Typically awful writing from the Globe

[yendi]

The latest listical from the better of the two local papers is about TV characters gone too soon. Any list that mentions Charlie on Two and a Half Men isn't starting from a great position to begin with, but moving beyond personal taste, suggesting that Dexter "was one of the original antiheroes" implies an incredible lack of actual knowledge, of either TV/literary history, or just what the word "original" means.

And it gets worse with the next item, which bemoans the loss of a character on The Wire. I won't link to it for spoilery reasons, but when the character leaves on the 48th of 50 episodes of a series, that character isn't leaving the show "too early;" he's leaving during the climax of the entire series.

(Basically, we're in an age where, with rare exceptions, almost none of the quality pop culture media writing exists in newspapers anymore. Ebert's death all but cemented this. You occasionally get freelancers like Sarah Weinman writing for the papers, but you'll find better analysis coming from places ranging from The AV Club and Badass Digest up through Salon than in the Globe or Times (to say nothing of rags that don't even pretend to care, like the Herald).

Comments

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

Before Dexter, was there a serial killer who only killed bad guys?

I dont know if that makes him an anti-hero, though. If you murder people, youre still a murder, even if you have justifications for doing so.

[yendi]

Oh, the serial-killer-as-killer might be original (although one could argue it's just a variation on the typical vigilante), but antiheroes go way back.

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

Of course anti-heroes arent new. But his motivation, and how he deals with it, are unique.

He's not killing bad guys because of any need to fight evil, like batman-he does it cause he HAS to kill SOMEONE. (Or he thinks he does.) Its a compulsion. Killing bad guys lessens his chances of getting caught.

Presumably, if there were no bad guys, he'd have to start killing regular people. Lucky for him, the world will always have bad guys.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I got that same vibe off of a fair number of John Wayne's characters, and also off of Marshall Matt Dillon. He was basically played, at least some of the time, as a killer who liked killing, and had found a job where that was actually useful.

[laurel]

I've been mostly avoiding reading TV criticism for ages now. With a few exceptions, of course, that I used to read regularly or would dip into to see if they posted about a particular show/event. Of course I also learned to avoid most TV fan forums (and email discussion lists and what have you) too. (And yeah, most of those folks no longer write for papers but for online publications.)

TV is such a hard thing to cover decently because there's so damn much of it. Even if you focus on a particular subset of what's out there, it's still really hard.

So often when reading about TV, it's clear that the writer hasn't watched all the episodes of a given show or even more than a handful of episodes. Or that they only watch the "hot" series and don't bother with others. Once I learned more about how these things work, it was easy to tell when a critic was writing about a show because a network sent them a screener. Or easy to tell when they work off press releases or are working from panels and interviews done at the upfronts or on various press tours and then you'd see everyone writing the same story. Or covering the same handful of episodes or shows. Maddening.

Of course I was a foolish woman who tried to watch everything (well, drama and comedies) and got seriously burnt out after a decade of that.

And while it's good that there are fans and bloggers and whatnot out there who can focus on particular shows . . . well, most really have no feel for context. Or the history of TV, even simply history of the last couple of decades of TV. I know all too well it's impossible to watch and know everything re TV, but some efforts I've seen are just pathetic.

Anyway. I think it's a much harder beat to cover than people realize. I haven't the heart to click through to the article you linked because I'd just rage.

I have thought I'm too old and burnt out to write about TV any more and now I'm years behind on current TV and yet . . . sometimes the impulse to school people is there. Even if I wrote about old shows, maybe there's still room for it. I dunno. You'd think with the advent of DVDs and streaming and such there'd be plenty of familiarity with older shows, but it seems worse to me now than before we had those things.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

You should be writing.

[laurel]

I went and looked after all. The factual errors! I just-- what? And then the fact that so many of these departures are after a lot of seasons (some with stories well played out). Bah.

[nishar.livejournal.com]

Basically, we're in an age where, with rare exceptions, almost none of the quality pop culture media writing exists in newspapers anymore

No... those kind of people are usually on blogs or doing a youtube/podcast weekly show.