I mean, theres a lot of tv out there. And we cant always be watching something in the theater! If not a TV reviews page, then a Television section in the forums! I want to hear some opinions...

yes

I, personally, would dissaprove of having television show reviews. Think about it, does it really matter what some pointless magazine like "Rolling Stone" thinks about some moronic show like "Desperate Housewives," "The Real World," or "Survivor 53?"

Sure there are a couple decent shows, mainly adult-oriented cartoons, but do a couple shows warrant having a section of reviews for them.

Another issue with this, would be where to get the reviews from. It would be rather difficult to find a legit medium to not only collect the data, but also determine the validity of particular reviews.

I wouldn't trust anything from TV Guide, but they are one of the larger review sites.

...Just a couple thoughts...

I disagree with Mike on at least one point: it seems to imply a certain attitude towards television that claims that movies, even really bad ones, have a higher degree of credibility than anything on TV and, and such, should be the subject of a review, while TV, on principle, isn't worth wasting our time on.

I think the better shows on TV, including Deadwood, the Sopranos, The Shield, 24, etc, are often FAR better than 90-95% of the movies released in a given year. Granted, there's a LOT of crap TV...but I'd bet there are more crap movies, and they get a LOT of attention.

If you can justify a section that reviews Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, and The Pacifier, I'm not sure why a section reviewing both good and bad TV shows is so far off the path.

I don't know enough about TV journalism to challenge Mike's second main point, but I can think of at least three "legit" sources for TV journalism: E!Online, The New York TImes, and PopMatters.

As for the recommendation from saintprattdaddy, there are two issues:

1. Whether the Metacritic Editors want to branch out to TV and take on the extra work, in terms of a collection of reviews. That's really a big project.

2. Whether or not opening a new thread in the Forums to focus on TV would be a draw. I think we've got at least 20 threads on TV shows and the like under General Discussion. It might be useful to have those collected into a distinct category. Maybe a "TV" topic and a "Sports" topic would make the General Discussion list less lengthy.

quote:

Whether or not opening a new thread in the Forums to focus on TV would be a draw. I think we've got at least 20 threads on TV shows and the like under General Discussion. It might be useful to have those collected into a distinct category. Maybe a "TV" topic and a "Sports" topic would make the General Discussion list less lengthy.

I like that idea, but I just don't like the addition towards the review part of the site. I have a rather large grudge against television simply because it is hard to find quality programs. I can honestly name only a couple shows that I like:

The Daily Show
South Park
The Simpsons
Family Guy
Sportscenter
King of the Hill


I have nothing against some of the more intelligent programming such as "24," but, in general, I find that most television shows are of poor quality.

There can be some decent shows, but, in general, television is a home of people who are not good enough to act in movies.

Hmm...well, I think that it's impossible to create a fair standard by which to judge television shows.

With movies you can sort of compare because most movies are your basic 'follow a bunch of characters through a series of events'.

With TV shows...well, first of all there's much more variation. There's..food shows, game shows, unscripted shows, regular fiction, etc. And within regular fiction there's everything from episodic 'Man does dumb thing, makes woman mad, everything's back to normal within 21 minutes' network primetime sitcoms to serial, super-cumulative, intensely deep dramas.

You'd essentially have to judge everything by it's own standard. But if you're going to do that, why bother?

Now, I'd like to see reviews of intensely deep, cumulative serial stuff like Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, 24, etc. But I wouldn't care at all about reviews for your more mindless episodic stuff like Everybody Loves Raymond.

It's funny about sitcoms. 50's sitcoms were all...humble submissive housewife woman or bashful kid does something stupid, man sets things straight' every week. Now it's 'dumb, incompetent man is relationship-retarded and almost drives his wife to divorce' every week.

quote:

It's funny about sitcoms. 50's sitcoms were all...humble submissive housewife woman or bashful kid does something stupid, man sets things straight' every week. Now it's 'dumb, incompetent man is relationship-retarded and almost drives his wife to divorce' every week.

Which one is better.

quote:

Originally posted by Bobthespirit:
Hmm...well, I think that it's impossible to create a fair standard by which to judge television shows.

