Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
 
                               The New York Times
 
                 October 20, 2002, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
 
SECTION: Section 6; Page 68; Column 1; Magazine Desk
 
LENGTH: 4524 words
 
HEADLINE: The Remote Controllers
 
BYLINE: By Marshall Sella; Marshall Sella is a contributing writer for the
 magazine. He last wrote about the British comedian Steve Coogan.
 
BODY:
 
Sarah D. Bunting and Tara Ariano are obscure names in the high-stakes world
 of Hollywood TV production. They are anything but L.A. insiders; Bunting works
 in Manhattan, while Ariano is based in Toronto. Yet their opinions carry real
 weight among the producers and writers who fashion many of the most popular
 programs on television. The two women are co-editors of a Web site called
 Television Without Pity, and that's a name producers know extremely well. True
 to its name, Televisionwithoutpity.com critiques shows mercilessly and includes
 message boards where vast communities of passionate viewers register everything
 from arcane appraisals of a program's story line to their hatred of an actor's
 leather jacket. When TWoP editors run interviews with writers and producers on
 the site, it is usually because the Hollywood types have contacted them, a
 little dazed by the level of the site's vitriol.
 
Even a show as critically adored as "The Sopranos" gets smacked around when
 it disappoints its most ardent fans. This season's third episode, for example,
 which was loosely centered on a local Columbus Day parade, was instantly deemed
 a flop by TWoP participants. "Was this entire episode made to shut up the
 Italians that keep complaining about how they are portrayed in the media?"
 complained one viewer. "The whole Italian image thing really just bored me to
 death." Another posting offered a litany of protests: "The death of Bobby's wife
 was really gratuitous. . . . I also don't quite get the reason why Carmela would
 be attracted to Furio." The hardest knocks, however, were reserved for a sex
 scene involving Tony Soprano's sister, Janice. "I really didn't need to see
 that," wrote one repelled viewer. "I've now gone completely blind." Another fan
 joined in: "I never thought I would be so grateful for a white piece of fabric
 in my life, but God bless the top sheet of Janice's bed." Within days, 274
 detailed messages had been posted about the episode.
 
Right now, Television Without Pity has active discussions on 35 shows. And
 that's just one Web site. Most popular series are tracked by scores of sites --
 an official one run by the network; the others run by fans -- that dissect the
 content of every episode. Many postings are requests for specific changes. Some
 of these are minute. "I can't believe Abby bleached her hair," an "E.R." fan
 recently lamented online. "She looks better as a brunette." Other critiques are
 more sweeping, asking the show's writers to aim higher. One TWoP participant
 recently wrote of "C.S.I.": "It would be refreshing if the 'bad guys' actually
 got away with murder (pun intended) on this show for once. Instead, 'C.S.I.'
 remains in a time warp, and takes the 'Perry Mason' approach in which the good
 guys win every ep. Boring."
 
It would be simple to underestimate the intensity with which Web sites
 fetishize TV programs -- and the impact they have on the show's creators. It is
 now standard Hollywood practice for executive producers (known in trade argot as
 "show runners") to scurry into Web groups moments after an episode is shown on
 the East Coast. Sure, a good review in the print media is important, but the
 boards, by definition, are populated by a program's core audience -- many
 thousands of viewers who care deeply about what direction their show takes.
 
Any notion that the Hollywood telegentsia hovers above the fan-site fray was
 shattered two years ago when Aaron Sorkin, creator of "The West Wing," bitterly
 responded to an online complaint; he posted under his own name on Television
 Without Pity (or, as it was then called, Mighty Big TV). A year later, Sorkin
 wrote a "West Wing" episode that savaged TWoP and its ilk, portraying hard-core
 Internet users as obese shut-ins who lounge around in muumuus and chain-smoke
 Parliaments. It was his best and loudest available form of revenge against a
 phenomenon that has not always treated him fondly. One disgruntled "West Wing"
 viewer recently demanded on TWoP that Sorkin show his fictional president and
 first lady "being nice to each other some time." She went on: "I don't mean show
 us they love each other -- that's been established. I mean call each other
 something other than 'Jackass' and 'Medea.' Or give each other a kiss hello.
 Something!"
 
