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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Please Please Pull It Together On Facebook
THE BASICS You’ve got two ways of viewing Facebook. One is your Feed, which is what everybody is talking about. If you just go to Facebook.com, that’s what you’re probably looking at. It’s a random mashup of things that happened. The other is your Wall, which is yours. It belongs to you. You can say…
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The Commonplace Book: A Novelette
The first published work by Jacob Clifton, and still one of the best.
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Caprica Six & The Rainmaker of Kiau Tchou
Mailbag time. …Your comment, both here and on Facebook, that it’s all about Caprica Six. I’m intrigued, and interested in hearing more, if you have time. I’m finding that my mental hierarchy of all of the characters’ arcs and their significance has been shifting as I re-watch, but I still haven’t quite decided where to…
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I DON’T KNOW WHY SHE DOES IT
I’m in a small, gluten-free café in the hills of Los Angeles, waiting for my lunch dates to appear. Ever since the Weinsteins’ record-setting deal on Jacob Clifton and Gwyneth Paltrow’s co-production, I DON’T KNOW WHY SHE DOES IT, they’ve been impossible to track down. Variety: “Jacob, you said you’ve been working on this script…
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The 5 TV Characters You Are Way Too Close To
I was going to do another pretentious religious post today but I had a great conversation with a friend tonight about the move from identifying with characters to identifying with story, which is a major topic that you can’t attack all at once. So I will ask you, to start with: What or who are…