Week-to-Week: An Elegy for TV Twitter
As the platform burns, a reflection on how it shaped over a decade of critical discourse
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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve delivered an installment of this weekly—whoops—newsletter, and while I could say that it’s because I’ve been busy (I have), there’s a simpler answer: I knew my next newsletter would have to be about the death of Twitter, and the death of Twitter makes me profoundly sad.
This response might not make sense for people who mainly lurked on Twitter, or those who—for understandable reasons—have found the platform unwelcoming or destructive to their mental health. But for those who used Twitter to find and connect with communities surrounding things we cared about, losing Twitter is the end of an era that redefined our lives. And what’s become clear over the past few weeks is that television critics and the communities around them are among those who will feel this loss most acutely.
Put simply, I would not be a professional television critic—or a media scholar, but we’ll set that aside for a moment—without Twitter. When I joined Twitter in 2008, I had been pretending to be a TV critic on my blog Cultural Learnings for a little over a year, aping the style of Alan Sepinwall’s What’s Alan Watching? blog. Blogging was a crucial starting point for the evolution of television criticism, both democratizing the form by allowing amateurs like me to easily participate and giving professional critics like Alan space to more regularly connect with their readers and build a community. Comment sections of blogs were how I met and connected with Emily St. James, who would go on to be my first editor at The A.V. Club, and I started building a relationship with Alan by being a regular commenter and not-so-subtly adding hyperlinks to my own reviews in case he or his readers were interested in more of my musings.
Twitter, though, took these disparate comment section dialogues and turned them into a coherent community. When Alan eventually joined Twitter in 2009, he was kind enough to give me the coveted “follow back,” which felt like a significant accomplishment as a still-wannabe critic. But what followed was more important: as more TV critics joined Twitter and started extending the conversations they’d normally have over email or at TCA Press Tour to a public audience, I was able to jump into those dialogues like I belonged, with Alan’s endorsement helping others like Maureen Ryan and James Poniewozik accept me as one of their own before they had any real reason to. As much as I wrote an insane amount of criticism and worked extremely hard in order to prove my “worth,” Twitter was the way that hard work actually reached the people it needed to in order for me to be taken seriously as part of this community, and eventually connect with Emily and the rest of the team at The A.V. Club a year later in 2010.
Everything after that is sort of a blur. By the time I first met Alan in person at TCA Press Tour in 2013, I was entering a room filled with people I felt I knew, and built stronger connections with dozens more by being able to connect with them in physical space. The openness of the conversations about television and the television industry happening within critical communities meant that anyone could contribute—critics and their readers, sure, but also producers and actors. The latter led to surreal moments like Bill Lawrence crashing the class hashtag of the Intro to TV screening I was running, or Lin-Manuel Miranda shouting out Emily for her Tony Awards coverage in a tweet after his TCA panel. It was a moment where if you were someone who cared about TV, you could follow a constellation of accounts and be assured that any given day could devolve into an hours-long debate about the state of the medium, with a cross-section of critics, showrunners, and the people that follow them—scholars, for example—chiming in.
This was also happening at a moment when Twitter was considered to be deeply intertwined with television’s future: I talked with scholar Cory Barker about his book covering the rise and fall of “connected viewing,” and the critical community that formed on Twitter was an active part of the experiences we shared around this time. An outsider likely perceived the Twitter conversation around TV shows as abject chaos, but those of us who curated feeds or lists built around the cross-section above had access to a dialogue that combined the rigor of critical consideration with the playfulness of the platform. And while declines in linear viewing mean livetweeting television has largely fallen out of fashion save award shows and the occasional vestige of a bygone era like House of the Dragon, this community has persevered, both through those events and the idea that on any given day someone could tweet out something and have a whole host of people chiming in.
I like to believe I’ve never taken the privilege of being part of this community for granted. I recall instances where friends who send me texts complaining that they had no one to talk to about the shows they were watching, and realizing that was never true for me: I had my followers, who signed up for my perspective on television and were forced to sit through my rants about empty coffee cups or my psychotic break watching NBC’s Rise.
As much as I would foreground the community dynamics of Twitter in reflecting on its value, there’s no question that it also gave me a larger platform that I could have imagined, and that had a profound impact on the course of my life. Professionally, that platform made it possible for me to step away from my largest audience at The A.V. Club and transition my work here to Episodic Medium (and thank you, again, for being here). Personally, however, it helped give me confidence that my efforts to blend critical opinion and academic insights were valuable, helping fight back the impostor syndrome that is inherent to academia and embedded in my amateur beginnings in a critical context. While I completely understand those who have chosen to leave Twitter over time to protect their own mental health from what can absolutely be a toxic space, I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do what I do without access to the positive reinforcement Twitter provided.
