The Culture Hole, Issue 13: The Baffling Pessimism of Media Criticism and Other Rhymes
Issue 13: The Baffling Pessimism of Media Criticism and Other Rhymes
[Update: Holy cats, you guys! It turns out some of the AV Club writers saw this and we had a really good discussion in the comments. Like, weirdly-polite-since-this is-the-internet good. Thanks to Rowan, Todd and everyone else who shared their opinion, here and on Twitter. The AV Club guys are great and I'm thankful they joined in. It was a lot of fun and a fantastic learning experience for me. - James]
I do not think at this point anyone who knows me is surprised at my ongoing frustration/interest in The AV Club, and yet I find myself still checking in periodically. I could very easily stop reading it forever, but the problem I find myself in is that a lot of their writers are actually quite good! Well, that is a problem, a wrinkle that’s compounded by the real problem, which is that I fundamentally find critics’ writing more interesting when they are talking about something they like, not actively trying to tear it apart.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely agree that we should take a critical eye to the things we consume, from every standpoint, be it sociopolitical, character, or pure mechanics of a television episode’s construction. However, I also think there needs to be a fundamental joy taken in the medium and in the specific show a critic is watching, and I think on both of these counts, the AV Club frequently fails to succeed, consistently and repeatedly. In fact, I think they’re so biased towards certain genres, formats & shows that they’re basically a Krusty Doll that’s been set to “Evil.”
There is zero reason for them to review a procedural show. Any procedural show, with the exception of Castle, which they are more than willing to forgive for the trappings of its format, and which tends to draw into start contrast their reactions to shows like House. They just don’t like procedurals, so why even watch them in the first place? Snark? I don’t think that’s a very good resaon. At this point, Zack Handlen’s reviews of House are running on several years of him saying almost nothing other than complaints about the patient-of-the-week, the characters and how he stopped liking the show years ago. In his review of the season premiere, he literally says that he is only continuing to review the show out of spite, to show the world it hasn’t “broken” him.
And to me, that seems like a completely fucked up attitude to have. How likely do you think it is that he is going to give a show he fundamentally dislikes a good or even fair review?
The Thursday night comedy TV lineup as reviewed on the AV Club fascinates me, because it is more or less comprised of a show they like (Community, a few that they used to (The Office, The Big Bang Theory) and one that they soon won’t (Parks and Recreation). I say that about the last one because it’s not only similar in format to a show they’ve inched closer and closer towards carrying a seething hatred for in recent years (more on that later), but because we’re starting to see the hints of it already. In the review of last week’s episode, we get to see it start to play out in an adorable miniature narrative. Steve Heisler starts by complimenting how deft the show is at making the character of Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) a nuanced one, a guy who is fundamentally well-suited for his career but who has some serious character flaws that continually get in the way, personally and professionally, but who is ultimately saved by his strengths. Then he proceeds to say this totally baffling bit of criticism following that:
And maybe I’m alone here, but I’m starting to feel like Chris [Rob Lowe] is dangerously close to the edge. Any weirder and he’d probably become unlikable, and any tamer and I suppose the writers would stop having fun with him… It’s cool that the writers have figured out what makes the most unflappable guy in the office [Jerry] totally lose his cool, but I think next they need to find a way to reign in the Chris-crazy while keeping his utter goofiness intact.
That’s right: the fault with that episode of Parks and Recreation, according to the AV Club, is that it is doing something well that’s quite hard to do - they point out the show is succeeding right now with the Character of Chris - but they assume someday the show won’t do it well. It is literally not even a flaw that currently exists, by their own admission, but it betrays an alarming fact: The AV Club has a fundamentally negative view of the media they review. A show they like is, frequently, one they already assume they won’t someday.
