The "
angry reviewer" style was initially seen as a popular way to review movies/shows/video games, etc. It was popularized in the late 2000s and early 2010s by
The Angry Video Game Nerd and
The Nostalgia Critic, who would intersperse their reviews with skits, mockery, yelling, and swearing. However, in the late 2010s, this method started to be seen as more annoying than funny, and viewers began to gravitate towards review shows that focused on levelheaded analysis and criticism with a couple of jokes added in, such as
I Hate Everything,
The Cosmonaut Variety Hour,
Mauler, and
Schaffrillas Productions. Additionally, viewers began to see such reviews
as produced in bad faith, and that most of their points consisted of nitpicky, half-baked hot takes and attacking the authors of the work in question rather than any actual analysis, especially once the negative effects this approach was having on content creators became more widely known. The decline of angry reviewer videos was further hastened by the genre
attracting a glut of low-quality AVGN clones, resulting in the genre becoming seen as
Lowest Common Denominator material. Perhaps the final blow was
a series of scandals involving many of these reviewers, most notably the exposure of
Channel Awesome's toxic work culture,
Noah Antwiler's
Creator Breakdown, GameDude stalking his girlfriend, Mr. Anime murdering his family,
the late JewWario being posthumously outed as a sexual groomer, and
The Mysterious Mr. Enter leading fans to harrass a writer of
SpongeBob SquarePants for an episode he hated by showing said writer's Twitter (
which he has since apologized for and would later try to make more analysis-based reviews) and promoting anti-mask views during the
COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, which showed that
their anger might have not been an act after all. Nowadays, the only shows that survive with this style are the aforementioned AVGN (largely due to
Grandfather Clause) and
JonTron (and even then he got kicked out of
Yooka-Laylee and voluntarily exiled himself for half a year after a disasterous stream in which he used extreme right-wing rhetoric), who phased out said "angry reviewer" tropes for
more surreal, zany humor; the rest have either suffered
Seasonal Rot and declining viewership for not transitioning to a more professional style or transitioned into this professional style and consider their earlier days an
Old Shame.