With movies you can sort of compare because most movies are your basic 'follow a bunch of characters through a series of events'.

With TV shows...well, first of all there's much more variation. There's..food shows, game shows, unscripted shows, regular fiction, etc. And within regular fiction there's everything from episodic 'Man does dumb thing, makes woman mad, everything's back to normal within 21 minutes' network primetime sitcoms to serial, super-cumulative, intensely deep dramas.

I'm not sure this isn't a problem for ANY ratings system. How can you compare, on an objective scale, an instrumental electronic record with a lyrics driven country album? How can you compare a documentary about quadriplegic rugby players with a scripted movie about superheroes? Or a book about a boy wizard with a book of political satire? I guess I still don't see how TV, with its many different genres, is so very different from anything else that gets rated and evaluated here.

Exactly. It's not hard to differentiate between well written and produced TV shows and bad ones. Even if they're not in the same genre. I can definitely say, for example, that "Survivor" is better than "According to Jim", "The Daily Show" is better than "Law & Order: Criminal Intent", or that "24" is better than "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers".

Well, if it means anything, we have begun preliminary work on adding television coverage to Metacritic. I think we have put it off for so long because it is quite a daunting task, but it does seem to fit well into the concept of our site. We probably won't have anything available before the end of the year, but hopefully by early next year we will have a functioning TV section to join the other sections on the site.

I do agree that having a "Television" category within the discussion boards makes sense, and we will add that soon.

Oh, and by the way, "The Wire" is the best show on television.

Has anybody read the Stylus magazine stuff on 'rockism', judging music by some set standards?

All I'm trying to say is that with television, there will be considerably more 'rockism' than with music. The most extreme example of which will be reality shows. A lot of critics will have an agenda against reality shows and indescriminantly bash all of them equally.

There's also one other issue that metacritic will need to address. I'll use Star Trek: The Next Generation as my example here.

The first and second seasons were terrible, and the third through sixth seasons were really good. Then the seventh season was only so-so.

How do you average things out equitably if the quality of a show changes dramatically over time?

Terrible? They weren't that bad, were they?

But that is actually an issue that the critics need to address, rather than us. We only report the reviews as they are given, and (as in the case for most shows), programs are only reviewed once, around the time of their premiere (and the reviews are typically based on only 2-6 episodes of the series).

In that respect, our scores for television programs will be less reliable than those for other forms of entertainment, but again, this is a limitation inherent in reviewing television, so there isn't really any way around it.

Television reviews (and thus our Metascores) are really only helpful for providing guidance as to which new programs are worth checking out; they tend to no longer apply to long-running programs. (This is where user scores can come in handy.)

Some shows--most notably all of the HBO original series (e.g., The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, etc.)--do tend to get re-reviewed at the beginning of each season, and we are planning on including separate Metascores for each season in such cases. But this will unfortunately not apply to the bulk of the programs on television.

Perhaps we will include a means, however, for our site users to rate individual seasons of a program as well as each program in general... this may help provide the season-by-season guidance you are looking for.

My wife, who watched all of them straight through when they came on until they finished, respectfully disagrees about the first two seasons being terrible.

Okay. 'Terrible' is too extreme. There were a few good episodes. But in general, the episodes weren't 'good'.

Back when I watched my VHS-from-TV Star Trek tapes there were a dozen episodes from season 1, and a dozen episodes from season 2 I'd skip, and maybe only a dozen more from the whole rest of the series.

Separating reviews by season seems to be a good idea, where it's possible. Or maybe you could do it by the season the review came.

Glad to hear that a TV section is on its way! Thanks for all of your work

A Television forum section is a must because the television format is a unique mass medium that provides prolonged programming that is impossible in movie format. "24," even "Ally McBeal," and "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," "X-Files," "Taken" sci-fi miniseries provided some of the most innovative programming some of which movies were actually the beneficiaries.

I would suggest that if a democratic constituency were interested, one could just begin to review television shows on this site somewhere to show there support and effort to discussing television regardless of whether or not there was a dedicated forum for television.

yay! We have a tv section now!