Please Don’t Ask What I Think Of That Movie/Show/Game
My lane in journalism is about cool stories, not hot takes. I would rather share passion than ignite it.
About a dozen years before I ventured into opinion journalism, Homer Simpson set an example I wish I’d thought to follow — with or without personal takes. Actually, it was more his daughter Lisa’s example, just printed under his byline. It was only a matter of time before the revolutionary animated sitcom’s patriarch turned his fondness for food into a vocation. It happened in the fall of 1999 through Season 11, Episode 3: “Guess Who’s Coming To Criticize Dinner?”
For the first portion of his one-episode gig at the Springfield Shopper, Homer hardly lives up to his title of food critic. Through a goatlike taste for anything edible and an articulate ghostwriter in Lisa, he affectionately tells of every local establishment’s merits. The shared Simpson father-daughter column’s utopian mood begets a boom around Springfield’s culinary district. During a family walk there, Homer stops to admire the “difference” his thoughts and Lisa’s translations have generated as everyone gorges on the town’s offerings. Even Monty Burns — Homer’s forgetful boss from his normal workplace at the nuclear power plant — uncharacteristically recognizes him and credits him with instilling a new joy.
Naturally, the teleplay soon takes a twist. Homer’s fellow newspaper commentators denounce his deviation from the norms of criticism. One colleague tells him point-blank, “You’re a critic. You don’t have to like everything.”
That’s true, but no rule says a reviewer must dole out a quota of both raves and rants. When he follows his instinct to attain his column and sticks with it early on, Homer is being honest. That is one indispensable principle in journalism. Although, being Homer, he swiftly reverses his tone on every assignment to propitiate his peers and balance out the bevy of praise he previously heaped.
That’s when Lisa, being Lisa, walks out on her unpaid, uncredited assistant job. She tells her father he is “being cruel for no reason,” and precociously sets an example in sticking to her guns. I was only a few years older than Lisa, still in grade school, when “Guess Who’s Coming To Criticize Dinner?” premiered. I have long since pursued a career that, early on, came with several opinion/analysis-based assignments concerning sports, entertainment, and the intersection thereof.
I would have rather focused on straight news and feature writing — namely, content dependent on interviews — but figured I couldn’t be too choosey, and writing was writing anyway. So, like Homer at the start, I gave honest assessments of any topic thrust upon my desk. Unlike Homer, whenever my take was liable to appear “negative” in anyone’s eye, I was calling it like I saw it. I never thought or pretended to think one way or another because someone told me to.
Like Homer initially does, albeit sans ghostwriter in my case, I instinctively poured my passions into my prose, even when I thought an aspect of the subject matter needed a change for the better. That’s what I’ve always done on any writeup, including my preferred full-fledged storytelling gigs. When I thought the subject was especially underappreciated, I ambitiously dreamed of witnessing a “difference” on a par with the peak of Homer’s food-critic gig.
People, I subconsciously reasoned, might not always share, let alone admire, my viewpoint. But they would all see the enthusiasm and sense the energy, either firsthand or secondhand. Some might let their newfound curiosity convert their indifference to a shared interest in the topic.
Having covered women’s hockey as a student-journalist emulating a standard beat reporter, I once harbored that very ambition for the sport. Except instead of telling people why they should like it, I wanted to show them. I gave my best effort as a disembodied byline: building up marquee matchups and storylines, then highlighting the sights, sounds, and sixth-sense atmosphere of the rink on game day.
In the mid-aughts, I gave that desire a second act when I took a job editing the NCAA section of a hockey news-and-commentary site, Along the Boards. Those duties joined others when ATB rebooted as a sports-and-pop-culture web magazine, Pucks and Recreation. Under the P&R banner, there was much of the same ATB regimen plus entertainment content, all bearing a trail mix of trivia, interview-based human-interest storytelling, and op-eds. Shortly after we relaunched, I landed an entertainment commentary assignment without looking for it.
My managing editor, who was and remains a real-life and Facebook friend, saw me post about my hopes for my favorite sitcom, Modern Family, to ensure a strong finish to its saga. The series had just entered its eighth season, and I was keen on sticking through its yet-to-be-scheduled swan song (it would ultimately be Season 11). I just didn’t want it to lose too much of its quality along the way if it didn’t have to. The boss asked that I expand on that paragraph for a P&R entertainment column, so I did and thought nothing of it.