John Wells, executive producer of "E.R." and "The West Wing," knows better
 than to shrug off Web sites' feedback. "We always have someone on the writing
 staff assigned to keep track of them," Wells says. "Though we don't often need
 to assign that duty. There's always a writer who's in there all the time and can
 give you a clear sense of what's going on. I don't overreact to the boards, but
 I pay real attention to messages that are thoughtful. If you ignore your
 customer, you do so at your peril."
 
J.J. Abrams, show runner of the very Net-friendly spy show "Alias," sees the
 boards as a real measure of the audience's pulse and rates their members as
 nothing less than "an integral part of the process." That could never have been
 said five years ago.
 
"If the Internet is your audience, TV is quite like a play," Abrams says.
 "Movies are a done deal -- there's no give and take -- but in a play, you listen
 to the applause, the missing laughs, the boos. It's the same with the Internet.
 If you ignore that sort of response, you probably shouldn't be working in TV
 right now."
 
Ever since "The X-Files" sparked the proliferation of Internet message boards
 in the mid-90's, TV creators have gradually come to realize the value of these
 feverish Web discussions. Online chat, fluffy as that phrase sounds, has become
 a force in Hollywood -- one that nobody anticipated, possibly because it married
 new technology with a curious variation of old-fashioned viewer mail. The
 Internet allows a mass audience to register specific desires and grievances that
 can never be conveyed by the Nielsen ratings. What's more, creators of TV shows
 can actually incorporate these insights from viewers. Where films are a single
 exhale of artistic breath, television breathes in and out over time. It doesn't
 exist as one impenetrable objet after a single act of creation. In TV's
 perpetual, rolling incompleteness, anyone with the right equipment, anyone who
 finds the right tunnel in, can actually bend and shade its content. And
 technology has made the tunnel wide enough for tens of thousands to enter at
 once. With the aid of the Internet, the loftiest dream for television is being
 realized: an odd brand of interactivity. Television began as a one-way street
 winding from producers to consumers, but that street is now becoming two-way. A
 man with one machine (a TV) is doomed to isolation, but a man with two machines
 (TV and a computer) can belong to a community.
 
Television without pity was conceived as a narrower and less ambitious site,
 co-founded by Bunting (who goes by Sars on the site) and Ariano (known as Wing
 Chun), along with a tech expert named David T. Cole (Glark). Back when they
 first published on the Net in the fall of 1998, their site was called
 DawsonsWrap; it charted the narrative path of the teen-oriented hit "Dawson's
 Creek." In very short order, that show began frustrating TWoP editors beyond
 measure. Bunting says that its "insidious, sexist, lazy writing had us
 apoplectic, not least because we're supposed to identify with a character who,
 on his best day, is an obnoxious, self-absorbed twit. Of course, there's no way
 for us to prove that we had a direct impact, but we spent three years taking the
 'Dawson's' writers to task, and in the wake of our criticism, the character
 actually became almost bearable." Although Dawson remained an irritating
 character, Bunting explains, he developed a welcome self-awareness about how
 much he annoyed the people around him.
 
In 1999, Ariano and Bunting widened their scope considerably, applying their
 site's gruff sensibility to an array of shows. TWoP's home page now bears the
 slogan "Spare the Snark, Spoil the Networks." The site is essentially twofold.
 One of its attractions, of course, is the message boards; anybody with an
 opinion can post a message. But its most elegant punch comes in its "recaps" of
 individual episodes. These recaps, written by freelance writers, routinely run
 anywhere between 10 and 16 pages, not much shorter than an actual script, and
 are stunningly witty and precise. Ariano and Bunting split the editing duties.
 In their accounts of every relevant moment of a given episode (progressing
 almost line by line, often reproducing entire passages of dialogue), their hired
 "recappers" are by turns vicious and admiring. They scatter their prose with
 references to any number of other TV shows and movies. It is all very
 intertextual discourse, shot through with cruel nicknames they accord the shows'
 characters and an overall air of merry, unveiled contempt. A recent precis of a
 "Dawson's Creek" episode, for example, began with this genteel observation:
 "Those screaming sounds you heard last night around 9 p.m.? They were the cries
 of anguish and pain unleashed when thousands of viewers ripped their eyes out of
 their skulls so as to avoid the opening scenes of the second half of the
 'Dawson's Creek' two-part season premiere." The recapper for "Six Feet Under" is
 particularly droll. Recounting a scene in which Nate Fisher flirts with Ari, a
 female rabbi, he writes: "Now, I know a lot of people are turned off by the
 rabbi's constant assertions that she and Nate can never be together, but the sad
 truth is that that's pretty much exactly how Jews really flirt. . . . The scene
 continues with Ari delivering some psychobabble about the nature of unintended
 consequences, but since no one is really interested in my thoughts on Talmudic
 law, I won't bore you with details. On the other hand, Nate clearly has a thing
 for girls who go metaphysical, so maybe it's actually a very clever dating
 technique. Anyway, the scene ends with them holding hands, each secretly wishing
 that they could rip the other's clothes off. I swear, if Nate doesn't dump
 Brenda for this woman soon, I don't know what I'll do. Probably make fun of his
 hair some more."
 
