Red Letter Media

RedLetterMedia is the most important film criticism on the internet, and it's not close. Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman's Milwaukee operation — Half in the Bag, Best of the Worst, re:View — has spent over a decade and a half redefining what movie talk can be.

It started with Plinkett. The 70-minute takedowns of the Star Wars prequels — delivered in the voice of a disturbed shut-in — remain the gold standard of video essays. Funny, forensic, and devastating, they proved that internet film criticism could be better than the professionals.

Half in the Bag is the flagship. Mike and Jay, on a couch, talking about movies the way you'd talk about them with a friend — if your friend had a film degree and zero patience for nonsense. The show's longevity is the statement: no gimmicks, no sponsorship-read energy, just two guys whose taste you can calibrate your own against. When Half in the Bag loves something, it matters. When it hates something, the funeral is spectacular.

Best of the Worst is the party. The crew — Mike, Jay, Rich Evans, Jack Packard, Josh Davis, and a rotating cast of guests — subjects itself to B-movies, shot-on-video oddities, and direct-to-VHS curiosities, then debates which one deserves to survive. It's Mystery Science Theater for the algorithm age, and it's where RedLetterMedia's chemistry is most visible. These are people who genuinely like each other, genuinely love movies, and genuinely enjoy watching terrible ones together.

re:View is the love letter. Longer retrospectives on films and filmmakers the crew actually admires — the antidote to the assumption that RedLetterMedia only exists to tear things down. The episode on The Thing, the Carpenter retrospectives, the deep dives into forgotten genre films: this is where the cinephilia shows, and it's the series that silences the "they just hate everything" crowd.

The history runs deeper than the channel. Red Letter Media, LLC was founded by Mike Stoklasa in 2004 in Scottsdale, Arizona — long before YouTube was the vehicle — and built on low-budget feature filmmaking. Oranges: Revenge of the Eggplant, Feeding Frenzy, The Recovered, Space Cop: these aren't sketches, they're actual features made by actual filmmakers on actual micro-budgets, starring Stoklasa and the same crew that now sits on the couch. That filmmaking background is the whole secret. The Plinkett reviews hit so hard because they were made by someone who understands how movies are built — blocking, pacing, character logic — and could explain exactly where the prequels broke.

The 2009 Phantom Menace review is the detonation point. Posted in seven parts, narrated by the ghoulish Mr. Plinkett, it ran over an hour and treated a blockbuster like a text worth serious analysis. It was praised for both content and presentation, screened at festivals and conventions, and effectively invented the long-form video essay as a popular form. Every "X explained" channel, every 40-minute deep dive, every serious piece of YouTube criticism — Plinkett is in the DNA.

The numbers tell the scale: 1.6 million subscribers, 1.4 billion total views, nine hundred-plus videos, and a Gold Creator Award in 2019. But the subscriber count has always understated the influence. RedLetterMedia's audience is famously engaged — uploads pull consistently huge view numbers from a fanbase that treats new episodes like events, and the Patreon support has reportedly run into the tens of thousands per month. Merchandise drops sell out. This is a small Milwaukee company with the reach of a media network and the overhead of a basement.

The aesthetic is the anti-aesthetic, and it's deliberate. Shot in a Milwaukee studio that looks like a video rental store that never closed, dressed in the grammar of public-access television, RedLetterMedia performs a kind of radical unpretentiousness. No ring lights, no jump cuts, no "smash that like button" theater. The humor is dry and blue in equal measure — Rich Evans' deranged energy, Jay's deadpan, Mike's barely-contained exasperation — and it never apologizes for assuming the audience is smart.

The influence is everywhere, including places that would never admit it. The Plinkett reviews changed how a generation talks about the Star Wars prequels — some would argue they changed the prequels' entire critical reputation, dragging the conversation from "they're fine for kids" to a serious reckoning with Lucas's storytelling choices. Half in the Bag's couch-and-conversation format became the template for a thousand podcasts. Best of the Worst proved that watching bad movies could be a communal art form.

There are controversies, because of course there are — the Captain Marvel review became a flashpoint, and the crew's refusal to play the discourse game has made them a permanent Rorschach test. But the work outlasts the arguments. Say what you want about any single take; the body of work is one of the most consistent runs in online media, and the crew's independence — owned by Stoklasa, answerable to nobody — is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.

The satirical side projects deserve their due too. The Nerd Crew — a pitch-perfect parody of fan-culture podcasting — might be the sharpest thing they've ever made, a show that eviscerates the exact ecosystem RedLetterMedia gets lumped into. Game Station 2.0 and Previously Recorded kept the gaming flank covered. Every lane they touch, they redefine by refusing to respect its conventions.

What keeps it alive after all these years is the simplest thing: they're still funny, still sharp, and still clearly having fun. The couch hasn't changed. The movies keep coming. And as long as Hollywood keeps making things worth talking about — or worth eviscerating — RedLetterMedia will be sitting in Milwaukee, waiting with a VCR full of garbage and a take you haven't heard anywhere else.

Previously covers RedLetterMedia because the Plinkett reviews are history, Half in the Bag is appointment viewing, and Best of the Worst is the best party on the internet. The couch is always open.