Hi, and welcome to The Incomparable. Let me tell you a story.
In the late summer of 1996 my wife and I had dinner in San Francisco with Ben Boychuk, a college friend. Since late 1995 Ben and I had been writing strange things about television and sending them to a group of college friends. I suggested that we post them on the Internet, a wild idea at the time. And in September 1996, TeeVee was born.
In the intervening 12-plus years, TeeVee writers have come and gone. At its height, we had more than a year where we basically posted new content every day. That height was a long time ago. In the intervening time that group of college friends expanded, to encompass our friends and even like-minded folks who read the site and liked it and wanted to write for it. But in that intervening time, we grew up and got jobs and got married and started families.
The Internet grew up, too. What was a novelty in 1996 — a site with writings about television! (the word blog hadn’t even been coined yet) — is now quite common. TV critics who get paid to write about television now blog about it, many of them quite well. (I occasionally contribute to TV Barn, run by our old pal Aaron Barnhart. I listen to Tim Goodman’s podcast religiously. And my TV viewing would not be the same were it not supplemented by the excellent blogs operated by Alan Sepinwall and James Poniewozick.)
For 12 straight years we posted an April Fool’s web site. It was a lot of fun, though as the perpetrator of most of the HTML fraud over 12 years, let me tell you, it’s a lot harder to fake a web site in 2009 than it was in 1997. But this year, we’re not doing one. (I repeat: this is not a joke.)
Instead, we’re doing something else. We’re shuttering the old TeeVee site and starting something new, The Incomparable.
What is The Incomparable? The short answer is, we’re not sure yet. But the idea is to make it a home where we can write about things beyond just TV. This month we wrote thousands of words about “Watchmen” in an e-mail thread on our mailing list, but it never went anywhere. We have enough comic-book geeks and movie geeks to form angry cliques and have a falling out, but TeeVee didn’t give us anywhere to put it.
So at The Incomparable, we’ll put it up for grabs. We’ll still talk TV, sure. But I hope we also write about comics and movies, books and magazines, sports and art and culture and who knows what else? It’s my hope that all the writers who have darkened TeeVee’s door over the years will blog here, joined by others we recruit.
We also want this to be a site from 2009, not 1996. As a result: We’re going to open comment threads on what we write. We’re going to maybe try to do a podcast, this time for sure. We’re going to Twitter, I think. YouTube embeds? It wouldn’t surprise me. (Not everything is working now, and this site design is more generic than we’d like — we’re just getting started. Pardon our dust.)
After 12 years, it was time for something different. I don’t know what The Incomparable will be, but it will most definitely be different. Maybe even incomparable, even.
