Television Without Pity:
A History

I got fired a lot, growing up. I think everybody’s had that experience but when I say “a lot” I mean it. Like I don’t think I’ve ever quit a job — sometimes I’d quit assignments or duties at Television Without Pity, but that’s it. Otherwise I always looked at jobs as extremely temporary. In fact, even doing Gawker and then Tribune I never felt as settled into a job and place as I do, say, now.

Likewise, my last apartment for 11 years was the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere by 8 years and I plan to be in my current place, haunted and cold though it may be, at least that long. (Unless I get married, he said obligatorily. [And presciently, as it turns out.])

So this story begins, like most stories then, with me getting fired. I don’t even remember the job but I know it was a temp thing. My days were caught up with trying to figure out Hollywood, basically pre-internet, based on things like the Buffy Watcher’s Guide, Entertainment Weekly, and interviews with the writers and directors I admired. I didn’t exactly want to write television but I knew I loved writing, and I loved television*, so it seemed to be working out.

• I would videotape each episode of Buffy as we watched every Tuesday, for example, and then save the rewatch until Saturday so I didn’t get burned out. A few episodes got watched, of course, more than just twice.

One of my mentors, post-high school, was a writer and Tarot expert named Rachel Pollack. She put me in touch with the editor Roz Kaveney, who was putting together a book of essays about the show. I pitched something about Artemis, I remember that.

It didn’t end up going in the book, but in imagineering a process to plan and write the essay I managed to clarify a lot of things for myself about process, editing, and the concept of going back to work on something you previously started, which is not generally one of my strengths or anything I understand. I don’t believe in astrology but it’s always right, and in this case I’m an Aries arsonist, setting my little fires and then wandering off to some new unburnt place.

Most stories begin with me getting fired, just like most of my stories start with me having dumped some very nice young man or another, for mid-twenties reasons that make less sense every day. Setting my little fires and then wandering away.

In this case, however, I’d discovered a new obsession: A website called Mighty Big TV, who did something called “recaps” about TV shows: This thing I compulsively did was not just an outlet but an art form. I was dimly aware of them from college; my friend Katie was on a listserv that got Melrose Place and Dawson’s Creek recaps every week, so I was aware. It seemed like something cool that required a definite set of skills and most likely a definite set of connections I didn’t have.

MBTV was great because, in those days, nothing was on demand — you caught your episode or you just never saw it, or saw it months or years later. It wasn’t just commentary back then, the “recap” part of the recap was more necessary — like I can remember the day, maybe six or seven years into my engagement with the site, that Glark (one of our leaders) tried to explain to us about this new thing called “bittorrents” that would change everything about how we worked.

Eventually, of course, they did.

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But for me, the recaps were a little bit of a touchstone: You could relive episodes by re-reading them, read enough of them to get in-jokes, and finally what came into view was a vibrant community of readers, writers and forum posters that was frankly overwhelming. I was not part of this community when I cold-wrote the site’s two founders, Tara and Sarah, asking for a job recapping.

I didn’t have a lot going on, after all, and it wasn’t meant to be a full-time thing. Just a fun activity that I thought I could do, if I put my mind to it — another fire I wouldn’t need to stoke. I was living on a couch in my friend Jac’s house by that point, and just a couple of months before leaving Houston (where I’d lived for six years, on and off) forever.

When they wrote back to thank me for my interest and graciously turn me down, I made a sort of deal with the Devil that we’re still seeing sequelae to: I drank a few glasses of freezer-cold vodka and tried again, this time writing them a concession letter that probably still would stand up, comedy-wise, now 20 years later. (I didn’t add espresso to the formula for a few years.) The letter had its desired purpose, and I was given the opportunity to cover… I think it was Mists of Avalon, that first time. Other one-offs followed. I would pitch whenever, whatever, because a regular show — an assignment — seemed like an impossibility.

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I still wasn’t part of this community of writers and readers, just a tourist, and that feeling (which I wouldn’t have been able to recognize as such) never really went away. There was always this group of “real” MBTV/TWoP writers that were awkwardly letting me share their space. Who were they? I couldn’t list them, but Pamie and Stee were doing a lot for the site at that time, and were friends with all the LA people, so that probably contributed to this sense that there was a raucous group of friends and peers I was just narrowly missing out on.

