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
WATCHING
Pretty Little Liars
WATCHING
True Blood
23+ volumes. New releases ongoing. All at Stag + Birch →
Recent criticism
From the archive:
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What the Moon Does to Us
A Travelogue from the Würstreich A two-handed solo campaign through Dungeon Degenerates: Moon Madness, playing as the Alley Cat and the Fugitive Fop. We are both of them. We have always been both of them. We reach Stone Circle just after dark and the air tastes like something that has been waiting a long time…
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Grime and Gold
On Loving Dungeon Degenerates Sometimes I’ll just go look at the character sheets. Not to play. Not to plan a campaign or check a rule. Just to look at them — the Gutter Witch with her cat and her herbs, the Night Knight’s sword, the deranged charisma of the Eccentric Astronomer holding his telescope like…
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Everything All of the Time: Stories by Jacob Clifton
Gods. Superheroes. Monsters. And the Men Who Love Them. From author Jacob Clifton comes Everything All of the Time, a masterful, genre-bending collection of five novellas & short stories that plunges into the heart of queer masculinity against epic backdrops of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. These stories explore the intimate spaces between impossible…
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Oldie: A Novel by Jacob Clifton
When they wake up on the pale sands of a strange beach, they’re reborn, but they’re hollow. They’ve forgotten their names, their powers, and the fact that they were ever a family. Now, they have to find the seven Aces to unlock their memories and stop whoever is hunting them before the Chain falls apart…
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Blank Space
S. lives in a Manhattan where it snows year round. Her high-rise is fashionably appointed and her fiancé is attentive. So why does it feel like she’s in Hell? Myth, fairytale and urban thriller meet in Blank Space, a novel coming soon.