An Open Letter to the Worst Entertainment Critic On the Planet

To: Chris Nashawaty

Entertainment Weekly magazine

Sir,

My blood pressure goes up every time I read one of your articles. That was negligible when I was in my 40s, but now I’m at the age where people take pills for that.

This isn’t about disagreeing with your reviews; everybody has those moments with critics. Ken Tucker, who used to head up your magazine’s TV coverage, hates both The Brady Bunch and Lou Grant, two of my favorite television classics.

That’s fine – I respect people with different opinions if they are intelligently expressed. He watched them and didn’t like them. It happens. I think we’d have some interesting discussions.

Here’s how you are different from Tucker – you write about subjects and assess their artistic merits without having experienced them.

How do I know this – well, let’s go back to the first time I noticed your byline about 10 years ago, as I was paging through the then-current issue of EW while waiting in line at the post office. The topic of the piece was your assertion that no comedy was still funny if it was shot in black and white.

Think of that: in one sweeping generalization you summarily dismissed the entire works of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy and the Thin Man movies, His Girl Friday and Some Like It Hot.

And on television, which is close to our hearts around here, you condemned Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs, I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, the first two seasons of Bewitched, The Addams Family and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet; The Honeymooners and The Phil Silvers Show. 

Apparently, you decided that any film or television show made before a certain date is no longer relevant or worth your time. In this blog, which focuses exclusively on the television from generations past, you can understand how that touches a nerve. 

Wrong Finger, Thing

It also calls into question your credentials as a critic of anything, since one quality essential to that profession is knowledge that surpasses that of your readers. If someone is going to be paid to review Broadway musicals, he or she has to know not just Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, but also Show Boat and Carousel, and to be really conversant On Your Toes and Lady In the Dark.

Television is the same. You don’t have to prefer old stuff to new stuff, or have the same affection for it shared by those who grew up with these shows. But you need to be aware of them, and have some first-hand experience of them, and understand their importance and their influence on everything that followed. 

When you wrote that piece you lacked that perspective. I’m guessing you were in your 20s, when a lot of writers (myself included) first started getting published, and thought we knew a lot more than we did.

Here’s the good news: If you live to be 100, you’ll never write anything that dumb again. So at least you got it out of your system early.

I had hoped your judgment had evolved in the interim, but that brings me to the reason for this letter: your recent review of Mission Impossible: Fallout confirmed you’re still up to your old tricks.

This was the line that had me asking my doctor about a Beta-blocker prescription:

“Twenty-two years after (Tom) Cruise first rebooted the hokey TV espionage series…”

“hokey”?

You could have written “classic” or “popular,” or excised the adjective altogether, but instead you chose “hokey”?

See, that’s something Ken Tucker would never have done. I don’t know if he liked Mission: Impossible but he wouldn’t call it hokey, because good writers know what words mean before they use them. 

What a Hokey Bunch

The Oxford Dictionary defines “hokey” as “mawkishly sentimental.” You would be hard-pressed to find a trace of sentimentality in any of Mission: Impossible’s 171 episodes. The agents of the IM Force carried out their missions with a cold and clinical professionalism, detached from friends, family or any emotional ties. Sure, you saw concern when Cinnamon was captured in “The Exchange,” but the mission still took precedence even as rescue options were considered.

If you thought that description was appropriate, I can only conclude that you’ve never actually watched the show. Or did you just need an insult, and that was the word that popped into your head? What’s the difference, as long as the point was made that Tom Cruise took some silly old TV show and turned it into something worth watching. How fortunate we are that today’s creative geniuses in Hollywood are able to create such masterpieces from such feeble, passé source material.

Where does this hostility toward the past come from? Please tell me you’re not in that group that shuns yesterday’s pop culture because it wasn’t as inclusive and enlightened (some say) as it is now. Is that it? Will you never watch Eight is Enough because there were eight kids and not one of them was gay or adopted from Guatemala? I know those are the only kinds of folks EW is hiring these days, which is why the magazine has devolved into The Huffington Post with an occasional piece on Carly Rae Jepsen. 

#Bradfordssowhite

In the end I guess it doesn’t matter. You’ll keep writing, and for some reason I’ll keep reading and suffering the potential health risks of doing so. I look forward to your take on the next Star Trek film, when you’ll no doubt celebrate how this stodgy old franchise finally ditched all that talk about ethics and morals, and replaced them with explosions and motorcycle chases. Nothing hokey about that.