It’s been the trajectory for shows like The Office and The Big Bang Theory on the site. I’m not saying that I enjoy The Office as much as I did when I first fell in love with the show, and even as recently as the summer I was saying that the departure of Steve Carell would have been a great place to end the series on a high note, but I’ve been pleased with how the show has introduced new characters (like James Spader’s Robert California and Ellie Kemper’s Erin Hannon) in recent years and I’m pleased to report that my negative prognosis is one that I have abandoned. I’m actually enjoying this season very much, and it’s the first season where I’ve watched every week in a couple of years. I think episodes like last week’s prove that the show still has creative legs because the characters are fundamentally interesting.
Myles McNutt (and let me take a second to say that, with absolutely no sarcasm or snark, that I think that name is fucking amazing), however, thinks that the show doing a Halloween episode two years in a row means that it’s lazy and creatively bankrupt, which is completely baffling to me because as someone who works in a large bureaucracy, Halloween costumes and parties are just a fact of life. He’ll make bold statements like saying that the whole thing was objectively dull (not just to him), or how nothing was connected to an overarching narrative through other episodes, ignoring the fact that the episode’s primary story, which is about the relationship between Andy (Ed Helms) and Erin, is quite literally part of a storyline about their relationship that the show has been working on for two and a half years. Or that the Pam/Angela feud isn’t connected to anything even though it has been a part of the show for six and a half years, with this pregnancy arc having been a significant part of this whole season. McNutt dislikes the show so much that he faults it for things that are factually untrue about it.
I understand, I really do. Myles McNutt no longer enjoys watching The Office. There’s nothing wrong with that; I don’t enjoy watching a lot of shows! Generally, I don’t watch them. It’s different for a professional critic, of course, and not just a fan with opinions. They get screeners and assignments and that is it! They have to see the ups and downs in a season; if a show tanks, they can get stuck watching that process. However, statements by the site’s writers lead me to understand that there is some fluidity with the assignments in between seasons. Zack Handlen has said he willingly re-upped with House and it seems likely that McNutt did it with The Office. If he was forced to, I genuinely feel bad for him. If not, I can’t help but wonder why he willingly made it is his job to be miserable every week.
However, I see little antipathy as actively hostile as the site’s response to The Big Bang Theory, which it has actively disliked since the third season. When he reviewed it, Todd VanDerWerff would frequently criticize it for its format and complain it was too “sitcommy”, which is unsurprising because it is a multicamera sitcom. He’s since passed on the show to another writer as of this season, and new reviewer Oliver Sava has pretty much exactly the same reaction: he prefers single camera comedies. After only a few episodes, Sava is already bored to the point where he is actively miswatching and misreporting the show, like saying that Melissa Rauch appears only to do an impression of her character fiance’s mother, even though that is one line in a scene in which she plays a large, active role and helps push forward the B-story. Sava’s statement is completely factually incorrect, something that is apparent to a person who has actually watched the entire scene and paid a modicum of attention. It honestly seems like he just saw something in the scene he didn’t like and either stopped watching or stopped paying attention.
Like I said before, it’s okay to not like something. And it’s okay for a critic not to like something, too. However, when you’re paid to watch a show, I like to think you’re obliged to watch and actually pay attention instead of reporting things that are factually untrue. Not doing it is an active dereliction of your job.
The real cherry on top of the problems I have with the site is the “compliment” Sava gives the show in the second paragraph, when he gives “Kudos” to the episode’s director “for breaking the three-camera format and joining the ranks of contemporary sitcoms, even if only for 30 seconds.” So let me say something a little more direct and negative than usual, just for a moment:
Fuck you.
Not every show is Louie or Breaking Bad (which I also love). There are different approaches to making TV, both comedy and drama. Hell, even Louis C.K. made a multi-camera sitcom and it is generally considered to be awesome. Not only is the live-taped multi-camera sitcom part of a proud comedy tradition going straight back to theatre and Vaudeville and including I Love Lucy, one of the most adored and influential sitcoms - not to mention the very first one - of all time. Some of the most influential comedies ever, like Seinfeld, were multi-camera. It takes skill to do well and it’s not an antiquated art form.