Every year there was a holiday party; every year I would get a call from the assembled writers at like 10 at night, annoyed that I had missed another year’s party and alienating some of them in ways I wouldn’t know about for fifteen years. So it was lonely, but I also had major social connections outside the job, so I didn’t think about it — moving to Austin meant a whole new social world to navigate, and I was quite the partygoer back then, so it didn’t seem to matter much if I was there or not.

And in any case, they were going to be annoyed with me whether I was there or not. My relationships with Sarah and Tara were never more than civil, and I often wonder still if I had prioritized those connections whether that would have even changed. (Years later, a coworker I was editing at one of the new places recalled how harsh Sarah could be when we turned things in even hours late — I called it “catching SARS.”) Sarah and I share a birthday, and I can see my own self in her in a lot of ways, but “editorially” is not one of them.

She always stuck up for me, even when the Serenity recap was the hardest push into the more romantic, emotional, fanfic-esque mode they’d eventually assume for BSG and Doctor Who — “There isn’t one way to write a recap,” she’d always say — and I really enjoyed the chance to modulate my whole way of doing things around that time. (My second big migration was to the “screenplay” style, which managed to include more recapping and less recap-writing.)

Cut to: 9/11/2001.

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Almost immediately I moved from Houston to Austin in pursuit of a boy that I knew would never love me, in whose grasp I was caught like a moth mid-singe, and I got a job here in town at a pharmaceutical company that I managed to hold onto for three years. I think during this time recaps maybe earned you $60 a pop or so — and the amount of attention and effort I put in would have made even that into something more like a $5-10/hour job. Pin money.

I think it was the following summer I was offered my first assignment: American Idol. It was still months away, so I wouldn’t be writing about it quite yet, but I’d be moderating the forums. I learned a lot about that side of the site and made a name for myself as a cop. For the same reason that American Idol was a good fit for me — as a particular kind of non-narrative content, it let me talk mostly about myself three times a week, in a way no other show could have — it was also a haven for wildness and madness of every description. The forums were colorful and in many ways it was, as I’d been warned, a baptism by fire.

Then the show started, and we were off. In the middle there I was offered a few other, less-key assignments — The Casino, memorably whose premiere I missed accidentally while in Hawai’i; Hey Paula, whose premiere was so dire I quit before writing the first recap — and subbed in for friends on occasion. My relationship with Idol co-recapper Joe Reid progressed to the point where he visited me in Austin, which was a swell time all around. He remains the only one I’ve met IRL, in fact.

After American Idol started it was all pretty much a blur of just very intense, joyful creativity. Apprentice recaps in the style of in-flight magazine business quizzes; Idol recaps with just pages of fanciful babbling and imaginary loves and conversations; Gossip Girl became an ongoing conversation about trauma in screenplay format; BSG recaps eventually took the form of poetic interp, with entire poems pasted into the recap and deconstructed by whirling text about the show. I don’t know who that creative, driven person was, but I know he’s hard to spot. Moves very fast. Sets fires and immediately leaves them to burn out.

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I’ve met a lot of neat, sometimes very famous people, based on my job. But nothing had quite the momentum as those Idol recaps. A show with which I had little to no affinity myself, but which was an open book, and very fertile, as far as current pop culture and the various things it signified, that I could then talk about. I was invited to speak in a Behind the Music special, invited onto several radio shows for “day after” commentary that I was horrible at, eventually contacted to write a book of essays that never saw print because I never wrote it, and the other random opportunities you might expect for a visible blogger in the early 2000s.

Even in the early days, Sarah would proudly tell people that she knew she didn’t have me for long — that I was destined for something else. I always found this darkly funny because moving anywhere upward or using any of these connections to my own benefit would have required more get-up-and-go, more sticktuitiveness, than I’ve ever displayed. I had a job I liked doing something I loved, and the idea of spinning that into more of a job just seemed bizarre to me.

I’d spent my whole life waiting to be a professional writer. The stretch from 2001-2008 was mostly a lot of wine, espresso, vodka and sweaters. I acquired a piano from a miserable narcoleptic girl at my day job, and decorated my low-income-housing apartment with black and white printouts of everything I loved. It became a bit of a social hub, with my Thursday “TV Nights” sorta infamous for the next decade. I remember the day I first thought of it, early in The O.C.‘s run: A weekly rotating salon of sorts, with TV and drinking as the main attractions. I lost 100 pounds and gained it all back. I went on a lot of second dates.

