no idea why he thought I would enjoy that mess but he couldn't have been more wrong.
The way me and my friends got to the end of the show hoping that Jennifer Coolidge was going to steal the house and literally cheered when she did - the only disappointment was her then being evicted by the creeps
Hard agree with deserving complete stories. I think there's room for leaving stories open ended/open for a sequel, but those should NOT be the majority of movies especially in the mainstream
why did I immediately think Ryan and Shane signed with netflix? I was like woah! it looks like it’s fictional too, what happened to the actually realistic ghost hunting?
Before watching the video: I sat through all of this waiting for something genuinely interesting to happen, because it kept seeming like something would. Each time they make up their mind about who it is, they immediately accuse them and turn people against themselves. Not only that, but looking back, every character was confusing. Their motives and characterisations constantly changed, and I don't believe for a second that it was intentionally confusing to fit with the theme of distrust and panic. In the end, it's a poorly written mystery with completely unlikeable characters. The dad was such a dick from the start and it was bad writing to have characters go "you were never like this!!" and just have us as viewers be like "I dunno it seems quite natural for him to be aggressive unprovoked". What even was that ending? I wasted so much time on this dumb series. Anyway, time to watch someone else complain about it and hopefully feel some peace.
Yes! When I finished watching I was just ... angry about how much of a waste of time it was. I kept sort of updating my spouse about it being like "Oh, I think they are going in this direction now". For a while thought it was going to turn out that the dad was possessed or something and that was why he was apparently acting completely different and was so weirdly intense all the time. What even was this show?
When you said you were "here in the Sahara" my first thought was confusion that you'd be in Northern Africa and how awful it would be to get the sand out of that carpet. In my defense the Sahara can be very windy.
I am so glad that you said that. It's so bad. Everyone on social media seemed to have high praises but it was a cringe fest. As someone who loves their true crime/mysterious cases content this was just ridiculous. I get that it's letters in a mail box so they have to add to the story to make it TV show worthy but no.
I did not originally know it was based on a true story. Without that knowledge, I enjoyed the first few episodes. A great mystery show for a weekend being sick. But then it continued like it did...and then I learned the backstory. Eesh.
I think that part of why the scene in wich the dad look at his daughter phone is so baffling, is because even if you want to be letcherous with the teenage daughter it would make more sense to open the messages. Open the chat with the guy and see that her last message was "good night" along with a sexy photo BOOM! The showrunner's creep quota is fullfill in a way that still ressembles human behaviour
when I heard they also threw in adapting the john list family murders into the show even when it had zero to do with the watcher letters I just knew it probably wouldn't be great. can't just do one story or the other? ehhhhhhhh 😬 so glad you powered through! your videos are fantastic.
I binged the entire show with my mom on a whim and complained the entire time because it was so bad. My mom tried to give it the benefit of the doubt or whatever but I was like “no this is terribly written they could have done much better than whatever the hell we watched”
The Watchers' erratic storylines might be because of streaming. Streaming is designed to get you to binge episode after episode all in one sitting, so cliffhangers are at the end of every episode, and characters do random nonsense for the sake of shock value. Several times they shoe horned in random plotlines that were dropped immediately. Like when their daughter goes on TikTok to flame her dad, and it's never brought up again. Or the person in the tunnels, or the random girl in the bedroom. Or the husband being the Watcher. Or the neighbors DYING. Also did anyone else find it hilarious that Nora "We need to sell this house" Brannock was suspicious of her husband cheating, but was totally fine drinking coffee with her neighbors who faked their death?
Ryan and Shane literally named their own company after this (Watcher Television) because of how much the case fascinated them. The Buzzfeed Unsolved episode on the Watcher is infinitely better than any poorly dramatized fictional retelling could be.
I didn't watch The Watcher but I saw the Jennifer Coolidge trailer and thought it was going to be a camp show and not a mess. Granted Jennifer probably helps make anything passable
I am so happy you covered this! A friend recommended this and I got so angry cause they do something’s so right but it’s completely overshadowed by the many things it does wrong!
I hate when the neighbor’s husband died and then they just brought him back like it was normal and everyone acted like they didn’t fake his death. At least the actor playing the dad is hot, and Jennifer Coolidge is a gem in this also
I was chatting with someone at work about it. She loved it until I told her the only thing that was true was the letters and that they didn't even move in.. her opinion changed very quickly.
I haven't even watched this show, I just glanced at it for literally half a minute when my brother was watching it and I INSTANTLY knew something creepy and inappropriate was going on with the daughter. (In the scene I saw she was literally just texting but there was a VIBE)
Haven’t seen this show but it’s reminding me of a French film called Caché. It’s about a family that gets sent recordings of their house (etc) on VHS tapes. I won’t spoil the rest or the themes of it though… I was terrified by it and I definitely recommend it to anyone that likes psychological thrillers.
I totally agree about the kids ages. I thought it was so weird that he spoke about the kids like they were toddlers. I have been obsessed with this story and was so excited about the show. They completely botched it.
Maybe this is just a "cold, neglectful family" take but I really thought the father was overly touchy and (obviously) controlling with the teen girl, to the point where at first I thought there would be an inc*stual ab*se plot line just because of how weirdly he was bunching up her hair and shit...
Thank you for watching it so we don't have to. XD I kinda figured it would be pretty terrible considering that the story it's based off of has no ending, no explanation, and is fairly widely considered to be a hoax. I'll just stick with the BuzzFeed unsolved version and leave it at that. Good lookin out!
See, from the title of the show I assumed it would be about the night stalker but nah, it’s just about a story that pretty much everyone believes is a hoax lol
Considering that there's a lot of evidence that the family did this to themselves in order to get out of the mortgage, them selling the rights to their story to Netflix for 7 digits is, something else.
this is definitely not how you do an ambiguous ending, like it’s almost as if they did and did not give us an explanation at the same time. even ambiguous stories need a resolution and this one just doesn’t have it and i always enjoy ambiguous or creepy stories that lack a clear expanation (Picnic at the Hanging Rock comes to mind) but I think narratives that do mystery without explanation effectively keep the mystery simple and the clues minimal. The Watcher gives the audience so much information and clues in such a convoluted way and then doesn’t have an effective resolution so it just feels like a cop out.
