Welcome to another Wildcard Wednesday! I hope you’re all sitting down for this. After months of introspection, I have decided that the time has come to reduce our rate of five original entries per week down to three. While this is partly a response to upcoming changes within my own life and schedule, the biggest consideration for this cutback is the simple fact that I don’t want to continue producing content that isn’t of the quality, or rendered with the same effort, as past contributions. In other words, it’s better to end things on a high, than a low, and I believe the the time to do so is now.
Starting in January 2016, we will cease producing original entries for Xena Thursday and Film Friday. The Xena decision is an easy one; we’ve covered the entire series, and Hercules, in a variety of forms over the past two-and-a-half years, and all that I have to say has been said. I’m sure many of my regular readers wondered (from the start) why I gave a whole day to this series, especially since it’s rather incongruous with the other subjects covered here. But there’s no way to undervalue the importance that the show has had in instilling within me a love of television, inspiring my need to be a storyteller, and illustrating the importance of remaining open-minded and objective. I love television because of Xena, and although I won’t be blogging about it weekly, my deep appreciation for the series is unending. These posts will remain here indefinitely for all future scholars, fans, and curious parties.
In the case of Film Friday, the decision was more difficult. When I knew that Xena was coming to an end, I decided that another day would be going as well. This isn’t a case of running out of things to cover; on the contrary, there are hundreds of films that I’d still like to feature here. Fortunately, the opportunity to do so still exists — on Wildcard Wednesday. It is my error that Film Friday has regularly highlighted mediocre films alongside great ones. I’ve mostly used the day to cover certain stars’ bodies of Pre-Code work: the good, the bad, and the ugly. As a result, there are many films that don’t deserve to be here. Transferring my insatiable fascination with Pre-Code cinema to Wildcard Wednesdays, where these films will be highlighted once or twice a month, allows us to return our focus onto the works that really deserve our attention. In other words, Film Friday is moving to Wednesdays, and we’re cutting out all of the films that aren’t worth your time. So, for fans of the day (and I know I have subscribers here who love Friday most of all), I urge you to stick around because there’s marvelous stuff ahead!
But I know that this may not be happy news to all of my readers, and as much as I’d like to cite this change as only temporary, it’s likely going to be permanent (at least, I won’t be going back to five days). However, as mentioned above, none of these posts will ever disappear from the site, and new Film entries — heck, Xena too — are going to recur on Wednesdays in 2016. (To wit: I just finished writing a comparison between the 1931 Pre-Code version of Waterloo Bridge and the glossy 1940 MGM production with Vivien Leigh. Expect it in mid-January of next year.) So I hope you’ll all stay with me for the duration of my time here, because I’m unspeakably grateful for your readership, your encouragement, your support, your kindness, and most importantly, your love of great entertainment. I look forward to sharing all this with you — and much, much more — for many years to come.
Come back next Wednesday for another Wildcard post! And tune in tomorrow for the start of our last series of original posts on Xena Thursday!
You need to do what you must to be happy with your work. We’ll be reading!!!
Hi, bobster427! Thanks for reading and commenting.
And thank you for your kind words. These next few months will be some of the best yet!
Jackson, this sounds like a very sensible decision. I’m sure the vast majority of your readers will understand — and will appreciate the blog as much as ever. Three entries a week seems extremely generous to me!
Hi, Scott! Thanks for reading and commenting.
I appreciate your kind words, thank you. (But I know if I’d cut Musical Theatre Mondays, you would be feeling differently!)
Best of luck on the changes. You have created an impressive body of work and I’m glad you are continuing. I don’t know how you did it in the first place.
Hi, David! Thanks for reading and commenting.
It’s all been a labor of love and I’m grateful to all my friends and readers for their support! There’s some GREAT stuff coming up soon . . .
You scared me for a minute! I thought you were going to announce that you were discontinuing your blog, and I just recently discovered it. The season-by-season sitcom analyses have been my favorite posts, overall. I don’t always agree with your choices, but even when I don’t, the reasons behind the episodes you select are always thoughtful and interesting.
Just curious about something. You’ve written about quite a number of TV shows at this point. Have any of them disappointed you in one way or another? Maybe didn’t live up to their reputation or just didn’t seem as good as you remembered?
Hi, James! Thanks for reading and commenting.
Disappointment, and its pleasanter opposite, is about expectation. I’ve generally gone into every series that we’ve covered on Sitcom Tuesdays with my anticipations properly calibrated. If anything, having to screen an entire show for analysis usually makes me more appreciative. For instance, I’d seen (almost) every episode of MAUDE before writing those entries, but I wasn’t prepared to genuinely laugh as much. I consider it a much funnier series now than I would have a year ago. I feel the same, with its inescapable flaws duly noted, about PHYLLIS.
Where most disappointment exists is when a show establishes itself at a certain level of quality that it’s soon unable to maintain. Now, as discussed several weeks ago, this is applicable to almost every series, and the better the writing initially, the more disappointing the fall (ALL IN THE FAMILY). I’m only really bothered when my expectations, dictated by the show itself, are not met. For example, we know THE JEFFERSONS (or BEWITCHED) gets really awful near the end of the run, so I know to decrease my standards. But no one remarks on the change in the final two years of THE BOB NEWHART SHOW. Sure, a rotten episode of THE BOB NEWHART SHOW is going to be lightyears better than a rotten episode of THE JEFFERSONS, but because of the excellent reputation the former series had already established, the disappointment cuts deeper, and because the decline is less obvious, you don’t know to prepare.
Wildcard Wednesdays is a different story, and in fact, I regret featuring some of those shows here. My thinking at the time was that they were interesting and/or related to other material we were currently covering. But based on their entertainment value, they didn’t deserve to be here. I’m speaking, in particular, about both THREE’S COMPANY spin-offs. They brought me a lot of hits, but they’re not good enough for me or my site, and I hope not to reach THE ROPERS’ level of quality here again — no matter how fascinating it is to look at a train wreck.