When reading Josh Levin's two article on Slate about how Alan Sepinwall has changed the way television criticism is written, I realized that I've been in the dark when it comes to criticisms and their influence on people. I'm not the kind of person who relies on other people's opinions to dictate what I watch on television, and honestly... I'm glad I haven't, especially in the more recent years of blogging criticisms. Levin's article reinforced the idea that criticisms have gone from "sampl[ing] a few episodes and then issue an informed recommendation" to "validate your interest in the shows you're already watching." This may be a good tool for people who are dedicated to the same shows every week, but in my current college environment it seems that the dynamics of watching television have changed dramatically. People are no longer bound by the time restrictions of shows on television. Therefore, people have been known to watch entire seasons of a show within a week time period thanks to tools like Netflix. Blog criticisms are irrelevant to a lot of people and the fact that they have been morphed into weekly recaps does nothing to promote me to read them. I would much rather prefer that a solid criticism inform me on shows that I would have otherwise never known about. While I understand the pleasure that critics get by being able to pick apart every single episodes of their favorite shows until nothing is left, I would much rather spend my time reading about a new, promising show or a show that has been overlooked over the years.
Inside these two articles I meandered through the hyperlinks and clicked on Sepinwall's open letter to NBC about Chuck returning for another season. This stood out to me because Chuck is a show that I was really into, more than the others shows that were mentioned in Levin's article. I was also really interested in how Sepinwall managed to convince NBC to being Chuck back for another season. That, to me, seemed like an incredible task for someone who doesn't have a lot of power in the television industry. He did a really good job at convincing the co-chairmen and the president that it is possible to continue Chuck for another season in order to avoid the repercussions that canceling it would have caused.
I was very curious about the other blogs that did criticisms (because I'm not very well informed when it comes to critics and I wouldn't know where to start to get interested in them) so I clicked on the AV Club's hyperlink. I've heard of The Onion, but it never really interested me because I would rather read real news stories than fake ones... although I did get a giggle out of when China's People's Daily was convinced that Kim Jong-un was names Sexiest Man Alive. I was skeptical that the reviews would be just as farcical as The Onion, but was pleasantly surprised by their large selections of shows that have been reviewed. Although I am not quite up to date with the most recent shows and therefore choose to not read a review of a show I have not seen, I will most definitely come back to this site whenever I want to geek out about a really great episode that I just watched.
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