As I tweeted in a thread that I wrote while putting off writing this newsletter on the topic, there’s a cynical read on those of us who are scrambling to translate these “followings” onto other platforms. Within spaces like criticism, one’s worth has over time become defined by one’s following: for example, if I’m looking for new contributors to Episodic Medium, and trying to convince people to pay $5 a month to read our reviews, there’s no question someone with a following on Twitter would be more “lucrative” and potentially draw in more people. As such, it can be easy to start quantifying value like critics are “influencers,” and thus perceive the starting of Substacks or pleas to follow on Mastodon as a sort of desperation to hold onto some concept of “fame.”
However, in the case of TV criticism particularly (and really media criticism broadly), I would argue that what we’re trying to hold onto is that sense of community. Sure, I can now text Alan Sepinwall whenever I want, but part of the fun of talking about TV on Twitter was the fact that anyone could chime in—every discussion was an invitation for someone to offer their own perspective. It isn’t just that I’ll have to work harder to keep up my connections with people I care about who I primarily interact with on that platform—it’s that there’s less opportunity for someone new to enter the discussion, and—as I did—tweet their way into a community. Substack has given me an outlet for my critical thoughts, and I’ll certainly be continuing to offer them through weekly newsletters, discussion posts, and chat threads (currently only on the Substack app for iOS), but it will never create the open forum environment that basically made me the critic, scholar, and arguably person I am today.
I don’t know how long Twitter has left. I’d like to believe that when the dust settles, there is some chance it will be able to return to its tenuous status quo, and that all of the value I’ve outlined here won’t become solely a distant memory. But my hope is that whether in the comments of Substack communities like this one, in Discords or Subreddits, or even on the inscrutable Mastodon, you find something that enriches your experience of television as a medium. And that if you’re new to this world, and didn’t get to experience the era I’m primarily describing here, I hope these spaces can offer you even a small percentage of what I feel I gained from being part of “TV Twitter” for the last 14 years.
Episodic Observations
I left a comment on Alan’s first Substack newsletter about why he’s recapping fewer shows recently, and obviously Episodic Medium is pushing back against some of these realities—ICYMI, we’ve added coverage of The White Lotus and Mythic Quest over the past few weeks, Zack Handlen’s coverage of Rick and Morty returns next week, and I’m starting to plan ahead for January and February—where I’ll be covering The Last of Us and Ted Lasso, provided the latter gets a release date eventually—as well. Look for another survey in your inboxes about shows we’re considering adding coverage for in the new year.
I might reflect on this in more detail in a future newsletter, but I watched the first three episodes of HBO Max’s Dan Levy-hosted The Big Brunch on Friday, and I thought it was entertaining but also spoke to some of the realities of merging cooking competitions with more feel-good reality programming, with each contestant having a service-based mission or personal story that helped determine their casting. It’s a fun watch, and I enjoyed seeing former Bon Appetit video presence Sohla El-Waylly get to have a real moment as an effective judge, but there’s a tension there that I think can be explored in more detail.
As I was discussing with Friend of Episodic Medium Louis Peitzman on (sigh) Twitter, I also watched most of this season of American Horror Story last week, albeit somewhat accidentally. I’ve never actually sat through an entire season of the show, but I was struck by how coherent it seemed. I’m not sure the season’s intersection of AIDS, a Dexter-adjacent serial killer, and a monstrous leather-clad enforcer terrorizing gay men in New York City will add up to match, but the fact there’s even the semblance of an equation went against expectation, and I found it to be perfectly watchable.
As was the case in the glory days of The AV Club, how I envy the ability to have a whole team covering television, rather than figuring out what I can do myself.
Which is why I'm glad you've created this place and brought in Donna, et al to be part of it.
See most of what you're associating with "TV Twitter" for me I associate with the heyday of TV recapping and recap comment sections itself. I understand twitter was a big deal for academics, TV critics, entertainment journalists etc. but for me as a civilian the sense of community etc. you're describing came from the actual AV Club itself (and also from non-AV Club writers like Sepinwall, Emily Nussbaum, Matt Soller Zeitz et al at their publications at the time) And I'm not one of those anti-twitter people. I was a heavy user of the platform from 2009 to the day the Elon Musk deal went through when I deactivated my account. It's just that following my favorite TV recappers on twitter was also secondary or even tertiary to actually reading recaps and their comment sections in their heyday. The big loss for me in re: TV commentary still remains the collapse of the old, good AV Club and with it a huge overall decrease in the amount of week to week recapping going on and the near death of worthwhile comment sections.