jacobclifton.com · Criticism
Twenty-five years of paying close attention.
I spent fourteen years at Television Without Pity writing about television in a way that was never really about television. It was about grief, transformation, the cost of paying attention, what it means to love something that will eventually disappoint you. The criticism is still happening — here, on Patreon, and in the WATCHING series.
The WATCHING series
The recaps, grown up.
Each volume takes a body of work — a show, a season, an era — and finds the thing running underneath it. Not a reprint. A remix. These are what the recaps were always actually trying to be.
WATCHING
Gossip Girl
WATCHING
Battlestar Galactica
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Pretty Little Liars
WATCHING
True Blood
23+ volumes. New releases ongoing. All at Stag + Birch →
Recent criticism
From the archive:
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Chapter Nine: The Ancient Bone Path
“This is the Ancient Bone Path,” Holder said in a hush. “Creatures older than time once came here to die, for thousands of years. Creatures younger than those made a road of sorts. It leads through this part of the Wood to an ornate door of bones, which opens onto a world nobody knows anything…
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Chapter Eight: The Blighted Prince
Flowers grew up from the Redwoods sand where Our Lady stepped, if She wasn’t careful. Holder said she’d always thought this was an affectation, but either way it certainly looked like a miracle.
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Arcadia — Cardboard Trees, Real Kindness
Here’s the reflex this piece mostly refuses: you’ve read enough stories to know that when a utopia looks too clean, the seams are the point, and the story is winding up to make you pay for believing the paint. Arcadia gives you every reason to expect that — the scenery genuinely is fake, staged, built…
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Mission — Fog, and What Endures in It
Mission doesn’t offer a battle you could point to and say this is the war, and this is what it’s about. It offers fog, and movement inside the fog, and the accumulated ghosts of wars that already happened layering in with whatever’s currently happening, until the distinction between a long-dead conflict and a live one…
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The Coop — The Obsolete Is Down There
The Coop is literal — a Land built in actual stacked levels, hypercapitalism as architecture rather than metaphor for it. Newer floors sit on top of older ones, and the older ones have a name for themselves: the Obsolete. That’s not a nickname visitors use. That’s what the people stuck there call the level they’re…