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Eventually I was fired from my pharmaceutical job, for reasons that seemed at the time to be very personal and ugly, but which I’ve decided since then are probably right on the money — namely, that although I was the best in the game, I was checked out and coming back late from lunch, which were both true. I needed a new fire to set.

But once again, that tendency to find stability in the chaotic — to find gravity’s level, like water, and refusing to move; accepting what I am given and never thinking about much less asking for more — kicked in. Unemployment and TWoP kept me afloat for months, and off and on throughout the years, as I got and lost more and more jobs. I moved to a different apartment (or friend’s couch) every year during that post-pharma period, every time I lost a job.

I was a walking red flag and I know that. I think even at the time I knew that. But I also knew that I was someone who had gone from having no real skills and taking no pride or joy in doing a good job, just working to work, and ended up at a job that offered unlimited and constant validation. So I started to think maybe my night job could become my real job — I wrote culture stuff for MSNBC, among other things — and was a freelancer during those times, too.

I was doing a lot of personal work during that time, undiagnosed depression leading to an almost manic amount of writing. When I wasn’t watching or writing for TWoP, I was writing fiction for myself. A novel every September, various SF/F/H stories throughout the year, and more than a little livejournal-type personal blogging, too. This stuff was probably marketable too, but I was lazy — and more than used to being offered praise (and work) by strangers.

The first big movement in what we were doing came when NBC (via Bravo, via Trio, via BrilliantButCancelled) acquired us for some ungodly sum and we all became workers for the Man. The founders and their elite stayed around for a year, presumably by arrangement, and a lot of my compatriots fled. But I stayed, with my now-huge catalog of ongoing shows I’d been assigned (or, often, gifted by the outgoing writer).

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I think I knew at the time what the difference was: I was well-acquainted with living on the cusp of millennial and Gen X, and one of the most dramatic differences there has to do with “selling out” and “being earnest” and a lot of other things that terrify and displease people my age and a little older, but mean nothing to me. And this seemed like that: Part of why I couldn’t connect with my TWoP peers had to do with our subjective ages. They were all older than their years, and I’ve always been, for good or ill, a great deal younger.

(My therapist, often: “How old do you feel today?”)

A bunch of superfans were elevated to forums moderation, as it became clear that our acquisition was about those eyeballs and forums’ stickiness, and not so much about the recap writing at all. However, our patron LA saint Pamie knew the system and knew well enough to know that we could demand a good deal more than $60 a pop, or however much it was by 2007. This is when we started getting syndicated and you’d find my recaps in your morning news on the Yahoo! and MSNBC frontpages.

I don’t know exactly how all that negotiation went down: I was, once again, checked out. If my checks had been arriving on time, I could (at least on paper) have made it work. But no matter how many times I asked about it, my checks were simply not arriving. So during this time when all of my peers were high on labor and collective bargaining (fifteen years too early for publishing, although at least it happened before Facebook started lying about video engagement), I was technically homeless and hopeless and feeling pretty nihilistic about the whole thing.

Eventually the paycheck thing was worked out, but not before a great deal more unpleasantness. At one point, you could find me being questioned by police in a check-cashing place because the Canadian money order (“draft cheque”) tripped some kind of alarm. That’s the kind of unbanked, rootless hassle my life was back then, with very little skills (still!) to even things out.

And coming out the other side, as one of the only original writers to remain on the site, with a year-round calendar of heavy hitters (Battlestar Galactica, for example; The Apprentice for a long time, too), meant that I could for once call it a full-time job. I wasn’t making tons of cash but I was making more than I’d made at most of the jobs I’d been fired from. And, I cannot stress enough, a nonstop flywheel of feedback, praise, and validation that went around and around, all week long.

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I can’t remember exact figures, which sucks because that’s part of what I wanted to be transparent about and share with you, but after maybe a year of working out kinks the new system was set up: Recaps were $250, morning-after recaplets were like $30. So you can see that even two shows a week was more than enough for my simple life, much less the four I usually carried, plus forums moderation money (and eventually moderating on the Bravo boards, as well, which is the craziest place I have ever been).

