The Press Box - Ep. 134: 'The Press Box': TV Critics Are the New Movie Critics

Episode Date: June 20, 2016

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis talks to TV showrunner Damon Lindelof, HitFix's Alan Sepinwall, Slate's Willa Paskin, The New York Times' A.O. Scott, and more about the rise of the television critic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Brian Curtis from The Ringer, and this is the press box. Picture this. It's Sunday night. You're watching TV. And you look over at Twitter and notice that a bunch of TV critics are watching along with you, almost reviewing the lines as they come out of John Snow's mouth. You know, you just go like, oh my God, that episode of Game of Thrones was just, I've never seen anything like that. That's amazing. And then you go online and these other critics are basically sort of saying the same thing, but they're doing such a better job of saying it was amazing.

That's Damon Lindeloff, one of the creators of the HBO show, The Leftovers. In the old art section, there was one towering figure. That was the movie critic. Everybody wanted to be a movie critic. I wanted to be a movie critic. Being a movie critic meant being a taste maker and meant standing right at the center of pop culture. And if you were really good, you might be called a worthy heir to Pauline Kale. I think a lot of the juice that resided in that job now resides with TV critics.

TV critics won the last two Pulitzer prizes for criticism. TV critic Matt Zoler's Sites, who also reviews movies, wrote that he'd never seen anything as innovative as what happened to TV criticism since the mid-aunts. I wanted to know what happened. How this became a destination job. How it became as thrilling to write about TV as it once was the movies. Let's call this episode, TV critics are the new movie critics. Make no mistake, the old TV beat had amazing writers,

John Leonard of New York Magazine, James Wolcott of the Village Voice, and the impossibly suave Clive Clive James of the London Observer. But most culture sections subscribe to the idea advanced by Renata Adler. The TV was not art, but an appliance. And thus the TV critic was kind of a lower species, more of a media critic or a human version of TV guide whose job it was to tip you off about a fresh prince the whole family should watch together.

Let James Ponawazek, chief TV critic of the New York Times, explain. They're wrong and you were, you know, maybe a couple of poets, maybe underneath books. I think that TV at the time was recognized as obviously important entertainment, but not necessarily significant art. If TV critics moved up the ladder, here's how it happened. First, TV just got better. If you remember 1990, you remember Murphy Brown and Northern Exposure and 30-something were

considered really good shows. 20 years later, we'd have Mad Men and 30 Rock and the BBC's Sherlock. And just as the Godfather and McCabe and Mrs. Miller conferred a certain gravitas onto movie critics of the 1970s, prestige TV raised the stature of TV critics, too. Here's Slate's Willa Paskin. Television has just ascended a brow. It's become the kind of stuff that people who used to frown on it now want to discuss at dinner parties. And critics obviously have like, I mean, we just are riding the coattails of that increase in television quality and quantity and people's interest. in it. If you had to pick a moment when TV critics be into siphon energy from the shows they were

covering, you might pick June 2007 when the HBO series The Sopranos ended. A lot of critics were comparing the Sopranos to high culture. It was a Scorsese movie, a Dickensian novel. No, Emily Nussbaum wrote in New York Magazine. The Sopranos was TV, and great because of that fact, not despite it. It was an amazing sentence. Because Nussbaum was not only claiming the Sopranos for TV. She was claiming the mostly uncharted realm of TV criticism for herself and her colleagues. So TV got better, but how to write about it in a way that connected with readers. In the early 2000s, Alan Seppenwall, who now writes for hit fix, was covering TV for the Newark Star Ledger. We had the home field advantage. It was not only was our paper, the paper at the end of Tony's driveway,

but my editor had gone to college with James Gandalfini. He's the one who put the dent in Gandalfini's forehead. You know, David Chase and I grew up in neighboring towns a few decades apart. So there was a lot of sort of linkage there. And I could see already just in the way people were talking about that show in the first year or two that this was sort of all I had ever dreamed about in terms of what TV could be and how excited people could be about it. Back then, TV critics were still operating more or less like movie critics. When a show debuted, they wrote a big piece about it. And then barring JR being shot on Dallas, the critic often dropped the show until next season. Seppinwall realized this gave away a TV critic's advantage, which is that his audience is watching everything at the same time he is.

