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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An Unfound Door: Watching Doctor Who, Season 1A
So there’s this wisdom, a spiritual light lodged in the material world, which the redeemer retrieves and gives back to God—individual redemption as restoration of the divine, or what we call world therapy: Going into the darkness for the information, putting it back where we belongs. Approaching the wholeness taken from us when we’re born.The…
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Reader Mail #7
Fri, October 9th, 2015 3:47 PM I hope you’ve had a good season and I hope that you’re looking forward to fall. You might have noticed I disappeared this summer and wondered if it was for good reasons: It really wasn’t. It was a tough time. My skill has always been in figuring out where…
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Key Review for Get Low: Wasted Beauty 1-6
(UPDATE: Check out this excellent review from The Onion’s own A.V. Club, published July 4!) It’s been so nice to have Jacob Clifton’s wonderful prose and deep insight into culture and character every week again, but I decided to wait until this first act was done to really review it, because as with any serial,…
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While You Are Over There: A Novella
“Well,” he’d say, in that drawl he likes when he’s educating you, “Seems to me everything that changes, isthe end of things. Everything’s the end of the world, really. We just get focused on some kinds of change and not others. You take an aspirin and your fever goes down, or the fever keeps goin’…
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Reader Mail #6: Birthday Girl
Wed, June 24th, 2015 4:06 PM How about this. Your daughter comes home from her first day of Kindergarten crying. She’s discovered some pretty shitty things about people that she didn’t know before. They can be selfish, they can lie, they can make demands that supersede hers. But even worse, she’s discovered some things about…