I wonder, additionally, how the relationships between the creators affects audience reception — within comics, at least, the creators very frequently hold conversations among themselves, and evidence of their friendships beyond the professional boundaries is abundant. Does recognizing constellations of like-minded creators who are likely to communicate and collaborate influence the perception of those people, for the audience? Are people more likely to read Matt Fraction’s work because of his friendships with Warren Ellis and Brian Michael Bendis?

I also agree with those who feel the tension, as critics, between being honest and being nice to creators you’ve gotten to know. I’ve been relatively lucky in that the creators I’ve formed relationships with put out quality work that I don’t have to criticize frequently, but I know there are opinions, even very mild and polite opinions, that I’ve stopped myself from expressing on twitter because I worried it might upset someone I admire.

Another facet of this problem which hasn’t seemed to impact the TV crit-osphere (yet?) is the Peter Travers Effect – writing reviews not to offer insight, but to generate pull quotes for press packs & posters. Once Myles and Todd start getting quoted on DVD covers, we can pillory them for selling out…

And it was probably just Harmon’s assistant that commented. I mean, how could a showrunner have time to visit blogs and websites…COMMUNITY is filming right now!

And of course it occurred to me that Sutter or Harmon might read my comment here but figured this is audience/critic turf, and it’d be pretty hypocritical of those guys in particular to object to someone expressing an opinion.

Louis C.K.’s comments interest me because they’re not so much responding to the review as they are adding to it: he seemed to be interested in expanding discussion, and further explaining the series’ function and purpose, and decided to interact with the community surrounding the posts rather than emailing the critics (which he certainly could have done, and then waited for the interview to post or the like). It’s not dissimilar from showrunners who would wade into the TWoP forums back in the day, albeit now merged more clearly with secondary textual analysis (which is what makes it really fascinating to me).

I’m equally fascinated, though, by the notion of self-censoring (however subtly) in order to take the “Stumble-upon” factor into account. I recently discovered that a showrunner was reading my largely positive reviews of their series, and my mind immediately went to the one negative review I had written. I don’t regret anything I wrote, but I do think that such knowledge would influence future writing, whether I want it to or not. It’s also something that would be different for those in different positions, raising questions about whose job it is to write negative criticism and what sort of different levels of cultural capital bloggers, fans, critics, scholars and other groups have in such matters.

But, rather than going on, let’s save it for Flow.