Caroline Handel

By Caroline Handel

Like many (if not all) good writers before him, critic Philip Maciak was driven to start writing television recaps out of a prolonged fit of procrastination.

A then-doctoral candidate studying 19th century American Literature and Early Film at the University of Pennsylvania, Maciak was having a hard time sitting down to his pen his dissertation. In a bid to get his creative juices flowing, his partner suggested that Maciak turn his attention to a writing project with slightly lower stakes, inspiring Maciak to launch himself into what he references as “the blog era criticism boom” that was expanding across the internet in the early 2010s.

Maciak holds membership to a group of esteemed critics, also including The Washington Post’s Lili Loofbourow, Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall, NPR’s Linda Holmes, and New York Magazine and RogerEbert.com’s Matt Zoller Seitz, all of whom cut their teeth penning online episodic recaps of a television show before expanding to long-form criticism.

And if you were worried, Maciak did eventually sit down to finish his dissertation. He now writes television criticism for The New Republic and is a Senior Lecturer of English and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Recaps Today Don’t Primarily Feature Plot Recapitulation

The term “recap” is somewhat of a thorn in the side of Maciak and others who’ve worked as recappers, as it’s a misnomer for what the form consists of as we know it today. Recaps that pop cultural hubs such as New York Magazine’s online culture site Vulture and the A.V Club run are a somewhat Frankensteined product of the internet age, falling in between detailed critical review and comment section run amock, and often written with a tone perhaps best described as snarkily analytic. Actual plot recapitulation is a fractionally small part of the critical genre.

“I feel like as a recapper you always want to add something to the show because people already watch the show, so you don’t need to tell them what happened,” said Bryan Moylan, a reality television recapper at Vulture and author of The Housewives: The Real Story Behind the Housewives. “When I do reality [recaps], I’m adding my opinion, adding my insight, adding, at this point, my institutional knowledge of all of Housewives.”

The cultural ancestor to that recapping tone and form is the now-defunct online forum Television Without Pity, founded by Tara Ariano, Sarah D. Bunting, and Dave Cole in the halcyon days of the early World Wide Web. Television Without Pity was created to give its three founders and other die-hard fans a place to obsessively dissect episodes of Dawson’s Creek and other lowbrow television programming, but soon became the premiere venue for anyone with a wifi connection and an itch to submerge themselves in funny, intelligent discussion of their favorite television shows. The site was eventually dubbed “the industry standard for obsessive TV fanatics” by Entertainment Weekly.

While TWP may have initially declined to publish recaps of premiere television shows, the proliferation of the recap form is inherently connected to the evolution of what has been referred to ad-nauseum as “the golden age of television.” As shows such as Mad Men, Deadwood, The Sopranos, and numerous others premiered over the last few decades, they fundamentally altered how audiences gauged the value that television could provide on a mass scale. As the quality of television improved, audiences began to treat television with the same reverence and attention that was generally only afforded to film in the past, and grew hungry for sophisticated, deeply analytic coverage that the quality of these shows demanded.

“The recap is like the homework of this type of [prestige] television, where you demonstrate that you’ve done the work, you demonstrate the attentiveness and…the care that you’ve taken in watching the television show,” Maciak said. “And I think that’s true both for writers of recaps and also readers of recaps.”

Bunting and her co-founders eventually conceded to cover shows outside of the site’s original milieu of “very watchable, even if they were bad” teen melodramas. They began to write about prestige shows, such as Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing–much to the showrunner’s chagrin. Sorkin eventually grew so aggravated with the site’s detailed, deeply opinionated recaps that he worked in a subplot to a third-season episode deriding internet forums.

NPR’s Linda Holmes, who got her critical start as a recapper at the site, called Sorkin’s move “the greatest thing that happened to Television Without Pity the entire time I worked there,” in an online eulogy for the site, which shuttered in 2014 after being purchased by NBC.

With the rise in influence of prestige shows, episodic recaps sprang up all over the internet. Much like Sorkin, the practice drew the ire of other “golden age” television scribes such as David Simon, creator of revered HBO series The Wire, who took issue with the nature of episodic analytic coverage as an incomplete examination of his work.

