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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Reader Mail #5
Sat, May 23rd, 2015 8:56 PM Let me tell you that the worst part of all this, the self-publishing and constant moving, is trying to come up with ways to seem interesting. There are only so many ways you can tell your story, especially if you’re telling a person who already knows the basics. All…
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Reader Mail #2
Sat, April 25th, 2015 9:00 AM Hi there! First of all, I can’t really believe the response to last week’s first email. A lot of those invitations were to some of you that I haven’t spoken with in almost ten years, so it’s really gratifying to see a response like this. Last year when TWoP…
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Sad Puppy, Why Are You So Sad? An Investigation
YOU KNOW You know, a lot of times it’s easy to reflexively feel compassion, if you’ve made that a goal, for people you might otherwise dismiss. Being automatically predisposed toward understanding what a monster is, and how they got there, can get you to a lot of places. Even when it’s smarter to keep it…
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Reader Mail #1: What Has Been Going On
Mon, April 20th, 2015 8:10 PM Hi! It’s probably been a while—maybe a very long while—so I thought I should start with a little update on what’s been going on since we last ran into each other. On March 27 of last year, Television Without Pity was suddenly and abruptly closed down by Bravo, who’d…
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The Tricks: For a Graduating Writer
Do you have any advice for writers on the verge of graduating, and searching for the writing-related dream job? The economy is turning over like an iceberg so I have no idea what the market will be like for journalists, or essayists, or really any kind of writer, in the near or the far future.…