Episodic Interview: Noel Murray and Emily St. James talk Lost's impact on TV Criticism [Part Three]
We're fully down the rabbit hole at this point, y'all
At a certain point, it’s fair to say that this three-part “interview” stopped being an interview and just became a navel-gazing conversation about the long tail of Lost’s impact on television criticism. As such, if you’re interested in some inside baseball of how veterans of that time reflect on shifts in how we write television reviews and the culture around them, I hope you’ll enjoy this conclusion to the conversation.
And if you have, I expect you’d also enjoy Noel and Emily’s book, and that you’d get plenty of great value out of a 20% off discounted yearly subscription to Episodic Medium in this, the final day of our annual pledge drive.
Myles McNutt: As I noted at the end of Part Two, there are some fundamental tensions that come from when writers covering a show aren’t necessarily addressing the show on the same wavelength as certain readers. I’m curious, for you both, how you’ve confronted this as an editor and critic. At the time of Lost, it maybe didn’t seem like this was as much of an issue—were we just all on the same wavelength, then, or did something change?
Emily St. James: Toward the tail end of my time as TV editor at The A.V. Club, it became very clear that the model of business we had developed was becoming untenable because they were too many shows and you couldn't really cover House of Cards week to week. You know, we tried—it didn't work. We tried a bunch of things to make that happen, and none of them ever quite clicked. And now it's settled into someone does a season review, and then you release the episode recaps across one weekend, which is…I cannot imagine doing that, but it is this thing that happens. In the midst of this, though, we found certain shows that the model still worked for because they had these dedicated, hardcore fans. One of them was the CW superhero shows—we covered all of those, because there was a die hard comic book audience that came in and watched those shows. And it was never the biggest show on the site, but they more than paid for the salary we paid to the recapper, which was never as big as it should have been. However, what we quickly figured out is they wanted someone who would be like, “here's this reference from the comics, here's this reference from the comics.” And, we did that, and it worked, but you see that tension a lot now.
Rings of Power is a good example, because the biggest complaint a lot of people have about that show is that it doesn't accurately reflect the book in certain ways. And as someone who writes for television, that terrifies me, because you could never adapt the Silmarillion in a storytelling setting like television. And as someone who was once a TV critic, I'm like, “Why do you care about this?” There's a YouTube review of Andor from a Star Wars guy who's like, “they don't have bricks like this in the Star Wars universe.” And while I do not care at all about this on any level, there are apparently a lot of people who do. And the tension of that is exacerbated by the divide between traditional written criticism and then YouTube/Podcast criticism, which tends to be more for hardcore fans because that’s where the audience is.
This was something we grappled with on the board of the Television Critics Association: should we let content creators in as critics? Some of them eventually did get in, but it’s a weird space because print criticism has a series of assumptions about how you write a review that shape all critics, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. The same isn’t true for YouTube or Podcasts, so you can get “bricks on Andor.”
Noel Murray: This is something that Donna Bowman—my lovely wife and a TV critic and professor [ed. and Episodic Medium contributor]—and I have talked about quite often, because neither of our brains necessarily are wired to deep lore on a show. Donna was writing about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two well-written shows that would reference back to past seasons often. She’d do her due diligence to keep track of that stuff, but you’d never know when you’d miss a small detail that was incredibly important to people who are superfans of a particular show and whose attention, unlike critics, might not be spread across multiple shows and assignments. We’re watching so much television and trying to keep all the details in mind, but it’s not always easy.
For this reason, I actually want to stand up a bit for the recapping model, and the inclusion of specific details of what happened. You were talking back in Part One, Emily, about Jeff Jensen’s coverage of Lost in the weeks before the finale being gobbledygook because it’s based on discourse we no longer have access to. But oftentimes weekly recaps have the same feeling—sometimes I’ll be writing 150-word capsules for The New York Times about a returning show, and because I don’t watch it regularly I’ll go searching for details about the previous seasons to get some sense of what’s happened. And it’s sometimes very difficult to find that information, either because nobody is covering that show or the reviews that are covering it don’t do the work of explaining it. So, it’s often useful from an archive point-of-view for me to write recaps with a desire to catalog those kinds of details, even if you’re never going to be as informed as some of your readers are on these shows.
ESJ: I recently wrote an internal review of a show that’s a spin-off of a different show, and I had no memories of the original show (which I did watch). So I just went back to read a bunch of recaps, and it was so helpful to have plot information in there. As someone who didn’t tend to do a lot of that, I do see the use of it. I mean, you do have Wikipedia plot summaries that you can go and read, but shows don’t always have much detail—the original show in my example, for instance, had no details on the final two episodes so I scrambled and found the set of recaps that really helped me situate myself. So you want a good recap, but in a way that allows for all of the nuance and other critical analysis. Obviously, I’ve been reading our Lost book off and on of late, and Noel’s pieces do have so much more of that productive recapping than mine do. Temperamentally, I just forget about it, until I have to remind myself to be like “Oh, and Charlie died.”