“They don’t know what we’re building. And by the way, that’s true for the people who say we’re great. They don’t know,” said Simon in a New York Times blog interview. “It doesn’t matter whether they love it or they hate it. It doesn’t mean anything until there’s a beginning, middle, and an end.”

Herein lies the systematic difference between recaps and traditional, long-form television reviews. Reviews look at the value and construction of a season (or however many of a season’s episodes are made available to critics before the premiere of a show) while recaps look at each episode as a distinct entity, deserving of self-contained analysis.

“The thing that recaps open up for you is that kind of close reading that maybe there isn’t room for in a season review, or that you might only really be able to eke out the space for in like an end of season review,” Maciak said.

Maciak and other well-respected critics who’ve penned both recaps and more traditional television criticism prefer to think of recaps as episodic or overnight reviews, operating within their distinct sphere in cultural criticism.

In an impassioned love letter to recapping for Vulture in 2012, famed critic Matt Zoller Seitz drew a stark line between recaps that simply recount an episodes plot beat for beat, and overnight reviews, constituting “a personal response to an episode,” incorporating a wide range of cultural issues and narratives, contingent on the tone and vibe of the show being analyzed.

“Overnight reviews at Grantland, Gawker, HitFix, EW, TV Guide, the AV Club, and other outlets run the gamut from academic/Talmudic to light/improvisational, depending on what show a writer is covering and what sort of tone readers expect,” Zoller Seitz wrote.

Credit for the legitimization of television recaps–and television as a medium itself–in the creative analytic landscape, must be given to Zoller Seitz, who famously wrote extensive, deeply analytic recaps of all 92 episodes of AMC’s Mad Men, eventually compiling them into Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion.

Recapping Offers a Community for TV Obsessives

Along with in-depth analysis, recap culture also created a place where television obsessives could find community with like-minded aficionados who wanted to discuss and debate television content with the same fervor that they did.

This has become especially important as streaming became the standard model for television, fracturing monocultural viewing. During the reign of network television, shows such as M.A.S.H and Friends drew over 50 million viewers for their final episodes. In comparison, the series finale of more recent popular, multi-season shows not distributed by streaming platforms, such as This is Us and Blackish, garnered less than 10 million viewers each.

Even Game of Thrones, the television show that most clearly emulated the monoculture experience, reached only 19.3 million viewers, according to CNN.

A key part of the monocultural experience was watercooler moments–surprising, momentous moments in highly-watched television to be widely discussed throughout the week.

“If you look at 30 years ago, or even 20 years ago, there was a much more sort of uniform concept of what was considered popular culture,” Bunting said. “With the evolution of streaming services [and] various social media that didn’t exist…this is now a word of mouth splintered culture.”

Recaps have filled in the space where water-cooler moments once occupied in the cultural conversation and provided a community for people in need of an outlet to process episodes of the shows that they love with others in a conversational form. The social aspect of recap culture is what originally appealed to Myles McNutt, a recap writer and editor and an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. McNutt was most enthralled with how recaps, aided by fellow internet advents like comment sections and social media channels, could be the beginning of a dialogue between critics and fans looking to converse about episodic content in an intelligent, deeply thoughtful manner.

“I think the community is the key part of it that really kept me invested…putting yourself in conversation with other writers and being in dialogue. I have friends who say, ‘no one else is watching this show that I know,’ and I’m like, ‘if you write about it on the internet, everybody’s watching it,” McNutt said. “Everybody’s creating that opportunity. And I enjoy the process, but realistically, I enjoy the conversation more.”

While McNutt is a cheerleader for the communal aspects of recapping, he and other recappers are keenly aware of its potential downsides, particularly when a schism forms between a recapper and their audience.

“Oftentimes, [fans] just want you to reaffirm their opinion,” Moylan said. “They want, like, ‘I think Ramona [Singer’s] an asshole, and Bryan thinks Ramona’s an asshole, so that means I’m right.’”