I loved the show. I think the ambiguous ending was freaky, because you see all of the former owners of the house coming to look at it and in my opinion, the conclusion is that the house draws you in and makes you obsessed because you never know who is sending the letters, so you kind of become a part of the mystery that leads to the next people that come to the place.
i watched the buzzfeed video a long time ago, and it made chills run down my spine. i didn't even know there was a show based on it, and i am not surprised that netflix butchered the story and made it nonsensical. it seems like lately everytime netflix tries to do something, anything, it ends up a mess with too many weird plotpoints.
It took me a full 1:29 minutes into the video to realize that this is in fact NOT about The Witcher and is instead the watcher. Which I'm realizing now that before this I think I've been assuming that it was the Same Thing. So... That's interesting. I may have been misinterpreting some posts on tumblr
He did not actually go through her photo album by the way, he went through the photos between her and the older security guy. My guess is because he had limited time with her phone before it would be suspicious.
I actually animated a clip from the buzzfeed unsolved episode about the watcher back in 2019 and it got reposted by the official Instagram account. My mom wants to watch the Watcher with me but neither of us can get through it without thinking of 14 year old me’s 15 minutes of fame. Love Watcher Entertainment nowadays though!! Shane and Ryan’s communities were very safe spaces for me as a teen and the tiny community my fan account cultivated brought me a lot of joy in a time when I wasn’t great mentally. Loved this vid, love that the case is getting more publicity with the family’s permission.
My boyfriend was recommended this show by MOST of his 50+ coworkers.... All men in their 30s-60s. That should tell you all you need to know about why this show has claims of being so "popular" 💀
I liked the show until my coworker and I did some research and literally the only thing that happened irl was the letters. No weird neighbors, no secret tunnels or break ins. So if they're going to make up that much stuff why not make up an ending
that’s what i’ve been saying! they took such creative liberties with the story itself but then decided to maintain an ambiguous, incomplete conclusion? it’s such a disappointment.
Yes! It could have been amazing had they stuck to the actual account. They basically made a parody.. So dumb
@@lydzz6344 the actual account would've been boring as hell.
@@jbracq2008 you’re boring as hell. Anything can be interesting with good direction. Queens Gambit is literally chess matches. CHESS. But it’s absolutely captivating by the direction.
Ryan Murphy isn’t that good at anything, so of course he didn’t think like this.
I hated how they had someone watching them but also kept the blinds and windows open at all times???
this bugged me so much lol. in a show about being watched it’s kinda important to have characters close the damn blinds and not have sheer curtains. it’s the least anyone would do if they knew they were being watched.
OMG YES!!!!!!!!!!!! Why do characters ALWAYS do that?? WTF~
I guess like common sense, blackout curtains aren't a thing
@@Gchildwarrior Or just any plain curtain, or blind… Hell I would’ve been at least a bit more satisfied even if the curtains were sheer. But they just leave the damn windows with nothing. Blows my mind, one of my biggest pet peeves on horror movies and TV series. lol
Flashbacks to You and the decision from the show to have Beck ALWAYS keep her blinds open
Can we also talk about how Ryan Murphy insists on including 700 plot lines in every single one of his shows??? Like this one had cheating, p****philia, blood cult, racism, underage dating, FERRET DEATH, and pottery
That's why I gave up AHS. Too many plot threads and his insistence that the sleaze factor is upped to 11. Why he needed to do it for a simple scary story about an unknown letter writer is beyond me. Sometimes less is more.
@@bree9272 lmao he even managed to do it in the dahmer show. I’m from milwaukee so maybe I’m more biased but the whole romance arc with the deaf person never happened it was an unnecessary story line to make us sympathize more with a real serial killer
"It's super easy, barely an inconvenience!"
We live in a world where Glee is Ryan Murphys only decent show
Ferret death and pottery 😂😂
i would say the craziest thing about the watcher (and i'm saying this as a ceramic artist) is that the wife was able to end up support her family selling pots in new york city galleries
maybe shes ray dunn
Oh my goodness! I had the same thought. (I’m also a ceramic artist) it is insane that she just fully supported the family on selling her mediocre pots. Also, who has a ceramics studio in the attic? Almost everything for ceramics is heavy and would be a major pain to carry up and down 3 flights of stairs. Plus you need access to water.
@@learning2live_brokeninchro157 YES!! plus where is her kiln? the most logical place for the studio would be the basement not an attic! ... which could have been a great plot point (people messing with her pots/etc)
@@0katsuki0 this comment deserves more likes 🤣🤣
@@learning2live_brokeninchro157 Obviously directed by someone who knows nothing about ceramic studios. Lol.
The thing that made it such a hard watch for me is that everyone in the family (save for the son, who's barely in it) is SO utterly undeserving of sympathy. How am I supposed to care about these characters when they all react to everything like they don't know what a consequence is??
Yes. No way for me to root for the family in this show.
Yea, towards the end I was wondering if we were still supposed to be rooting for them. I only felt bad for the ferret.
That's Ryan Murphy for you.
the mum assuming that her husband cheated on her because of that obv-edited footage💀💀
and the dad scrolling through the daughter's phone
The moment you said that the mother should have been pregnant, I imagined a scene where the Watcher sends a "congratulations" note with the positive test enclosed. Legitimately would be horrifying.
I'm imagining the mom opening it and being covered in confetti
It's a legitimate congratulations note. Or make it worse, they wait and the watcher knows the gender of the baby and sends a pink/blue card and possibly has a copy of the ultra sound photo that they send along...
Which the family realizes they still have all their copies they didn't quite send to family yet. They're all there. So how'd they manage to get a copy? Who do they know in town?
If you're gonna go with escalating this for fictional methods, go all out.
