TWOP3 - Television Without Pity

[kostgard]

Oct 28, 2009 0:16:53 GMT -4 @marywebgirl said:

I talked to someone a couple months ago who is a semi-big wig in the blogosphere, and he met Glark and Wing Chun a little while ago at some sort of business thing. According to him they regret selling TWoP and are disappointed with what it's become.

I've wondered about that. I don't know how much they got in the sale and if it was a good deal for them, but I just know that I would be kinda sad to see the little website I helped built into this huge thing go straight down the tubes as soon as I walked away from it.

You can add several posters in the FlashForward forum, who have been carping on the "douche" moment in the most recent episode for pages and pages now. The character, Maya, watched a man hit on her girlfriend. After he walked away, she muttered "douche" under her breath. Apparently this makes her a frosty, uptight, unlikeable bitch who confirms the "lesbians hate men" stereotype.

Meanwhile, a male character openly admitted to causing the central calamity of the show a few episodes, and people can't wait to see more of his awesome self!

I'm glad I don't look at any of the threads soaked in the lady-hate. That would be super-frustrating. The only thing I've come across was the opposite - there was some discussion about where or not two characters on a show should get together, a situation where the male character is a perfectly nice, sane guy, and the female is a huge emotional mess who is incapable of real relationships because of it. So someone commented that the female needs to get "better" before anything happened, and other posters just flew off the handle about how that poster framed it as the woman needing to work hard in order to "deserve" her man and refused to listen to any explanation - which was simply "that lady needs to get better before she enters any relationship not because she's a lady, but because she's an effing mess!"


I am just really amazed at the number of posters who take the littlest thing on a show so personally. I think I've already mentioned the person who got all offended at the jokes made about the kid in the wheelchair on Glee (never mind that everyone gets made fun of on that show), but recently someone was freaking out over 30 Rock because Tina Fey's character wrote a book for ladies on relationships, and in the book there was something like "If he's over 30 and still has a job that requires a name tag, that's a deal breaker." This person went on and on about how "smug" the show had gotten and she couldn't believe that they were dumping all over non-rich people and people who work in retail and don't they realize that management is retail is a hard and perfectly respectable job?! Okay, to anyone who watches that show, it is pretty clear that Tina Fey's character is supposed to be kinda terrible. I mean, they've implied several times that she's pretty racist. So the joke really isn't "people who work in retail past the age of 30 are losers" but rather that "Liz Lemon is small-minded and terrible." This poster was clearly not new to the show, and should have picked up on that by now. But instead decided to get all offended about it. I just don't get that.

And there was something similar in one of the basement shows - there was an episode where two characters were in a restaurant and the waitress openly rolled her eyes at of them over his order (which was not off-the-wall, or demanding) and the other character snarked on the waitress for it. Suddenly in that thread there were these posters who were going on about how that character was in the wrong because waiting tables is a crappy, low-respect job, so she should have been nice to her. Uh, no. Just because your job sucks doesn't give you the right to roll your eyes at your customers when they were being perfectly polite. That character snarked on her not because she was a waitress and she figured that could dump on her because she one of "the little people" but because she was rude to her friend, who happened to also be the waitress' customer.

I don't know. There seems to be a number of people on TWoP who have issues about their jobs and are so sensitive about them that they read A LOT into television shows that might mention their occupation.

[Deleted]

I wonder if posters on TWOP realize that the characters they see on tv aren't real. They get so offended by character flaws and actions but they don't seem to realize that its a joke. I hate how everyone has to nitpick everything to death.

[GirlyGhoul]

Oct 28, 2009 12:16:09 GMT -4 @honeybee said:

I wonder if posters on TWOP realize that the characters they see on tv aren't real. They get so offended by character flaws and actions but they don't seem to realize that its a joke. I hate how everyone has to nitpick everything to death.

I see this A LOT in the Supernatural threads. They get so offended by minor lines of dialogue- forgetting that sometimes lines are meant as throwaway jokes or to set up a plot point and keep demanding that the characters apologize for actions they may have taken several episodes ago. Never mind that this is an action show and there is only 45 minutes per episode to tell a story, move the plot along and slaughter something evil in a splattacular way. There may not be time for an apology or a heartfelt talk when there are corpses to burn and blood to clean up.

But the posters just won't let it go! Like it is a personal offense to them!

I am often so tempted to type out in boldface IT IS JUST A TV SHOW PEOPLE!! But then I decide it's not worth the effort of moving my fingers across the keys.

