TV Criticism In The Age Of Curation

I've been writing about television since the late 1990s and I consider myself every bit the critic as anyone working for a major publication. But it's fair to say my career path as a critic has been an erratic and often unconventional one. While many of my older colleagues have covered the industry exclusively for most of their careers, I've tended to always have two or three careers going on simultaneously. I wrote about television on a Compuserve forum in the late 1990s while also hosting a syndicated talk radio show. I later worked for a short-lived financial news site (think Cheddar, but in 1999), where I juggled writing hard news stories and interviewing then FX-head Kevin Reilly or the CEO of the still-in-diapers Bay Area DVD service Netflix.

The next decade my career followed a predictable path. I'd get laid off and expand my television writing until I found my next permanent job. Which led to some awkward moments, such as when I made waves after writing some pieces about MSNBC canceling Phil Donahue, only to have to mothball my writing when I took a job managing a network owned-and-operated web site. It's only been in the past 3-4 years that I've finally devoted all of my attention to writing about television and the media.

I say all of this only to illustrate a point. Because I'm a bit of an outsider, it's been easier for me to write about subjects that would otherwise impact my career options. Sure, I think my pieces more than ten years ago arguing that the twice-a-year Television Critic Association gatherings were increasingly pointless made a lot of sense then and even more so now. But I received a lot of pushback from more established critics, including a memorable mention in one of the trades, which described me a "troll and failed critic." And it pretty much ensured that in some of my colleague's eyes, I was just a troublemaker who didn't properly respect his elders. So for better or worse, I'm an outsider. But because I am I have been forced to develop a clarity of purpose of my role and how I fit into the television critic universe.

Which is why I found two recent pieces about the role of television critics so interesting. Because while they came from very different points of view, they also reflect different aspects of a theory about television criticism that I've held for a long time. That the most effective role I can take is to serve as a gatekeeper and television concierge for readers. I like to sample a lot of shows and I have opinions on everything from the best Christmas movies of 2018 as well as what should happen on a new season of "Elite." AllYourScreens reflects my sensibility and I cover the shows and trends that I find of interest to me. The theory of the site is that there are enough people out there who agree with my point of view and are willing and eager to come along for the ride. I see myself as the television critic equivalent of a pirate radio station. I cover what I want for whatever random reason I want and trust my specific vision to attract enough regular readers to provide me with a steady income. So far that's worked out okay, but it's a singular way of approaching criticism that is out of favor in this world where everyone wants to work at Vox or Buzzfeed or one of the established industry players.

That's why I found Tim Goodman's latest piece on the evolving role of a television critic so interesting. Goodman is the chief TV critic for the Hollywood Reporter and it's useful to think of him as the industry's equivalent of Statler & Waldorf, the two cantankerous guys who grumble and heckle the performers from the balcony on "The Muppet Show." Goodman is talented and has twenty years or so of major league criticism under his belt. He's gruff, sometimes to a fault and has a maddening unwillingness to break out of the old-school critic role he wears like that coat once owned by Columbo. But he's also written a series of intriguing pieces in recent years about the role of television critics in the era of Peak TV. As much as anyone, he reflects the point of view of critics who have one foot in the Internet era but still kinda long for the days when you could write two or three thoughtful pieces a week for your local newspaper and be guaranteed of having a full-time job as a critic. So when I don't agree with him - and that's often the case - I'd have to be an idiot to dismiss his point of view on the industry.

In his piece "Amid Peak TV Glut, Critics Now Must Also Be Curators," Goodman comes to the realization that some of us have known for a while. That although reviews are nice, what matters to the majority of readers is context and curation. There's a place in the critic ecosystem for critics who focus on writing the big reviews. But for most readers, they also need someone to help guide them through the chaos of conflicting streaming services, uncertain premiere dates and nearly forgotten television shows:

Peak TV affords people the luxury of waiting. Reviews still help. They will always be there when someone is ready to read about, let me coyly say, the first season of The A Word and also the second season of The A Word. So that's nice. But what I've come to believe is infinitely more helpful than telling someone what's going to premiere in a week on HBO is a curated list of series they might have missed in the last five or six years (yes, really) and that they can watch right now. Or maybe just one series, revisited, that got lost — and here it is, resurfaced, not just with a link to the original review (although that could be helpful, sure) but a fresh reasoning — taking into consideration all that's come after — on why they should still seek it out. 

Another effect of Peak TV is that viewers aren't just looking forward anymore. Most of them are looking backward, at what they missed. I think this is a fundamental shift in viewing patterns that old-school journalistic thinking in regard to reviews hasn't properly addressed.

So I've become, rather aggressively of late, a list-maker. It's more than just some kind of added-value PSA. It's an opportunity.

This is a role I've been doing full-time for maybe the last 5-6 years and while some of it was the result of my sense of where the industry was headed, part of it was also driven by necessity. HBO could give a crap about me or my site. So spending my time cranking out "Game of Thrones" think pieces to compete with the other 400 similar efforts seemed like a fool's errand. But what I could do was focus on the shows that the major critics didn't cover regularly. It made it easier to cut through the clutter and to be honest, I liked discovering shows that garnered very little attention from the established critictariat. Even better for my bottom line, a lot of these shows never really go away. Every time one of these shows hits a streaming service, readers go looking for reviews and info on the show. And there my pieces sit, sucking up new readers without any effort on my part. Even better, a fair number of these readers decide they like what I'm covering and keep coming back. So Peak TV and the ephemeral nature of most entertainment sites means there is a viable business model that rewards a specific and singular vision of what television criticism should be. And it's a vision that is slowing becoming clear to critics who still see their roles as the intermediary between the television industry and its viewers.

