The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

It's really not a small thing, sites/advertisers are really shooting themselves in the foot with this stuff (again.)  Stop giving people a reason to install ad-blockers just to make a site even quasi functional, we've reached another tipping point on this crap (and that's a rant for another thread but god I'm pretty glad I don't have to worry about that stuff anymore.)

I feel like there should be some sort of emergency notification system for when GJI isn't shitty. Like, I look at all the ones up there now and think "these are really shitty," but...what if I'm wrong?!

That really confused me. That's the most hate I've ever seen from an AVC writer.

So, okay, I realize it's probably poor form to wade in here, but since I do lurk and occasionally post here, I just wanted to respond quickly. In what I hope is a nice, civil sort of way. Just a few quick things:

1. To call my reviewing the show one of AVC's biggest blunders based on the grades I give feels a bit ... incomplete? Like, surely the more important thing is how I review the show rather than what grade I give (and, more broadly, my reaction to it, which is indeed a subjective thing, and I'd argue it would be worse if I were theoretically talking myself out of particular reactions to better fit a critical consensus). Do my reviews feature analysis and commentary, or is it just fannish gushing? And I'll be super honest here and say that my season 7B reviews are not all that great. There's a lot of fannish gushing there. But I'd argue I improved a lot with the beginning of the Capaldi era.

2. Part of your critique rests on a less than glowing fan reaction, which may well be the case. Like, I know the A.I. scores for those two were 82 and 81, IIRC, which is still very good but a bit below that mid-80s sweet spot the show tends to be in at its best. (I also don't think A.I. is a good indicator of fan reaction, but still, that's a data point.) Yet if you just look at the A.V. Club's community grades, the response is overwhelmingly positive: I don't have the exact figures, but it looks like >90% of the 162 votes for "The Woman Who Lived" were A or A-, with the more common score being A, and the 193 who rated "The Girl Who Died" were probably >75% A and A-, with the rest being mostly B+ or B. Also, this is unscientific, but the comment sections for both episodes were way more positive than your typical Who episode. Maybe that's community-specific, but I think it's hard to say I'm really out of lockstep with the AVC fan consensus, or indeed the critical reaction more generally.

Anyway, this isn't a big deal. We disagreed a lot on these two episodes, which is fine, and it's not as though you're actively calling for me to be taken off the reviews or anything, so I certainly don't mean to throw what little weight I may have around or whatever. But it's a bit difficult to read my reviewing Doctor Who is one of the AVC's biggest blunders and not take it a little personally, so I felt moved to offer this response... 

I will now close with an emoticon to confirm that, seriously, this is all meant with good will and high spirits.

No worries, friend! I probably wouldn't have bothered responding if I didn't know we had been cordial in the past. I mean, we're both Stewart Lee fans! If we can't make it together in this world, what hope is there?

So, there really isn't a lot of attention paid by editorial to the grades, per se. I don't actually remember the last time Erik sent out any specific guidance on them, and I think he more or less continues Todd's view that they're a necessary evil. The one thing we do try to keep in mind is that, as far as the A.V. Club is concerned a B- is the lowest recommendation, which means our grades perhaps look a bit inflated to those who assume the boundary line is somewhere in the C range.

For my part, when I look at the A's I've given Doctor Who (and I think I can do this from memory) -- "Cold War," "The Time of the Doctor," "Listen," "Kill the Moon," "Mummy on the Orient Express," "Last Christmas," "The Girl Who Died," and "The Woman Who Lived" -- I'm not sure I'd call any of those flawless, though I will probably do nothing for your opinion of my critical faculties when I say "The Girl Who Died" is one of the two, along with "Last Christmas," that comes closest to that benchmark. For me, it's more about the response those episodes provoke; they feel vital or ambitious or some other vague thing ("Cold War" earns the "A" largely on the strength of its Spanish Inquisition levels of ruthless efficiency, narratively speaking), and I then try to contextualize that reaction through the review I write. That sense, though hard to pin down, is what makes them exemplary in my mind, and why I give out the "A."

In a perfect world, I suppose I might like access to the A+, which I would give to maybe six or seven stories throughout the new series. Which I realize could also be accomplished by only giving out the A to those episodes and giving everything a cut below the A-. But, at least as far as grades are understood these days by the wider community, I think that would end up looking like I was underrating the episodes, at least relative to my actual reaction. So a more expansive A grade is where I land with that.

Yay, Alasdair Wilkins! I'm always happy to see you here!

Or anywhere really.

Except the bushes outside of my house. I don't mind the concept, but you're ruining my hydrangeas!

So, a B-?

Maybe I would if your blintzes weren't so terrible!

I wish I'd had a college class where a clip of Ron Swanson giggling got an automatic full grade extra credit.

Because, let's face it, Ron Swanson giggling deserves extra credit.

I guess for me, the fact that I arrived at the AVC relatively late was sort of an advantage. For me, it's always been primarily a place where I can shoot the shit during work and make puns, with the possibility of occasionally engaging in an interesting discussion as an added bonus. But if I had been there, initially, for the serious discussions, I could see the direction the comments have taken as a reason to leave.

 And, as a religious person, I already have enough of a remove from a few of the discussions that happen there anyway that seeing a comment thread I don't want to participate in on another subject is just part of the deal. The advantage of talking to people I don't know is that if they're talking about something I don't care for, I can just ignore it. 

Don't know if blunder or the Old Country is becoming a bit too self-aware:

The reason AVC doesn't use A+ is because it's meant to be the "flawless, perfect" grade, and nothing can be that. I think it was a policy stolen from '90s Entertainment Weekly, of all things.

So A has never meant flawless or exemplary. It literally just means "one of the best episodes the show will ever produce," which could mean a lot of things! Thus, an A episode of Glee is very different from an A episode of Breaking Bad.

I wasn't around for that. But because TV Club employs so many freelancers, they often don't know about the prohibition against A+ (which is still stupidly available in the CMS).

We also used it, very briefly, for TV Club Classic, but in a different context than "perfect." Instead, it meant, "The best episode the show ever did." Then a random Curb Your Enthusiasm got an A+, and the practice ended altogether.