I agree but out of context this sounds hilarious. Like, "oh, thanks watcher"
I'm writing that down for my book, thanks
@@helloill672 it's a glitterbomb so strong it whooshes her hair back lmao
Interesting how Netflix could pay for this story but couldn’t even be bothered to ask for consent from certain other victims…
@Grant Understanble but the direct families have openly stated how uncomfortable they are with the documentary and how much mental anguish they have to go through over and over again because of people turning these terrible situations into a source of entertainment. There is nothing wrong with true crime but when you are activity hurting the victims/victims families it then becomes a serious issue.
@Grant if the WW2 movie is going to have characters based on real people then, yeah it would probably be a good idea to get their family’s permission. However, a lot of WW2 movies just use fictional characters so I don’t see that being an issue
@Grant Np! :)
@Grant the families are alive and seeing their missing/horrifically murdered family members being profited off of without you knowing or being asked is terrible. How would you like if your sister/daughter/son was horrifically assaulted and murdered then someone made a tv series or documentary all about the killer who killed them and had someone act as your family member or show the crime scene photos without asking you first if it was ok. It’s traumatizing for families. Especially with any sort of narrative. Your child was murdered but someone made a documentary talked about how the killer was innocent or focuses on how the killer murdered your family member? Have some empathy for families, these aren’t fictional characters. They’re real people who have families who are still alive!!!!
@@isabelgonzalez4662 Oh stop whining. This is history.
Honestly I think all of the neighbors acting suspicious could've worked if they had started out normal then slowly amped up. Like as they received more letters without answers maybe they could have started noticing things about the neighbors that might just be a little strange, but because they were getting more and more desperate for answers they would start to see small things as proof of guilt. I think it could've given the show some sense of growing paranoia and suspense instead of trying to start everything off at 100.
And you, good friend, have just proven you are a better writer and have a better understanding of the basic building blocks of storytelling than the writers of this show's script.
This is the same thing I thought like then the audience could have those lightbulb moments where then it made sense why they seem suspicious.
This is probably how it should have been done. In my understanding of the real-life story, none of the neighbors (other than the Langstons) acted suspicious; they were simply suspects by proxy. So the show could have framed the "suspicious" neighbors as the paranoia of the family rather than how the neighbors actually were.
Yup. Instead this show was literally screaming LOOK AT ME!!!!!!!! I'M A RED HERRING!!!!!!!!! at all times
@@j.g.9045 I believe the issue in the real life story was that when the family was trying to sell the house and solve the problem, the neighborhood council unanimously voted against their plans to tear down the house and split the land to sell to a developer (so as to avoid the very public murder-stigma). Even worse, they allowed a different neighbor to do the exact same thing. So there is a reason to believe there was unexplained animus towards the family.
I got to be honest, I LOVED THE SERIE! I fell sleep in minutes whenever I put it, and it’s sooo slow it actually helped me sleep more than the usual.
10/10
why did this made me exhale so hard
Now I have to watch this
Lmao, had me in the first half 😬
I was literally so bored watching it, so I just left the room and let my mum watch it
I watched it in 102° F fever , and it made me bare with the discomfort of going through the fever pains, i wouldn't be able to watch it till the end if i hadn't had that fever.
I thought the father’s obsession of what the teen girl was wearing was creepy. Many 15 year old girls wear makeup.
Yeah they do but realistically alot of them do their makeup to look older and to thirst trap. So they really shouldn't.
@@goddammitalana that’s a weird take and not even very accurate
It was so out of touch, like 50’s sitcom level cringe
@@goddammitalana look older, maybe, but at the end of the day they just wanna feel pretty. For me, sure I can do without it, but makeup is just an extra step of pampering that helps me feel I’m putting my best foot forward at the start of the day
@@goddammitalana How do you know a lot teen girls are trying to look older and thirst trap? Speaking as a former teen girl who wore makeup I liked wearing it for me. Idk, your comment is alarming in a way that is hard for me to explain. Maybe it's the assuming what their goal is with wearing makeup.
I didn't even make it past the point where they purchased the house. Their wardrobes kept making me think of the "sad beige clothes for sad beige kids" thing and I couldn't take it seriously.
the mom straight up always wore beige or cream colours, i kept watching and being like... surely she owns something in A Colour at least but no. the only time we see her in something other than beige is in the last episode when she is getting ready to go out in a sexy black dress and it basically signals her pulling away from her husband and entering her villain era or something. by the way her pottery was so boring and beige too!!! and she is supposed to be a prestigious Artiste? ok
Just like youtube mommy vloggers
Werner Herzogs sad beige clothes for sad beige children
😂🤣😂🤣😂
I got the feeling that a lot of things in this show were meant to be artistic or metaphorical but the guy whose idea this was wasn't allowed to actually get it into the story
It's a shame Netflix has so many resources to buy all of these stories and torch them.
Right? This story is basically gold, yet both renditions of it have been horrific.
Yeah it’s a shame I feel like they just buy the rights and push it out quickly Cus they seem to value quantity over quality so rather than making something high quality they just push out numerous mediocre tv series and films with the same writing flaws
Netflix didn't make this show. Ryan Murphy did. Netflix doesn't write these shows. So saying they're torching them is wrong.
@@DavidKen878 yeah it's weird how people don't understand this
That said, channels" have arcing purchase themes. I'd sum for some "is it A24?" In any situations
@@DavidKen878 they bought the rights, hired Ryan Murphy, let him torch it and then greenlit the release so they did torch it.
Another plot point was the whole teacher having his class write a poem towards their favorite house....wtf was that
What 💀
@@magickaldust1213 It was the “An Ode to a House“ lesson from a character that was kinda confirmed to be The Watcher for a short time (Roger Kaplan. In his past he was a teacher and his town-famous lesson was basically writing a poetic love letter to another house.
