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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Goodbye to All That
This is a long one, and a little dark. But Elon bought Twitter today and this time, we had advance warning. So I tweeted the biggest thoughts I had going currently in my head, in the hopes of maybe finally getting it right. And that’s basically what this is, after a rewrite: my third or…
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Clean
I. “Clean” as in “simply good,” I think. “Clean” as in “not particularly broken.” “Clean” as in “approved for mass consumption.” So much of my life has centered itself on Clean. And its many opposites. II. My favorite comic book character of all time, growing up, was a girl named Illyana “Magik” Rasputin, a member…
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Yellowjackets Season 1: What the Show Is Actually Doing
A deep read of Yellowjackets Season 1 — the survival horror, the timeline, the girls, and what the show is really about underneath all of it.
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Dispatch: Places I
Growing up I never stayed in one place for too long. My mother’s father was in the Syndicate (Texas Mafia) and this made her neurotically peripatetic as an adult; my father was my father, and stayed generally where you left him. But with my Mom it was a new place every year: Lubbock, where I…
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the Nevers: Touched — a Post-TWoP Recap
The Nevers premiere, recapped in the old Television Without Pity tradition. TWoP’s own Jacob Clifton on Joss Whedon’s Victorian sci-fi series — episode one.