“There is an unreasonable amount of TV” was exactly the right declaration to open The AV Club‘s “All The TV You Should Have Watched By Now” panel at Sydney’s inaugural BingeFest.
Over the course of the following session, the three representatives from the popular online TV criticism website pitched a member of the audience on why their comedy or genre show of choice was worth their time. It was a fun collaborative experience that always made the audience feel like they were special and made the most of the enormous venue involved.
I caught up with one of the three visiting TV critics, Laura Browning, afterwards to get a debriefing on both the panel and the Buffy Binge-A-Thon the trio hosted the night prior.
“Buffy Binge was great. We ended up doing seven episodes. We planned for six and we ended up having a little extra time before breakfast started,” Laura says.
“We were all really interested in Buffy because Joss Whedon played with these storytelling structures and narratives structures and we picked a couple of episodes that really played pretty heavy-handedly with those storytelling structures,” she says.
She says they had a ton of fun picking the episodes and “by all indications, the crowd was really happy” with their final choices – even if if their decision to include an episode from Season 7 proved somewhat controversial among some.
However, that’s not to say that the process of choosing those six with coworkers Erik Adams and Alex McCown-Levy was easy.
“The three of us sat down and basically fought over our Buffy playlist and the fighting continued until last night, in fact. But yeah, we did six episodes. We really tried to be representative of the full seven-season run.”
“We skipped the largely maligned first season. Even though I think there are some perfectly-acceptable episodes in that season it’s probably not the best for an overnight binge-a-thon.”
“I think we hit five of seven seasons over seven episodes,” she says.
Laura adds that she enjoyed watching the audiences’ reaction to Season 2’s “School Hard”, the first episode where fan-favorite Spike appears.
“The cheering was so loud and it warmed my heart,” Laura confesses.
Later, during the AV Club’s panel, she made an impassioned plea for Joss Whedon’s similarly-acclaimed series Firefly for best genre show. Though the space western ultimately lost the match-up to HBO’s The Leftovers and NBC’s Hannibal, Laura stuck by her choice.
“Firefly was just a foundation for so much,” she says before adding that she almost went with Marvel’s Agent Carter instead.
Even in a theater full of TV-aficionados, it likely would have proved a divisive choice.
Speaking of divisive choices and upstart-nominees, Laura also took a moment during the panel to acknowledge and speculate on the influence that the election of Donald Trump will have on the kind of TV that gets made.
“The USA is just a really scary place right now,” she admits, “it’s gotten legitimately frightening in the past six, seven weeks and every single day is a new gut-punch and every single day is just this increasing realization that people are going to die in the next four years directly because of Trump and Trumpism. The damage is going to be irreparable”
“I don’t think it’s going to be like Thatcherism and punk. I don’t think that we’re going to see this new genre but I think the arts is going to become one of the only places where people can speak freely”
“I hope that I am wrong about that,” she quickly adds, “but it’s going to increasingly be seen as a form of protest so I hope that the political commentaries are able to bring some form of truth telling.”
“We already have a lot of good political comedy,” she says, “I’m a huge fan of Full Frontal With Samantha Bee. I think John Oliver’s doing some good work.”
Laura says that while these figures are more entertainers than journalists, “I think they’re going to be in a position to call things as they see them whereas even The New York Times and The Washington Post are kinda of tripping over themselves a little bit in terms of trying to figure it out.”
She cites and criticizes the false-equivalency these bigger mainstream publications made when it came to weighing up the importance of Hilary’s emails and “the list of Trump atrocities.”
“I think that they are just trying to figure that out whereas Samantha Bee can be like “fuck that” and I think that comedies, both directly through shows like that and indirectly through shows like Veep, are potential going to have this ability to tell the truth.”
I ask if her hypothesis could extend to dramas.
“I think it’s harder with drama because the storylines and such tend to have more nuance and its easier to write a few running gags than put it into this narrative that’s just not shoehorning it in,” she responds.
She adds that the rise of limited run series potentially opens up an avenue for political commentary.
I ask her what show defined the year for her and our conversation turns back to Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
Laura’s quick to praise Samantha Bee, saying “she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s totally unafraid,” and even goes so far as to say that she’s outpaced Jon Stewart.
“It could have been anything and she very very quickly became the spiritual heir to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Whereas The Daily Show with Trevor Noah is catering to this different audience – which is great, it’s fine, [but] it’s not what I looked to Jon Stewart for”
“For me personally, I really like the feminist Jon Stewart angle,” though she quickly adds that”that’s unfair to her – “she’s way better than just that.”
Looking forward, I ask her what show she’s most excited or interested to see grow heading into 2017.
“I am excited about this NBC comedy called The Good Place. I’m a little eh on sitcoms but its a really charming show and I think that that could be something. It could be interesting to see if they try and take on any social commentary.”
“A lot of people are head over heels for it and I think it has the potential to become a really interesting television show,” she says.
I ask her how the mass-infiltration of TV culture into mainstream media affects The AV Club.
How does a dedicated site like that fit into a world where major newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald runs reviews and recaps for big shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld?
“The’s one thing that The AV Club has always done and done really well is that we’ve made a big deal of calling out reviews reviews and not recaps.”
She says a lot of similar sites tended to just recap what happened in each episode and not bring too much critical analysis to the table.
“We’ve always made it a point to engage critically with what we’re talking about and I think our TV reviewers across the board have done a outstanding job,” she says.
“Major outlets are starting to do TV recaps [but] they’re still treating it as ‘oh you missed this episode, here’s what happened’ and we’re looking to continue the conversation”
To that end, Laura says, “we truly try to avoid internet-language or bloggy language, which can be really difficult to define. We’re really looking for reviews that aren’t just being sort of snarky about something.”
“Even if it’s a really terrible episode of whatever, we are going to engage with it as a text,” she says.
“I think that’s something we’ve always succeeded with that and that’s something that we’re outpacing what The Wall Street Journal does. Which is bizarre, but whatever.”
During the Q&A part of the team’s panel, Alex described the amount of TV being produced by media giants like Netflix as a “professional nightmare.”
I asked Laura if Netflix’s dominance is likely to come with any caveats.
“I think it will, at some point. I think right now they’re generally doing really good work,” she says.
“I think maybe the caveat I would consider is that because they do these full season dumps I think that perhaps the caveat is that this method of consumption is changing the entire pop culture television landscape and will increasingly play that role of [saying] ‘this is TV you have to binge’ and that’s very different from something like what Shonda Rimes is doing with stuff like Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy”
“I think that’s going to be interesting to see how that changes the television landscape and how we consume it.”
“I mean, it’s great for me – I’m a total binger,” she says.
The AV Club’s Buffy Binge-A-Thon and “All The TV You Should Have Watched By Now” panel took place at this year’s BingeFest weekend in Sydney over the 17th & 18th of December.
Photography by Prudence Upton
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