A conversation with Television Without Pity founder Sarah D. Bunting

I’ve recently been conducting and compiling research for an upcoming project involving television history and the nature of online fandom. (Specifically, the fandoms of television shows.) For historical context and anthropological investigation regarding the state of internet fandom at the turn of the century, I turned to Sarah D. Bunting, the co-founder of Television Without Pity, which was the first major website I ever encountered that wrote about TV shows and gathered troves of likeminded viewers, who flocked to TWoP’s reviews and message boards. 

Sarah currently runs her own website, Tomato Nation, and hosts the Extra Hot Great podcast with TWoP co-founders Tara Ariano and David T. Cole.

Here is an excerpt from my interview with Sarah about the twin evolutions of television and fan culture since the launch of Television Without Pity.

SARAH BUNTING: Well, the story of our creating the site is, like, mercilessly well documented, so I'm not gonna get real granular about that, but the, you know, sort of the origin of it was only writing about Dawson's Creek, and kind of having this, vibe, where, you know, “guilty pleasure TV” was what other people called it. That was, at least in the early days, the main thrust of Dawson's Rap and Mighty Big TV was to get really granular about so-called “guilty pleasure TV.”

Tara Ariano, one of my co-founders, and I, had come from this place of adoring My So-Called Life, and finding every other show that sort of tried to touch the hem of its garment failed. We were always hoping that Dawson's, or The Young Americans, or whatever. The Carrie Diaries almost got to it – justice for The Carrie Diaries – but, like, we were always hoping that that next teen show was going to be the next My So-Called Life, and it never was, and I think without really being conscious of it, we were sort of working through grief about My So-Called Life for, like, 10 years after that, so I think that there was that… like, “raison d'etre” is a bit grand, but there was that.

I think that where the internet was, in terms of being more available to people at home for what was beginning to be a second-screen experience, it was more like: watch the episode and then run to your giant brick of a desktop computer, to log on with the screeching noise to talk about it. But the internet was developing into that place, and people who cared about TV had seen that it could do better, and now expected better of it. 

That was all happening at the same time, and I  loved Television Without Pity. I still work with a lot of these people, including my co-founders. It pleases me when people say grand things about the site, but I always say, and I will say it again: If it hadn't been us, it would have been someone else. And in fact, it was a number of “someone elses” at the same time. That was just a perfect, confluence of the internet becoming more accessible, TV becoming more respectable, and both of those things becoming sort of worthwhile media, versus when I was a kid – you know, movies were it. And newspapers and print journalism were it. I graduated from college in 1994, and that was how it was. Having a weblog was like, “Well, that's not serious. Anyone can do that.”

Right.

BUNTING: Well, you know, as it turns out, if you just do it for long enough, eventually everyone else who's not serious gets a grip on themselves and goes to law school, and you're still there. You've outlasted people. But Television Without Pity … you know, I'd love to take credit for our influence. I think we were real good at picking writers  who made us look good, but I'm not sure we were that smart. I think it was just a timing thing, and I'm glad that it worked out. I think it was definitely a timing thing, with [online] media evolving at the same time, kind of concatenated together.

As best as you can remember, was there a prevailing sentiment or… a vibe, I guess, circa, 1999, 2000 – was there a collective feeling or personality to television fandom? Or fandom in general at that time?

Bunting: The comments that you hear about, like, “some keyboard warrior in someone's basement,” that was the attitude [from the establishment]. That the internet… and internet commentators were, you know, ugly, under-socialized people.

And when we were pitching a Television Without Pity TV show – which, we went on a couple of these pitch rounds in the early aughts – I got the distinct feeling at about half of these meetings, and we went to dozens, that [the people we were meeting with] just wanted to see us. That they thought we were mole people. And when we weren't even plus-size, they were like, “Well, what do we do with this? What, are we supposed to talk to them?” 

Like – okay, guy, in your Charlie Brown sweater. And you just kind of acclimated to that attitude that your parents’ friends – they didn't have the internet at home, and they didn't understand what you did. I'm not sure my parents ever understood what we did until we got a book out of it, and then they were like, “Oh, it's a thing that I can pick up! And read, and go to Barnes & Noble and, like, turn it, face out.” 

And then, I think the attitude towards fandom was that the moliness of those mole people was even more intense. That was the sub-basement of the House of Media. The dungeon under the jail. And we were guilty of some of it, too, although it depended on which fandom.

