Listen, chochachos. If you’re familiar with my Twitter feed or some of my other articles here, you’ll be pretty familiar with my distaste for most critics, who I generally think, with few exceptions, are assholes. I like Rob Sheffield. I like Amanda Petrusich. I like Scott Williams. Most of all, I like Roger Ebert, whose stated modus operandi is to try and imagine who would like a particular movie, even if it’s not him. Even when I disagree with his opinions on movies, even when he hates movies, I can usually tell whether or not I will, and can make my spending decision accordingly. To me, that’s about as good as it gets.
On the other side of this is The Onion AV Club. I dislike a lot of the snobbishness of their reviewers, in particular Todd VanDerWerff, editor their TV section, who does things like complain that the sitcom he is reviewing is too “sitcommy” or say things like, “Now, I could analyze or dig into this scene/part of the episode, but…”, which is followed in my head by, “…I don’t actually understand that it’s my job to do that.” His review of the Community Christmas episode, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” takes 600 words before actually talking about the episode being reviewed, which is to say it spends about 600 words being pretty useless. This is par for his course.
For the next little while, the AV Club is actually doing something pretty cool, called “Second Opinions,” where reviewers switch up their assignments and review shows they normally wouldn’t. One of the ones I was interested in was seeing how another writer handled VanDerWerff’s duties reviewing The Big Bang Theory. Unfortunately, the writer they got, Rowan Kaiser, is somehow even worse than the guy he’s replacing. He, like many critics, mistakes a live studio audience for “recorded laughter” (a laugh track), and when called on it, makes a pretty feeble excuse pretending that’s what he meant all along because studio laughter is recorded and added to the episode, even if that’s not really true, per se. He says, “I found the funniest moments didn’t come from the writing of the episode, but instead came from the characters’ physical comedy,” which is to say he apparently, despite being a writer, doesn’t understand that writers handle more than just dialogue. Apparently, he thinks everything else is just ad libbed. He says that the one character he liked, played by Mayim Bialik, wasn’t part of the main cast, which is to say that the “cursory research” he claims he did apparently didn’t include the Wikipedia article of the show, the actress, or even a Google search for “Mayim Bialik Big Bang Theory”, since the first two results say in the preview that he’s wrong. So basically, he’s a hack.
And what’s the point of this? Never, ever accept arbitrary numbers or letter grades from arbitrary people. Read the articles, figure out who’s talented, and support them all the way. I suggest starting with every single one of the critics I first mentioned at the start of all this, because they are doing it right.
