Just Eat the Damn Peach

The Office | Recaps for All Seasons

I had fun recapping some of last season's episodes, but then I also got bored.  It's harder than it looks, man.  I mean it's harder if you care about accuracy, detail, and incorporating your own commentary (which was kind of the point.

After a certain point I just decided I didn't want to go on with it.  So what's a fan of The Office looking for more recaps to do? 

Why go here, of course.  Finally, finally Television without Pity decided that The Office, though a comedy, was recap-able.  Or perhaps their Bravo masters decided for them!  I was disappointed that they weren't handled by Jacob---whose strange and poignant insights entrance me and whom I tried (palely) to emulate in my own recapping career---but they are still pretty good, especially M. Giant's and Joe R.'s.  They don't have the detail  or nuance of, say, M. Giant's Rome recaps, because, in TWoP parlance, they are "weecaps."  This too was disappointing----The Office has depths to plumb and M Giant is a pretty astute (and pretty damn witty) commentator.   (Where, by the way, IS Jacob Clifton?)

I just feel for a show this nuanced, Jacob or the lamented djb would have provided the spin I was hoping for.... Still, if you're looking for recaps, there you are:  TwOP weecaps "The Office." . They started back in Season 1 and have worked their way forward.

Big Crock o' Rock: Potes on MTV's "Rock of Love"

Television without Pity watches crap television so I don't have to and writes up the episodes so I can ridicule it without having (in the time honored favorite metaphor of its forum posters, "scrub out my brain with bleach" afterward). 

They're usually at their best when the show is constructed to highlight not the worst aspects of human nature, but the most embarrassingly, humiliatingly petty and ridiculous. In other words,they really come into their own for bad reality TV.  With the writer's strike, I expect to be reading many a reality show recap.   

With Jacob Clifton nowhere to be seen, my favorite recapper bar none is the divine Miss Potes, currently recapping "Rock of Love," possibly the best reality television I have never seen.   Picture this:  a passel of young girls, whose main qualification appears to be artificially enhanced boobs plus a propensity to party (and many of whom make their living as strippers) all assemble in the home of one of rock's time-tarnished idols of yesteryear, of whom I have of course never even heard.  Much talk---natch!---of bitches, boobs, booze, and boners.  Much twirling also around the stripper pole which the production company (MTV) has thoughtfully supplied. 

I thought of looking at YouTube to see if I could find footage of this "blue-eyed...veritable Rock God"'s  work, but then I thought better not.  I am not even going to look for clips from the show.  It might ruin it for me.  But there is a photo gallery here, if you would care to see it.  It's a scary, stressful world:  I want my bread and circuses and I think you do too.

Read the recaps here. 

The Mainstreaming of Television without Pity?

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.   

Homage to The Recapper Jacob and to Television without Pity.

<<Back to introduction.

I have already said what I think about Television without Pity.  It was once a force for good on the internet and among critics of the Entertainment Industry, and it's still a force.  For awhile, there was a  whole website devoted to hating it, which shows that at a certain point it had big legs like a stone giant's and stomped all over the people who loved it the most.   I stopped posting at TWoP a couple of years ago because it occurred to me that the time I was spending trying to work out whether a post would earn me a rebuke from a moderator was time better spent on other pursuits.

But the recaps are a different matter.  There is some excellent writing to be read at TWoP.  In addition to all of Jacob's recaps, which I'm about to get to,  I'd recommend Al Lowe on Deadwood and M. Giant on Rome).  And those are in addition to the ones I particularly noted here. 

And though a lot of the early (and best) recappers have moved on, my all-time favorite of all recappers anywhere, Jacob Clifton (whose idiom is anything but generic and is his alone), remains. 

Jacob isn't merely the best of TWoP's best, in my opinion.  He's a great and completely original inimitable writer.   Though he's recapping television, often very terrible television, his writing is in the grand tradition of belles lettres, so I really don't care what he writes about; I read him to read him. 

He has a style all his own.  "Too long and I don't like his run-on sentences," sniff the prissier readers, who think the point of a recap is to find out what a show was "about," as if that couldn't normally be handled in three to four bloodless paragraphs. 

Jacob's recaps are epic, and they are about more, much more, than the "events" covered by the show or even the show's plot, characters, and story arc).  They are deeply insightful into the state of American culture (and specifically the culture of television viewing as opposed to, say, "the entertainment industry").   More generally, they are deeply insightful examinations of the human condition.  Finally, they are what I'd call (if I were a different sort of person) laugh-out-loud funny (in TWoP parlance "you owe me a new keyboard" funny).  In other words, you're unsuspectingly and wonderingly reading his trademark stream-of-consciousness commentary and then suddenly....

He's a reader's writer, i.e., a writer for someone who reads for pleasure.  At this point, I watch the shows he recaps not always for pleasure (because there is really none to be had from Season 6 of The Apprentice) but so I can better appreciate the recaps.  I watch them while I do other things, like this, because they don't matter to me except to the extent they give meaning to Jacob's recaps.  What's more, a lot of people all over the internet will say the same.