It’s been a long ride for me at TWOP. TWOP was where I migrated to after the Usenet tv groups dried up.
Maybe the Cafe Section at the Straight Dope will become more active? Theres not a lot of on going tv show threads here. There are a few. I know the Straight Dope isn’t a tv site. Cafe is just a small part of it. Nothing can ever replace a dedicated tv site like TWOP.
I’m going to feel a bit lost for awhile. I really enjoy discussing my favorite shows. I learn so much from others opinions about the story plots and the direction the writers may take. Half the fun in watching a modern show is figuring out the possible plot twists.
I’m not surprised they are closing. The modding over there drove people off. My first warning was for leaving off a period on the end of a sentence. No kidding, that was really worth a formal warning strike. Then number 2 came later because I was summarizing the episode too much in my post. I drastically cut back on my posting after that. Mostly lurked.
Doubt I’ll mess with previously.tv. I suspect the same mods will be transitioning over there.
I do feel bad for the free lance writers that did the episode recaps. I’d imagine that was good money for a beginning writers.
some trivia. A Recapper for Top Chef coined the phrase Cheftestant. Used it throughout a full season of Top Chef recaps. Bravo tv stole it. It’s in the common word usage now for that show. I even see Cheftestant used at other tv review sites.
That is part of what drove me crazy about the heavy handed modding. They’d ding you for wrong spelling and punctuation, calling someone on their BS about real life artists, etc. I understood the desire to discourage fights between posters, and they did a good job with that, but keeping such a heavy boot on everything else was too much. After I realized I had trouble not calling people out in certain topics for the BS they spewed out about certain artists, I lurked more than I posted and stayed out of certain topics. But I will miss the place because I watch a lot of TV. I might have to participate more in the TV topics here.
To give a current example of imo terrible modding, in the episode thread about the last episode of How I Met Your Mother, there is a sticky and a post about not talking about the spin off, not talking about how other people liked or didn’t like the episode, and a few other things. While technically they might be off-topic to a certain extent, it’s the final episode of a show ever and the boards are closing shortly. I’m not saying things should just be let go and turn chaotic for chaos’ sake, but at this point, it seems petty and childish to try to keep things on track that strictly. It’s locking the barn doors after the horses leave and it just exemplifies how unwelcoming and un-fun a place it could be. I will miss it, but it doesn’t mean I like everything about it.
I’ve wondered about that too. It would explain the mod demands for proper spelling and punctuation. I could see books on tv and popular culture referencing this material many years from now.
Yes. And it was a good thing; I’ve never seen it used as an intro without being followed up by a post dripping with condescension. Although banning for it may have been a bit over the top.
I got hooked on them when I discovered “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” late in Season 3 and had no other way to catch up. Since then, some of the recaps were better than the shows, but many of them were great, particularly the ones by Aaron Leaman. The recaps for Sopranos, Enterprise, Rome, Doctor Who, Angel, Battlestar Galactica, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Californication, and several others were very important for satisfying my need to think about shows that I enjoyed, or even despised.
Initially, I was a participant in the forums, but it became too difficult, especially when they spun off all the non-recapped shows into grouped category forums. Also, there were actually too many people participating, which made it impossible to carry on any kind of reasonable discussion. Also, the administration got so heavy-handed, it made me feel unwelcome.
In any case, I was still reading recaps of shows that I watched regularly, but those were now rare. Often there would only be one recap for me to read every week, and when those shows went on hiatus, there was no reason for me to visit the site for weeks. The last one I followed was for “True Detective.”
How I missed Fametracker! and sorry to hear TwoP is going away. I laughed SO hard reading both!
Now I read the AV Club, and Tom & Lorenzo (though its mostly focussed on fashion, Mad Men in particular), and Alan Sepinwall on hitfix.com kills hours for me.
Over time, the only thing good about the site was the recapping. But about the time Bravo took over, they were doing too much content and the quality was diluted.
I loved Jacob by the way. His recaps were often much better than the shows he wrote about.
Recaps were pretentious and after a while were less recap than some sort of free-form stream of crap about their life and or how much they hated the show- or loved the show or whatever. In other words, 10% recap, 50% opinion, 40% personal notes.
The forums were run by jack booted thugs with itchy ban-hammer fingers. My Bro was banned for asking (in the right forum) why someone who openly hated a show was chosen to write about it.
The posters were universally “me too” fanboys, always agreeing with the ‘recapper’. Mind you, disagreeing meant you were banned, so i suppose after a while…
And, both the writers and the posters seemed to think TWoP actually mattered. They kept claiming some off line was a 'shout-out". (Mind you, once director did mention TWoP, but negatively, but that was still cool, as someone important cared!!! )
This does read like a bit of a hate screed, but i will note that to start, TWoP was both entertaining and useful. Recaps actually* were*. Snark was there, but it was 90% recap. My complaints are mostly about the later years and most seem to agree.
That’s exactly what I liked about them. They were thoughtful detailed essays about a work by someone who had a point of view and could use knowledge of things other than the show itself to put its themes in context.
It was like talking to a smart friend about a show we both liked watching.
Well… sometimes. But more often it was like talking to a smart friend about a show that I liked watching and that (s)he did not enjoy watching, and indeed had to not enjoy watching - whether it was good or not - in order to have suitably “funny” things to say about it.
Done in sufficient detail and with intelligence, wit, and articulation – I love hearing shit taken down and destroyed, even if I like it. Half the fun of liking something is hating it, from my point if view.
It’s in the common word usage now for that show. I even see Cheftestant used at other tv review sites.