September 20, 2003 Saturday Final Edition
SECTION: Pop Culture; On the Web; Pg. D2
LENGTH: 391 words
HEADLINE:No shortage of laughs: Television without pity summaries hilarious. Surf the Net before you channel search for the real lowdown on programs and their stars
SOURCE: Freelance
BYLINE: KALI PEARSON
BODY:
It's official: Fall is here. And that means that a new season of television shows is just around the corner. Every channel worth its salt has a fancy Web site to enthusiastically promote its programming and provide shiny glimpses into the private lives of stars, but for the real lowdown, surf the Web before you channel surf.
You'll find the "official" word on the best of what's on the air during tonight's Emmy Awards broadcast on Fox at 8 p.m. Find out who is being nominated for what at The site also includes galleries of photos of the set, the parties and last weekend's awards presentation leading up to the main event. The site, which is heavy on technical information for television-industry types, does include a section called "Emmy Fun," but, perhaps tellingly, it comes up completely blank.
One site that is never short on fun is Its mantra is "spare the snark, spoil the network" and the site certainly delivers with snark to spare. The site employs "recappers" to sum up the latest episode of any of 122 shows it follows. Thumbnail recaps are brief, to the point and amusing, but it's the blow-by-blow summaries that are laugh-out-loud hilarious. Recappers retell the stories in detail with a tone usually reserved for regaling friends with stories of blind dates from hell.
They don't just tell you what happened, they veer into parallels with their own lives, snipe about the snipes about the characters and dialogue, the outfits and generally expose all the silly things we love to hate about television. People who write for this site are clearly driven to do so by the love side of their love-hate relationship with television, but refuse to adopt the breathless tone of industry-sanctioned publications and Web sites.
Each show has its own forum, where fans swap comments and debate the merits (or lack of merit) of each episode. There are also mailing lists for those who can't wait to hear the latest about their most loved (or most hated) shows. In case that's still not enough, the site also contains a personals section, powered by the same company that runs Nerve.com's very successful matchmaking service for urban hipsters. There, you'll find fellow pop culture junkies with whom to curl up on the couch and bring in the new fall season.