When I would do preseason pieces, they got some reaction, but not a lot. But when I would write a story after an episode had aired, usually after an episode where somebody died, the reaction was through the roof. It was just everyone was writing and calling and saying things. And I realized just how excited people were to talk about the thing that they'd already seen, as opposed to sort of guessing whether they were going to agree with me on my review of something that had yet to debut. By the early 2000s, the recap was already in existence.

Sepinwall famously recapped NYPD Blue episodes on Usenet during his college days. For the Sopranos, Sepinwall stepped outside his day job and picked up his old hobby again. This is the second moment TV critics make a jump, when they realized television writing ought to be different because television is different. And then I think especially in writing those Sopranos reviews the last couple seasons of the show, I could tell what the audience wanted from me more than anything else wasn't so much thumbs up, thumbs down as really, you know, thematic stuff. What did this mean? Not just the dream sequences, but just the imagery in general. Why is this happening?

What's going on underneath, you know, Tony's head? And, you know, I realize I could apply that not just to the Sopranos, but to lots of other shows. And obviously it's easier where something is dense as that or make. admin, but there's really, you know, you can dig really deep on a lot of these shows, especially the scripted serialized dramas, uh, in a way that I wasn't at first because I didn't realize that I could. As Sepin Wall was writing recaps, the critic James Panoazik was facing a similar problem. Before he moved to the New York Times, Panozik wrote for Time magazine, where it was even harder

to keep pace with TV than it was at the Star Ledger. One of Panozik's editors suggested he write a blog, the first in Times history. You know, there'd be a lot more than you could be writing about than you would ever have the space allotted to do. So getting to do this blog was kind of like getting to run my own magazine within the magazine. So immediately responsive to an audience and EKG of the sort of concerns and obsessions of the society is right about for. The recap was a newish critical form. As the writer Josh Levine noted, it combined traditional criticism, plot recap, what will happen next punditry, and unadulterated fanboyism.

If there was a line between quote-unquote proper criticism and internet writing that catered directly to the audience, Sepinwall erased it forever. It's easier in a way because you don't really have to do any exposition. You just sort of assume that the people watched it and they know the things. That's why I always refer to them as reviews and not recaps because it's maybe there's a little bit of plot breakdown, but not a lot. And so you can really dive deep into things and not just talk about why this was good and this wasn't good, but what did this mean and what did this suggest and what could be coming next? Movies are great. I have nothing against movies, but a movie is a

finite experience, which in terms of talking about, like at a certain point, you're just going to run out of things to say about because there's only the two hours or so, whereas this just keeps going for weeks and weeks and years and years. These days, everybody does recaps. Even the New York Times and New Yorker are recapping Game of Thrones. Ironically, when you talk to critics, they now talk about returning to the older clunkier form of TV writing, the big preseason piece. The latest transition is I feel like I'm almost going back to the way I started, because for a long time, you know, for about 10 years now, the pendulum swung almost entirely to the post-episode review, and that's what people were really coming for, and that's what I was

spending most of my time on. And now there's just so much stuff that it's not really realistic to try to keep track of it all that way. And more and more, I'm finding that what people want is they want some level of guidance of, here's a new show, like, is this worth my time? Here's a show that's coming back. I'm not sure if I should be sticking with it. And sort of, it's gone back to the pre-review as being the greater currency, even though I still do, you know, maybe half a dozen, you know, episodic things a week.