Yeah it was so weird. And sending it to the address! I could understand it as just a piece of creative writing for school only but he was insisting that they send it. Even if it's the nicest letter in the world, I can't imagine being happy to receive that letter. It is creepy to think of someone looking at and thinking about your house so much. So much of this story revolves around people being obsessed with houses for their own sake in a way I just don't think all that many people actually are. Historical societies who want to preserve old houses, sure I'll give them that, but I bet most people who love a house love it because they had loved ones who lived there once and lots of good memories there. Most poeple couldn't tell you much about a house they know no one in beyond 'I like going past that house, it's pretty'. And yet we're meant to buy that this is so many students' much remembered favourite lesson? It was all so fucking implausable.
Would have been better as a limited episode series,like 3 episodes.soooo boring.
@@aeddiefarmer it’s… it’s meant to be a teacher’s creative writing exercise.
That whole racism subplot was incredibly cringe
What racism subplot?
@@sadem1045 I think it was when the dad of the main family (who were getting stalked obv) accused his daughter's black boyfriend of grooming her + being the watcher
Its when the daughter got mad that the dad for SUSpecting her boyfriend of being a stalker so she creates a tiktok and claims that her parents are racist and her dad nearly loses his job. And then later she says sorry to her mum and they just hug it out. Im not making this shit up its that bad
@@callmecharlie0498 saw this and yes it was so cringe
and the dad, mom and daughter were so insufferable
The writers take it totally for granted that Dean's not racist, they push it so hard that everyone who knows Dean knows he's not racist. But how do they know that? It's out of nowhere. What about his character makes everyone believe that? It's all tell and no show.
The raw panic I felt when I saw the watcher and immediately linked it to Ryan and Shane 🤣🤣🤣
Literally sameeeee
Could y’all imagine a collab👀🥺
me too😭😭
I watched an episode of ghost files before watching this lol
OMG Same!!!!!!???!!
I also thought the daughter thing was SO WEIRD AND ICKY and I didn't know Murphy has a history of being a creep so now it all makes sense.
I dunno if it's a like "oh he's a creep" or that most of his work is in the horror or horror-adjacent genres-American Horror Story, Ratched, American Crime Story, Dahmer, etc. and he WANTS his audience to feel uncomfortable about the daughter and knows that that's an easy way to do
(also hes a gay man, so itd be weird to me if it was because it was something HE wanted to see-like why feet were a thing on iCarly or something)
@@FIRING_BLIND regardless of sexuality, Ryan Murphy is still capable of sexualizing young women/girls and using them as props, ie. using their sexualization as a plot device. Anyone is capable if they don’t respect that group.
@@FIRING_BLIND I certainly think his obsession with teens having sex is creepy- gay or not he does it for EVERY show even if it adds absolutely nothing for the story. It feels like he’s one of those “oh look at me I’m so edgy!!1!” people, but his “edge” is just shock humour that barely anyone but him finds funny. Kind of feels like Shame Dawson in a way.
This is coming from someone who is a huge fan of American Horror story/ Glee/ Scream queens.
I do agree that nearly all of Ryan Murphy's shows have a profound and at times seemingly gratuitous emphasis on sex but I do think that's in part due to the close ties the horror genre has with sex, particularly sex between teenagers (like, think of all the old slasher films where a couple is making out and then they get butchered by the villain). Historically there was this idea that teens having sex = bad = deserving of horrible things, which is why the "virgin" character was usually the victor at the end of a slasher movie. In modern horror, a lot of creators try to subvert this idea because it's old-fashioned bs. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most famous examples of that but I think to some degree Ryan Murphy attempts it too. I realise I'm probably giving him way too much credit and it's possible that he just wants as much sex and violence in his shows as possible purely for shock factor, but it's something to think about 🤷♀️
His obsession with serial killers has always rubbed me the wrong way.
I wanted to scream every time they referred to that McMansion as a ~beautiful historical home~
The real one was from the 1940s but in the film it's new Edit: internet says the real one was built in 1905
@@nineteenfortyeight I decided to look up the actual filming location and it was built in 2016. Not that it matters too much, but they didn’t even TRY to make it not look like a McMansion lol
@Iris ik r?? I live (sorta) near where the original incident occurred. And my town in particular has a combination of actual historical homes and recently built ugly McMansions, and almost nothing in between. So I could NOT take it seriously AT ALL when they kept being like “this house is so old and beautiful 😊” like it drove me CRAZY.
I personally didn't really notice that many mcmansion elements
maybe because i'm european, but it just didn't look like a historical home. it looked like pretty much every house in the u.s
See the thing about the teenage girl, for me i was a bit disgusted at the sexism. I mean is it still so bad we have to have a possessive dad screaming at his daughter and no one says anything? Thats the thing that irks me a bit. If he had a teen son i doubt he would even care.
I hated him for that. Hoping he would get axed lmao
I hated that. I assume they were trying to connect it to this case of the man who killed his whole family but his behaviour was so inappropriate and unlikable. I kept waiting for his wife to sit him down and be like hey fucking stop this it's very weird and creepy of you. I honestly thought they were setting up for him doing something horrible to her at times, but then it stopped going down that path and no one really reacts to his behaviour like it's bad, so maybe the show thinks it isn't???
Yeah I think there was supposed to be a link between him and John list who basically acted the same way, to show how he was slowly becoming just like him
It’s probably just that the dad’s is an arsehole, and has weird ideas about gender/sex/violence.
The entire cast of characters seemed like they were written by AI or something. The entire time I was watching, all I could think was, "NO ONE acts like this in real life! Why is everyone so psycho?" It just felt so alien and inorganic.
Yesss! This is perfectly put! Exactly how I felt about all the characterisation
I believe all teenage girls in horror movies/shows exist to be sexualized. I hate it
Any show. I've seen very few media of any genre with teenage girls (or teenagers in general) in it where they're not sexualized.
@@AndreaFMS100 TRUE you're not wrong
It's messed up
Lol
teenage girls in horror movies made by hacks def are
This show could have been an incredible atmospheric slow burn horror about a family devolving into paranoia. Unfortunately Ryan Murphy got his sleazeball hands on it.