Then followed seven years, from 2007-2014, in which I pretty much solely recapped and started selling my own fiction online as an experiment. (It’s worked out pretty well.) I got into a fight with my friend Susan, the head moderator, about something stupid, and quit moderating around that time, I think. She’s passed away now; one of the few points of contact I’ve had with the rest of them was them reaching out to let me know she was gone. I was sad; we hadn’t spoken in many years.

The thing I remember most from moderating is how Sarah and Tara had solved so many of the problems we still see on the internet today — their rules, after years of refinement, were brilliant. The forums were known to be of high quality, but I think nobody understood just how key the moderation was in that. Disagreements about the level of scrutiny were part of the issue with Susan, I remember that, but not much more than that. Just that if you wanted to create an internet from scratch you could do much worse than using the Television Without Pity forums rules as your foundational document.

(If you’ve heard differently, or had a different experience, I am sorry — but I will note that the people most likely to complain about the rules are those who don’t fully understand the rules; c.f. the Tea Party, and Jan 6 insurrection. So a lot of the complaints but not all of the complaints come down to “TwoP Jacob/TWoPBayliss suspended me for no real reason” or “Jacob/Bayliss always cuts off conversations when they’re getting good” — which may well be possible, in the sense that nobody is perfect including myself, but 9 out of 10 involves somebody being an asshole and getting shut down for it. I had the most bonkers forums, so I had the most bonkers people, so I had the most — and most bonkers — reasons for shutting things down and kicking people off. That’s true.)

My favorite story from moderating is the time I shut down a conversation and someone privately messaged me to give their opinion of that. So I said, “Here’s how that is going to go. A is going to say X, B is going to say Y. Meanwhile C and D will wander in and twist the forum further off topic by responding to X and Y. Then A will repeat X, B will say Z, and at that point things collapse.” He didn’t respond… Until an hour later, when that exact sequence of events motivated him to admit that maybe I did know a little bit about things.

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My favorite part of moderating the Bravo forums, and one that I wish I had been able to parlay into more of a career, was the heat mapping/social listening aspect — every week I would produce a document about trends in the Bravo audience — likes, dislikes, heroes, villains — that would, I believe, make it to the c-suite with very little changes. I loved that, truly: Just being able to essentially recap a week’s worth of inane conversation, with bulletpoints.

All I asked in return was to never know how many people were reading those recaps, how much money I was making them, anything like that. I knew, somehow, that I would develop the yips and freeze in paralysis if I ever learned how many readers I had. (I was correct in this, and my time at Gawker bears this out.)

What I think I would most like to take away from that time in my life — which, at fifteen years, comprises more than a third of my time on this planet — is that unfettered, wild (feral really) sense of creativity. I had something to prove, for some reason, maybe some mid-twenties reason or maybe something deeper. I miss that fire even though I think it was at least partly neuroatypical and, off and on, depended on alcohol and drugs (caffeine) to unlock.

Maybe if I rocked myself back to that state I could do it again: Eating no carbs with the sun up, every bite and sip and outing planned around how it would affect me creatively… I can be kind of a jock about some stuff, and this is one of those things. Maybe if I put myself back there I’d find nothing had changed. But somehow I doubt it.

Mostly I resent the narrative that depression and/or mental illness are some kind of creativity thing, and if you get medicated — if you do what you have to do, to survive — you will lose some or all of that creative energy. I hate it because it’s true, but it’s not the whole truth: The whole truth is that it just gets a lot harder. C.f. this entire Patreon experiment, for one example.

But I also had the most absurd, “created for Jacob” job I could ever have asked for, and I knew that as it was happening: “You get to watch TV for work” is as close to the truth as “you get to eat all that ice cream” is part of working at an ice cream shop. But I knew it was special, and weird, and I was enough of a Gen Xer myself to (along with swearing up and down that I never, ever wanted to write for TV) play it off: For some reason, people let me do this, so I’m going to keep doing it.

And until March 2014, they did. So I did.

But we’ve talked about that before — that fateful morning when I got a text from my friend Heather Hogan milliseconds before the official email from HQ arrived, and I got in the shower and didn’t get back out until I had a plan.

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I don’t know how interesting the rest of that story is — Gawker, then Tribune; Facebook; my preschool job — but I knew behind-the-scenes on TWoP is why some of you are here, and I thought you’d find it interesting enough to share.

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