Myles McNutt

"Critical Conduits: Television Criticism as Hybrid Fan/Intellectual Engagement with Television Studies and the Work of John Fiske"

This paper will investigate how online television criticism has formed a unique space for fan/intellectual engagement that reflects the unique challenges of reading television which John Fiske examined throughout his career. While critics continue to play the role of the reviewer, offering readers their opinion so as to inform their viewing habits, many have taken on a far more important role as a facilitator of online discussions which reinforce the importance of Fiske’s observations and communicates them to audiences beyond the academic community. 

While the internet formalized reader response to television, making it both instantaneous and accessible, the collective voice of the people is often primarily viewed as an emotional discourse, with fans on message boards arguing over relationships or expressing their love for a particular character. Of course, the Internet provides intellectuals the same opportunities, offering space to post their more detailed academic considerations of television. However, while scholars may visit fan communities on occasion (more often to study them than to engage with them), and fans may occasionally stumble upon scholarly writing about their favorite series, the direct interaction between these two groups is generally limited. 

Recently, however, trends within television criticism have established a space where these two groups converge on a near-nightly basis. Built on a foundation of television studies, critics have taken to deconstructing individual episodes in lengthy informal essays, analyzing the episodes both in terms of their position within a show’s narrative and in terms of their thematic, theoretical, and technical content. A show like Mad Men is not only analyzed in terms of considering Don Draper’s future (which would form the content of an episode “recap”), but also in terms of how the writer and the director chose to portray Draper’s story, and how the episode mediates the show’s 1960s setting and its unique cross-section of entrenched ideals and emergent social forces. 

By going beyond plot and delving into the complexities of both television production and theoretical discussions, critics like Alan Sepinwall and the collective at The A.V. Club have created an environment where fans are incorporating these detailed analyses into a post-episode ritual. Their reviews inspire the same complex comment threads you might find on a message board, but when placed in the context of a detailed deconstruction of the episode these discussions offer a unique blend of witty repartee and carefully considered theoretical discussions about the show involved.  

The result is an online community which not only taps into Fiske’s foundational work in television studies to consider the medium on a weekly basis, but which also extends those principles to audiences who may have never considered television in that light before. By investigating reviews from individual critics, the comments they inspire, and the fan community responses to these more critical investigations of their favorite series, I will demonstrate the degree to which Fiske’s legacy has merged with the internet’s unique potential in order to introduce television studies to a whole new demographic, one review at a time.