Any and all “negativity” came from a place of love.
But tell that to the column’s most vocal respondents. One wrapped up their protracted message to me as follows: “So, Al, if Modern Family is such a let down (sic) for you, then stop watching it and quit ruining it for the rest of us who still like it.”
Another displeased reader insisted I was trying to “destroy” the show’s “reputation” and that I was “hoping for it to end.”
Therein lies the proof that, just as you can’t make everyone agree with you, you can’t expect everyone to accurately interpret your message. I never said I no longer liked the show, let alone wanted it to curtail its run posthaste, because I didn’t feel that way.
As other portions of the column should have verified, I thought the series still had some steam and could find ways to beat the clock and cap its run triumphantly but there was no guarantee it would. None of that mattered to most of the readers who bothered to engage. The first of those commenters who fixated on column’s low points unequivocally wanted me out of the Modern Family fan club. Like Homer’s reviews in the latter half of his food-critic episode, my work was infuriating my fellow aficionados for what I, like Lisa, came to see as no good reason.
Similarly, two months after the ModFam misunderstanding, a regular weekly hockey column I tended to for P&R left me feeling like a full-on pariah among women’s hockey enthusiasts. My assessment of the sport’s despairingly paltry fanfare in a fledgling professional league and my propositions to rectify it — such as putting teams in more provenly viable markets and working from there — incited punches from fellow sportswriters. That list included former coworkers and (I thought) one-time cordial competitors.
Much to my consolation, my aforementioned boss defended me publicly and one-on-one. In private conversations, he laughed at the implicit accusations of sexism I had drawn for essentially saying that women’s hockey needed and deserved more fans and for proposing what I considered pathways to that. He knew I was proud to have covered that sport at the elite travel and Division I college levels when I was a student and that I wanted my writing on it to take an effect similar to what Homer’s (err…Lisa’s) food reviews had on the Springfield restaurant scene.
Still, the preventable unpleasantness had me asking why I was doing this. Because controversy sold, let alone that much better than storytelling? Because this was just what we as media members did in this age?
Now here I was, doing what came more naturally to me. Asking questions, as opposed to inevitably acting like I had all the answers, whether it pertained to a fading sitcom or a fledgling sports league. With the way the construed negativity boomeranged to me, you would have figured I had flipped my tone on those topics 180 degrees, a la Homer.
I had not. But because I had spotted an issue, wanted it remedied, and suggest a solution, the outspoken masses seemed to think they needed to grow our mutually beloved show or sport’s base through addition by subtraction. They wanted me to go away, just like that. So as soon as I could, I did get away — from all things opinionated.
Clickbait commentary is undeniably all the rage on print journalism’s cyberscape. In fact, “rage” was the emotion one of my fellow women’s hockey scribes expressly deployed in the onslaught against my column.
Yet whereas some bylines thrive in spite of or even because of the vitriol they incur, I struggled through my repeated baptismal fires. Prior to ATB/P&R, I had lost a sports columnist job at another site after being implicitly demoted 18 months prior following a wave of roundly lambasted columns, then seeing my all-important analytics recede. Come what may, at both sites, even in the moments when cooler heads prevailed among readers, I was starving for stories. I wanted constructive conversations with people before the content went out, after which readers would talk about said people, not me.
And so, when P&R’s managing editor asked me to fill his seat while he focused on other ventures, I took the brand in the direction I thought suited my needs. I was unfit to opine, so if I could help it, mine was a steady diet of fun facts and human-interest narratives from now on. My colleagues — who were now all technically answering to me — could handle the opinionated content as it suited them.
Around the one-year mark of the P&R era, our team embarked on a comprehensive series to accentuate our tagline: “Where hockey and culture collide.” Leading up to the 25th anniversary of The Mighty Ducks, we would roll out 25 articles in as many days, ultimately covering all manner of the Mighty Ducks brand, from the three movies to the Anaheim NHL team and everything in between.