When I started watching it I thought "why is everyone in this mental? No-one behaves normally!" and then began thinking that it was an hallucination the dad was having
I thought they were trying to portray some kind of subtle supernatural effect of the house that than snowballed via human interactions for a few episodes! Once I realized it probably wasn't that or anything that actually would hang together, I looked it up and discovered I was correct. :P
the storyline about the teenage daughter and the security guy. why? the whole time they were on screen i kept asking why?! maybe im silly but there was no real reason to include that storyline in the series. esp the way they did it disturbed me. they made the only Black male character look creepy, only humanizing him (showing his mom and him connecting for like two seconds and she never reappears) when he became “useful” to the dad when he had the security video footage (which also didn’t make sense cuz why wouldn’t the dad have access to the recordings in his own house??). and then the many shots of the teenage girl being in a bikini and bra and undressing - there’s ways to show that without lingering and zooming in on her chest/stomach/thigh areas. i literally had to look away cuz it felt so weird looking at her body from the guy’s pov. not only gross but insulting that they thought we as viewers wouldn’t understand he’s attracted to her without looking at her thru his eyes??
you're not silly for saying that...the teen daughter plotline never even happened irl
It completely slipped my mind that they don't have access to their own recordings. Also, couldn't the dad sue since the security guy installed a camera in their bedroom without their knowledge? I don't know how installing that type of system works but wouldn't they've signed something acknowledging what cameras have been installed and where? Assuming that they read it (which giving these people's IQ level, I doubt it). If they wanted to have the security guy as a suspect, they didn't have to include him and the teenage daughter subplot. HE'S THE GUY THAT INSTALLED THE SECURITY CAMERAS AND HAS ACCESS TO THEM! That's enough to make anyone look at him twice.
@@MsVampirestories exactly! the dad really didn’t bother to go check his recordings of the footage to see who the hell this woman was coming in his room at night? or he didn’t have access to them? then why did they have the camera system installed in the first place. this series has so many problems with the plot and characters. it’s ridiculous. this subplot alone has so many issues they would’ve been better leaving it out all together. a few other things that really bothered me about it was 1) they all kept calling her a 17yo girl when all they saw was her creeping in the room and wearing pigtails, pray tell how would they know shes 17 or even underage from that small amount of grainy ass footage?! & 2) the way the mom (nora? i don’t care to double check lol) saw that sketchy footage and, like Swell said, didn’t question why there’s a camera in the room and immediately just believes it and turns on her husband? like she really had no thoughts beyond “girl/woman in room w knocked out husband filmed on a creepy bedroom spy camera while we have an ongoing Watcher problem = husband cheating for sure” it’s not even a lack of attention to details, the whole story of this series just don’t work
i kept thinking there was no way the guy would be as stupid as to start anything with the teenage girl like! aint no way
You’re not crazy, it’s just Ryan Murphy doing what he always does, taking everything too far
Ryan Murphy is my enemy version of a parasocial relationship. I didn’t know he made this, I hadn’t heard of it at all actually, but the second you mentioned his name I had such a reaction of overwhelming anger.
parasocial nemesis
I love you
As soon as I saw Ryan Murphy was involved I avoided this show like the plague. Not surprised-given the real facts and his role-that it turned into a dumpster fire
So you didn’t watch it?
I also felt that in the show the father was a little...too concerned about his daughter's sexuality. It was a bit much
They repeatedly allude to this being a sudden thing, and even Dean himself asks Andrew (I think, maybe someone else), the man who lived in the house with his cellist wife who took her own life, whether he'd always had old-fashioned attitudes or only when he moved into the house. Andrew gives Dean no answer.
They half-arsed some "This house makes me a stereotypical old-fashioned guy" subplot.
I agree that aging the kids up as much as they did totally changed the dynamic of the story and the letters. They totally could have had twins or one young child plus a pregnant mom, but a weirdo talking to your teenagers is very different than a weirdo talking to your 3-year-old.
i think there was a way to leave the story unresolved and still be satisfying, like a psychological horror movie, but that would take like. creativity.
In the interest of awareness, I think it's important to point out that Jasper was not fully mute, he was a selective mute. It's different. They can talk sometimes, but they do not choose when they're able to talk or not. It's different for each person when and where they can talk, or what can trigger the mutism.
This should have been better explained in the show. I don't want a doctor popping out and explaining it... but my little cousin has selective mutism. It's so upsetting to see this adorable little girl vibrant and laughing and then her anxiety stops her mid sentence. She doesn't really have a choice when her words can "turn on/turn off" and she tries so very hard. She's learned to find ways to communicate. She's very smart. Smarter than I'll ever be. But... we could really use with better depictions and explanations. If it means two sentences of someone saying they can talk, but sometimes it's difficult for the words to come out, then I'm happy enough for that rudimentary explanation. Ryan Murphy isn't great with disability and we're like show dogs and cats to him. I don't appreciate what he does to us as a whole community. We are vast and varied. He just kind of chucks us into a pile.
As someone who lives in the area, the only reason someone probably wanted this home is because of the area. It’s a good school district, 30 minutes from NYC, good place to raise a family, has train stations, and full of other multi million dollar homes.
I grew up there and can confirm that no one lives in central jersey for the sense of community, just the Raritan Valley line 😂
@@emmarosestrong Westfield isn’t central Jersey. It’s north Jersey. Atleast I’d consider it north Jersey lol
The whole show I was so concerned about the younger son 😅 like this poor kid has to be going through it and the parents seem really uninterested in him
When you said you were in The Sahara I thought you meant the desert in Africa and I was like "you are closer to me! I can rescue you if you need!" But then I googled 'When We Were Young Fest' and it's in Las Vegas. Very different desert. Very different continent! Good luck to you! I will continue to enjoy your content from afar.
Me too lol
I'm in America and I thought she meant the desert at first too. I was like " ohhhh!I didn't realize they had nice hotels in the Sahara Desert!
