The iconic pop culture media website, TWOP, is closing its door.It's a total bummer. I grew up on posting on the site. I started posting there when I was 14 years old, in the spring of 2000. That is literally half of my life. I remember back in those days, my posts would likely revolve around the WB line-up...Dawson's Creek, Buffy, Popular (THAT was a big one for me because the board there was really active), Roswell (which was able to have 3 seasons instead of just 1 because the members of then-MightyBigTV banded together to get the show renewed), and Felicity. (I remember the on-going theory was that Ben was going to eventually abuse Felicity- didn't happen, but still.)

 

Then the summer of 2000 happened, and with it, Survivor, and the big boom of the reality show phenomenon.

, and that's largely because of the person who recapped it, and declared it one of the nastiest, hateful speeches she'd ever seen on T.V. Reality shows would eventually morph into stuff like The Osbournes and The Hills, but I don't think anything will ever top or replicate the Survivor phenomenon, where you suddenly saw ordinary people being turned into household names because they were appearing as themselves on a t.v. show. (You got a preview of that on the Real World, but Survivor was a much bigger show.) The discussions we had on MightyBigTV as this developed was pretty interesting, and somewhere during this era I learned the term :snark", and it became a part of my personality. Another term that I learned from TWOP in this era, when American Idol hit big in 2002, was the term "eyefuck", which described how Justin Guarini's eyes looked while singing on camera- it was kind of the updated term for the old-timey term "bedroom eyes."

 

After Survivor and American Idol, the next big show that I got into while reading MightyBigTV/TWOP was The O.C., in 2003. It was a hit show that had a lot of posters talking, and loads of controversy, especially over the lack of acting chops of Mischa Barton, and the fast decline in quality of the show, which seemed to have imploded during season 3 but then given a chance to redeem itself during a shortened season 4 run.Here, I picked up the term "bromance" as Ryan Atwood and Seth Cohen had a great bromance. Also at this same time period, I got into the show Veronica Mars, which was tailor-made for a place like TWOP because the show actually had a lot of race, class, and gender conflicts that made for great discussion.

 

In early 2005, my high school classmate appeared on the reality t.v. show on MTV called Made as a "Basketball Jock Who Learns Ballet", and I was so excited and posted a lot about it. He read the site and actually figured out who I was, and the whole thing got out, so I got a little bit of grief about it. In retrospect, that was an interesting lesson for me as a teenager to learn about the idea that what you say and do on the internet can come back to haunt you. Nowadays we hear so much about kids who overshare or post stupid things on the internet, and I kinda felt like a person my age was right at the beginning of all that.

 

As the years went on, the site changed, the way people view T.V. shows changed(just think- in 2000 Ipods didn't exist and now people watch T.V. on them), and the site got more and more regulated. I'm still pretty active in TWOP, but I haven't quite thrown myself into the community the way I used to. Part of it is that at some point, my life stopped revolving around the WB lineup. (Seriously, my 14/15 year old journal entries were all about watching episodes of Buffy and the like.) I also think I took a lot of that enthusasm for discussion that I had with TWOP when I was a teenager and put it into Adam's many iterations of this bar, and Gay Authors. I know Adam rolls his eyes when I go on about the Hunger Games or other pop culture stuff instead of analyzing Mozart's music or pondering Kafka, but I do think it's a good thing to analyze pop culture. It often has a way of putting a mirror on contemporary society, and giving us a sense of where we're at and what we're valuing. (Or not valuing.) Not to mention throw a spotlight on the social issues that are plaguing us. I actually remember being surprised when I watched OnDemand streamings of the 80's sitcom Facts of Life and being surprised at how many of the topics they covered were still VERY relevant to contemporary society- lesbianism, rape, teen suicide, eating disorders, human trafficking, the sexualization of young girls by the media, the push for Abstinence -Only sex education, racism, the treatment of handicapped people, the controversy that can surround a university donation, etc etc.

 

I think TWOP taught me how to argue a point, how to snark, and most importantly, how to analyze a story's characters, writing, and acting. It made me think about how T.V. is often written in cliches and generic formulas, and then wonder WHY those cliches and stereotypes exist. And really appreciate when a show goes against the mold. If a moment on T.V. moved me, I learned to articulate WHY it moved me.And if it left me cold, I learned to articulate why it didn't move me. If I had a problem with the writing or creative direction or acting of a t.v. show, I learned to go beyond just saying "I think Riley on Buffy is a boring male Mary Sue."

 

I think those were valuable things to learn. Generally, I think TWOP had a pretty positive influence on me (although Gay Authors posters can get at me for how intense I can be giving feedback to Mark Arbour), and I'll miss all of the intelligent pop culture analysis. It's so strange- I posted at that place for an entire half of my life. It's basically always been around, so I never thought it might not be around. It's not quite as looming large in my life as it used to (especially back when they had the Off-Topic board and I made a ton of e-friends from there), but it was a part for an incredibly long time (14 years) and I'll definitely miss it.