There are still a lot of multi-camera sitcoms on television, too. The two most-watched comedies - including The Big Bang Theory - are multi-camera sitcoms. It’s not some outdated, antiquated format that “modern” people have given up on, it is a current, contemporary and completely artistically valid stylistic choice and fuck you for saying anything otherwise. Don’t be a snob. Did you know that the single camera sitcom isn’t anything purely contemporary either, but a style that goes back to shows like The Andy Griffith Show, which premiered only three years after the first multi-camera sitcom went off the air, or M*A*S*H, whose finale is the most watched television episode in history? 106 million people watched a single-camera television episode in Nineteen Eighty-Three, so if you want to pretend that multi-camera sitcoms are old and single-camera ones are contemporary, you are so completely, objectively incorrect that saying anything else is nothing more than snobbery.
AV Club, I really want to like you. You have some incredibly talented writers, who can give some of the most beautiful, nuanced prose analyzing television that currently exists. When one of your writers likes something, the article that results can be transcendent. It shouldn’t be conditional on liking a show, though, and I worry that your outlook is so fundamentally pessimistic that the deck is stacked against liking something. Personally, I find it easier to write about things I like, and I’m happiest with my writing when it’s something positive. I started this site with Brandon to bring more positivity to discourse, and while your approach is completely valid, I can’t help but notice that too many of your writers are vocally unhappy about shows and episodes they say they like. It’s okay not to like things. Criticism is important and it is needed. But it’s okay to like things, too, and giving shows a fair shake by not misrepresenting them is where things have to start.
Hi there, AV Club writer here. We’re not opposed to criticism of the site - especially with so many writers, where it can be hard to separate our personal stories from the overall site as a whole. However, I think you’re conflating a three different things all into one, which is a little confusing. They are: misrepresentation of shows, appropriateness of reviewers matched with their shows, and the part that gives your post its title, “baffling pessimism”.
Misrepresentation is the easiest one of those to discuss. If a critic is doing it - and I can’t judge the examples you gave - that’s a problem. It is not necessarily a problem that’s indicative of anything wider, though. Maybe a cat jumps in your lap and you miss an explanatory line. Or maybe it actually is something confusing that both you and the critic have different opinions and certainties of. Given that we don’t do reviews-by-committee, such things are likely going to happen, though they can be very bad things at times.
Second, yes, it would be great if we could match reviewers up with the shows they wanted to cover. I would love if I had a schedule of Classic Veronica Mars, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and current Misfits, Community, and Game of Thrones. Instead I have Classic VM, American Dad, and Terra Nova (and Misfits, Wilfred, and Bob’s Burgers on hiatus). Is Terra Nova what I want to cover? Not ideally. Is it a good show? I don’t think so, though it could be one day. Do we need someone to cover it, and am I as good a match as any for it? Yes. Is Todd a good match for Community and Game of Thrones? Yes. So while I might want those, it’s a constant negotiation between the writers, editors, and yes, business considerations of what shows get covered and who covers them.
So it might not be ideal that someone who doesn’t necessarily like 3-cam sitcoms cover Big Bang Theory, but it’s also possible that that person was the best person available for the job at the time for other reasons. I’m not a huge multi-cam fan myself but it’s not like I’m incapable of talking about a Seinfeld, in the same way that I’m not necessarily a fan of Parks & Rec’s celebrations of certain small-town social norms but still enjoy that show.
Finally, the most important and interesting point on pessimism. To be honest, virtually every week we get commenters who say “GOD WHY DON’T YOU GET SOMEONE WHO LIKES THE SHOW TO REVIEW IT”. We generally do like the shows we cover, but we’re *critics*. This means we have to analyze the show according to whatever tools seem to fit. Also, discussing a show week-to-week, without knowing how it’ll all end up, pushes us into certain constraints. As savvy viewers of television or storytelling generally, we try to work at putting the shows in context as they air. A lot of the time, this is going to take the form of “I’m worried about where this aspect of the show might be going” or alternately “This is a problem now, and here are the challenges in fixing it.”