MM: One of the things I had to learn upon accidentally becoming editor-in-chief of this newsletter was how to communicate this to new writers, and there’s no question the balance between summary and analysis has been the most common note I’ve had to give. My resistance to summary is that it isn’t how my brain works—I don’t find it useful in thinking about an episode, and thus don’t intuitively write it. But for others, as you note Noel, it’s a crucial part of their process, and so I’m not going to suggest that it be removed entirely. However, the philosophy I’ve developed and tried to communicate to writers is just me transferring over the feedback I give student writing, which is that if you’re summarizing something in a review or recap, it needs to be for a reason. If you’re doing a granular recounting of events in an episode, it can’t just be for the sake of it: the reader has seen the episode, they don’t need a reminder. However, if there’s a point you want to make about a particular scene or storyline, and having the details of the episode be present helps you make that argument, summary can be a valuable tool.
Back when I started writing about Lost, I was working in that Television Without Pity mode of mostly just writing a live slightly pithy recap of events, and then attaching a short essay/analysis section at the beginning. Some of that had to do with prioritizing speed, rushing to get things out as soon as possible, but it also felt like recaps had a clearer value in the context of that show and that moment. Over time, as criticism evolved, we went from being able to quickly deliver recaps to quickly delivering thesis-driven arguments, because the form changed without the (mostly self-imposed) deadlines changing. I remember I had a writer who had screeners for an entire season except the finale, and I was waiting for that review to come in—it was getting a bit late, and while I wasn’t mad or concerned, I just wanted to check in to see how it was going. They let me know that they weren’t done yet because they “had to watch it a second time,” and I was like “oh sweet summer child, a second time?” I was so flabbergasted that they thought this was necessary, given how instinctual it feels to watch and take notes and then write furiously, but then I remembered: our brains are broken, y’all. Lost helped break us to where we think this should be so natural and it’s just not.
ESJ: I watched the Game of Thrones finale at a party with a bunch of friends, and I went to another room and sat down and wrote 3500 words about it in about an hour. Now, this has been very helpful in my current career because I can write a script in a very short amount of time, but yes—I’m horribly broken by all of this.
NM: I was at Keith Phipps's house when the season five finale of Lost aired, so I watched that with with him and his wife, and then had to immediately put up some kind of review within a couple of hours. And that was a pretty dense episode—a lot goes on, Jacob meets a lot of people!
ESJ: Funnily enough, I watched the famous battle against the White Walkers on Game of Thrones at Keith Phipps house, and then had to write it up at his kitchen table. And I had this sense of him watching me, being like, “this is the magic happening.” Sarcastically, of course.
MM: I did the same thing for “The Long Night” at my cousin’s house, and then I was in Seattle for an episode of Game of Thrones one year and watched it with friend of the newsletter David Chen. He took a photo of me that memorialized my writing process, and it was strange to see what is so often a solitary process captured like that.
To bring this full circle, I do think one of the things that was so powerful about Lost was the way the reviews created a sense of community between those of us writing about it. I started my blog in 2007, before Twitter really took off, and I remember right after you’d finish your review the first thing you’d do was go read someone else’s. It was all about connecting to this larger group, and to see how different people had connected to that story, which was why near the end I spent a lot of time creating link posts to all the various reviews of each episode.
I remember when Jeff Jensen was kind enough to link to the work I was doing at Cultural Learnings, and was basically like “There’s this guy who’s just, like, doing all of this for free?” And the answer was yes—until I did my classic coverage at The A.V. Club, I had never been paid to write about Lost. But there was this sense that your ideas were entering into such an exciting exchange of ideas, and I sometimes wonder if we still have that—by the time we get to Game of Thrones, it felt more like SEO was driving the conversation than individual voices, and today it often feels like we’re writing into voids (especially on sites where the comments have either disappeared or shrunk considerably). Reading your book really brought me back to when it felt like—silly as it is—we were in the trenches together, and I miss that.
