RIP, TWoP

It was on Thursday night, the night of March 27, when I was looking through my Facebook, and I saw on the "Trending" area on the right side a headline about a TV chat site I've been a member of for a long time, Television Without Pity.

The headline: That it's being shut down.

Shit.  I go over there and see that there's a message saying that its last day of full operation is Friday, April 4 -- basically another 24 hours.  Now there may be some reprieve.  The recaps, from which TWoP made their name on, were supposed to be shuttered at the end of this week, but outcries from fans convinced NBC Universal, the owners of the site, to keep them up indefinitely, supposedly.  Meanwhile, forums may remain up and running until May 31, but after that, they are gone, no reprieve.

Regardless, unless there is some last-minute sale (and who knows if that may or may not happen), another piece of my life will be dead forever.

I feel guilt, however, because this isn't really a case of something leaving me, but me leaving it.  When I immediately went to their website and logged in, it was the first time in months, possibly over a year, that I've done that.  When I posted a message of condolence, it was the first time I did that in probably over a year, when I talked about how a product I saw on Shark Tank called a Spaddy Daddy looked like a sex toy.  It was only one sentence, very unlike the paragraphs of thoughts and expressions and cries from the soul back when I spent hours and hours on Mighty Big TV.  But those days are long gone, and as of April 4, for all intents and purposes, so is TWoP.

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It all began when I got hypnotized by Survivor.  I didn't believe the hype so I willfully missed the first couple episodes.  But then the buzz got too much, so I decided to check it out.  And goddamn, I was hooked.  Not only by the bizarre, real-life aspect of what really was a game show, but by seeing dramatic themes of trust, betrayal and evil portrayed not by characters, but by real people.  In short, that is how the reality genre renewed my faith in television.

I could not get enough of Survivor, and I knew other people were on the Internet talking about it.  For hours on end in college I'd be at the library and checking out my favorite groups on Usenet (remember that?!) talking about stuff from porn stories to movies.  So I knew there had to be, like, some chat room or something that's talking about all things Survivor.  I therefore Googled (or, just as likely back at the dawn of the millennium, Altavista'd) "Survivor" and "chat room" or "Internet board," and either the first or second entry on the list was this place called Mighty Big TV.  Hmmm, interesting name, I thought, they must be good.  So I clicked on it.

It gave me everything I needed and more, about Survivor and other shows I was and was not interested in.  And there were other rat children (my pet name for Survivor fanatics) who lit up the site -- my kind of people, also obsessed with who screwed who and why.  Eventually, on Tuesday, July 11, 2000, I signed in and joined Mighty Big TV.

From that point on, till about seven or eight years ago, I was a big fan of MBTV, which changed its name (I don't know why, that was a great name) to Television Without Pity.  When I began I wrote opus upon opus about each week's Survivor, commenting on why did he or she do that, and more importantly What This Means To Us As A Society (won't bore you to death, but I am not being melodramatic when I say that not only is the show a breakthrough in television, but it finally broke the seal on Man seeing itself as venal, vain, greedy and immoral).  I then migrated from reality show to reality show -- The Amazing Race, The Mole (RIP), The Bachelor, Temptation Island, America's Next Top Model, and up to Dancing With The Stars.

There have been some tribulations.  I've had heated arguments with other posters and some of the moderators on Mighty Big TV/Television Without Pity.  There was one woman, who has since gone to some renown, who was notorious for being incredibly bitchy towards members, including me.  (The time I was able to get one of her warnings overturned after I appealed to her boss, one of the site's founders, is, no joke, one of my biggest accomplishments in my life.)  There was a time when the founders broke the news that TWoP had to downsize in order to cut down on bandwidth and save money.  At that point they solicited us members to pay for ads we created for the site.  In 2007, however, they sold TWoP to Bravo.  I don't exactly think that was the reason I drifted away from it, but I nevertheless did.

The big thing I regret about TWoP was a promise I made about posting to my own little thread the moderators were OK with me maintaining, something called the Reality Television Awards.  It would be my thing where I would rank all the worst and worst of the Competitive Reality Shows on TV.  I was going to be the main contributor, but there was the other guy who was going to help.  Well, I did it successfully for, like, two years, then all of a sudden I either got busy or lost interest around 2010, I think.  I promised everybody and this guy that I would get around to it as soon as I had the time, but I never did.  Subconsciously, maybe that was the reason I stopped going to TWoP -- I felt guilty about not delivering on my promise.

So I double down on my guilt.  The only reason I went back to TWoP to post is when I heard it was closing.  I've been one of hundreds paying respects to the site, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who went away from TWoP over the past few years.  I still don't think it's, for lack of a better term, "right" that we're expressing our condolences.  If we really cared, we would have stuck around and continued to post.  It would, well, "just" if we didn't come back to post at all.  I guess I had to, for selfish reasons.  It may have been the independent website (I don't count ESPN.com, which is probably the website I have visited in my life the most) that impacted my post-collegiate life the most.  And like all things I catch back up with in my life, I can't say it's important to me now, but I still don't think I can live without it.

It really wasn't until now that I truly understood the global reach of Television Without Pity.  I had no idea that mainstream sites like USA Today and Entertainment Weekly ran stories about its demise (as well as sister "Web 1.0" site DailyCandy).  But the reporter from the former is a huge fan, and that of the latter actually worked for TWoP as a recapper.  In fact, I'm sure that the overwhelming majority of people who wrote on TWoP have gone on to write in other, more popular places, entered other media, or otherwise maintained an Internet presence in some capacity.

Again, while the recaps live on for the foreseeable future and the forums can be posted onto till the end of May, TWoP (which seems to have stopped updated as soon as the news came down it was closing last week) ceases live operations some time tomorrow.  If you've never been, go to it.  You will be tapping into something that has made me who I am today.