Hollywood hardly takes its marching orders from TWoP -- it would be daylight
 madness to abjure creative control to amateurs and, worse, outsiders -- but it
 certainly pays heed. One of the executive producers of "The Agency," Shaun
 Cassidy (yes, that Shaun Cassidy), once e-mailed the TWoP editors about their
 brutal coverage of his show, but he conceded that he thought the posts were
 funny and went so far as to end his note with the sincere query, "Do you have
 any scripts to show me?" One TWoP recapper, Heather Cocks, was hired as a
 Hollywood staff writer on the strength of her critiques of "Making the Band."
 She now writes for a reality show called "Tough Enough," which is actually much
 like "Making the Band," only with wrestlers.
 
TWoP pays its recap writers next to nothing and has itself hovered on the
 brink of oblivion; generating revenue on the Internet continues to be a mystery
 even to the best minds in American media. Though it has been forced to cut back
 on the number of programs it covers, the site sees a lot of traffic. Even during
 this summer's languid off-season, it pulled 350,000 "unique users" a month, and
 those numbers have sharply increased since. Most remarkably, the average
 viewer's time per session on TWoP is now 22 minutes; on the Net, that's an
 eternity.
 
One of the more playful signs of TV creators' scrutiny of Internet sites is a
 new tactic that Hollywood slang has dubbed "the shout-out." Quite often, as a
 sly wink to a Web site (and an assurance that its interest is requited),
 producers will include references to specific fan sites in their episodes. There
 have been dozens of shout-outs to TWoP alone. The satirical (and therefore
 canceled) show "Popular" named a character after the man who recapped the show
 for TWoP, only to cheerfully kill him off in an auto crash. NBC's "Ed" once
 similarly tapped out a coded greeting to the site; the man who recaps it for
 TWoP goes by the name Uncle Bob, so the show's writers used the nonexistent
 Midwest expression "What in the Uncle Bob was that?" The show "Once and Again"
 has included glimpses of an extra carrying a messenger bag with the TWoP logo.
 It is all a way of ratcheting up Internet heat, of Hollywood whispering through
 the screen to its online enforcers: We read you loud and clear. Also, please, be
 gentle with us.
 
Internet message boards, observes Abrams of "Alias," reverse the process of
 the writer's room. In conception, a staff plots out and arcs a story line,
 fleshing it out in production. "Viewers in the boards dissect it just as
 carefully," he points out. "They're so smart. They realize the most subtle
 connections in the script and get to the core nugget. It's really cool."
 
Accordingly, sites like TWoP have subtle but substantive input. "On our show,
 there's a character named Will that we thought people would love," J.J. Abrams
 says, laughing. "We conceived him as a man pursuing the truth. But on the
 message boards, people thought he was an idiot! He was pursuing a truth they
 already knew; they were way ahead. So we fine-tuned the way he was presented and
 came up with stories that worked better for the audience. Of the 10 million
 things you have to keep in mind running a show, you can only keep 8 million in
 your head. The Internet groups are right there to remind you about the other 2
 million things. They don't lead us, but they're as important as anything.
 