If fans feel that a show’s recapper is not suitably appreciative of the television show in question, they aren’t shy about venting their disapproval, potentially undermining the form’s critically analytic framework. The tension raises an essential, existential question: if recaps provide television fans with a sense of community, who’s the arbiter of the values, rules, and standards held within that community?

McNutt points to his experience covering Ted Lasso as a prime example of this conflict. Premiering in the heart of the early pandemic, Ted Lasso’s first season quickly claimed an almost mythical status among the audience as a balm for the topsy-turvey covid chaos that had engulfed day-to-day life. McNutt eventually added it to his recapping roster and had penned recaps for the bulk of the sophomore season by the time before its release–before quickly realizing that his deeply engaged, analytic take on the season was not what fans were looking for.

“[Ted Lasso was] a COVID comfort show for them, and I was criticizing it,” McNutt said. “There are certain kinds of shows where there’s going to be a fundamental resistance to that type of reading of it.”

Audio and Video Channels Have Fundamentally Altered the Recap Form

Eventually, the bubble of online recap culture had to burst. However, fan desire for a community with which to consume and analyze their favorite television content, rather than receding, has simply completed a lateral migration away from the written word towards other content platforms.

In the late 2010s, podcasts began to supersede internet culture sites as the premiere place to seek conversation around television.

The podcast that arguably established the audio-recapping renaissance is Gilmore Guys. Created by Kevin T. Porter and Demi Adejuyigbe, airing its first episode the same month that Gilmore Girls premiered on Netflix, each episode delved deep into an episode of the popular millennial series from the perspective of a long-time fan and a first-time viewer, respectively, along with a comedian or veteran recapper. The show, along with standard examinations of the plot, dissected character development, fashion choices, pop culture references, and various other segments that broke each installment of the original seven-season series into multi-hour-long affairs.

Porter sees the community that the show was eventually able to build as a natural extension of the forms internet blogging days, in its ability to provide fans with a place to think deeply about television content they loved, with the dialogue based aspect of the medium enhanced. Eventually Porter and Adejuyigbe began to live-host episodes where fans of the podcast could physically connect, leading to friendships and relationships and even a marriage proposal.

“It was always so touching for us to hear stories of people becoming true friends through listening to the show, going to shows together,” Porter said. “I think people like engaging with the things that they really love deeply. And to hear people speak about it, even if they fundamentally disagree with what they’re saying still provides some outlet of satisfaction as far as critical thought.”

After Gilmore Guys ended, other television recap podcasts, such as the popular podcast Streaming Things, have taken up the mantle of audio recapping, enhancing the community aspect of recapping further through the use of Discord platforms, in which fans can pay to have different levels of access to the recappers themselves. This reinforces the somewhat parasocial relationship that frequently occurs in many different iterations of digital relationships, and demonstrates how much the communal, conversational nature between recapper writer and reader has evolved from the form’s original iteration.

Other content mediums, such as TikTok, have also gotten into the recapping game as they’ve grown more prevalent in the cultural conversation. Content creators suck as TikTokker Matt Anderson have taken to comedically breaking down shows such as the religious WB drama 7th Heaven, offering plot recapitulation and snarky commentary in short and sweet bites.

“I think [the shift to recapping on social media] is like everything on the internet, it’s become like more compact and smaller and quicker and more visual,” Moylan said. “Recaps are a product of the internet and as the internet evolves, so do recaps.”

Whether consumed via text, podcast or video, the recapping of our favorite television shows speaks to both the evolution of television as a creative medium, as well as a continuation of our collective desire to share our opinions, thoughts, and feelings with others. Ultimately, though, engaging with recaps in any form is a way to enhance the joy we feel when we get to consume content that we love.

“I think it’s great…that people pay this kind of like granular attention to television,” Maciak said. “I feel like I almost enjoy those shows more than I enjoy the shows that I’m just like, sleepwalking through. I definitely enjoy television more when it invites me to think critically about it.”

This story was originally published on Medium.