Lessons from the Critical Drinker’s Reviews

Why Do People Watch the Critical Drinker?

Will Jordan plays a drunk ranting at a bar with an endless supply of whisky, and his analysis of modern movies is sharper than most professional film criticism being published today. His millions of subscribers come back for the critique. For more, see long-Lasting lessons from my first ghostwriting project.

The entertainment press treats him as a culture war figure, and he does wade into those waters. But that framing misses what makes his channel useful.

Jordan is a professional fiction author. He wrote the Ryan Drake thriller series and co-wrote a book with James Patterson. When he talks about setup and payoff, character arcs, and earned emotional moments, he’s drawing on craft knowledge. His “Why Modern Movies Suck” series is a lesson in story structure delivered by a guy pretending to be hammered.

His best videos teach real lessons about storytelling, and writers should pay attention even if they never watch another superhero movie.

What Does the Critical Drinker Teach About Setup and Payoff?

Jordan’s most repeated concept is setup and payoff, and he hammers it because modern blockbusters keep getting it wrong.

The principle is simple: if something significant happens later in your story, you need to build toward it first. If your hero overcomes the villain, the audience needs to understand why that villain needed defeating. If an unexpected event changes the story’s direction, the audience needs enough context to believe it could happen.

His go-to positive example is Aliens. That film sets up every significant payoff earlier.

It establishes Ripley’s competence with the power loader in a throwaway work scene before it becomes the tool she uses to fight the Queen. It shows the marines’ overconfidence before their first disastrous encounter strips it away. Every moment works because the film invested in the groundwork.

Aliens is the example I’d pick too. Every payoff in that film feels inevitable the moment it happens, and it feels that way because the filmmakers did the dull work early. Writers skip the dull work constantly, and then they wonder why their climax plays like a coincidence.

His negative examples are everywhere in modern franchise filmmaking. Characters develop abilities with no setup. Emotional beats land with no foundation. Villains are defeated through powers that didn’t exist two scenes earlier. Jordan’s point is that the production pipeline prioritizes speed and spectacle over the patient structural work that makes audiences care.

For writers, this is the most transferable lesson on his channel. Every chapter in a book, every section in a memoir, every argument in a business book needs the same discipline. If your ending doesn’t land, the problem is almost always what you failed to set up earlier.

Why does tearing down old heroes to elevate new ones fail?

One of Jordan’s sharpest observations is what he calls the denigration of established characters to prop up new ones. His complaint: modern franchise films take beloved characters and make them incompetent, broken, or morally compromised so that a new character can look better by comparison.

His Star Wars analysis is the clearest example.

Luke Skywalker in the original trilogy is a flawed but hopeful character who redeems his father through faith and persistence. Luke in The Last Jedi is a bitter hermit who considers murdering his nephew in his sleep. Jordan accepts that characters can change or age into disillusionment. His argument is that the story has to justify the change, and the writers imposed Luke’s to service a new character’s arc.

Jordan’s diagnosis of that Luke is the right one, and the change is still a mistake. A hero can go sour, since real people do. When the writers drop the sourness on him offscreen so somebody else can have a better scene, though, the audience feels cheated, and they’re right to.

The writing lesson underneath the film criticism is about respect for what came before.

In memoir ghostwriting, this shows up when clients want to skip over or diminish earlier chapters of their life to make the current chapter look more impressive. In fiction, it shows up when writers break established characters to create cheap conflict. The audience (or the reader) always notices when you tear something down instead of building something up.

The “Strong Female Character” Problem

This is the topic that gets Jordan labeled as anti-woman. That misses his actual argument. He praises Ripley in Alien, Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, and Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. His complaint is with one writing pattern: female characters who are instantly competent at everything, face no meaningful obstacles, and whose strength the writers show by making every male character around them stupid or weak.

