What the Hell is Happening Over at The A.V. Club?
I try not to think too much about the past because there is little to gained from doing so and much to be lost. So when I quit The A.V. Club, I never looked back.
But the website is the home of eighteen years of my writing. So I regularly find myself looking at old pieces I’ve written on the site. Truth be told, I’m never tempted to look around that much, particularly since the people in power have forced their most senior writers to quit twice in the 9 years since I quit my position as head writer to become a staff writer for The Dissolve.
Needless to say, that has NOT had a positive effect on the quality of the writing, the site’s reputation or its overall integrity.
I watched with sadness and bewilderment, if not surprise when the site took the bizarre step of removing all of the images from old articles.
That means that a tongue-in-cheek photo essay about my time at a junket for Idle Hands is now completely nonsensical, since all of the humor came from interplay between the pictures and the captions.
That was unfortunate but honestly nothing that affects my day to day life as a full-time freelancer and website proprietor.
Yesterday I happened to stumble on my old employers once again. I’m not sure why but I clicked on a “new” article about the best movies and TV shows to watch on various streaming services.
It was credited to the A.V Club staff but I was mortified to discover that the article was, in fact, “written” largely by people who left The A.V Club to form The Dissolve and many other former staff writers and cherished freelancers who today want nothing to do with the site or its current owners and have not been a part of the section for a very long time.
It was not terribly surprising, given the way the site has historically treated its veteran writers, invaluable freelancers and history. But it was unfortunate.
The site used to pride itself on having at least a modicum of integrity and ethics but that seems to have been lazily discarded in this latest awful, toxic press-generating “shake-up/editorial bloodbath.”
I clicked more articles credited to the A.V Club staff and was amused to discover that even after quitting the site in disgust for a SECOND time in April, 2017, somehow Nathan Rabin had returned to the A.V Club as a semi-prolific contributor.
My byline accompanied multiple lists about streamable content, alongside those of people I have not seen in seven long years and will probably never see again.
It was downright eerie. Whoever threw together the lists was unwittingly reuniting people with complicated and painful histories from multiple different eras in the site’s fairly extensive history for the sake of a cheap, sleazy buck.
I’m not surprised that I was not asked if I wanted my old reviews and essays to appear in “new” The A.V Club lists in condensed form. I worked for The A.V. Club for eighteen years. Everything I wrote for them during that time belongs to whoever owns the site now.
They can do whatever they want with it, up to and including recycling it in an endless series of opportunistic pieces of clickbait. It’s not honorable but it is legal.
It’s sad, is what it is. But I can also see the dark humor in it.
I have a complicated, deeply painful and bittersweet relationship with The A.V. Club as an institution and many of the writers and editors that I worked with there.
So it is both flattering and insulting that I am somehow still cranking out content for them long after leaving for good.
I guess you could say that the long-term contract that I had to sign said they could use my writing until the end of time alongside those of my professional Yodas, the mentors who showed me the way and then headed for greener, Nathan-free pastures.
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