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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Ventura — What Fairylande Won’t Tell You
Ventura is a theme park. Say that plainly, first, because everything else about the Land depends on holding both halves of the sentence at once: Fairylande was built to sell people magic, and somewhere along the way — nobody agrees exactly where — the built magic and something else stopped being distinguishable from the outside.…
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Ællaë — The Style Hasn’t Gotten the News
Ællaë is the Land that looks the most like a warning label — hot pink fire burning along a razorblade wire, a theocratic city-state running cyberpunk infrastructure that’s one bad night from total collapse. The holy law still holds. The god the law was written for might not be watching anymore, and nobody in Ællaë…
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Redwoods — A Domain, Not a Home
Redwoods has exactly one living resident, and that fact reorganizes everything else about the place. This isn’t a Land with a culture, a population, a way people there talk about themselves — it’s Benjamin of the Beasts’s domain, singular, and everyone else who moves through it either isn’t alive or isn’t quite there in the…
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Chapter Seven: The Mysteries
The Mysteries were deep and ancient halls where the Ace burned, hidden in a reliquary. Their mission now was to gain entrance. To be reborn you have to die, Our Lady Maeve heard Herself saying, in another life. The world already ended.
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Santana — What the Desert Extracts
Santana doesn’t give anything away for free, starting with entry. Land there wrong and the desert itself will throw you back — ask The Bard Thomas, who tried to step onto Santana’s sands and was hurled clean back onto the deck of the Actæon by a force nobody could see. Some places test your paperwork.…