And then she mentioned the festival and I figured that probably wasn't what she meant 😅
Sahara is a hotel chain!
when she said she was in the sahara i thought she meant the desert in africa too, which really confused me. like "wtf are you doing in the middle of a desert in africa?"
@@Ray_Vun she hiked the Sahara desert so we don't have to
So my take on the "anger not fear" response from the parents was 100% that they were scared but wanted to put up a stoic front. I often find that anger masks fear, and our society absolutely values anger and views fear as weakness.
Firstly, when the detective (the cop, not the private eye) tells Dean and Nora he understands that they are afraid, they get defensive immediately. "We're not afraid, we're pissed" or something like that. Even if you don't want to come across as afraid/fearful, you can say that you're worried/concerned because of your children. It was odd. It seemed as if they felt attacked by the detective. Then it's Karen who tells Nora that she "should be angry". And Nora goes home and tells Dean "You know, I am angry". So odd.
I found Naomi Watt's beige and eggshell colored wardrobe throughout the series the most compelling thing about this show. Like how did they think a bunch of outfits that looked like upgraded Snuggies and blanket scarfs with some gold necklaces throw in for variety was visually exciting?
The two absolutely funniest parts are how they make a twist about the neighbours being murdered and then just bring them back and don’t know how to explain it so their crazy son actually found two homeless people that looked like them and shot them.
And then the “hacking scene” where some guy just intercepts a wi-fi connection and somehow ends up in his online game then, game pops up on their laptop and everything.
And most of all, the security guy installing a friggin camera inside their bedroom facing their bed, and then confronts him like "yeah I did it to prove a point, and I'm going to call the cops" which is super illegal to secretly install a camera like that, the other guys like "Oh, well yeah I kinda deserved that, please don't tell my wife" I was like WHAT! dudes been watching you with your wife in bed, and you don't even consider calling the cops on HIM?
That movie just plain ran out of ideas too early.
@@lissettelopez8331 that was hilarious. “Oh I just happened to install a camera for no reason but then it turns out the villains sent someone to get into bed with you so I can blackmail you”
"Ryan Murphy is creepy. I said it and I meant it". If I wasn't already subscribed, this would've definitely lead me to subscribing.
I don't understand why Hollywood feels a need to change real historical events when the unchanged, real story is so interesting/scary/fascinating. Why??? Just tell the story as is with incredible writing and acting, change it at little as you have to to make it legal or whatever but don't rewrite it completely! Truth is stranger than fiction. It's so frustrating. Thanks for covering this so I didn't have to expose myself to more garbage.
Because real life isn't pc & doesn't push the narratives they want it to
@@goddammitalana Wtf? Are you ok?
@@goddammitalana PC? Seriously? She literally pointed out that the real children were little and the show went out of its way to sexualize the daughter by turning her into a teenager and taking skimpy photos. Real life was definitely more “PC” than that.
Because the real story is pretty boring, they got a couple letters with on-the-nose "threatening" writing with details about them that anyone could have easily heard or seen from outside.
The looking through the photos thing is so creepy to me too. Like my father wouldn't even enter my room without knocking and loudly announcing he was coming in because he didn't want to accidentally walk in on anything. Like the only proof you could find in photos is NUDES. As opposed to seeing flirty texts or something. What father who isn't creepy would thing to first look through photos???
Just an excuse for the creepy people involved to show pics of the daughter in a sexualizing way to please the creeps they know will watch hoping for something. It’s so gross!
@@phoenixgirl70 🤡
The most creepy thing about this whole show was the dad and him sexualizing the daughter. Me and my partner couldn't stand him and his horrible comments on her looks, that was just disgusting. He was the problem.
they literally could have made her character 3 years old and had her running around in the yard and making friends with strangers she found in the woods or something 💀
The internet tells this story better as like a ten minute creepy pasta I can’t believe how bad Netflix messed it up - like the writing was bad and convoluted + no ending (wish I didn’t watch it)
I laughed very very hard at “I don’t know who’s funeral I went to” and then realized I was finishing the show out of principle not bc it was actually any good lmao
What's weird to me though is, if the watcher sent the letters because they wanted the home, then why not buy it once they put it up for sale? They were desperate to sell that house and no one wanted it ( at least not after seeing the letters.) So either the watcher never wanted the house or they must have changed their mind. Idk which is worse
It was sold in 2019 for a considerable loss, to another family. Read the 2018 story in The Cut, and the recent update in the same.
@@dontbefatuousjeffrey2494 Yes I read the cut article that Amanda put in the description. Def worth the read!
Are you saying that you think the watcher is who eventually bought the house in 2019? It's an interesting possibility but that's a long time to wait and risk someone else buying it first
@@cakebby18 I doubt it, but some people subscribe to that theory. I agree with you 🙂
Ugh I just read that entire article. It's definitely worth the read but it's just such a sad story. All of the neighbors at the town meeting complaining for hours so that they couldn't split the land, when someone around the corner who was even farther under the zone limit was allowed to. Not to mention the other properties that were also already under the zone limit. People can really just be down right awful sometimes. To me that's even worse than the letters in the first place; being treated terribly by so many people around you. Everyone seemingly assuming you're a bad person and making your life as difficult as possible when you're struggling. I pray their family is doing much better now after selling to Netflix, especially those kiddos. Even if it means we get a shitty show haha
That’s just how central jersey is. Petty disputes about zoning and property values. When it came up that none of the towns met their low income housing requirements, the classist racist WASP types came out in droves to make sure poor people didn’t have the right to exist in their presence.
Single family zoning and its consequences
@@emmarosestrong i'd say westfield is more north jersey, but regardless you're right. all the high-earning nyc expats who live in the surrounding areas sure like to brew up a toxic environment for the ppl that have been living there for years
Lmao didn't realize Ryan Murphy was a creator/producer/whatever. God, what a wildly varying, in terms of quality, body of work he has
Okay so here is the tea:
The house didn’t sell because of the Watcher stuff. It’s mainly because the kitchen was in bad shape and no one wanted to spend 1.3 million dollars on a house with a shitty kitchen. (I found this out from talking to an architect in the area).