In my role as the P&R “player-coach,” I mostly oversaw everyone else’s output but made time and space for three feature stories of my own as part of this series. One of those self-assigned projects yielded one of the most enlightening interviews of my career thus far. As it relates to covering the likes of sports and entertainment, it was the most thought-provoking.
I got hold of Nathan West, who by then was best known among music fans as East of Eli; or possibly as the husband of Supergirl actor Chyler Leigh. He got there via a foray into acting in the late ’90s and early aughts after reaching his ceiling as an aspiring hockey goalie. And as he said in a remark that became the article’s headline: “It all started with Mighty Ducks 2.” With my knowledge going in, I teed West up and listened as he recounted his casting in a bit part as the rival Team Iceland goalie.
The movie’s hockey technical advisor, Jack White, had watched him backstop his Anchorage, Alaska team through a tournament in Southern California, approached him with an offer, and one opportunity led to another in due time. West later played major junior hockey, but when no pro contracts were forthcoming, he looked to build on his D2 credentials. Within a year of his last game in 1997, he had notched guest spots on four TV shows.
By the next year, he had met Leigh on the set of the new show Saving Graces. By 2001, they were engaged after he proposed behind the scenes of Not Another Teen Movie. By 2004 — a decade after D2 — he had one more go-round in hockey cinema as Rob McClanahan in Miracle. Leigh, who was expecting their first child when Miracle was in production, had pointed him to that opportunity.
“I did get to be a pro hockey player,” West told me of those two Disney roles, “not as a professional athlete, but as an actor.”
And he had played in a professional venue for that first role. The D2 championship game was filmed on location at the Anaheim Pond before a reported crowd of 12,000-plus extras. Nearly a quarter-century later, the gratification of suiting up and assuming his natural position in that setting had West explaining the profundity in what outside viewers might miss.
“I don’t think you understand how much it means to those young kids that get on that ice between periods of a National Hockey League game,” he told me. “We all find it to be adorable, but for those kids, that is something that is engrained in their mind. It will never leave you, it’s going to be there for the rest of your life.”
West knows that because he had the opportunity through a movie that critics tended to pan as more corny kiddie comedy on top of the same from the original Mighty Ducks. That general assessment is patent in the aggregate load of the film’s 15 selected critical reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, where D2 holds a paltry 20 percent critics’ approval rating and a failing 59 percent score among viewers.
As RT’s archive displays, the day the movie premiered, Entertainment Weekly’s Lois Alter Mark wrote, in part, “The sequel is even more banal than the original.” In a retro review posted in 2002, eFilmCritic’s Scott Weinberg slammed the screenplay as “Non-stop commercialism and a bunch of boring hockey stuff.”
In the papers, Malcolm Johnson of the Hartford Courant opined that D2 “seems to have next to nothing on its mind other than cashing in on the success of the original.” Meanwhile, Melinda Miller wrote in the Buffalo News, “Real junior hockey players might enjoy the fast-paced skating and rollerblading scenes, but when it comes to a story, this ‘Ducks’ doesn’t fly.”
West, having gone on to become a real junior hockey player in the Ontario League, proved Miller right on her charitable plus point. Having smoothly transitioned to acting, followed by music, and forged one of Hollywood’s steadiest — and, perhaps for the better, overlooked — power couples in “WestLeigh,” he represents one inside testament to the movie’s worth, regardless of what anyone has to say about its entertainment value or breadth of appeal.
“This whole door opened kind of by accident,” he told me, “but, man, Jack White had started it. Without that, I don’t know that I would have my three kids. Kind of funny to look at it from that perspective.”
Perspective — that was a key word my first journalism teacher introduced to me in middle school. And certainly, from West’s perspective, D2 absolutely did need to be made.
D2 provided the bridge for West to start repurposing his skills and restructuring his ambitions. Whatever form his dream took at a given time, and however much attention or glory it yielded, there was something to discuss about it a decade or two later. It went beyond the game, beyond the project, beyond the data in the box scores and box offices and all other items subject to critical assessment or analysis. Not many people may have watched his scholastic or junior hockey games compared to the crowds in NHL mansions. Not many may have watched, let alone admired, the movies that molded his entertainment resume compared to the audience films with a more “mainstream” appeal fetch. Some prospective viewers may have even decided they didn’t care to see his work because a pen-pusher or peer venomously discouraged them.