"This isn't live TV. We're working six or eight weeks in advance, so our
 reactions aren't immediate, but there are times when, in post-production, we'll
 make line changes or alter a piece of music. I'll accept a smart critique from
 anywhere, whether it's from a 50-year-old studio executive or a 12-year-old kid
 in a rural town. Internet people are a community. They have a proprietary sense
 of the show. Why would I ignore people who take the time to think these things
 through? I am so grateful. They're doing what I'd be doing if I weren't working
 in TV."
 
The "Alias" message boards on TWoP include a section called "Dear J.J."
 Viewers don't post letters to the show, or naively to the stars: they know how
 the creative hierarchy works. Typically, one member, who goes by the name
 Carrielynn, offered this critique in the wake of Will's rehabilitation: "Dear
 J.J., Now, after some consideration, I have decided that I don't completely and
 utterly hate Will. Yes, he is completely idiotic sometimes, and yes, he screams
 like a girl. But aside from that, I got no beef. Just a couple of conditions for
 you to follow and everything will go smoothly next season. 1. As previously
 stated, there is no reason for Willage to be sporting a leather jacket. Ever. 2.
 Please, and I'm begging you, don't try to make him a love interest for Syd. Good
 friend, fine, but I'd hate for this show to go the tired love-triangle route
 that so many other shows have gone (cough, 'Felicity,' cough cough.) Let's show
 some creativity, shall we? And J.J., this last contingency is of utmost
 importance: 3. FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, BUY THE BOY A HAIRBRUSH. Do we understand each
 other?"
 
As they are cybernetically masked in a spooky "Eyes Wide Shut" sort of way,
 message-board folk are unfettered by the decorum you would employ in a letter to
 the editor of a magazine, but they police a show's quality and content all the
 same. Anonymity breeds not only rudeness but also sincerity. For his part,
 Abrams is dazzled by the viewers' meticulous knowledge. Message groups are so
 reliable about a show's history that he has used them to confirm details about
 old "Alias" episodes. It is quicker -- and every bit as trustworthy -- as
 rifling through old scripts.
 
Sites like TWoP may have more power than even their creators realize. Two
 years ago, the producers of "Charmed" were on the fence about bringing back a
 (half-human) character named Cole for its next season, but the message boards'
 lust for him was a deciding factor. Granted, this practice isn't entirely novel;
 soap operas have reacted to regular mail with that degree of attention for
 decades. But the swiftness and heft of it is utterly different. Though few on a
 TV staff read viewer mail, everybody can read the boards. Writers check out
 their episode's "grade" on TWoP; cast members read Internet commentary and are
 by turns elated or upset. Some who portray villains are mortified to see that
 people in the message boards hate them. (An alarming number of viewers want to
 "slap" Janice Soprano.)
 
It has even become Hollywood routine for a writer's assistant to work the
 boards as a mole. A staff member will slink into a board anonymously and, like
 Prince Hal walking incognito among his troops, tout a coming episode. Aspiring
 writers are routinely ordered to pop into message boards and pimp an episode
 before it is shown, often with a shifty claim along the lines of: I know someone
 who works on "Angel" and got a sneak peek at tonight's show! It's awesome!
 
That said, advance press doesn't always come from moles. Message groups
 sometimes get hold of synopses and scripts, then post "spoilers" about coming
 shows. In Hollywood, keeping control of a script is nearly impossible. On some
 popular shows, there is said to be what amounts to a near black market in
 as-yet-unshot scripts. Within a day or two of a script's being dispatched to the
 studio for approval, the thing has appeared on the Internet.
 
Curiously, this has occasionally resulted in direct improvements in shows.
 Recently, one hit show had a routine script leak, and the staff awoke to find
 someone on a message board complaining that a character was speaking fluent
 French when that same character had been seen peering at a basic phrase book not
 so many episodes earlier. The writers were actually able to correct the
 continuity error in shooting that very script, thanks to a message board's
 ill-gained insights.
 
