Author's Saving Throw: In April 2024, Shane, Ryan, and Steven Lim announced that Watcher be leaving YouTube to put their new shows exclusively on their own subscription-streaming service, reportedly due to their company being financially unsustainable if they produced exclusively for YouTube. Following immense negative backlash, they returned just a few days later to provide another on-camera update, apologizing for the announcement and admitting how poorly they considered audience reaction, further announcing adjustments to their plan to make the transition more palatable, including making new videos merely timed exclusives (premiering a month on their platform before uploading them to YouTube) and offering additional access to the service for Patreon supporters.
The Cast Showoff: Shane brings over the Hot Daga energy, doing a song every time for Puppet History and a load of different voices for both that and The Quarantine Games. He even shows off dancing moves in Weird Wonderful World’s visit to a Shakespeare theatre.
The Quarantine Games was created for content they could do in their apartments and social distancing.
Ryan’s original idea for Are You Scared had a campfire setting, but with the pandemic, he changed it to him and Shane in the dark reading on their laptops.
Ironically, this was revamped to Too Many Spirits where Shane and Ryan read ghost stories to each other around a fire pit while getting drunk.
Teasing Creator: From True Crime s4, Shane’s been teasing Bergara Guitara and in The Quarantine Games, Ryan has his guitar in the background until finally playing a chord in episode four.
Troubled Production: As covered in "The Truth About Filming Ghost Files • Making Watcher", they had planned on shooting "The Chilling Tunnel of The Old Montana Prison" for Ghost Files during the same period of time as their Weird Wonderful World video on Butte, Montana (which was released in April 2023), but after shooting the latter, Ryan caught COVID-19, forcing the shooting arrangements to be rescheduled to a later date, sending the crew members back home early while Ryan remained in quarantine (thankfully, no one else was affected and Ryan soon recovered). They would eventually return to shoot the Ghost Files episode, which was finally released in October 2023.
According to Shane, the songs in Puppet History were a last minute addition and he was originally going to do like the end of the Pope Ruining History with other characters taking questions.
Are You Scared originally had no true stories, because Unsolved’s true stories can be draining, and Mari/Katie convinced Ryan that not knowing if they were real or fake added to the intrigue. However, after the first two seasons, they found that the real stories were indeed too upsetting and reverted to the original premise of telling all fictional stories.