But unlike Homer, I haven’t always been so apt to crumble under peer pressure and kick aside my curiosity with something. Back in high school, it puzzled me the way some of my fellow sports enthusiasts would get angry — angry — when I brought up minor-league and other low-level or low-profile teams and leagues. They would curtly assert that “no one cares” about that, implicitly because the caliber of competition is not the highest in the game.
But even as I acknowledge the straightforward skill hierarchy in a given sport and its tiers, I have always found an appeal in the less-than-major leagues. Whether it was the sheer atmosphere of the games I attended as a kid or the gripping human-interest stories of the athletes following a big-league dream, however unrealistic it may be, or simply seizing the opportunity to play a child’s game for a living while they can and accepting the less-than-glamorous lifestyle that comes with it.
One of my favorite books — Dan Barry’s Bottom of the 33rd, all about Triple-A baseball’s longest-ever game and its various participants — exemplifies the big-league caliber of storytelling fodder hiding in plain sight at any ostensibly meaningless minor-league function. All parties involved in that contest — players, players’ spouses, coaches, officials, stadium staffers, media members, plain old spectators, the works — had their reasons to be there and stay there. They had treks leading them to that moment and then beyond it, all born out of the same affinity for the game.
That is the species of content I want to produce. I prefer not to assume, let alone assert, whether anything is worth paying attention to, let alone liking. While I loved the trimmings of the Pawtucket Red Sox experience during my childhood in Rhode Island (incidentally, the PawSox were the hosts of The Longest Game), I moved later in my upbringing and found other minor-league venues okay, but comparatively substandard.
Then again, that was probably just my Ocean State homesickness clouding my judgment. In the most compelling settings, a sports team at any level is a staple in the local culture, and everything goes well beyond the game, let alone the scoreboard or stat sheet. Since it matters to somebody, I feel duty-bound as a human-interest journalist to flex a little empathy and observe, absorb, then channel their passion through my prose.
Even outside of my work, my takeaways from the West interview have had me pausing and refraining from deciding whether anything — provided it unequivocally doesn’t harm anybody — should happen.
In the decade-plus between “Guess Who’s Coming To Criticize Dinner?” and my breakup with commentary, I would freely dismiss this century’s Simpsons teleplays as “glorified fan fiction.” As dedicated as the new writers were to the show, I thought they could not get inside the heads of their beloved characters the same way their predecessors who created and developed the cast in the first place had.
But so what? I based that stance on the only criterion at my disposal, namely my idea of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and their fellow Springfielders. My idea did not even necessarily align with the show’s old writers who had effectively shaped it for me. It was just an outsider’s interpretation, and so was whatever idea the new Simpsons staffers had going in.
I never followed my idea, or my affinity for the written word, into Matt Groening’s studio. Those teleplay writers did, and as a fellow storyteller, albeit one of a different species, if not another genus, I owe them kudos for that.
As a fellow scribe, I have to assume they are in their gig for the same fundamental reason I pursue mine. I write, in no small part, for that aforementioned love of the written word, which for me stems from refreshing droves of compliments on my work in my formative years.
Whether I have a natural interest in a given project’s subject matter, it helps my writing to learn how and why someone else loves it. So I prefer not to even come across as a purveyor of hate, let alone be an object of hate. Hate is an appropriate anagram for heat, and I prefer to keep my kitchen at a temperature just hot enough to ensure quality dishes.
No uncontrolled flames for me. I will leave that to the natural firebrands.
Rather, while still taking care not to unduly cross the line into public relations (unless that’s what I’m commissioned for), I prefer to keep chasing my constant craving for stories by getting brief hold and then highlighting the narratives of other dream-chasers.
People expect contention and confrontation when they read commentary and criticism. On those grounds, I will humbly self-critique and admit that, just like Homer in his honest phase, I am unfit for that sector of journalism.
I’ll stick with old-fashioned storytelling and the constant quest to get to know people and their perspectives on untold, underpublicized narrative fodder. I don’t have to like everything, nor do I have to dislike anything, let alone go out of my way to consciously express my taste.
I just want to follow my passion and proficiencies while learning how others follow theirs. Whatever “difference” that makes is a bonus.
