The Distressed Watcher



The Distressed Watcher is a former reviewer character created by T.J. Kincaid, formerly a contributor to thatguywiththeglasses.com.

A native of New Orleans, Kincaid built a following for his left-leaning political and social commentary on YouTube under the name The Amazing Atheist. A fan of TGWTG, he applied to become a contributor and was accepted, creating the title "The Distressed Watcher" to focus his entertainment reviews around.

His first show with TGWTG was Trailer Failure, in which he critiqued trailers and previews of upcoming movies. His opening tagline was "I review the previews and let you know which trailers are failures!" He would usually review three to four trailers per episode, and while he would mostly make snarky comments at each one, he would point out a trailer's good points by the end and give each trailer an honest A-F grade.

The show arched a fair level of popularity on the site, though DW did receive criticism from those who claimed his jokes often took too long. Despite this, DW eventually ended the show, claiming the process of producing this particular type of show was too much for him.

DW's next big venture was to review the Star Wars prequel trilogy, posting three-part reviews of each individual movie and flat out pointing out what was wrong with each one. These reviews were done exclusively with voiceovers on top of the movie clips with DW never shown on camera.This time viewers called him out for covering a topic that had already been greatly criticized and largely for the same reasons he pointed out, citing Red Letter Media's review of the prequels.

After that, his videos began to vary in content with no definite direction. He did some lists of topics like his picks for the most badass characters, and he later started reviewing music videos. His last few reviews made for TGWTG seemed to focus on criticizing entertainment culture in general, closer to the political social commentary he did on YouTube.

Despite becoming one of the more watched contributors on the site, DW also began building a hatedom among many viewers, especially as he became known as one who did not respond well to criticism over the content of his videos. He also did not appear very popular among the other contributors and staff; despite being well-known, he never appeared in any of the big anniversary crossover specials. Two online petitions were started by fans to have him removed from the site. Despite this, he was never fired. Eventually, though, he left on his own terms and his videos were taken down from the site.

In a video on his YouTube channel, where he had continued posting videos as The Amazing Atheist, Kincaid posted a commentary on why he left. He claimed that TGWTG had appeared to be going in a different direction since they let go of the site's co-founder Mike Ellis, one of the few friends he had within the company.

Kincaid continues to be a polarizing figure as he continues to post videos as The Amazing Athiest. He recently made The Hardcore Kid's third list of "Smegged Up YouTube Failures."