So, now that TWoP has been added to Bravo's stable, there is much consternation about whether it will become Bravo's bitch. Friday's Slate published "Will corporate ownership ruin a Cult Website?" by Dana Stevens.
[quote begins]
Last week, the Bravo network (which is owned by NBC Universal, which in turn is a subsidiary of General Electric) announced that it had added the Television Without Pity Web site to its "portfolio of linked digital assets." In the same eye-glazingly jargon-filled press release, Bravo President Lauren Zalaznick describes TWoP as an "online brand destination." That inert chunk of corporate media-speak can't help but send a chill down the spine of the many readers—about a million unique visitors a month—who treat the site like a frayed and lumpy couch on which to plop down next to their funniest friends and heckle the show of their choice. Will the conversion of TWoP into a network brand smooth out the idiosyncrasies that make the site such a grumpy, stubborn, and endearingly unnavigable place?[quote ends (links in original)]
Are they kidding me? TWoP change? Listen, if Yahoo didn't change TWoP, Bravo sure isn't going to do it. I mean, I can't imagine how it would or could (well, the site could become a bit more elegant and less lumpy, but I wouldn't mind that). I can't see the TWoP big three yielding one inch of their curmudgeonly governance to Bravo or its corporate masters. Is that naive of me? I just don't see it happening. I don't think that's wishful thinking. I hope it isn't wishful thinking. It's only this that separates TV from dozens of virtually indistinguishable television sites all over the internet.
I know that there are quite a number of former TWoP members who would maintain that the site ruined itself through an excess of its well-known and uncompromising prickliness (always ready to sting the hands that fed its advertisers). But I've never had the sense of entitlement of many of these people, so it never hurt my feelings if it cancelled a show, closed a thread, or banned a fellow poster. I find the forums fatiguing and the stress of posting a bit silly, given that it's meant for a leisure past-time. But though I've done my share of bitching about the site (not at TWoP, which (probably wisely) doesn't provide a forum for that, but at one of the spin-off sites which does. But I still keep going back. I could never give up the recaps.
I've been reading the site since the days when it was "Mighty Big TV" and have been an official member since (I think) 2002. Like most long-term members who haven't managed to get themselves banned, I have a love/hate relationship with the site. The "rambling recaps" to which Dana Stevens refers are the reason for the love part of the relationship, and even though I rarely post in the forums anymore, I often read them.
The ramblingness is the point of them for me. I see these writings as the successors to the great reviewers of past eras, such as Dorothy Parker. They're in the tradition of belles lettres. There is, and has been, some great and innovative writing going on at that site (oh daniel j blau, how I miss thee) and though it's about television, it's always also about pop culture generally, 21st Century life, and the individual writers. I hope the Bravo brass have the sense to know this. Wouldn't they know this? Why would they choose TWoP if they didn't see how it is different from other television websites.
As for the forums, I can't see much change happening there. Why would it? And if it did, I don't think I'd care, at least with respect to the sort of posting that goes on.
[quote begins from Slate, "Will corporate ownership ruin a Cult Website?" by Dana Stevens.
Comment threads on TWoP can easily run into the hundreds of pages per discussion, with a dozen or more separate discussion threads per show. Clubby cult shows with small viewing audiences tend to develop larger TWoP apparatuses than smash hits: By far, the two most-commented-on shows in the current TWoP lineup are Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls. Nor are the boards reserved for snark alone. Fans known as "shippers" (short for "relationshippers") earnestly root for the eventual reuniting of their favorite TV couples..... Watchers of Lost and 24 sift through past episodes to speculate about the shows' master narratives, or to argue about which tie-in novels, online games, and other Lost para-phenomena constitute a legitimate part of the show's "canon."
Sure, obsessive fan-chat exists everywhere on the Web, but I don't know of any place that catalogs it as extensively and precisely as the Television Without Pity forums. And thanks to the iron fists of the forum moderators—more on that below—the caliber of the discussion remains consistently high, whether or not you give a damn about the show in question.....