Although fierce in their criticisms of beloved shows, Internet discussion
 boards feature the most loyal viewers imaginable. And when a cherished show is
 canceled, they don't move on quietly. Last month, when TNT canceled
 "Witchblade," a call went out in an Internet group called Witchblade Central
 Station to publish a "save our show" ad in Variety. The ad cost $3,550, but
 members were thrilled to help and donated the funds in short order. A similar
 outcry occurred on the Yahoo message board for ABC's "Push, Nevada," a show that
 suffered the terrors of the damned from being relegated to the worst time slot
 in television (pitted against the monster hits "C.S.I." and "Will and Grace").
 Group members -- numbering more than 8,500 on that one site alone -- drew up
 petitions and contemplated boycotting ABC and all its advertisers.
 
In the wilderness of Internet feedback, of course, there is more fecund
 ground for certain networks and shows. While ABC has actually eliminated most of
 its official message boards because of the manpower it takes to moderate them,
 networks like the WB and Fox, with their younger, Net-savvy viewers, lean
 heavily on them. Any program with a sci-fi element is, by its nature, bound to
 have an Internet presence. After all, it was "The X-Files" that started this
 whole phenomenon; in effect, it paved the two-way street. The show was an ideal
 petri dish for Web cult status, appealing to fans who knew their way around
 their computers and who were prone to trade theories on conspiracy and mystery.
 (It still draws extensive Net feedback, despite the fact that the show is now
 only on the air in repeats.) Similarly, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which offers
 the twin appeal of teen fashion and the supernatural, has long been a sure-fire
 message-board draw.
 
Conversely, shows that skew to older audiences or those with very broad
 demographics are less likely to pay close attention to their Internet response,
 and logically so. Viewers of "Yes, Dear" and "Providence" are not typically
 clambering online the minute an episode ends. And there is no "Friends" forum on
 TWoP. "We'll never get a shout-out from 'E.R.,"' says Television Without Pity's
 Ariano, without a trace of regret. "It's too established."
 
That said, though the two-way street of viewer feedback is rolling with
 tumbleweeds on grayer, more staid networks like CBS, reality TV is the
 exception. Chris Ender, that network's senior vice president for communications,
 says "Survivor" was CBS's wake-up call to the power of the Net. "In the first
 season, there was a ground swell of attention in there," he recalls. "We started
 monitoring the message boards to actually help guide us in what would resonate
 in our marketing. It's just the best market research you can get."
 
The "reality-based" shows also enjoy direct participation on the Web by their
 protagonists, who are giddy from the attention and only too happy to hang out
 with virtual fans. TWoP editors have moles in one of the more famous programs of
 that genre and have become friendly with the contestants of "The Amazing Race"
 from both of its seasons. The "stars" consider the site their mouthpiece,
 chasing the adrenaline high of their all-too-fleeting appearances on TV talk
 shows, and now sometimes socialize -- "IRL," or "in real life" -- with TWoP
 staff members.
 
Message-board types feel that they're getting something back in their
 half-imaginary communities. They're happy to be neighbors, bound by a common
 mission out in the Internet suburbs of big-ticket American media. They bend
 heliotropically to the attention of artists they admire, warm their hands on the
 glow of celebrity and creativity. And they feel that, in a very real way,
 they're involved with the show.
 
They're not deluded. A few seasons ago, after the main character on
 "Felicity" decided to cut her famous long hair, WB executives were so alarmed at
 the virulent Web reaction that they feared their actress had lost some of her
 iconic power. There was even talk of using wigs to lure back the betrayed
 viewers, but it was felt that the wisest course was to have her grow the hair
 back. Similarly, the show runner for "E.R.," John Wells, told me that a sudden
 appearance of wispy facial hair on the dreamboat-doctor Noah Wyle "resulted in
 thousands of Internet hits. It was staggering." As it happened, Wyle had never
 meant to keep the goatee as a long-term look, and he shaved it off of his own
 accord. (His Internet approval promptly grew back.) The TWoP critique at the
 time, written by Ariano, was gin-clear: "Oh, Jeebus," she wrote, in the
 freewheeling house style. "Why won't someone close to Noah Wyle just tell him
 that he shouldn't grow facial hair, like, ever?"
 
