Revolt With a Remote

'West Wing' spat: TV Web sites give fans a voice - and execs are listening in

By Adam Sternbergh
National Post

In a recent episode of The West Wing, Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff, stumbled on an Internet fan site dedicated to discussing, dissecting, and debating the merits of Josh Lyman. Intrigued and somewhat flattered, he decided to join the discussion, posting a few responses on the site's message boards. His online fans, however, soon turned on him, challenging his knowledge of political issues. When his retort wound up quoted in a newspaper, Lyman got in big trouble at the White House. He blamed the whole mess on the site's moderator, whom he described as "a dictatorial leader who I'm sure wears a muumuu and chain-smokes Parliaments."

Many plotlines on The West Wing are drawn from real life. This subplot, however, was drawn from the real life of the show's creator, Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin himself has posted regularly to several West Wing fan sites, most notably a site run out of Toronto called Television Without Pity. Sorkin, too, regularly jousts with his show's online critics. And Sorkin has also had one of his Television Without Pity posts, concerning a feud with a former West Wing writer, reported in national U.S. newspapers including The New York Times. He was none too pleased, as this recent episode demonstrates.

What Sorkin's subplot also demonstrates is that the Web has given TV fans a new and unprecedented power. While the Web has not delivered on all its promised innovations -- as it turns out, not many people want to order dog food over the Internet -- it has proved extremely successful in one area: bringing together geographically disparate people who share a particular passion. On eBay, for example, the passion is obscure collectibles. On sites such as the Toronto-based one Sorkin visited, the passion is TV.

Over the past several years, a number of Web sites have emerged as virtual water coolers for fervent fans. A site called Real World Blows, for example, hosts discussions about MTV's Real World, and is regularly visited by the Real World cast members.

The famously rabid fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer can find each other -- and, often, the show's writers -- chatting at the official Web site, Buffy.com.

But the biggest and most celebrated of these TV sites is Television Without Pity (www.televisionwithoutpity.com). The site, whose motto is "Spare the snark, spoil the network," receives more than 500,000 visitors a month, and was recently named by Time magazine as one of the Web's 50 best destinations. (Full disclosure: The site's co-editor, Tara Ariano, writes a column for the National Post. She also co-edits a separate site, Fametracker.com, with the very person writing this article.)

Rather than focus on one show, Pity recaps more than 40 different programs, providing exhaustive rundowns of recent episodes. These recaps not only detail an episode's plot, but also critique, often in biting detail, a show's foibles: whose hair looks bad, who can't act, which show's writers need to be fired en masse, etc. "After a pleasant hiatus," went the teaser to a recent recap of Ally McBeal, "Ally McBeal is back, for two freaking hours and with many guest stars. Christina Ricci lays those chub rumors to rest as she appears in a bathing suit."

Of course, the phenomenon of fans voicing their displeasure at the crappiness of TV is nothing new. In some ways, a site such as Pity is like a supercharged update of the TV Brick -- that fake, foam-rubber brick, popular in the late '80s, that you could throw at your TV. The difference is that the Web offers a much more sophisticated conduit for feedback -- and one that might actually result in your opinions affecting the show in question.

All of which means that, suddenly, fans have been handed a powerful tool. Since its invention, television has always been a famously "top down" medium. Highly paid people concoct shows that they think we will like, and then beam them out on the airwaves for us to consume or ignore. Traditionally, there hasn't been an effective mechanism for viewers to register their responses, other than the Nielsen ratings -- and even those are notoriously crude. The Nielsen ratings can decide if a show lives or dies, but they can't measure how many people like a certain character or think a new storyline is totally lame.

As for diehard fans, they could initiate a letter-writing campaign to save a favourite program (as happened with Cagney & Lacey) or organize an advertiser boycott to protest a show's content, as some groups did when naked bum-bums showed up on NYPD Blue. But these, too, are clumsy, all-or-nothing options -- a little like a doctor using a machete to perform an operation.

The Web replaces the machete with a scalpel. It lets fans voice minute grievances or praise tiny details in a public forum, in real time. Episodes can be debated moments after they've aired, and choices given an instant thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Of course, all this scalpel-wielding would have little effect if the fans didn't have the ears of the shows' creators -- but increasingly it seems that they do.

At Television Without Pity, for example, Aaron Sorkin has regularly contributed to the West Wing message boards. While most producers resist the urge to wade into the fray, there are several who read the discussions about their shows (or, in online parlance, "lurk"). Judd Apatow, creator of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, and Ryan Murphy, the producer of Popular, have both revealed themselves as serial lurkers on the Pity boards.

Several of the shows recapped on Pity have incorporated on-air "shout outs" to the site -- in-jokes that only posters would recognize. For example, Popular once included a character named "Nellie Gustav" -- an apparent reference to the show's recapper at Pity, Gustav, and his not-exactly-secret sexual orientation. The character wound up getting hit by a car, while another character shouted, "I hate you, Nellie Gustav!" While this may sound like a slight, in fan culture, a shout-out of this magnitude counts as the highest compliment.

Most producers seem grateful, and even flattered, by the almost Talmudic scrutiny their shows are subjected to on Internet discussion boards. (Apatow and Murphy, for example, both agreed to be interviewed by Pity.) But as Sorkin's recent televised vendetta on The West Wing reveals, not everyone appreciates this online running commentary.

Which is funny, given that, in effect, a site such as Pity acts as a kind of super focus group. As with any focus group, producers are not obliged to heed the advice they're given. But in a town as test-market-obsessed as Hollywood, you'd think producers would welcome the chance to eavesdrop on thousands of viewers. Then again, this group isn't a random sampling, but rather, a gang as knowledgeable and passionate about the show as the producers are. And their responses aren't limited to "Unsatisfactory, Satisfactory, or Very Satisfactory."