Why is TV reviewing dying on its knees? The Daily Telegraph has just bid farewell to its TV reviewer. Is television no longer worthy of criticism? Buzz. Dumb question.
What actually has happened is that reviewing has been bypassed altogether. Take Channel 5’s Strangelove: Married to the Eiffel Tower*, a programme which featured women who claimed to be married to – yes – the Eiffel Tower and the Berlin Wall.
24 May: The Independent has a piece from the documentary-maker.
27 May: The Telegraph carries a sober news account of just one of the women – Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer. No link to her website though.
27 May: The Sun (‘cemented’ the relationship, brick-teasers etc.) carries a less sober account. The Mirror moralises, invoking Sex And The City.
28 May: It makes China Daily.
Guardian readers might have come across Berliner-Mauer before in Adrian Searle’s account of the Berlin Biennial, where she is the subject of a film by artist Lars Laumann.
Berliner-Mauer turns out to be something of a self-publicist. Back in 1997, as plain old Eija-Riitta Eklof, she was featured in the Independent for her love of guillotines.
But her own efforts were as nothing compared to a bit of pre-programme publicity re-packaged and syndicated. The programme airs in the UK on 4 June. Reviewing by then will feel a little late…
*Produced by Blink Films, the company set up by former Channel 5 director of programmes Dan Chambers. Small world, telly.
4 responses to “The death of TV reviewing: an explanation”
The Globe and Mail, out of Toronto, still has one (and I hope for a long time). One of the best TV reviewer I’ve ever come across: John Doyle.
He’s required reading, especially during the network promo tour weeks with all the other TV reviewers in LA.
Will look out for him. The Guardian‘s Nancy Banks-Smith is a legend, but it does seem like the business of programme promotion is rendering it – and its practitioners – increasingly redundant.
Hi Adrian,
Look at jumptheshark.com — or televisionwithoutpity.com — reviewing is not dying — it seems stronger than ever.
Maybe these newspapers are just a bit behind like how they got caught out by craigslist on classified adverts — any newspaper could have started a televisionwithoutpity website, but I’m not sure many gave it much thought…
Russ
Totally agree with that – another example of how papers couldn’t reinvent themselves online from the customer’s POV, or scale up.