Melissa Crawley - The American Television Critic: A History

Also by MELISSA CRAWLEY

Mr. Sorkin Goes to Washington: Shaping the President on Televisions The West Wing (McFarland, 2006)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2903-2

2017 Melissa Crawley. All rights reserved

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To Tom Hill,

whose observation that I had the writing voice
of a columnist started me on this TV critic path.

And to Helen, Elle and Charlie,
the bestfour-legged officemates a writer could have.

As a TV critic, I receive a steady stream of emails every day from television network publicists. The people over at PBS think Ill be very interested in their latest documentary. The men and women at the major networks want me to know that last nights screening of their new cop drama was a big hit with 18- to 35-year-olds. Do I want to join a conference call and interview the star of a new situation comedy on Fox? Or maybe Id rather speak to the latest reality TV winner or loser? The publicists who flood my email inbox every day hope to guide my choices so that I might guide your choices.

Whether or not I persuade you to watch or avoid a show depends on so many factors that its not a real goal. You know what you like so my intention is to share why a show delights me or leaves me feeling uninspired in a way that makes you consider something new or different about your viewing experience. Its a desire that comes from knowing that while TV has its lows, its highs are there too, waiting to be discovered. From the complex dramas to the laugh-out-loud situation comedies, from news to sports to documentaries to movies, television is everything. It is part of the fabric of life.

Having spent a few years exploring the work of my predecessors and colleagues for this book, I discovered that it is respect for the small screen that unites all of us. Our critical voices are unique and our stylistic approaches vary, but what we all have in common is awareness that television is not the idiot box. Rather, it demands that its viewers be active participants, that they seek its many moments of excellence and recognize the cultural conversations it starts. Guiding those conversations with sharp insight into the way television as a creative product, as an industry and as a technology shapes everyday life are the critics.

This book chronicles those who celebrate the best that television has to offer and challenge it when it fails to reach its potential. It is about influential men and women who have sought respectability, struggled to define their professional practice and debated their role. Throughout their history, journalistic TV critics have been gatekeepers, advocates, agitators and promoters. Not every critic is all of those things but most are more than one, making a single definition of TV critic elusive. It is an idea that contemporary critics embrace as they accept that both television and those whose job it is to write about it represent a variety of voices, all being heard, and some louder than others. This book charts the development of an active, impressive and unsettled profession whose future, like that of televisions, is full of possibilities.

Television is all around and everywhere, ready for viewers to engage with it on their own. It is a direct art form with familiar stories that are designed to be relatively open for interpretation and easily accessible. It requires little mediation to be understood, so for many, deferring to expert opinion is unnecessary. In other words: Arent we all TV critics? Its a question that has its roots in a fundamental way of thinking about art and how its judged. Among critical traditions, popular writing about television occupies an uncertain place.

Art and literary criticism use measures of high and low to determine what is worthy of analysis. The objects studied are not expected to reach a wide audience. The criticism is specialized and often exists as meaningful on its own. Television criticism (here defined as that written by journalists in print and online) does not follow strict distinctions of taste, is aimed at a general audience, appears in mainstream outlets and does not depend on elite knowledge to be understood. In addition, TV critics have a relationship with their readers, their employers, the artistic communities who create television and the business interests who keep the industry running, making their status as cultural authorities more ambiguous than those in other critical traditions. While this ambiguity may lead some to dismiss their expertise, the people who write about television shows play important roles in how those shows are circulated. TV critics are intermediate consumers, mediators of audience response and meaning-makers who offer ideologies that validate certain programs as art.

Hundreds of critics reach thousands of people every day with TV columns and online sites that do more than list program schedules. Their coverage of the creative and business aspects of the industry is the major source of information that connects the viewing public in a discourse about television. The critics who write for the popular press and for online publications may not convince viewers to watch or avoid a particular program but they enrich the debates surrounding shows. They help audiences understand why television means what it does within communities and societies. They give viewers different ways to engage with the series they love or thought they hated. TV critics recognize televisions role as an art form and as an integral part of everyday life. They influence how audiences share their views on a pervasive medium.

While academic television criticism teaches students how to become informed readers of TV texts by learning and employing a set of critical tools, the best popular television criticism, while less methodological, aims for a similar outcome. It describes, interprets and evaluates visual and sound style, production techniques, narrative devices, and representations of different races, ethnicities and sexualities. Its goal is to broaden the way audiences think about what they watch. Understanding how the best critics talk about television matters because their reviews are much more than simple judgments of taste. They create frameworks for how audiences interpret televisions diverse meanings and, ultimately, help to create more critical viewers.

This book is the first to cover American critics from the early days of television to the present. Organized chronologically, it uses their writing as a new way to explore the social and cultural impact of television. Whether they are praising or discouraging programming trends, educating readers on production techniques or ratings, analyzing narrative or gender representations or weighing in on policy decisions and funding issues, their work represents more than a consumer guide. It is a rich and overlooked part of television history that offers a valuable way to think about American culture and its relationship to the small screen.