Such reactions are, I think, natural and possible even inevitable when faced with the difficulty of judging a show week-to-week. Now, you can and possibly should argue that this is a flaw with the idea of the week-to-week review (as critics, we certainly do have those debates). But I think it needs to be understood and acknowledged.
Hi Rowan,
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
I disagree about your response regarding the misrepresentation. Regarding the review of Big Bang Theory, it was a matter of Mr. Sava saying that all a character did in a scene was X, when in reality the scene went on for about 3-4 more minutes, with her in the whole thing. I’m not sure that’s about a momentary distraction or a matter of confusion/differing opinions; that’s a complete factual inaccuracy that spans an entire scene. Similarly, knowing that Myles McNutt has watched The Office for years, I find it hard to accept a distraction or confusion explanation for not tying together two characters who he has watched date with an episode where they talk about dating. It seems like a genuine failure to pay attention to me, but of course, that’s my opinion, like you said.
I do understand that the scheduling reviewers is hard, and I know that critics don’t always get to watch what they like - I tried to address that in my article, though I might not have spent enough time on it or elucidated it well. I absolutely have sympathy for professional critics in that regard, and I recognize that as someone who gets to watch and write about what he wants in his free time, I’m pretty lucky. However, I expect that a critic be fair with what they’re reviewing, and that’s what I meant to communicate instead of the idea that reviewers should review shows they like. It’s expected that a critic who doesn’t like a 3-camera sitcom might have to review one. However, I think it’s the critic’s responsibility to not actually take digs at the 3-camera format when they’re reviewing it, and that’s what I criticized Mr. Sava for doing. In his dig (about 3-camera sitcoms not being “contemporary”), he also managed to say something inaccurate about the format, which is where I additionally criticized him. To me, his pessimism about the show and the format resulted in an unfair approach to the review and a couple of factual inaccuracies (the remarks about “contemporary sitcoms” and the part about the character), which is why I connected those three in the article. For an example of a critic keeping the reviews “fair,” as nebulous as that is, I immediately go to Donna Bowman on How I Met Your Mother, Noel Murray or yourself on Terra Nova. While I was watching Terra Nova, I liked reading your reviews because they found a way to be critical of some of the show’s choices (like the amnesia episode) without seeming inherently against them. Sometimes, comments like Mr. Sava’s make it seem like he’s against a show, and in the case of Mr. Handlen and House, he’s explicitly said as much in the article I linked.
I do think the pessimism is something that pops up frequently on the site, though. With the Parks and Recreation review, I think Mr. Heisler could have stopped with his compliment to the current Chris/Jerry dynamic and, should the show not do it well in the future, remark then that he had hoped the show would have adjusted some of those characterizations/dynamics better over time, but was disappointed that it didn’t, using the aired episodes as evidence. I think the idea of reviewing it as/after it happens is generally more pragmatic than the “I’m worried that it won’t be as good later” approach and makes it less pessimistic. I think your “This is a problem now, and here are the challenges in fixing it” line is a great example of something that I agree with and try to emulate in my own writing, but which I don’t think Mr. Heisler did. It makes him sound prematurely unhappy with something he said he liked.
Like I said, though, there’s a lot I do like about the AV Club. You are all talented writers (and interviewers), and that’s why I ultimately keep coming back, even if I add and drop some weekly show reviews as time goes by. Thanks for taking the time to write such a reasoned response to my article; it made my day. Have a good evening,
-James
It’s just very problematic for a reviewer to say “There is no way I could ever possibly enjoy this.” It’s honest, but it’s not very helpful to people who actually do consider themselves to be the audience of that show.
I think they can, however, say some form of “This is not for me, but there are things others will like,” or evaluate themes and mechanics without snark. It’s the assumption of having the “right” opinion that gets to me.
Exactly. Look, I hate Two & A Half Men with a fiery passion, but I can comprehend when it’s doing right by its audience, I think.
