TV recaps abound, thats obvious. But why have they become such an overwhelming and unavoidable force? Maybe the internet is trying to talk your television.
(This is the third edition of View Source, a weekly column in which Rex Sorgatz obsesses over the new ways we create, consume, and manipulate moving images.)
During Sunday nights season premiere of The Newsroom, you probably saw something that made you guffaw, laugh, squeal, or yell at the television. You made a sound, but the television didnt hear you.
The internet has been trying to spark a conversation with television since it could talk.
The telly was oblivious to your elation or annoyance, so you fired up Twitter to announce your celebration or grievance. In the morning, you hopped online and gorged on other people recapping their concerns about the same episode. You probably also perused comments from other viewers at the bottom of the page; possibly, even typed in a few words yourself.
You kept talking to the television, but the television wouldnt listen. But soon, very soon, it will be forced to hear you.
A SIBLING RIVALRY: WEB & TUBE The internet and television are unnatural siblings. They dont particularly like each other, and the elder considers the younger petulant and fickle. Because it is!
The internet is a never-finished thing. Even a web page created years ago keeps changing. It gets redesigned or deleted, new comments are submitted, new ads continue rotating, "related stories" from the future are unwittingly appended. And then browsers update, reformatting old code in unforeseen ways, or plugins disappear, leaving sad face icons (new ones, too; there are always design updates to the sad face). Like Heraclituss river, you can never step in the same webpage twice.
In that sense, a wiki represents the web in its purest form: A page that anyone can edit, a conversation that is always happening. (Even if a Wikipedia entry hasnt been edited in years, it still feels unstable, always subject to change.) The web is a contested place, where debates are never completely resolved, where the page is never officially "finished."
The internets big brother, who is of course television, is nothing like that. TV is a highly structured system, resistant to manipulation or feedback. You cant go back and change an episode of The A-Team. You can gripe about its characterization of post-Vietnam America, but B.A. Baracus wont hear you, fool. Its meaning or significance can change, but its content is locked in time.
The internet this funny kid who thinks instability is a feature has been trying to spark a conversation with television since it could talk. For a long time, the television couldnt hear the kids caterwauling, and later, it pretended it didnt understand. But now, finally, it is being forced to listen.
The TV recap is the internet screaming at your television for recognition.
SPOILER ALERT: THE RECAP AS CRITICISM
To proclaim The TV recap has exploded in popularity! is about as insightful as saying water is refreshing. Rather than listing a swarm of sites that write recaps, it seems a greater challenge to list sites that dont.* Everyone is a TV critic.
Criticism, when good, provides a way to understand a piece of culture. But most of todays popular criticism doesnt do that. Most movie, music, and book reviews, for instance, address another question: Is this worth my money or time? Even when lofty readers of the New York Times Book Review read a review, they hope to know whether to invest their time and money in Freedom. (Pro tip: Skip it!)
Recaps dont retell the story so much as perform it.
Reduced to a commerce decision, most popular criticism dedicates a great deal of space to description this book depicts an orphan who joins a wizardry school, this song concerns a paranoid android, this painting consists of splatters of brown and black and white. After all that description, the critic, finally, reaches her diagnosis, whether the thing is good or bad. Thumbs up or thumbs down?
But TV recaps are completely unlike that. Recaps dont try to convince you to spend your time and money, because they assume you already have. In fact, they actually demand you have. Thats the purpose of a "Spoiler Alert" to signal to newcomers, Enter ye watchers through the narrow gate of people who saw last nights Breaking Bad.
The recap removes the rhetoric of commerce, but it also puts the critic and the reader on equal ground: We have all seen the same episode and we are here, together, to judge it. Because it doesnt dwell on describing the show, the recap becomes more open and fluid, engaging the show in new ways. (If this sounds like a minor thing, just imagine if A.O. Scott could write movie reviews with the knowledge that weve already seen the movie. So much better!) The recap is afforded the time and attention to interrogate the show.
The recap is the younger sibling sneaking into the older siblings bedroom.
EVERYONES AN UBER-CRITIC
A modest lie was told above. Recaps dont completely abandon description. After all, they are called recaps (but that seems to be residue from a pre-DVR era when one sought recaps because they missed an episode). Recaps still describe, often in precise detail, the narrative of an episode. But these retellings are seldom direct renderings of plot or character, because that would be boring to those of us who have already seen it.
Recaps dont retell the story so much as perform it. Vultures recap of last weeks The Newsroom, for instance, takes the form of an oral history about The Newsroom. (To recap: Its a real recap disguised as a fake oral history book excerpted for a real website about a fake show about a fake cable network reporting on real events.) That isnt "criticism" as much as some sort of strange embodiment or assimilation of television. (In our overwrought metaphor, the kid
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TV recaps abound, thats obvious. But why have they become such an overwhelming and unavoidable force? Maybe the internet is trying to talk your television. 