Even among the people creating content and doing reviews on the internet, there was this sense that, there was a certain level of fandom that was – whatever the expression of “go outside and touch grass” was back then. It was like, please find something else to think about.

But, I also think that the thinking about that evolved for us, and sort of, like, culturally, as well. And there are two sides of that coin. The first side is that a lot of different kinds of shows, and different kinds of thinking about and reviewing the culture – and social media sort of reinforced this, at its best – were allowed to flower and have a chance, that that sort of theoretical democratization that the internet stood for was sometimes good. Things were in front of people that wouldn't have been before.

On the flip side of that, I think that the idea [arose] that corporations and holding companies could market and exploit these proliferating fandoms and these niche interests. That's sort of the downside, that this thing that started out as, this cheerful following of a property, and enjoying of a property, and going on the subreddit for a property. Now there's an intern assigned to collect information about who is talking about it, and push ads and dropship crap product to them. 

In the early aughts, that wasn't as direct a line. The cycle was not as quick. But I think that's where it was, sort of, at the turn of the millennium. Fandom was becoming a more respected player in the culture. But then, of course, [the studios ask] “how do we monetize this?” How do the capitalist states of America monetize someone's sincere interest in … whatever; Babylon 5.

As Television Without Pity was going through its most engaged period, do you think that’s around the time the shift happened where studios and executives stopped viewing fans and fandom as a necessary evil? Moving from an attitude of, “Well, I guess there have to be fans if we’re gonna make money of this thing,” to the reality of today, where so much of product and content is geared to the attitude of, “We have to make sure the fans are happy with this.” Now it seems like the fans are the lever that makes the machine go, as opposed to the other way around. 

BUNTING: And then you have something like The Good Wife, where it's possible to listen to the fans too much.

I don't think I'm necessarily qualified enough or grounded enough in the broader history of TV on the internet at that time to say [definitively], but I will say we were seeing enough engagement from creators of varying sizes, and there was a range of ways that they would interact with us. 

Our first big get [was when a show creator] emailed our recapper and was like, “Do you want an interview with me?” The recapper forwards me the email, and she's like, “This is bullshit, right? Like, there's gotta be a hundred dudes named Ryan Murphy.”

And I was like, “I don't know. Ask him for an extension on whatever lot he's on, call him back, see if it's legit, and then interview him. Why not?” And that was when his big show was Popular, that show on the WB.

And [Ryan Murphy] was very … he didn’t, you know, talk a lot of trash about executives or anything like that, but he was as frank as he could be.

And then we had some showrunners who were real fuckin' assholes, or just, like, bigfooting us like crazy. And then, of course, legendarily, Aaron Sorkin making up a screen name, and then writing us into that show about Lemon-Lyman.com, or whatever the hell. And I was like, oh my god, buddy, first of all, no. And second of all, do your research. Like, back then I smoked Camel Lights, not Parliaments. Please. Phone a friend who knows. 

But there was definitely that sense, especially if your show was either inspiring intense devotion, or extremely well-regarded among a very small section of the viewership, or there's some venn diagram. But the sweet spot of that venn diagram meant that creators had to care about [TWoP], and all the not-fit-for-the-public slobs that we cater to.

I don't know where or when the turning point was, but I think by the time we were getting show creators who – now they have remained big names – that by the time people were leaving shows and telling the showrunner that came in after them, “You don't have to go on TWoP, but you better delegate someone to do it.”

There was this sense that it wasn't really Television Without Pity per se that was an important part of the marketing file. But especially for shows like, I don't know, Buffy, or anything in the Buffy-verse. The West Wing was, this weird outlier where we [said], “A political show with Rob Lowe? LOL, that'll last 3 episodes.” And then we have a Canadian basically learning American politics and jurisprudence on the job, and sharing her homework with the readers.

And then you had little teeny shows on VH1, like Making the Band, where it's like, alright: almost nobody cares about this, but the “almost” section is, like, intense.

It didn't take long. Pretty soon [after our launch], you did get the feeling based on, I don’t know, reality show producers showing up in the forums, showrunners showing up in the forums, people emailing our recappers, “How dare you,” that the internet generally was on studios’ and writers rooms’ radar.

It is now assumed, and that every show will have an account on every single social medium, but in 2001, I think that’s where it started. There were a lot of different things happening culturally at that point, but in that corner of the internet, if you had a show that was on the bubble, I think probably there might have been some conversations about, you know, maybe you’d see if Television Without Pity was covering it. “I, Rob Thomas, worked extremely hard on this television program about a teenage P.I. I really want their recapper to keep liking it!” And I think that worked out pretty well for everybody.