Which brings me to the second piece of interest in this discussion, Kyle Paoletta's piece for The Baffler entitled "Party Monsters." He argues that the era of Peak TV has had the consequence of forcing many of the major television critics to focus on shows that garner mostly positive reviews, because they don't have the time to waste on shows that are "F" or even "C" level programs:

Kael, of course, was right. Dirty Harry begat Rambo begat Top Gun, and film audiences have been knocked about by cyborgs, secret agents, and superheroes ever since. Kael celebrated the films of the late sixties and seventies that she thought truly superlative, but always with the understanding that New Hollywood was too good to last. She also, importantly, was no rubber stamp: she blasted A Clockwork Orange as having “no motivating emotion,” and used it to argue that no less an eminence than Stanley Kubrick had “assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk.” Indeed, throughout the era of New Hollywood, the critics were as likely to sing the praises of a now beloved picture as to pan it, as when Renata Adler—Kael’s great antagonist and a necessary skeptic to the widely held assumptions of Hollywood’s excellence—wrote that “Seeing The Graduate is a bit like having one’s most brilliant friend to dinner, watching him grow more witty and animated with every moment, and then becoming aware that what one may really be witnessing is the onset of a nervous breakdown.” Compare to now, when a show’s poor review is usually blamed on the factors of its production rather than those responsible for creating it.

Though the latest season of Luke Cage is a “repetitive slog,” Sepinwall writes, that’s Marvel and Netflix’s fault for “filling up a thirteen- episode bag with only three or four episodes’ worth of story,” rather than, you know, the creator’s fault for only coming up with three or four episodes’ worth of story. Similarly, even as Sepinwall chides Legion as a series that prizes “style over substance,” he is quick to reassure the reader that in its “wonderful” first season, “the style was so dazzling, and the story propulsive enough, that it didn’t much matter that the characters were largely hollow archetypes.”

Such rhetorical excuse-making looks flabby next to Kael’s reviews of the eighties, when she blasted Platoon as “overwrought, with too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity” and wondered, bemused, why Scarface treated its characters “as if they had an interior life and were going to grow or change.” These are, by many accounts, quality films. But they are not half the measure of their sixties and seventies antecedents, and they were treated as such. Today’s television critics, unfortunately, learned the opposite lesson from their own Golden Age: Breaking Bad was a work of genius, so everything else must be pretty good too.

There is a lot about the piece I disagree with, but it's instructive for a couple of reasons. It provides a glimpse into how writers who aren't television critics see the form. And it provides a rare attempt to try and provide an overview of television criticism at a time when the needs of the industry (and the readers) are changing at a disorientingly fast rate.

Still, I think Paoletta misses a couple of things. One of the reasons why major television critics focus on high-profile, prestige television shows is because they have to. No critic gets hired at Rolling Stone or The Hollywood Reporter or the New York Times to write about "Dr. Pimple Popper." Editors expect big pieces about shows perceived as prestige offerings. It's good for everyone's brand and it generate a level of buzz with a key group of readers and advertisers. As Peak TV has continued, it's led to this odd bifurcation of television criticism. A small group of major critics waxing poetic about the improved later season of "Succession," while a larger group of often underpaid worker-bee critics generate pageviews with a relentless supply of recaps, snarky rewrites of other sites news and stories marked with headlines like "Jordan Peele wins the Internet." 

And that's the other side of this conversation that doesn't get enough attention. For most sites that carry a lot of television coverage, there is a race going on for pageviews and readers. It's a pressure that defines nearly every editorial decision. As more sites move behind a paywall - or at least a soft one - the need increases to have pieces that are "important" enough to be seen by readers are worth paying for. And even for sites that don't have a paywall, those big pieces help to continue to define that site as important to the industry and to readers. No site can afford to be seen as disposable or not integral to the day-to-day conversation in Hollywood. Being a tastemaker brings advertising money, more traffic and not coincidentally, more marketing opportunities.

All of this pressure sometimes leads to the grade inflation noted by Paoletta. Writing negative reviews can burn bridges with studios and networks. Bridges that need to be there in order to drive more revenue. And critics generally want to be considered thoughtful and fair. For better or worse, few people in the industry look at a harshly negative review of their show and say "well, that was fair." Even if they secretly believe with much of what has been said. So while I think Paoletta identified a real problem, I don't think he identified the real causes. And while it's amusing to see Paoletta whack critics such as Alan Sepinwall around like a pinata, focusing on the small subset of top-line critics over-exaggerates their importance and ignores the more interesting group of less-noticed critics who are being used like cannon fodder by sites who have realized they can get away with paying middling freelance fees months after the piece posts.

All of this is a long way of saying that the television critic industry hasn't given enough thought to how it needs to change in the era of Peak TV. Other than complaining about the ongoing tsunami of new programs, many critics are approaching their roles in much the same way they did in the past. If you're working as a major critic as a prestigious outlet, then you can afford to see the industry through the lens of television shows you see as important. But for the rest of us, we need to provide a curated tour through the minefield of peak television. One that is personal and distinctive and provides value to readers they won't find anywhere else.

You have to remember that while not all television is important, it's important to the people who watch it. That's how you provide value to the reader in a way that is good for both the soul and the bottom line. While there will likely always be a place for the old-school television critic, the future will likely be written by critics who are part reviewer, part guide and part entertainer.