Goodbye, Television Without Pity

[adamgreer]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 12:01am

NBC is shutting down the website on April 4. The recaps will be stored digitally, but not publicly available.

I was never interested in their forums (one of which was the basis for the "Lemon Lyman" episode of The West Wing), but their recaps were fantastic. When I wanted to remember something that happened in a particular scene of an episode, I would look it up there. I also liked reading recaps of current shows in case I missed something. I know they got less snarky after NBC bought them, but I still enjoyed them.

Sad to see them go.



Bye bye TWOP Updated On: 3/29/14 at 12:01 AM

[Jungle Red]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 1:21am

Luckily we still have Tom and Lorenzo to do Project Rungay!!

[JerseyGirl2]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 3:25am

I used to participate in a Grey's Anatomy forum over there and it was usually pretty decent. I went yesterday to look for a Scandal promo and saw that is has becoming nothing but a bunch of people bitching about how much they hate shows. The recaps used to be hilarious. When ER was still on, they would just make me cackle. I don't think they have been that funny in a long time.

[doodlenyc]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 1:50pm

That's sad! I used to love Potes' Top Model recaps. She is hilarious! I admit that I stopped reading them regularly years ago.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 3:31pm

I always wanted to like TWoP more than I actually did. It seems like any show I really liked was recapped by Jacob, and after a while his endless digressions and ever-growing preachiness and superiority just wore on me. The forums were no better. The only one I ever really tried to be a part of was the one for True Blood and those people drove me crazy. All most of them did was complain about the show, or misunderstand, or never be able to grasp that vampires = gay peole was never and was never going to be a perfect metaphor.

[Plum]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 4:52pm

Oh Jacob, the plague of the sci-fi recaps. Couch Baron was a treasure, though. And the forums were even good sometimes, until the mod changeover. I haven't been back there in years, though, and I guess I'm not the only one.

[adamgreer]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 5:00pm

Sounds like it went downhill after NBC bought them out.

[strummergirl]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 5:17pm

I dropped in too late, post-NBC buy and I can only assume I missed out on a real phenomenon the way people were lamenting about it this past week. Because the forums, at least of the shows I watched, there felt a little mean-spirited and smug, as if such fans had a better grip on their 'favorite' shows than the central creative people involved. The Mad Men forums (Breaking Bad forums somehow were more civilized, and that was the fandom always tagged with attacking the show's actors and being monomaniacally pro-Walt when I always found fruitful discussion) just devolved into something where people confused their personal fan fiction with a possible creative avenue that was never going to be explored- but they gave their hopes up anyway.

I'm also just mixed on recap culture, in general. There are some shows that do need a weekly review and others that really don't. It seemed like a double-edged sword for shows caught up in weekly fixations. Great to have that dialogue but some shows never seemed designed for being caught in these kinds of discussions where there are remedial semiotic theory-driven recaps, where everything must mean something.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 5:28pm

Yeah the AVClub serves all my needs--and their comments, as unwieldy as they can be to navigate, tend to be much better than TWP's forums.

[trentsketch]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 7:51pm

Good riddance, I say. The site changed dramatically when it was bought out and never quite got its footing out. I was one of many regulars banned for arbitrary message board crimes against Bravo. One day, I was in good with all the mods and writers because I was getting reliable spoilers for Project Runway from friends involved in the show. The next day, I was banned for getting reliable spoilers from Project Runway from friends involved in the show. A lot of others were gotten rid of for being critical of The Real Housewives franchise in the threads inspired by recaps that gave the stars clever nicknames that would be automatically censored on this board.

Previously.tv is where the creators and a lot of the original writers wound up and it's wonderful.

[Plum]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 8:17pm

Ha, yes, once the new mods suspended me I was finished. Still the only time I've ever been in trouble with forum moderators, and I've been at this kind of thing for a very long time. *gives Eric the AVC high five*

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 3/29/14 at 8:20pm

Oh god, I forgot about how insane the board mods were. "Boards on Boards!"

[JerseyGirl2]

Posted: 3/30/14 at 3:58am

I got suspended for Board on Board!

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 3/30/14 at 1:06pm

It was just insane the way those boards were policed.

[Jon]

Posted: 3/30/14 at 2:25pm

Their choices of which shows got their own forums/recaps were so random. "How I Met Your Mother" got a weekly recap and it's own forum, while the most popular sitcom on network TV, "Big Bang Theory", and the most acclaimed, "Modern Family", were relegated to fan forums in the "other shows " category.

[strummergirl]

Posted: 3/30/14 at 2:50pm

^^^^^^^
That too! I was shocked what shows got the forums and who didn't. Seemed arbitrary. Other websites that had certain show recaps which garnered the most traffic for those websites still somehow were not getting whole forums on TWoP.

[Plum]

Posted: 3/30/14 at 7:19pm

Popular shows aren't necessarily the ones that'll generate enough discussion to merit a whole forum, to be fair. Teeny tiny shows like Veronica Mars might generate an outsized web presence, while other, more high-rated shows might just be something that people watch more than they discuss. TWoP was a default place to turn to for so many years because it was the only place where you'd get a thread for pretty much anything televised in the U.S.