I would agree. It's very strange to think about how everyone viewed the internet – and people on the internet – so differently before your site and after your site. And maybe it's come full circle, and people view people on the internet that way again now. But it’s so interesting for me to think about television creators moving from just checking the numbers that come in and having that be the one thing that tells you how well you’re doing, to understanding that fans have a commiseration with a show, and now we have to keep our finger on that pulse.

BUNTING: Yep. And I don't think that that made anyone's jobs any easier. Sure. But now it’s sort of a matter of going on Google Trends and seeing if various search terms are popping anywhere.

It's very different from a much more straightforward [era where] everybody turned in their Nielsen diaries, and this is what we have. And not to mention, this is the era when you went to Netflix.com, and you made a list, and then they sent you a couple DVDs! And they actually only stopped doing that … I mean, it wasn't, in the last year or anything. I don't know if you had this account or anything, but they let you keep the last movie that you had out? They're like, “Whatever. We don't feel like dealing with it, that's fine.” Which is how I have a Netflix envelope with Satyricon in it? Like, what a weird time to be alive. 

But that really was where a lot of people were able to catch up on certain shows that they'd missed. Streaming absolutely changed everything, and atomized the information collection process, but you look back at some of these numbers that were considered absolute dogshit for, like, a sitcom in 1987 or whatever, and it's like, “They only got 21 million people to watch the pilot, and then it dropped off to 9 million.” I don't think 9 million people total watched The Leftovers, ever, or even heard of it.

Yeah. It's insane; the balkanization of television, just in the last, like, 20 years, has just been staggering to watch.

BUNTING: It's wild. You could say this about a lot of different media, or creative media. I think film was the same, and then the pandemic – again, all of this is above my pay grade. I was a poetry major who started a TV recap website. What do I know?

But that grudging acceptance [from studios and executives] that the fandom actually was important, and it was important to learn what the fandom thought, even if it didn't affect plotting – which it shouldn’t; those are two different skill sets. You are professional television writers, and you don't have to change anything.

But the marketing and sales team behind you, and the executives above you, need you to play ball with the viewers, and the superfans, because that's how you justify your existence to shareholders.

So, yeah, I think a lot of the codifying of that probably started 25 years ago. How much Television Without Pity, again, explicitly had to do with that. I have no idea, and I would always rather err on the side of, “we were just standing there.” Intent-wise, that was what was happening.

Have you observed anything else about the massive changes between television circa 2000 and modern TV?

BUNTING: Functionally, you had the Big Four networks, the last of which was functionally born when I was in high school, and then the two netlets. And, then you had… the, like, two and a half prestige networks. Wi-Fi was not a thing. And the internet was not strong enough to do streaming, really. Nobody knew how to cut their own GIFs except, like, people with engineering degrees. 

It was just a difference in the ubiquity of the internet, the wireless internet, the extremely fast internet for every citizen, and that led to streaming and so on and so forth. You build the car to drive on the roads that you already have, to a certain extent.

There was actually plenty of choice. There was a lot of basic cable. But it would not have been imaginable that Netflix would have gone all streaming, or that you wouldn't need to wait for seasons of a show to be physically printed on DVDs so that you could buy them.

So, I think that's the biggest difference, is just how much TV there is, how quickly you can get it at any time of the day, and how there's also an almost equal amount of ways to talk about it with each other. Reddit. Tumblr is still trying it. People are going back to blogs, newsletters, social media. Things are always evolving, and I certainly am the last person to ask about the direction in which they will go, since in an interview I said to a tape recorder, “The video iPod, that shit will never work.” I love telling this story on myself while I watch an old HBO documentary on my telephonic device.

Television Without Pity, I think, absolutely benefited from being a relatively early adopter of the idea, that any television that you watched is therefore, by definition, worth talking about, even if we're not covering it. We'll give you a tiny little lane on the forums to discuss it.

And the Television Without Pity experience – the 2025 version – we're doing a podcast called Extra Hot Great. It's once a week if you're feeling skint, and then twice a week for members on the Patreon, and then that has a whole Discord, which I guess is the new era's message board. So, yeah, people are missing it. 

I feel like every 18 months or so, there's a spasm on social media of people being like, “Remember TWoP? Whatever happened to those people? I think they're dead!” And we're like, “We're just doing a podcast, we've been here for, like, 10 years, it's fine. Love you guys, too.”