ESJ: I remember I wrote an article betting on who was going to “win” Game of Thrones, and I was like “I think Bran’s going to be on the throne because George R.R. Martin set the first chapter of the first book from his perspective.” It was a guess, as a storyteller, and then I was right, and we put it up within five minutes of the episode airing, and that’s the most read thing I’ve ever written. More people will read that than any episode of Yellowjackets, or this book, or my novel—it will outlive me, and people will be like “I remember this article I read on Vox one time.” [Laughter] Okay, so I don’t think that’s actually true, but I miss the collective sense that we’re doing something together and the friendly competitiveness that came out of writing in those spaces. I miss the race of covering Mad Men for many seasons, and knowing I could write a really strong piece of writing that needed a little bit of editing and get it up before everyone else. That feeling of “I am the best of what I do” was incredibly, even if I eventually realized what a niche thing I was very good at, but it was the camaraderie around it that made it. It was “well, the episode’s over, maybe I’ll make a tweet and connect with others,” but that’s really gone now, and I do miss it.
NM: We’d sometimes boast about how fast we got it up, and how long it was. I remember social media boasting—which, not healthy at all—that was like “That’s right, 3000 words this week” about Fringe, or whatever. And no, you shouldn’t have written 3000 words about a non-event episode of Fringe.
MM: I’m the greatest victim of that. Lost trained us to be fast—I definitely yelled “Suck it, Sepinwall!” to myself at least once, sorry Alan—and it trained us to be long, and that totally fit the demands of the audience and their expectations on all the lore and everything we’ve discussed. But then I started writing about The Office, and giving those fans 3500 words about the dynamics of Michael Scott as a character, and people were just like “Excuse me? Tell me the jokes and whether they were funny.”
It's another reminder that it’s a mode of writing—as long as you want, as fast as you can be—that felt so perfect for Lost but taught us habits that didn’t apply so readily to the rest of television. There are still shows where it feels right—Thrones was one, and that continues with House of the Dragon—but other times Ted Lasso fans want to burn me at the stake. And that’s just how it goes.
ESJ: You know, I wrote about Community at great length every week, and I now I have a reputation as someone who was very critical of that show, which was not true at all, but it was entirely because I wasn't just writing “here’s the jokes.” By far the most influential thing ever in television criticism is Keith Phipps telling me “Well, we try to make them no longer than 1200 words” and me hearing “We try to make them no shorter than 1200 words.” And I was just like “Well, I gotta hit 1200 words. That's my thing!” And to this day, I'm still thinking “I hit 1200 words. I did it!”
MM: I know you’re being slightly facetious, but I definitely still have reviews that come in at like 1050 words and I send it back to them like “You have a paragraph in you to get this to 1200.” I remember I would sometimes see 600-word reviews go up at The A.V. Club, and I would have this response—to be clear, we were getting paid like $30 for those reviews, so I don’t begrudge anyone who was being more efficient with their time. But I simply wasn’t capable of leaving so much unsaid—weekly coverage was such an opportunity for engaging in dialogue and exploring the dynamics of television, and I was going to leverage it as much as I possibly can. Now, that’s a terribly unhealthy approach to freelancing in general, even at the (much better) rates I’m now able to offer, but at the time the rewards of committing to a beat were so apparent and rewarding that we didn’t really think about it. And now I can’t turn it off. Is that the same for the two of you?
NM: Lost was where I learned a lot about the process of writing this type of criticism. I have a memory when working on my review of the finale, and I tried to think about what might happen and got a bit of a head start by writing some general thoughts on the show as a starting point. Whenever you do that, you often find out once you watch the episode that you’ve screwed up and gone in the wrong direction—that time, though, I was able to use a bunch of it, and so I was able to get up a longer review a bit faster than usual. And I remember our friend Jason Mittell asked me on Twitter how much of it was pre-written, and I felt weirdly ashamed, like I had cheated in some way. That’s not how he meant it—he was just curious about the process. But it felt like the only way to try to prepare yourself for the task at hand, even if odds were it wouldn’t be as useful as we had hoped.
ESJ: As I said, becoming a TV critic terribly broke me. When I started at The A.V. Club, I was recapping 15 shows a week, and they brought me onto a salaried position because I was making so much freelance money that it would be cheaper to give me health insurance. But when I tried to slow down at all, it would feel like I wasn’t doing enough, or that I was slacking and letting down my bosses. And yet, now that we’re in a moment where everyone’s a freelancer, my terribly unhealthy relationship with content generation is now a vital skill. I’m promoting one book and proofreading another, and that’s what is necessary because that’s the life of a writer: selling this book should have set us up for a couple of years, but—some potential cool royalties aside—it did not at all. And if I’m looking for a silver lining in the way things have changed since Lost, it’s that the ability to generate content at the drop of a hat that we developed at that time has prepared us for our new reality.
I want to thank Emily and Noel for spending time with me in the week of their book launch, and for indulging this conversation that’s really just an excuse for all of us to head down memory lane.
Really enjoyed this interview (and the book, I'm mid-season 4!).
This was a great read!