His point is about craft. A character with no vulnerabilities has no arc. A character who succeeds at everything on the first attempt generates no tension. A character whose competence the writer establishes by contrast with incompetent supporting characters hasn’t earned anything. This applies to male characters too. It’s just more visible in current franchise filmmaking because studios are producing the same flat archetype repeatedly and calling it a win.

Ripley works because she’s terrified and outmatched and figures it out anyway. Sarah Connor works because she transforms from a waitress into a warrior across two films, and the transformation costs her everything. The characters Jordan criticizes work less well because they skip the transformation entirely.

Ripley and Sarah Connor are the heroines I’d hold up to any writer, and what makes them great is the fear. They lose things and they bleed for every inch. A writer who hands a heroine instant mastery thinks they’re honoring her, and all they’ve done is take away the part of the story worth watching. For any writer building a protagonist, the lesson is the same regardless of gender: strength without vulnerability is boring, and competence without cost is unearned.

What happens when a story puts message over story?

Jordan’s most controversial recurring theme is his critique of films that prioritize political messaging over storytelling. Again, his actual argument is more subtle than the discourse around it suggests. He doesn’t object to themes in stories. He objects to themes replacing stories.

His distinction is useful: a theme that emerges from character and conflict lands with the audience naturally.

A theme that’s imposed on the story from outside feels like a lecture. The original Star Wars films are about hope, sacrifice, and redemption, but nobody walks out of the theater feeling like they sat through a sermon. The themes arise from the characters’ choices and consequences.

Jordan points to Game of Thrones as a case study in both directions. The early seasons worked because the political intrigue, moral complexity, and consequences for bad decisions emerged from the characters and world. The later seasons failed because the writers started working backward from the moments they wanted (spectacular set pieces, shocking twists, a particular ending) and forced the characters to get there regardless of whether it made sense.

Game of Thrones is the saddest case of this I know. The early seasons built an enormous amount of trust, and the later ones spent it dragging characters toward an ending like furniture. Readers can smell that kind of backward plotting from a hundred pages away, and they don’t forgive it.

This is a problem every writer faces. You have something you want to say. The question is whether you build a story that justifies saying it, or whether you build a vehicle for the message and call it a story. Readers and audiences can always tell the difference.

What can writers learn from the Critical Drinker?

The Critical Drinker’s channel is a case study in something writers rarely see: an audience of millions engaging passionately with discussions about story structure, character development, and narrative craft. People who would never read a screenwriting textbook will watch a drunk Scotsman explain setup and payoff for fifteen minutes and come away understanding the concept better than most writing workshop graduates.

Jordan succeeds for the same reasons any good writer succeeds. He’s a distinctive voice. He uses specific examples instead of vague principles. He takes a position and defends it instead of hedging. And he respects his audience enough to assume they can follow a real argument about craft.

His channel has its blind spots. The culture war framing can overwhelm the craft analysis. The Daily Wire affiliation raises questions about objectivity. He’s harsher on some targets than others for reasons that seem more political than structural. But when he’s focused on the mechanics of storytelling, breaking down why a scene works or why a character arc falls flat, his analysis is as good as anything being published in mainstream film criticism. Better, in many cases, because he’s a working fiction author who understands the problems from the inside.

I share those reservations. When he drifts into culture war, the argument turns into a scoreboard and the craft disappears, and I lose interest fast. When he stays on structure, I learn something, and I can’t say that about many critics. Novel, memoir, or business book, the fundamentals don’t change. Setup and payoff. Characters who deserve their transformations. Themes that emerge from story instead of replacing it. The Critical Drinker wraps these lessons in whisky and profanity, but the lessons themselves are as old as storytelling.

What I respect most about Jordan is that he takes a position and backs it with specifics. Too much craft advice is timid mush from people afraid of offending a studio or a publisher. A fake drunk with a glass of whisky has taught more ordinary people about story structure than a shelf of screenwriting textbooks, and the textbook authors ought to be embarrassed.

If you’re working on a book and want help getting the structure, characters, and voice right, let’s talk.