04-18-2015, 05:45 AM
Quote:It's enough to make you feel like they're being paid off by someone
I haven't read this particular review nor watched this ep, but AV Club is always ass-kissing and/or weird and/or rage-inducing.
I get a strong impression that the reviewers know relatively little about the show and certainly haven't been watching since Day 1. I think somebody gets assigned to write these things, they watch an ep or two or maybe just some Youtube clips and they read the Wiki or some summaries.
I happened upon a particularly stupid review of 43rd Peculiarity which made it clear that the writer had no understanding of the show's roots, no sense of what the pre-A&B era was all about, no Nostalgic sensibilities. This writer said the Howard&Raj segments were one of their least-favorite parts of the show, and clearly saw the absence of A&B in that ep as an anomaly and a step backwards. ( a step backwards in a bad way, I mean.)
Personally, I don't believe the AV Club reviewers have sat down and watched all of S1 or S2. I don't think they've watched more than a handful of episodes, period.
There's so much second-hand information on the Web now, it would be extremely easy to fake an opinion on something you're really not very familiar with.
They watch the ep (or just clips from the ep), they read Wikipedia to remind themselves of who the characters are, they write their spiel. They have no sense of the show's history and therefore they don't see its current state as an aberration.
And yes, I absolutely think they're "connected" in some way and there's some type of cronyism/networking/whatever in play. $$$
TL;DR: From what I've seen, AV Club's reviews are never Nostalgic-friendly or even logical/reasonable/consistent, and that's because they're working from sort of a Cliffs Notes version of the show, IMO. Oh, and one guy said that it was awesome to watch Howard being emasculated. I went at him like a Grizzly on PCP.