"I'm jailbait you creep" is a line that will hunt me for the rest of my life.
Jfc send this man to prison
Yeah, as soon as I saw Ryan Murphy was attached, I said "they are going to ruin everything compelling about this story". I first read about this in 2017 and it STILL creeps me out. That's the thing about being targeted by an unknown attacker - the Watcher only has to do very little, because you'll drive your own self crazy.
I regret reading the actual watcher article, I ended up scaring myself. That’s just terrifying, all you wanted was a nice house to raise your kids. Instead you wind up in debt, with a fucked emotional & mental well-being and the whole town against you. I don’t know whether it was a true threat or a hoax.
I love this kind of creepy, unsolved mysteries and the Watcher is one of my favourites, mainly because its one of the few I honestly can’t say whether it was a hoax, a cruel prank, or a genuinely unhinged person watching the house. This show seems to ruin all the spooky, terrifying, unanswerable parts about the real story that makes it so compelling and fascinating
My husband was so excited for me to watch it. I hated it so much that I introduced myself to him at the end and told him him I look forward to us getting to know each other. I have no idea why he thought I would enjoy that mess but he couldn't have been more wrong.
It felt like Ryan Murphy was just trying to make AHS Murder House all over again
I hate when shows market themselves as a documentary and then make things up like a goosebumps episode
The creepiest part was the dad's reaction to the daughter
'nO LiPsTiCk YoU'rE tOo YoUnG'
The way me and my friends got to the end of the show hoping that Jennifer Coolidge was going to steal the house and literally cheered when she did - the only disappointment was her then being evicted by the creeps
I was hoping the real Watcher would torment her just to validate the family but nooo. It had to be the dad
someone on tiktok said "it's the haunting of the HOA" and that plus *male incompetence* just defines the show
Hard agree with deserving complete stories. I think there's room for leaving stories open ended/open for a sequel, but those should NOT be the majority of movies especially in the mainstream
I'm so glad you're talking about this. I got to the second episode where they mentioned adrenochrome and gave up
why did I immediately think Ryan and Shane signed with netflix? I was like woah! it looks like it’s fictional too, what happened to the actually realistic ghost hunting?
the kid opens the dumbwaiter and there are shane and ryan crouching in the dark
I saw a review saying the watcher was basically AHS Murder House Lite and I can’t look at it any other way
Before watching the video: I sat through all of this waiting for something genuinely interesting to happen, because it kept seeming like something would. Each time they make up their mind about who it is, they immediately accuse them and turn people against themselves. Not only that, but looking back, every character was confusing. Their motives and characterisations constantly changed, and I don't believe for a second that it was intentionally confusing to fit with the theme of distrust and panic. In the end, it's a poorly written mystery with completely unlikeable characters. The dad was such a dick from the start and it was bad writing to have characters go "you were never like this!!" and just have us as viewers be like "I dunno it seems quite natural for him to be aggressive unprovoked". What even was that ending? I wasted so much time on this dumb series. Anyway, time to watch someone else complain about it and hopefully feel some peace.
Yes! When I finished watching I was just ... angry about how much of a waste of time it was. I kept sort of updating my spouse about it being like "Oh, I think they are going in this direction now". For a while thought it was going to turn out that the dad was possessed or something and that was why he was apparently acting completely different and was so weirdly intense all the time. What even was this show?
i rewatched the buzzfeed unsolved video to refresh my memory on this case. genuinely terrifying. this had the potential to be so good lmao
babe wake up, new swell video just dropped
I’m up
Wild how Netflix paid for the rights for this but didn't think to speak to the families of Jefferys victims before making that series
Because tje Dahmer case is an open public case and also historical. There are many public records and transcripts and isnt needed to be asked consent
@@moodyxepher3729Some of his victims are alive!!!
When you said you were "here in the Sahara" my first thought was confusion that you'd be in Northern Africa and how awful it would be to get the sand out of that carpet. In my defense the Sahara can be very windy.
THANK YOU!! nothing about this show made sense 😭 I think i screamed at my tv during the "dean is cheating" plotline because like... what?
I am so glad that you said that. It's so bad. Everyone on social media seemed to have high praises but it was a cringe fest. As someone who loves their true crime/mysterious cases content this was just ridiculous. I get that it's letters in a mail box so they have to add to the story to make it TV show worthy but no.
I did not originally know it was based on a true story. Without that knowledge, I enjoyed the first few episodes. A great mystery show for a weekend being sick. But then it continued like it did...and then I learned the backstory. Eesh.
@@bab8771 yeah I think that had I not known that it's true I would have probably enjoyed it more
Ryan Murphy IS creepy. It's true and needed to be said
i know the audio is technically not as good here but something about your voice in this microphone is making my ears feel nice
I think that part of why the scene in wich the dad look at his daughter phone is so baffling, is because even if you want to be letcherous with the teenage daughter it would make more sense to open the messages. Open the chat with the guy and see that her last message was "good night" along with a sexy photo BOOM! The showrunner's creep quota is fullfill in a way that still ressembles human behaviour
when I heard they also threw in adapting the john list family murders into the show even when it had zero to do with the watcher letters I just knew it probably wouldn't be great. can't just do one story or the other? ehhhhhhhh 😬 so glad you powered through! your videos are fantastic.
I was so confused by that! They somehow added a completely different story and didn't even do that one any good either.
@@panicatthefallout7710 right? who knew you could throw two interesting things together and get nothing good out of it. what even?????
I binged the entire show with my mom on a whim and complained the entire time because it was so bad. My mom tried to give it the benefit of the doubt or whatever but I was like “no this is terribly written they could have done much better than whatever the hell we watched”
The Watchers' erratic storylines might be because of streaming. Streaming is designed to get you to binge episode after episode all in one sitting, so cliffhangers are at the end of every episode, and characters do random nonsense for the sake of shock value. Several times they shoe horned in random plotlines that were dropped immediately. Like when their daughter goes on TikTok to flame her dad, and it's never brought up again. Or the person in the tunnels, or the random girl in the bedroom. Or the husband being the Watcher. Or the neighbors DYING. Also did anyone else find it hilarious that Nora "We need to sell this house" Brannock was suspicious of her husband cheating, but was totally fine drinking coffee with her neighbors who faked their death?