So we've got great TV and a journalistic vehicle nimble enough to honor it. The third thing that lifted TV, criticism is the rise of the celebrity showrunner. 20 years ago, you hardly heard the word showrunner, and it certainly didn't mean artist, the way it's used today to honor Vince Gilligan or Shonda Rhymes. And even if we admit TV is a collaborative medium, an inevitable product of the writer's room, picking out some otours is a handy thing. It helps critics identify signatures in different shows. It gets feature stories assigned, see Willa Paskin on Catastrophes Sharon Horgan. Moreover, these showrunners have courted critics in the

same way Woody Allen once handed a script to Pauline Kale and asked if she had any edits. Listen to Andy Greenwald, who covered TV for Grantland. When I was covering some shows, I would talk to the showrunner ahead of time about the season that we were about to watch. I would write about the show during the season, sometimes even be in touch with the showrunner, where the showrunner would send me a note saying, oh, I was glad you saw that, or I'm sorry you didn't like that, and then having a conversation about what was accomplished at the end of it. And for as much as I enjoyed the access and the fan and me really appreciate it, that perspective, the fan of the show and the fan of the medium in general as a creative enterprise,

I do sometimes wonder, and I did wonder while it was going on, if that was affecting my relationship with the show, where I was expecting it to be much more of a results-oriented medium than TV or art really necessarily should be, that there was one thing that someone was trying to accomplish, and it boils down to did he or she accomplish it or not, and I don't always, I don't know if that's always the best way to process a work of art. A critic like James Ponawatzic, on the other hand, doesn't really want to talk to showrunners at all. I just keep it as impersonal as possible. The showrunners I talked to found TV critics

to be interesting objects of study themselves. TV critics were publishing so many words that a showrunner came to know them really quickly. In a way, it used to take years in a published volume of reviews to know a critic. Here's the leftovers, Damon Lindeloff. I have never met Emily Nussbaum. We've had a couple of back and forth on Twitter,

but I've never sat in a room with her but I feel like I know her because I have read tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of words that she's written. And so there is an intimacy, you know, in my own head that I've created. And there's also a part of me that's like, I don't want to ruin that. The Insta criticism of Twitter and recaps offer the showrunner something, too. While his show is on the air, he becomes like a playwright standing in the wings, listening to gasps or laughs from the theater. At an episode of The Leftover's airs, and I basically go online and I see, how is everybody responding to this episode immediately after it aired? That's the closest I can get to finding out what letter grade I got on my test.

There's an insatiable desire for me to know how I'm being evaluated, and I wish that I could turn that part of me off, but I can't. And so I've embraced it. The fourth reason the TV critic rose in stature is the world changed. In the swing in 60s and 70s, the TV. critic like Clive James or James Wolcott was almost making a philosophical statement by being glued to the set. What changed? Well, our TVs got bigger and sharper. Cable became a golden corral for content. Our laptops became TVs. And the dream of even swinging people everywhere was to stay home. Here's James Panoazik of the New York Times.

Staying in has become the new going out. And yeah, TV critics, the reason that we used to carry, they've come to us. I know what Panoazic means. I love movies. I love going to movies. But more and more, I feel the movie critic is telling me about stuff I'd love to see. If only I had the time. Whereas the TV critic is telling me what I'm actually going to watch.

If the TV critic is on more or less equal footing with a movie critic, it's made our digital art section an interesting place. For example, women are underrepresented in lots of journalism jobs. But there are a lot of women who write about TV. Not only Paskin and Nussbaum, but varieties Mo Ryan and. Sonia Soraya, Vox's Caroline Framke, and the ringers Allison Herman. I asked Slate's Willa Paskin if she had a theory. There is something about TV having been this like sluffy soft medium for a long time

that made it easier for women to get into and also like, because it was not like the plum spot for so long that it was just like more open. And so it has become more gender diverse. In 2016, the TV critic works that are craft under an avalanche. As Panoazek noted in the Times, when you count commercials, the premiere of the TV show Fargo was only one minute shorter than the Cohen Brothers movie Fargo. An FX CEO, John Landgraf, who's been warning the world of oversaturation, pointed out that in 2009 there were 211 original scripted series. Six years later, there were more than 400. If I were to be caught up on all the shows, I should be caught up on and have seen everything of the new shows that I should have been, like, even not just to review, but like just to be up on them.