This article does a fantastic job at pointing out one of my main issues with The AV Club. They’re often extremely biased toward the shows they’re reviewing, usually in a negative way, but sometimes in an overly positive way. For example, I’d argue that great shows like Community and Louie occasionally have dud episodes, but you wouldn’t know it from reading The AV Club reviews, where even the duds get a free pass. On the other hand, when they dislike a show, even the more positive reviews will be couched in bile and vitriol. I’m thinking mainly of Todd VanDerWerff’s terrible recaps of Glee, where his hatred for the show seeps through even when he’s giving an episode a B+. Why does he keep reviewing a show he has no positive feelings toward?
That being said, sometimes the site pairs up the right reviewer with the right show, and the results are a joy to read. Their AV Club Classic reviews are always written with genuine love and enthusiasm, and I think Carrie Reisler does a fantastic job with her Vampire Diaries coverage. I’m not saying all their reviews have to be positive, but maybe write from a place of love instead of a place of condescension and hate. Is that so much to ask?
I think bias is everywhere and it’s impossible for a reviewer or critic to get away from it, actually. We all have things we like and dislike, and in the case of AV Club reviewers, they don’t necessarily get to pick what they review. Ideally, I think a reviewer should try to compensate for their bias, but it’s hard to do. I know Todd Vanderwerff has really started to do it better than I thought he used to when it comes to Community reviews, and it’s definitely made those articles a lot more interesting to read. I think positive bias is easier to compensate for, though; it’s easy to go, “Dang, I sure am laying this praise on thick,” but harder (at least for me, hello self awareness) to acknowledge my negative biases. The best reviewers (like Roger Ebert) can betray their bias and still leave you with a useful review that lets you know whether you’ll like something or tease some useful analysis, and my main criticism of the AV Club in this article, at least as I tried to convey it, was that some of their writers are not always great at acknowledging when they’re being pessimistic or unfair to a show, which harms the analysis because the negativity gets passed off as objectivity.
That said, there are still a LOT of great pieces and writers on the site. I’ve heard Reisler does an amazing job, and I also like Noel Murray and Donna Bowman a lot, too. Plus, even writers whose reviews I don’t always like reading often do some killer interviews.
I’m genuinely baffled that I’m painted as someone who doesn’t like multi-camera sitcoms here, when I’m pretty sure my continuing belief that there’s a good show inside of the 2 Broke Girls mess is going to get me chased off the Internet with torches and pitchforks.
Part of good TV criticism is and always has been and always will be soothsaying. We need to look at elements of shows and see if we think they’ll be problematic going forward or not, because TV criticism, unlike, say a movie review, is all about filing reports from the field and saying what the current status of operations is. Some of our predictions will inevitably turn out to be wrong-the one I always use is when I said Brothers & Sisters would be the next thirtysomething, which obviously didn’t turn out to be true (it was Parenthood)-but if there’s something that pings our radars as starting to push too far, then we need to bring that up, if only to point out our own biases on the matter. (And all criticism is inherently biased, etc.) When I read Steve’s criticism of Chris, I don’t read an unfounded accusation of something he fears might happen; I read him saying that the line is here, and Chris is still on this side of the line, but only JUST. If the show pushes him any further, then he’ll be over the line, and it’ll become grating. Which is a fair criticism to make, especially of a work in progress, and it’s a criticism other critics, critics who don’t write for our site, have also made. (I’ve made it myself about Ron in the past, though the show usually-not always, but usually-knows when to reel him in, so I cut them more slack in that regard.)
It’d be easier-no doubt-if we only covered the shows everybody loved. But that would amount-at most-to about a dozen TV shows, and even then, we’d inevitably find stuff that didn’t work in some of them. Because that’s what we do. That’s our job. The nature of episode-by-episode reviewing is that it ends up being a three-way conversation between the reviewer, the readers, and the show itself. The interesting thing is that the show doesn’t have to listen. Ultimately, I have no idea if anybody on 2 Broke Girls is reading my suggestions for how the show could be better. I suspect they don’t care since they have a huge hit on their hands. And it’s entirely possible-if the show turns out to be amazing or horrible somewhere down the line-that my early write-ups will appear hopelessly naive. But that’s the nature of field reporting: You never quite know how the situation is going to evolve, but you can hopefully give your best guess.
