When Sepinwall first encountered his writing, Tim Lynch was a fellow geek who could, miraculously, communicate with other Trekkies from across the country. Now, he’s a friend who lives 15 minutes down the road.
I love how the author ends by explaining his relationship with one of the recappers that this article was focusing on.
I feel like people find the conversation on social media to be increasingly toxic, and want to just read somebody who’s well informed.
I've definitely seen some people on the internet who are just all around negative and can say it is very nice to hear from someone who is writing with a legit purpose.
ecapsRecaps are past their peak, but they’re also far from dead.
i feel like recaps have become so expected and normal that they're less appreciated. They're still useful, but no one notices them as much.
I think one of the reasons that TV criticism is much more diverse than film criticism is, people of different races, women, LGBTQ folks, people of different religions, etc., etc. — that was a window into TV criticism that held the door open just enough for them to get their foot in.
I think that the different aspects of each episode allow this diversity rather than having it randomly in a movie.
critics and recappers aren’t interested in applying their energies to something that doesn’t reward their efforts
I understand this feeling, but at the same time, I feel as if recappers should be doing this regardless of the rewards and just out of enjoyment.
There’s less of a need for a self-contained episode when an episode no longer has to serve as a stand-alone unit of entertainment; consequently, many streaming episodes, particularly of dramas, feel like arbitrarily divided units, inseparable from their larger whole.
I tend to enjoy shows like this because it adds some suspense when you finish one episode and have to watch the next to see what happens.
But now we have more shows, so we’re still recapping a lot — it’s just that there’s so many more.
It must be hard to pick something to recap considering how many shows people watch now.
To do that, you wind up going off on how a character is acting like a jerk, but really what you’re doing is, you’re identifying story points in a piece of popular fiction, and how they’re being coded in a way that’s very weird and arguably inappropriate.”
Commenting on negative aspects of a character is more like finding key points of the story and how they are conveyed negatively.
What should I be watching? I’m tired of watching these 17 crappy things that Netflix or Amazon recommended to me. Help me cut through the clutter here.”
I have this exact issue so I really benefit from these kinds of websites.
Because the following morning, there was this massive audience hungry for conversations about the TV show, and you just don’t see that anymore.
I see so many people eager to talk about shows but not eager to listen to others discuss them.
Like all recaps, Mad Style was fundamentally viewer-oriented, despite any artist attention it may have incidentally received
I think being viewer-orientated is what made this so successful.
In the process, they shone a light on an underappreciated art and offered a new avenue into an overexposed one.
Fashion is definitely an art form that is overlooked far too often.
Fitzgerald and Marquez have backgrounds in film as well as fashion and had written prolifically about both, but they had never combined them into a single approach before.
I love the idea of studying how costumes and fashion develop movies and tv.
“I think because we had a lot of rules, it allowed some people who were comfortable with that to have good discussions it was hard for them to have in other places.
Rules allowed a safer environment for discussions which attracted people who had bad experiences before.
embedding these Easter eggs into the show
I love when shows and movies have this. because it allows me to rewatch it and find something new each time.
quit Twitter over persistent backlash to the series finale
I find it odd that someone who was recapping a show just like everyone else was getting backlash for stating his opinion.
The voice of the recapper could be an attraction in and of itself, earning devotees that echoed the recappers’ own interest in their chosen show.
Recaps should be interesting. You shouldn't get bored and should want to read more because of the ways they're written.
sending them lengthy emails with “these really crazy theories about what’s really going on in SD-6, what was really happening with Rambaldi, and all of tha
I love how he was so invested with his recaps and would send his ideas to his coworkers in hopes that they were too.
all I’m doing every week is listing the jokes I liked and the jokes I didn’t, and that’s not really interesting to anybod
I can definitely see this prompt getting boring after a while.
Originally, a lot of what the recaps were was they were supposed to be fun and funny,
Recaps were never meant to be negative, which sometimes makes them appear as unserious.
the site’s posts could run more than a dozen pages long, and would often go up on the site nearly a week after the episode in question initially ran
Im guessing this happened so that there would be time for people to watch the episode so that they wouldn't be clueless when reading the recap.
nIn 1998, writers Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting launched a fan site for WB teen drama Dawson’s Creek, titled Dawson’s Wrap, in partnership with tech master David T. Cole; by 2002, they had widened their focus to nearly three dozen shows, from Survivor to The Sopranos, under the name Television Without Pity.
I love how this shows how easily one small thing can develop into something major.
Television didn’t have to be talked about as an investment to be made or checked in on, but as it was actually experienced: as a regular, consistent part of our lives.
I agree that these shows do not have to be discussed with a profit in mind, but I think it is cool that they are because it is a career that seems very enjoyable and is helpful.
You get to really dive in deep with, Well, what does all that mean? What was the show trying to say?
I often finish a show with questions similar to these. It is really interesting to read about how people can analyze a show and decipher what it meant and how it applies to themselves and their lives.
dense and laden with meaning and subtext and symbolism,
There are components of shows/episodes that classify them as a great one to analyze.
recappers were there to register their amazement and enumerate the reasons why those hours had the power to shock and surprise.
Recappers were great for advertising because their reviews generally made the episodes seem like a must watch, which persuaded people to do so.
Social media has supplanted comments sections as a meeting site for like-minded enthusiasts
Social media has opened up new horizons in critique whether someone is a famous critic or just a random person.
collapsing the line between writer and reader, or even critic and artist, into something much blurrier than it was before.
I love how this is worded. It does a great job showing the positive impact of recaps on groups of people you are usually divided.
What if, instead of simply telling viewers whether or not they should spend their time on a show before it even airs, a writer tracked a program’s ups and downs for the people who’d already made that commitment?
I find it funny that recaps seemed like the grandest idea when they were first mentioned, but now they're everywhere and done by tons of different companies.
the practice of methodically working through an episode of television and then posting it online has both a name and a hallowed place in the history of the medium.
Im very happy it has because I love to read people's input on shows before and after I watch them!
“I was like, I’ve never built a website like that, but I think like this!”
Random people thought of making websites to chat before a writer for entertainment weekly was able to. This shows how much potential everyone has, not matter their hierarchy.
which gave fans the infrastructure to meet and talk to one another in real time
To me, this seems like the same concept of texting someone. i text literally everyday so the fact that people had to create whole websites to do so is mind blowing for me.
and scrutinizing it on a chapter-by-chapter basis was essentially unheard o
Doing this is so common now to the point that it is even a career.
Sepinwall, now the TV critic for Rolling Stone
I find it interesting that this man went from analyzing one of his favorite shows in his free time to doing exactly that but for Rolling Stone.
spent his free time penning episode-by-episode rundowns of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager
I feel as if this would take some serious knowledge on analyzation, especially considering the fact that this was over 20 years ago.
the internet was still more of an eccentric hobby than an all-consuming entity
It is so crazy to think that the internet was just a hobby and not used in everyone's lives at this time.