[bitca]

Oct 28, 2009 12:51:01 GMT -4 GirlyGhoul said:

I see this A LOT in the Supernatural threads. ... I am often so tempted to type out in boldface IT IS JUST A TV SHOW PEOPLE!!

OMG, how dare you! *shields Dean's ears from such noise*

I agree with you. That's the only forum I even venture in anymore and I don't even know why I do it. There's such ridiculous nitpicking. It's kind of fun to see what other people's opinions on the show are, but then it always downward spirals into "so-and-so wouldn't do THAT!" when it's something so small as picking a lock or some dumb shit like that. I don't understand putting that much effort into a TV show. (Just like GWoP, I suppose...)

[susyhomewrecker]

Oct 28, 2009 11:39:50 GMT -4 kostgard said:

I'm glad I don't look at any of the threads soaked in the lady-hate. That would be super-frustrating. The only thing I've come across was the opposite - there was some discussion about where or not two characters on a show should get together, a situation where the male character is a perfectly nice, sane guy, and the female is a huge emotional mess who is incapable of real relationships because of it. So someone commented that the female needs to get "better" before anything happened, and other posters just flew off the handle about how that poster framed it as the woman needing to work hard in order to "deserve" her man and refused to listen to any explanation - which was simply "that lady needs to get better before she enters any relationship not because she's a lady, but because she's an effing mess!"

This just illustrates the TWoP double standard, though. It happens all the time in the Greek thread. Is that show groundbreaking television? No. Is it a complex thesis on collegiate women? Hardly! It's a fluffy show on ABC Family that doesn't pretend to be anything more (cough*SecretLife*cough) but the posters get so worked up over whether the sorority sisters are too vapid or into their appearances--even though the majority of the characters are a play on some kind of stereotype. But those same posters will criticize the female characters for the way they look or dress or style their hair. And they're all manipulative tramps, of course, and the men on the show are never at fault. (To be fair, not all the posters in that thread share that attitude, but an annoyingly high percentage do.)

[Neurochick]

Many of the posters on TWoP (I'm getting sick of them on the Top Chef thread) remind me of a woman I met in 1996. She was REALLY into fandom, was in her early forties, never had a job and lived with her parents. She was completely joyless because she hadn't been able to get on the set of X Files.

I think the reason the folks on there are so humorless is because they are no longer the audience for many of these shows. Most of the folks on there are over thirty-five and some are my age (50). I've come to realize that I am not the audience for many of the TV shows out here today. I think it pisses them off that they're not the young, cool dolls they were years ago.

[Deleted]

The number of postings on all the shows seems to be reducing.

When Gossip Girl started there would be something like 21 pages for every episode.

Now there seems to be only 10.

Other shows don't even have that much.

Have people stopped going to the site as much?

[twopfan]

I was wondering that too, ds1. The Dexter threads are less than 10 pages too. And Top Chef isn't getting as many posts either.

[Casino Bride]

Depends on the shows. Glee usually gets 25+ pages per episode, sometimes even closer to 35 pages.

Needless to say, I don't usually bother posting. Who the hell has time to read 35 pages?!

[Deleted]

Oct 30, 2009 20:14:14 GMT -4 Casino Bride said:

Depends on the shows. Glee usually gets 25+ pages per episode, sometimes even closer to 35 pages.

Needless to say, I don't usually bother posting. Who the hell has time to read 35 pages?!

I've just noticed that some forums used to have a tremendous amount of posting going on and now not so much. I was just wondering why the downturn was happening when the show itself has not gone down in popularity.

Glee is in it's first season but I'm wondering if that 35 pages will suddenly turn into 10 pages a season from now.

Nonetheless, you're right. I don't have the time to read 35 pages either. However, I'll try to look at the page numbers just to see how popular a show is. Some shows, which I would assume are rather popular according to the ratings, don't have as many pages as I would expect it to or think it might have. Then again, Prison Break had a lot of posting going on, but wasn't so popular in the ratings. I guess I'm wondering if the moderating that goes on has an effect on the level of posting that goes on in a particular forum.

Edited to add:

On another note, why has the soap gossip thread not been unlocked? I found that thread intriguing. I don't even care if people go off-topic. Even when they go off-topic there's usually some gossip to be found somehow and it's usually mighty interesting to me. But they won't unlock it! Why not, why not, why not?