Television Without Pity

Whatever Happened To . . . Television Without Pity?

December 11, 2008 by Jim Connelly

A few months ago, I wrote a pretty vicious post describing the awful, user-unfriendly makeover that Bravo had foisted on Television Without Pity.

Part of the reason for the viciousness was that TWoP was a site that, only a couple of years ago, I had declared as maybe my favorite website ever.

Of course, two years is a very long long time, especially on the net. Still, when I wrote my declaration of love, TWOP had been kicking ass for a lot longer than that, and there was no reason to believe that by the middle of 2008, they would be bought by Bravo; the original founders would leave and it would be transformed from a site that I visited several times a day to a site that I now don’t visit for weeks at a time.

It’s a long way for such an established site to fall in a relatively short period of time, and apparently, I’m not the only person who has noticed: ever since the original post, there has been a steady stream of traffic to it, and commenters on it.

Blogosphere Without Pity

July 20, 2006 by Kassia Krozser

Let us speak, for a moment, about a new phenomenon: the Internet. As some of you may recall, it slipped quietly into the room way back in, what?, the seventies? For many years, it cruised along quietly, picking up fans via discussion groups and bulletin boards. Somewhere along the line, they added pictures and clickable links and sound and motion and more users than you can imagine. All of this is the stuff of legend and only included to make a point: the Internet is not this brand new thing that just showed up yesterday!

In a thinly disguised promotional piece about the upcoming Studio 60, the Los Angeles Times tries to focus on the rapid-fire response of the blogosphere to every bit of news about the show. Hello? We’re bored out here. It’s summer and they don’t seem to be rerunning anything good but The Office. You can only watch “The Injury” so many times, you know?

Dancing About TV

April 25, 2006 by Jim Connelly

The infamous quote goes like this: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” What makes it so infamous, of course, is that it’s attributed to so many people, and nobody seems to know who actually made it up.

Fine. It was me. Can we move on now? In any event, the point of the quote — my quote — is that it’s nearly impossible to use one art form to describe another art form. Either that, or it was “piss off, you fracking critics!!”

Maybe. While it might apply to writing about music — there are only so many times you can use the phrase “jangly guitar” — in no way does it apply to writing about that other great art form: TV. And nowhere can you find so much great writing about television than on the internet, especially now that several TV critics have their own blogs.

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