Nancie S. Martin, who runs the WB's Web site, sees the boards' imprints
 firsthand. "The directions shows take is affected by all this," she says.
 "Producers really do use these communities. On 'Smallville,' for instance, there
 was a feeling on the message boards that the show should focus more on character
 than Kryptonite, and sure enough, the next season is going to reflect that
 directly."
 
Of course, there are limits to viewers' understanding when it comes to the
 inner workings of Hollywood. No show runner discusses the boards without using
 the phrase "grain of salt." Marti Noxon, executive producer of "Buffy the
 Vampire Slayer," has had to cut back on her Web visits, in no small measure
 because some loyal fans quite unjustly turned against her -- by name. Internet
 fans blamed Noxon for changing the tone of the show, which was created by Joss
 Whedon. One British viewer went so far as to post: "I think Marti Noxon should
 be on BtVS. And I think Drusilla and Spike should tie her up and torture her,
 then kill her in the most painful way possible. Then hacking her body beyond
 recognition so there could be no possible way to make her rise from the grave.
 Then they should STAMP on the bits."
 
Says Noxon: "It all gets very personal. I don't have a strong enough ego to
 go in there. People on those sites blame me for the darkness of last season's
 shows, and those story lines were created by Joss a year earlier. This show is a
 slow-turning ship. But suddenly, I'm the Queen of Darkness on the Net! This
 year, we've made the show . . . well, a bit less dark. We get the sense, having
 read those criticisms, that maybe we've just been amusing ourselves."
 
Nell Scovell, creator of the TV series "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch," has also
 felt the Net's pull, but knows to be a bit skeptical. "When I was running
 'Sabrina,' I used to check the message boards after each episode, but it's hard
 to know how much stock to put into them," she says. "I'd see a comment like, '
 This show is more inteligent than most,' and my first reaction would be, 'This
 viewer's a genius,' and my second reaction would be, 'Wouldn't a genius spell
 "intelligent" correctly?"'
 
Of course, it is tempting -- and often well advised -- to scoff at people who
 adopt loopy pseudonyms (Dawsnzchck; Touched--By--A--TV) to obsess online about
 their fave TV shows. It's as easy as shooting Trekkies in a barrel. But perhaps
 that's not a fair impulse. Robert Thompson, a media expert at Syracuse
 University, withholds his scorn. "If this were happening at any other time in
 history, we'd celebrate it," he insists. "When readers hold parties for
 Bloomsday and discuss James Joyce, we consider it an apex -- people taking
 culture seriously. But when viewers discuss the minutiae of a TV show, we call
 them crazy. One's got to admire it. Essentially what the message boards are is a
 panel of unpaid experts, with passion, analyzing culture."
 
Even on this oddly personal level, the effect of the new interactivity has
 its distorting effects. As much as it grounds the program, it fictionalizes the
 viewer. While audiences feel more invested in their favorite shows, the medium
 might become more geared to precisely what the old neo-Marxist intellectuals
 dreaded: a hyperactively numbed consumer culture, resulting not in art but in a
 "culture industry" that demeans and deceives rather than enlightens, even if the
 message boards' input is "active" and has an impact on the narratives of shows.
 
In an extreme case, it could be that Net influence, with its qualitative
 specificity and sheer heat, could gnaw away at the hegemony of the Nielsen
 ratings. Perhaps, if message boards become powerful and pervasive enough, the
 day will come when viewers vote online for or against a show's renewal,
 "American Idol"-style.
 
So, for the moment, TV interactivity lives where it always did, but writ
 large: in human feedback. Television Without Pity may lack mercy, but it is
 wildly supportive of the medium. It's electronic tough love. But then, there's
 the old truism that, in Hollywood, a friend is someone who stabs you in the
 chest.
 
And -- for the moment -- Sarah D. Bunting, with her bright, flick-knife
 prose, is still on the job, keeping both lanes open on the two-lane highway.
 "There are people who tell us, 'Get a life!"' she says. "Well, this is it. This
 is what we went out and got. If only we could get to these TV people before they
 made the shows."
 
 
http://www.nytimes.com
 
GRAPHIC: Photos (Scott Garfield/ABC; Barry Wetcher/HBO; Craig Blankenhorn/NBC)
 
Drawings (Paul Davis)
 
LOAD-DATE: October 20, 2002