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The Letter Unread: My Secret Diary

No One Cares About Your Narrative Framing Device

In the past decade, there’s been a lazy trend creeping into television. Scripted comedies are so saturated with this jarring practice, we’re hardly distracted by it anymore. And yet, my dislike for the technique is overpowered by a surprising side-effect.

We can easily point to the success of The Office (UK) as the instigator of the documentary narrative trend. Ricky Gervais and company first effectively utilized the private interview as part of its narrative, and ten years later, The Office (US) is in its eighth season, Parks and Recreation shows no signs of stopping, and Modern Family is coming off a virtual sweep of the comedy Emmys. What is it about documentary framing that makes it so successful?

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Punk Rock is Cool, But Try Techno: An Alternate Future of Television

The following is a response to Ryan McGee’s article, “Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s the Future of Television Criticism.”

I’m going to speak directly, on a not too broad scope, and try to sell you on a non-conventional journalism platform in which to publish reviews.

My name is Andrew Seroff, I won’t bury my mediocre lede either. A little biography to keep you reading (since I flatter myself by even writing to the TV critic community): I majored in television at Notre Dame, under the advisement of TVitterati’s own Professor Becker. Since graduating, I’ve become something of an amateur television critic and academic, that is to say, I write about the things I like, but for free. I recently took an internship at a start-up called Miso, which you may know from the last year in news about Social TV products. 

I think you’re right to question the current model of television criticism. It’s flat. The only reviews/recaps I read are the standouts, like Cory Barker’s Community timeline breakdown, to name a recent example. It’s a matter of economy. I can’t afford to waste my time reading a review that is more long than it is interesting, I need punk rock. Speaking of which, I’ll skip further agreeing with you and get to the point.

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The League Season 2: Does Raffi Make You Raugh?

"Bored to Death: The Complete Second Season" Anything But Boring

Mystery Science Theater 3000: 'The Unearthly' and 'Red Zone Cuba'

Against Persistent Identity (for the Children)

In general, I think the internet has a lot to offer. So much so, that many of its downsides go unperceived by its users. Along with its stereotypical criticisms, such as the abundance of spam, pornography, and hackers, I’ve already addressed an unfortunate cultural downside of the internet. Not to become the Debbie Downer of the internet, I’ve got another bone to pick with our Skynet overlord.

I was born in 1989 to a hardware engineer father and a videogame testing mother, and as such, our family was always on the cusp of technology. My brothers and I had the privilege of utilizing every OS as they were released. Our young minds were filled with DOS directories that became something like passwords to our favorite 8-bit games. We were even playing LAN games over our house’s network before “multiplayer” was even a standard game type. Okay, so we were a little young for Usenet and the Atari, but for the most part, we matured right alongside the computer.

This parallel becomes exceptionally relevant in the early 2000s. The internet became a commonplace fixture only a few years previous, and was in a period of commercialization. One of the ways devised to make money on the internet is what we would now call “social networks,” though at the time were known simply as “blogs”. To say that my middle school years were dominated by online interaction would be an understatement. To the children of Silicon Valley families, the internet replaced many of the downsides of awkward middle school interactions. Popularity was determined by how many comments received on angsty blog posts, and “going out” referred less to dates and more to the amount of time spent chatting on AIM.

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