jacobclifton.com · Start Here
You found this place somehow.
Here’s a map.
If you know who I am
If you were there for Television Without Pity —
— if you found me through Gawker or the Chronicle or the former Tor.com, or someone sent you a link years ago and you’re only now getting around to it — the place to go is Patreon.
That’s where the real work lives now: essays, recaps, dispatches, and things that don’t fit anywhere else. The ongoing project of figuring out what television is doing to us and why we can’t stop. 220 members, starting at $5/month. It’s the continuation of the same conversation we’ve been having since 2000, just without a corporate middleman.
If you’re new here
Start with Rough Stuff.
If you found this site through the books, the card deck, or someone just sent you a link and you have no idea what you’re walking into — that’s the place to start.
It’s a good introduction to how this works. It circles around. It has footnotes. It’s about men and women and dogs and violence and marriage and mortality and how much of your fear is really just love in a bad mood. It was the biggest thing I’d written in years — I say that not to oversell it, but because the response told me something true: that this is what people actually come here for, even when they think they came for the television.
If you like that, the blog archive goes back to 2009. There’s a lot of it.
If you want to learn to write
That’s A Rough Trade Writing School.
More specifically: if you want to learn to read the way a writer reads, which is the only writing instruction that actually works — that’s ART School.
The curriculum is built on 25 years of professional criticism and the conviction that pop culture is serious literature that simply refuses to dress up. Courses, prompts, workshops, and a 52-card deck of writing lessons called the Wild Magic Oracular Spectacular. Self-paced. No cohort schedule. Class starts when you do.
If you have a content problem
That’s Clifton Creative.
A brand that doesn’t know what it sounds like. A blog that exists because someone decided you needed a blog. A content operation generating volume and losing signal.
Content strategy, SEO writing, editorial consulting, ghostwriting, and AI content advisory. I’ve been a writer and an editor, which means I know what the work looks like from both sides of the desk.
If none of those are quite right
Just start reading.
The blog has been going since 2009. It’s about television and writing and dogs and marriage and what it means to pay close attention to things that other people have decided aren’t worth close attention. That’s the whole project, really. Everything else is a variation on that.
Welcome. Glad you made it.