Book Review: Television Without Pity by Tara Ariano and Sarah D Bunting

Fans of the fabulous  Television Without Pity (motto: “spare the snark, spoil the networks”) will already have a good idea what to expect from this book by the site’s small screen-obsessed co-founders, Tara Ariano and Sarah D Bunting. Subtitled ‘752 things we love to hate (and hate to love) about TV’, Television Without Pity (the book) is an in depth A-Z about everything televisual, from Acting, Wooden to Zeiring, Iain (we swear that juxtaposition was unintentional). It’s all written in the same snarky, thoughtful, madly observant and occasionally reverent tone of TWOP (the website) and delivered in encyclopaedia format, making it an ideal book to dip in and out off (although our editor raced through it in a weekend).

We constantly found ourselves wanting to read sections aloud and could often be found screaming with laughter and recognition at Ariano and Bunting’s brilliant insights. Their take on watching a whole show on DVD over a weekend is exaggerated, yet familiar: “We try to ration the 24 episodes, one at a time, but we can’t… the next thing we know it’s Sunday night and we’re sitting in adult diapers on the couch, surrounded by forty-eight hours’ worth of snack bags and Diet Coke cans, heads pounding, cracked out on Keifer…” Fellow TV addicts will relate. Except maybe about the diapers… (we don’t need to know).

TWOP probably isn’t the book for you if you’re not an American TV-junkie from way back (as you should have guessed by now, that sums up the teen it! team to a tee) but if you love your US drama series and sitcoms there’s loads to learn or just relate to here. (We have to question the authors’ downer on Brandon Walsh and their assertion that Gilmore Girls lost the plot but we’re with them on their love of Felicity and hatred for Dawson Leery).

This is a brilliant reference for TV fans (we’d ideally like to see an updated, larger version, in fact - this was published in 2006) but it’s not all fun and games: there’s also a lot of intelligent analysis about the way pop culture functions in among the jokes. We loved it.