[quote ends]
The things that Dana Stevens seems concerned about are the things most of the posters and former posters I know of don't especially like. For example, the "talmudic commentary" can get repetitious and shrill. The self-feeding obsessive frenzy of some of the fans----especially the damn shippers and the stupid shipper wars----is one of the things that's driven me away. (I can't read The Office thread at all because of the so-called "Jammers" and "Karimmers" fighting over whether Jim and Pam should get together as if that were the POINT OF THE DAMN SHOW; it's NOT the point of the SHOW shut up shut up shut up and talk about the SHOW.
Ahem. Sorry. To be fair, it's probably not any stupider than the philosophers I studied in college arguing about the realness of reality, esse versus percipi, or about theologians from even earlier times getting agitated about the nature of angels and how many could fit on the head of a pin. Truly.
And, to be fair, the mods are pretty good about breaking up the little cliques and clubs that inevitably form at the site. (Will any of us old TWoP lags forget the entertaining spectacle of Shack trying to cope with fans of Clay Aiken during the second season of American Idol? It was better than television, better certainly than the show, at least from where I sit.)
And you can learn a lot by hanging out on some of the more serious forums (such as all the HBO ones tend to be). I learned a lot from lurking on the Deadwood and Rome forums. Some very impressive and knowledgeable people have posted on those forums (and elsewhere).
[quote begins from Slate, "Will corporate ownership ruin a Cult Website?" by Dana Stevens.
The site's founding editors, Sarah D. Bunting and Tara Ariano (known on the site under the screen names Sars and Wing Chun), are former lit majors who met in a Beverly Hills 90210 chat room. They run a tight ship. The recapper of each individual show—currently, about 40 series are actively followed—doubles as the moderator for that show's multiple discussion threads. Every few pages, the author/moderator will check back in like a den mother—not to rid the threads of bad language or, as some TWoP-haters have contended, to censor posts that disagree with their own views, but to police the boards for repetition, digression, and sheer inanity. And stinging though it may be to receive a rap from a moderator's ruler, that level of intervention is what keeps TWoP threads free from the semiliterate trolls who tend to hijack online message boards. As one TWoP reader posted in a forum on the Bravo sale, "I like brains on my boards. Poor spelling and grammar make baby Jesus cry."
[quote ends (emphasis mine)]
If only the mods would be as strict on the repetition of TWoP cliches, such as "make the baby Jesus cry." One thing that makes forum participation so maddening if you've been around for a long time is the way new members latch on to TWoP catchphrases that were hilarious and cutting edge five years ago but have long sense run their course. One of the TWoP-hating websites had an entire forum devoted to hating some of these phrases ("TWoP Cliches Make the Baby Jesus Go BWAH!")
Some of them---"Word. BWAH!"---seem to be dying away finally, but you can't get away from the combination shipper names ("Jammers") and the ongoing, cliquy, bitchy quarrels over whether this or that actress is fat or ugly or has had work done. The best you can say is that the mods do what they can to police the boards for repetition, digression, and sheer inanity and to keep it down to lower levels than you see on other sites.
I have mixed feelings about the moderating.
I do appreciate the clique-busting attitude of the mods and the insistence that people write actual sentences and make use of the spell-checker. At TWoP spin-off sites, I've noticed that these attitudes persist. Even ex-posters who hate TWoP don't want to have to read the sort of "writing" that goes on elsewhere on the internet or have to exchange views with 12 year olds. Furthermore, they tend not to be comfortable with the sort of trolling and flaming that goes on elsewhere, which means that even on successor boards, ex-members try to maintain a certain tooth-gritted passive-aggressive civility that is a million times better than what you see almost anywhere else. I think there will always be a segment of the internet that owes a great deal to TWoP, where the mods insist that what you post be a component of an ongoing conversation; not whatever random thought pops into your head.
So even though I've been frustrated and exasperated with the site in its time, I find myself hoping that nothing much will change there. I hope I'm not wrong. And I hope that Bravo picked the site BECAUSE of its unique characteristics and not so they can make Mr. Sobell stop writing tepid reviews of Top Design....
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