Real Talk: The AV Club would likely give their show a C-
Adapting the website to a weekly TV show fails both the Internet and television.
As the new weekly The AV Club series opens, host John Teti loudly protests: “I’m an internet person. I’m not supposed to be on TV”. There’s advice in that which somebody should have heeded.
It’s not that Teti, an editor-at-large for the website, makes for bad TV talent. He’s perfectly fine. But he is trapped by a magazine-style format that simply doesn’t quite work. In translating the website to a broadcast TV format, the show manages to catch a few of the things that works about the website — the TV news section up front keeps the snarky tone of the classic Sean O’Neal newswire stories from the website. And a final segment in which two AV Club staffers offer some pop culture recommendations fits nicely.
But a very flat middle with an incredibly generic interview and an explainer on how TV ratings work speak volumes about where the show has gone awry: the producers have been successful in translating the website to TV, but during the process have missed the point that a quick read slotted in between handling emails at work offers an entirely different level of engagement than it does for a home viewer who has put aside 30 minutes of their time to directly watch the TV show.
There’s a reason people don’t talk about TV content on TV much — frankly, it’s a bit weird. It feels like a snake biting its own tail. The 1990’s Australian ABC TV show TVTV got away with a fairly wonky nightly analysis of TV thanks to a pre-Internet era with viewers starved for smart TV discussion. Similarly, in the US, the talk show-focused Talk Soup delivered snark to the screen in its dissection of late night chat shows — an approach that felt like a novelty in a pre-mainstream Internet time.
One of the few examples of a show focused on TV that got it right was Talk Soup’s successor, The Soup. What host Joel McHale did on that show was not that different to the attitude of Talk Soup, even if the remit was broader to focus on television with an eye towards making fun of reality shows. The reason why McHale made The Soup work is that the tone shifted ever-so-slightly to serve as a conversational dialogue with the viewer. Building in a rich library of recurring in-jokes (Sanjaya!), it was less a presentation to viewers, and more a cheeky club house with a show put on for those in the TV studio and to what felt like the four home viewers.
The AV Club, however, is all presentation.
What makes TV and other pop culture fun is the conversations that surround it. Chatting about TV and movies and comics and books and albums with friends (either IRL or online) is part of the joy of consuming the media.
But where is the conversation on the AV Club show? Was it the silly graphic displays that explained how TV ratings work? Or was it the talking heads of AV Club staff being asked what they know about NCIS (precious little apparently). If that’s what counts for establishing an on-screen conversation, The AV Club are bad dinner party hosts because they’re leading the conversation with a topic that is obviously not of interest to AV Club audience members. AV Club talking head Erik Adams even says as much, explaining that NCIS articles never work on the website.
The reason NCIS doesn’t work for The AV Club is simple: It’s a great casual viewing show for an audience who are undemanding in what they watch. It’s fast and breezy television. Meanwhile AV Clubbers are looking for more in their pop culture. They take the analysis of pop culture seriously, therefore aren’t interested in a show that is overly simple in how it engages with its viewers.
So, why dedicate as much time as they do in the episode to an audience who are simply never going to care much about what bespectacled dorks from a pop culture website think or say? And we know that they are trying to talk to a broader audience because, let’s face it — the established AV Club audience aren’t interested in broadcast TV or ratings measurement systems. The shows they watch on Netflix and cable channels are increasingly irrelevant in conversations about ratings. Discussing ratings is almost antithetical to the foundations of The AV Club’s cultural analysis.
It is just week one, though. There’s still plenty of time to course correct.
The AV Club TV show needs to establish its conversational voice. Panel chats with staff engaging with each other (as opposed to talking heads talking directly at the audience like Jim from The Office) about shows and movies would be great. Have some disagreements. Engage with the texts being discussed.
It’s not that The AV Club show was an embarrassment. It wasn’t. But it was alienating, detached, and failed to capture the joy of discussing pop culture. Translating a website to TV successfully isn’t enough. It also has to make for good TV.
