NBCUniversal is pulling the plug on two of its big pop culture web properties: Television Without Pity and DailyCandy. Although I haven’t read the site in years — which was bought out by Bravo in 2007 — it’s hard to imagine it not being around. In a brief message on their website and on Twitter, Television Without Pity stated:
Television Without Pity, otherwise known as TWOP, was founded by friends Sarah Bunting and Tara Ariano after meeting on the internet in 1997, initially creating the website to post Dawson’s Creek recaps before broadening its scope to include everything from Real World to ER to Veronica Mars. Despite your personal feelings about the site it’s hard to deny that they were influential in creating the landscape of how we talk about television today.
I personally had a love/hate relationship with TWOP. I remember back in the mid-aughts, I was working as an Art Director for a crappy company just a few years out of college, and I would pass the time pouring over their Buffy and Angel recaps. Of course once I actually tried to join in the discussion I promptly got myself banned from the forums, thanks to their insufferable commenters and rampant elitist snobism of the site moderators — one of the main criticisms many had with the site.
Despite my feelings, TWOP was probably at least partial inspiration for when I finally started my own website back in the day, which led to other websites asking me to come write for them. So I guess I’ve got to thank them for that much; a sentiment that’s been echoed by many over the past 24 hours:
(Via The Daily Dot)
Overall, this was pretty inevitable — between the corporate stink slow death march and the internet’s tastes having moved from long recaps and forums to GIF-heavy posts with comment threads — it was only a matter of time. So what do you guys think? Miss it or who cares?