Ryan and Shane literally named their own company after this (Watcher Television) because of how much the case fascinated them. The Buzzfeed Unsolved episode on the Watcher is infinitely better than any poorly dramatized fictional retelling could be.
I didn't watch The Watcher but I saw the Jennifer Coolidge trailer and thought it was going to be a camp show and not a mess. Granted Jennifer probably helps make anything passable
7:14 the sons only personality trait is that he's seen playing with a soccer ball in the yard a few times
Look I was into this until I wasnt, that's how I felt about the entire show. I was worried they were gonna go supernatural because Ryan Murphy lmao
I am so happy you covered this!
A friend recommended this and I got so angry cause they do something’s so right but it’s completely overshadowed by the many things it does wrong!
This is what happens when Ryan tries to produce 4 shows at one time.
If ever there was a moment to post the Cardi B "What was the reasoooooon?!" gif, this would be it. That's the subtitle of this video.
I hate when the neighbor’s husband died and then they just brought him back like it was normal and everyone acted like they didn’t fake his death.
At least the actor playing the dad is hot, and Jennifer Coolidge is a gem in this also
The only saving grace of this show is that a Bobby Cannavale is hot
That’s it
I was chatting with someone at work about it. She loved it until I told her the only thing that was true was the letters and that they didn't even move in.. her opinion changed very quickly.
I haven't even watched this show, I just glanced at it for literally half a minute when my brother was watching it and I INSTANTLY knew something creepy and inappropriate was going on with the daughter. (In the scene I saw she was literally just texting but there was a VIBE)
without watching the trailer on netflix i hopped into it hoping it was about ryan and shane
Dude same!!!
We are getting really desperate after first season finale 😔
I can't wait for the sequel about the low-budget suboptimal version, "The Glancer"
Haven’t seen this show but it’s reminding me of a French film called Caché. It’s about a family that gets sent recordings of their house (etc) on VHS tapes. I won’t spoil the rest or the themes of it though…
I was terrified by it and I definitely recommend it to anyone that likes psychological thrillers.
I just finished watching it and I was so mad at the end!!! I knew nothing about it and was so confused and so pissed with their lack of ending
I totally agree about the kids ages. I thought it was so weird that he spoke about the kids like they were toddlers. I have been obsessed with this story and was so excited about the show. They completely botched it.
Ah man I was a "Sadderday kid" as well! Glad you took such a sad situation and made a great video out of it!
Maybe this is just a "cold, neglectful family" take but I really thought the father was overly touchy and (obviously) controlling with the teen girl, to the point where at first I thought there would be an inc*stual ab*se plot line just because of how weirdly he was bunching up her hair and shit...
Thank you for watching it so we don't have to. XD
I kinda figured it would be pretty terrible considering that the story it's based off of has no ending, no explanation, and is fairly widely considered to be a hoax. I'll just stick with the BuzzFeed unsolved version and leave it at that. Good lookin out!
See, from the title of the show I assumed it would be about the night stalker but nah, it’s just about a story that pretty much everyone believes is a hoax lol
Considering that there's a lot of evidence that the family did this to themselves in order to get out of the mortgage, them selling the rights to their story to Netflix for 7 digits is, something else.
EXACTLY!!! There’s just nothing!!!
EXACTLY!!! There’s just nothing!!!
@@ndawn90 there’s reasonable doubt that they didn’t do that to themselves tho. If they really went through all that at least they got some cash.
this is definitely not how you do an ambiguous ending, like it’s almost as if they did and did not give us an explanation at the same time. even ambiguous stories need a resolution and this one just doesn’t have it
and i always enjoy ambiguous or creepy stories that lack a clear expanation (Picnic at the Hanging Rock comes to mind) but I think narratives that do mystery without explanation effectively keep the mystery simple and the clues minimal. The Watcher gives the audience so much information and clues in such a convoluted way and then doesn’t have an effective resolution so it just feels like a cop out.
21:42 just saying, selective mutism is the name for when people are mute in certain situations!
I loved the show. I think the ambiguous ending was freaky, because you see all of the former owners of the house coming to look at it and in my opinion, the conclusion is that the house draws you in and makes you obsessed because you never know who is sending the letters, so you kind of become a part of the mystery that leads to the next people that come to the place.
i watched the buzzfeed video a long time ago, and it made chills run down my spine. i didn't even know there was a show based on it, and i am not surprised that netflix butchered the story and made it nonsensical. it seems like lately everytime netflix tries to do something, anything, it ends up a mess with too many weird plotpoints.
It took me a full 1:29 minutes into the video to realize that this is in fact NOT about The Witcher and is instead the watcher. Which I'm realizing now that before this I think I've been assuming that it was the Same Thing. So... That's interesting. I may have been misinterpreting some posts on tumblr
The Witcher is so lit. I can’t imagine someone hating it
He did not actually go through her photo album by the way, he went through the photos between her and the older security guy. My guess is because he had limited time with her phone before it would be suspicious.
OK but "basic fucking horticulture" is my favorite line out of whole series lol
I actually animated a clip from the buzzfeed unsolved episode about the watcher back in 2019 and it got reposted by the official Instagram account. My mom wants to watch the Watcher with me but neither of us can get through it without thinking of 14 year old me’s 15 minutes of fame. Love Watcher Entertainment nowadays though!! Shane and Ryan’s communities were very safe spaces for me as a teen and the tiny community my fan account cultivated brought me a lot of joy in a time when I wasn’t great mentally. Loved this vid, love that the case is getting more publicity with the family’s permission.
My boyfriend was recommended this show by MOST of his 50+ coworkers.... All men in their 30s-60s. That should tell you all you need to know about why this show has claims of being so "popular" 💀
Ick.