I actually watched like 20 or 25 hours a week. I'm not doing that because that's impossible. This month, the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum said on Twitter that she'd stopped watching Game of Thrones in season two and was only now just catching up. And when Netflix releases an entire season of a show all at once, it makes life even worse. Andy Greenwald explains. When Netflix dumped the first season of House of Cards, I worked my way through it as quickly as possible like everyone else, both because I was interested and because I had a deadline. All of the episodes began to blur together. And of course, you know, they encouraged that by naming them chapter one, chapter eight, chapter nine.

But there was one episode that in any other type of TV show would have essentially been a bottle episode, meaning it took place in a, in one setting, away from the week-to-week tumble of the show. And in this episode, Frank went back to his alma mater and connected with some other graduates of his college class, and we found out some secrets about his personal life and his past. And I remember watching that thinking, oh, there's a lot to unpack here. This show is actually doing something more interesting than I thought. There's more depth here than I had previously realized. But it was midnight, and I had another episode to get through. So I click next. And there was no collective conversation based around that episode.

And I think had there been, it would have improved not just the criticism about the show, but I think it would have improved the conversation and the experience around it, too. So I do miss that with a dump-em-all method. If we're going to declare the TV critics of the new movie critics, we probably ought to talk to a movie critic to see what he thinks about this. A.O. Scott writes for the New York Times and is the author of Better Living Through Criticism. Here's what Scott thinks a movie critic still has over a TV critic. There is a variety. There's high and there's low.

That doesn't quite exist in the same way in television. I mean, yes, there is TV shows or whatever, but there isn't yet room or a space within strange and esoterror. I mean, I do think that, and I'm sure there are TV, but I do think it is still a much more convention-bound, a way. Fair enough, right? We don't have a VontGarde TV unless you count Louis. But I also ask Scott the opposite question. What is a movie critic in 2016 envy about a TV critic? Scott told me he just read a book about Otis Ferguson and the movie critics of the 30s and 40s, who are figuring out how one ought to review a film. Similar moment where the art form is establishing itself, you know, as an art form visibly and self-consciously for the first time, which means that critics have to

figure out what the plot, what the unit of tension is, you know, are you writing about, you know, maybe a sequence of episodes that are written by or directed by the same people, are you writing about that change? You know, are you still writing about the same show or when it's, you know, the third or fourth iteration of the cast? So what I envy is the fact that, you know, that the plaster is still, and more established critical idioms don't. That's perhaps the final reason being a TV critic in 2016 seems so thrilling. If A.O. Scott is the very best movie critic of his age, we might call him a worthy air to Pauline Kale. If Nussbaum or Panoazik or Paskin or Sepinwal is the greatest of their age, they might be Pauline Kale, the person who lays down

the critical vocabulary. How fitting, a revolution as democratic as the medium itself, TV criticism has been invigorated by women and men, amateurs and pros, on Twitter and in the pages of the New Yorker. As the old observer critic Clive James once put it, everybody. as a television critic. I have never met anybody who wasn't. The only difference is that a few of us write it down. That's it for the press box. I want to thank

my ace producers Joe Fuentes and Tate Frazier. The watch is Andy Greenwald served as the unofficial, which is to say unpaid, showrunner of this episode, and the ringers, Alison Herman, was nice enough to let me talk to her about covering TV. Thanks to Tate Frazier and Chris Almeida, who provided

additional research, and to Jim Cunningham for the additional production assistance. music comes courtesy of Dustin Raglan. We've got more Pressbox podcasts in development. In the meantime, listen to all the ringers podcasts. I'm Brian Curtis. Until next time.