Television Without Purpose
I don’t visit many Internet message boards anymore because, as I failed to mention the other day, message boards are just too time-consuming, especially if you participate. The few I look at, I don’t read regularly, and I participate even less frequently. But there was a time, when I was working one of my many dead-end jobs and had assloads of time to kill, where I became obsessed with a website called Television Without Pity. For those who aren’t aware (because you have better things to do with your lives than obsess over TV), it’s a site where folks write long, snarky recaps of television shows. At their best, they approximate the experience of watching a show, simulating the things that run through your mind so you can say, “Thank God I’m not the only one who didn’t think a single moment of 24’s fourth season made sense.” At their worst, they descend into rambling, pseudo-intellectual garbage overanalyzing the kind of reality shows most people half-watch as they do laundry or cook dinner.
And then there are the forums. I’ll get to that later. First, a little personal history…
I read the recaps on that site off and on from around 2001 through…well, pretty much through the recent Bravo buyout. My reading the recaps isn’t some kind of anti-corporate protest so much as a result of the shake-ups and new features really sucking up the site. The only idea worse than recapping sitcoms was the plan for “weecaps,” which aren’t defined by brevity (as you’d think, with the name) but by turnaround time. As a result, normally entertaining recappers deliver barely-coherent, joke-free summaries that are roughly as long as normal recaps.
Although I had read the recaps on the site for awhile, the forums were barely a blip on my radar until the fall of 2005. At the time, I was working at a tech company I’ve taken to calling Motorama on this blog (to make it harder to Google) that had a metric shit-ton of downtime. Even taking my now-legendary three-hour lunches, rolling in around an hour late and leaving an hour two early…I still had about four hours of downtime, because I was an efficient worker in a department notorious for inefficiency. Good times!
Also at the time, Lost launched its second season with one of the greatest mindfucks in the history of television. It was this that drew me to the TWoP forums. Well, also the fact that the color scheme of the Lost forums approximated the proprietary software we used…and also the fact that the show’s massive popularity at that time caused threads to balloon to hundreds of pages within days of an episode airing. (For a frame of reference, many other shows I watched at the time had episode threads that would rarely get to 20 pages in a full week.)
I was addicted to uncovering easter eggs and secrets, which was hard to do since ABC didn’t even carry HD feeds (or maybe it was just my cable company) at that time. As weeks passed, it became even harder because the vocal minority of Lost haters infested every thread — not just containing themselves to the show’s official bitterness thread — and this, almost as quickly as my addiction started, is what started to frustrate me about TWoP’s forums. Were all posters this obnoxious? Were they all unaware that most TVs can change channels? When they kept complaining that Lost defied its premise (and promise) by veering in a sci-fi direction, did they not noticed that the first episode featured a dinosaur-like monster that could uproot trees but was apparently invisible? Did they all hole up in threads that acted largely as echo chambers, causing their rage to increase to such a point that, by the end of season two, bitterness posters were making up their own, 100% untrue storylines, then getting mad at the writers for plot twists that…never happened.
As I started to have issues with the forums, I also noticed what I perceived as a sharp decline in the quality of recaps. (Turns out, I was just reading more of them, and the overall site quality was not nearly as good as the limited sampling I’d had before. I didn’t know this at the time.) Randomly, I popped “twop sucks” into Google just to see if anyone on the planet agreed with me. Because of the way the forum is modded, you can’t find any actual criticism of the site, or any of its posters, anywhere on their boards. You have to go to outside sources, and fortunately for me, the first hit was an anti-TWoP forum (conveniently named “TWoP Sucks”).
There, I discovered a smallish group of people who didn’t necessarily hate the site — if they did, unlike Lost viewers, they’d stop looking at — but needed to vent frustrations about unsavory posters, inconsistent moderation, and other general site weirdness. I quickly learned much more about the history of the site (in particular the forums and mods) than I ever wanted to know, but I stuck around because, although I posted infrequently, the folks there were…surprisingly normal and down-to-earth. Even their disdain for certain posters felt like typical vent-and-move-on behavior, not the rabid fandom (or anti-fandom) so often expressed on a website devoted to saying they are not a fan site.
So last year, Bravo bought TWoP for mysterious reasons. Since the site actually had some money, they hired part-time mods so the roster of recappers could do disappointing work recapping sitcoms. (Seriously, at this point M. Giant’s 24 recaps are the only things I’ll read on the site, but they should not have made him recap The Office. Much as I like him, recapping a sitcom is even worse than someone trying to retell a really good joke — it’s like someone standing next to a guy telling a really good joke, then getting flustered and trying to outdo him and failing.) With new people devoted exclusively to modding, you’d think it’d get more consistent. But no — it’s pretty much the same old shit (some would argue it’s worse). You have the mods who are fair and reasonable, the mods who strictly enforce the rules no matter what, the mods who enforce the rules inconsistently based on whether or not they agree with the offending poster, and the weird, overzealous mods who will just ban on a whim and make up an appropriate rule violation.
Which leads me, at long last to this post with a reasonable, if slightly bitter, account of getting banned from TWoP. The real fun is in the comments section. If you ignore the misguided conspiracy theories and tales of similar woe and bitterness, you’ll get to a comment that’s both sad and hilarious, in which a 61-year-old retiree was first warned, then banned for improper capitalization (ironically, she was a schoolteacher). If you keep going, you’ll find another comment in which she explains that she took the time to get the runaround from various employees of Bravo/NBC/Universal, going all the way up the chain of command to Jeff Zucker.
Because she was banned from an Internet message board. For a legitimate violation of the rules.*
Eventually, an employee of NBC (followed by a former employee) jumped on to mention that it’s both insane and hilarious to believe anybody with any kind of authority cares. This launched a bout of insanity that has resulted in, quite possibly, more traffic and comments than the poor blogger has ever received. I admit, the whole thing is hilarious, especially when it spilled over to TWoP Sucks (now known as Bitter But Brilliant) and, back on the blog, a sock puppet joined the original commenter in defense that she admitted, eventually, was being dictated to her by the original commenter. (Even funnier, I just noticed now, after pasting all these links to the comments, that the original post was written in November.)
I think the whole thing reached such a nadir of stupidity that it went from weird-yet-sad to flat-out funny, around the time somebody asked why she didn’t just re-register, and the commenter’s sock puppet answered with a paranoid (and untrue) conspiracy theory that mods obsessively check every username and e-mail address that registers to the site for superficial similarities to posters they’ve already banned.
I’m often attracted to the lurid wreckage of Internet strangeness, but I’m still just baffled by the crusade of a woman who was actually banned for the right reasons.** Her obstinate unwillingness to admit any wrongdoing kind of makes you realize that she’s exactly the type of person who would get warned once, ignore it, get warned a second time, ignore it, and then act shocked and outraged when she’s banned on the third offense. Why do so many people who gravitate to TWoP have such an utter lack of self-awareness?
More importantly: what does that say about me?***
*Say what you will about the rules and the fascist mods, their rules about spelling/grammar/capitalization make the forums much easier to read, and when you’re warned twice, why would a banning shock you? [Back]
**Although lack of capitalization is a pretty minor offense compared to the behavior of others the site hasn’t banned, it’s one of their most clearly stated rules. [Back]
***Hey, wait. That’s sort of like self-awareness. [Back]
Posted by Stan on April 14, 2008 5:45 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Random Musings | Digg It
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