(I’ll address notions of “bias” down here. Often, “bias” is used to signify that the particular reader believes that we have unfair attitudes toward a show which will never shift or evolve; really, in a journalistic sense, it should mean that, like, if I were married to Kat Dennings-which would be awesome-I really shouldn’t be reviewing 2 Broke Girls, for obvious reasons. What this usually means is, “I wish that you loved/hated this as much as I do.” Which is totally cool. I get that opinion. I’ve read people bashing Community and been baffled. But we follow a couple of rules: 1.) Nobody gets assigned to a show they absolutely hate; it’s always something that either shows promise or something they genuinely like(d). 2.) Nobody’s forced to cover something they don’t want to cover, even if the hits are worth it. (Well, I’ll force myself to do it, but I’m an insane workaholic.) Our reviews-always, always, always-stem from a place of wanting the shows to be better or to be as good as we remember them being. And that’s hard for an old show to do, but not impossible either. I’ll direct you to some of Zack’s later reviews of this season of House, which were complimentary toward how the show was trying to shake things up.)
Hi Todd,
I definitely didn’t mean to paint you as someone who hates the multi-camera sitcom - you’ve been pretty vocal about your respect for it and its traditions - simply that, knowing that, your occasional criticisms of The Big Bang Theory for “sitcomminess” baffled me because they stood out and seemed a little… off to me. I really liked your review of the 2 Broke Girls episode you attended the taping of, because it added that extra layer of analysis in terms of the show’s construction and the audience experience (I found attending a taping of Craig Ferguson’s late night show to be revelatory in certain ways, and I was sad my tickets to see a BBT taping got canceled when the show went on hiatus due to Kaley Cuoco broke her let). I find your love of the craft of TV, as well as shows like Community, truly wonderful.
I’ll admit that I haven’t seen Zack’s most recent few reviews of House, and that’s a definite mistake on my part.
I try to approach bias from my background in psychology, which defines it as basically any opinion or trend that skews in either direction, positive or negative. Everybody has them, lord knows I do. Here at C!TB, I try to lay them extremely bare to get ahead of any idea of objectivity, which is why I think I bristled at some of the things I did in the article - like my perception of snark or “unfair” judgment - whether I should have or not.
Thanks sincerely to both you and Rowan (and Zack on twitter) for being so eminently respectful and reasonable; looking back, I was a bit of a dick (I definitely shouldn’t have cussed at Oliver, however much I disagreed with his take on things), and your thoughtful responses have been really wonderful to read. I’m definitely reconsidering some of my opinions, and I believe you when you say that the writing comes from a yearning for good TV. Thanks for treating me so well and sharing so much.
The reason we don’t put our base opinions about the show as a whole up front is because that would get boring to read, week after week, not to mention repetitive. We trust our audience to have read our articles and know where we’re coming from. Again, an ongoing dialogue. What we’re doing isn’t saying, “This is right, and you are wrong.” What we’re doing is starting a conversation, a conversation that our readers enjoy participating in.
I agree. Just stating the base opinion on a week-by-week basis would be boring and repetitive. However, I think there’s a way to be self-aware of bias and make that clear in the writing without simply saying it bluntly, a big part of which is the reviewer’s acknowledgment that the reaction is personal instead of making bold, objective pronouncements. I think at its best the AV Club does that. For example, Donna’s articles always feel like extremely well-formed personal reactions that have a lot of great analysis in them. Even when she and I disagree, it doesn’t feel like I’ve been told I’m wrong for disagreeing, which isn’t the same case all the time on the site.
Es serio? No!~ Es no posible!
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