A few years ago when I wrote a piece
in my blog where I was vague critical of a certain person on Jeopardy I
received a personal explicit and fairly impressive email from that
subject. My reaction might puzzle some but
would be familiar to any critic: it meant I'd officially arrived. I printed the
email out and saved it as a badge of honor.
If you're a critic by definition you
have to have a thicker skin then most which may be part of the reason I've been
able to increasingly laugh off so many hate-filled comments I've received
whenever I say something vaguely centrist over the last few years. So I was
first shocked, then puzzled, then overjoyed when someone who was the subject of
one of my TV reviews chose to post a comment on them.
The part that puzzled me was who it
was. I've never been shy about certain writers and shows that I feel a
withering, visceral contempt for and if Shonda Rhimes or Sam Levenson – two of
my more frequent targets – had chosen to comment I would have expected it
more. What makes this all the odder is
that the comment came from someone who is associated with a show that I've been
writing about for about a year and a half personally and nearly three years in
general terms well before that in some of the most overwhelmingly positive
tones possible.
Those of you who've read my blog are
aware of how big a fan I am of NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street, a drama I would be more than willing to
say was the best of the entire 1990s and certainly one of the greatest TV shows
of all time. This is a consensus held both by contemporary critics and those
decades later. In the fall of 2024, right around the time Peacock and Amazon
began streaming it, I began to do a rewatch of it for my blog going episode by
episode. These columns while not as overwhelming popular as some of the others
I write about still do get a significant readership which I find impressive
considering that this is a show that aired 30 years ago.
Now because I'm not the kind of writer
who will kiss and tell when people
disagree with me and even write offensive things I'm going to be speak
generally from this point forward. I'm not going to name the episode in
question nor anything else associated with it.
What I will tell you is a few months back I reviewed an episode in less
then favorable terms. It wasn't a pan and I didn't excoriate it the way I have
been known to do Shondaland shows, series like Succession or Ray
Donovan or the way I did Adolescence last year. All I said was that
this particular episode wasn't at the usual high quality of most episodes,
particularly given the caliber that I was used to from this writer. This
opinion, I need to be clear, doesn't originate with me: other critics who've
written about the show such as Tod Hoffman have spoken negatively about it and
in far stronger terms. I posted it and I moved on.
Now earlier this morning I got a post
in regard to this episode. Now if I am to believe what I see – and the profile
of the individual gives me no information to confirm or contradict this – the
poster in question wrote the episode I'm talking about. For the purposes of
this article I'm simply going to call him X. Roughly three hours ago in response to it he
wrote:
Go f--- yourself. You have no idea
what you're writing about.
Not Shakespeare but his point was
made.
My first thought was: "My God!
One of the writers of this show reads my blog!" Second reaction: "Thirty
years later and he's still sensitive about criticism? From a guy whose only got
up 1000 readers a month ago?"
The third reaction, I'll be honest,
was: "Did he not read all of the other articles I've written about Homicide
for the last two years – many of which praise his ability as a writer to
great extent? Or is he the type whose so sensitive to criticism that he ignores
the raves and only acknowledges the pans?"
To be clear I said that this episode
was weak only in comparison to some of X's other writing on the show both prior
to this episode and well after it. I consider X's work on this show some of the
greatest writing in TV history no question. And I thought I made it clear that
the episode in question wasn't even that bad.
There were quite a few parts of it I found incredibly impressive and
registered very powerfully with me.
And more to the point its not like
every single piece of work a writer does on TV is gold a hundred percent of the
time. This is true for many of the writers on Homicide both on the show
and in later work. (I won't name them because I don't want to reveal who my
secret admirer was even by process of elimination. To be clear his name's on
the site himself but I'm not going to highlight it.) And to a larger point its
true of every writer: David E. Kelley had his share of stinkers on The
Practice and Ally McBeal; Howard Gordon had some lousy episodes on The
X-Files before he wrote for 24 and Homeland and he had some
bad ones there too and Aaron Sorkin is a genius but shows like The Newsroom were
almost unwatchable. I don't expect perfection from every writer on every show;
that's too high a standard even if they can, occasionally, meet it.
Again this episode wasn't a terrible
one. Even a mediocre episode of Homicide was still better than 75
percent of what was on television in the 1990s. And even if it was a stinker –
which it was not – writers are allowed
to have episodes of shows that don't work. I assume that it is through failure
you find a way to improve on your next episode and this writer absolutely did
in the episodes that he did that followed. Hell I'm going to be raving about
X's work on Homicide in a few weeks' time, so its not like he didn't
improve.
To be clear I'm not offended in any
way, shape or form by X's comment. If anything I'm impressed that he found me
writing on my column and cared enough to send a meaningless, irrelevant in the
grand schemes of this website a post of such vitriol. It may just have been
eleven words long, but in a weird way it means more to me than any long rave
from anyone else could. (Although if you feel that way about my writing and
some of you have made it clear you do, by all means send long meaningful raves.
I welcome them.) Someone connected with something I love read my reviews and cared
enough to tell me that I was a clueless idiot who had no idea what he was
writing about. That's practically a love letter for a critic.
To be clear my opinion of X's work or Homicide
has not altered one bit because of this note. It is still a great show and
X is still a great writer. I will continue to write reviews of this show with
the hope of earning praise from X or perhaps even more visceral condemnation of
how clueless I am. Hey people called me horrible names when I suggested that
Natalie Portman and George Clooney didn't know anything about politics.
Compared to that X's comment was barely a glancing blow.
But this is a bigger badge of honor
then almost anything else I've received as praise in nearly a decade of
writing. To be clear it doesn't mean quite as much as the fact that at this
point over a thousand people are reading my blog regularly but it matters in a
different way. Its good when people appreciate what you write and if you're a
critic like me, you're going to get comments like this. It's taken a while, but
I've arrived. Let the hate mail begin in earnest. (That's a joke, but one that
critics will understand.)
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