To those not yet aware, recently the pop culture website the AV Club (known to many here on the Avocado as “the Mothership”) has come under new ownership yet again, this time by Paste magazine. And so far, they’ve made some game efforts to return the site to its pre-Kinja glory days, including switching the comments sections back to Disqus, and getting Nathan Rabin to return for the occasional column.
But there are still things I miss from the AV Club of a decade ago – one of them’s having an index of all the TV shows the site has reviewed. Without that feature, you might never realize the treasure trove of series the AV Club has covered, providing episode-by-episode analysis of such shows as The Twilight Zone, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, The Flash, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Community. And even if you find your way back to those old reviews, the original Disqus discussions that grew out of them (half the fun of the AV Club of yore) are still gone for good.
So I wanted to create a feature here to highlight some of the greatness of the AV Club’s rich history, and maybe generate some new discussions to replace the ones that were lost. And I figured we should start off with what, for my money, is the best thing the AV Club ever did: their roundtable reviews of Cheers. Sporting a murderer’s row of AV Club staffers, they go through each episode of the classic sitcom’s first two seasons, each person bringing their own insights born both out of their love for the show and a scholarly knowledge of the medium we call television.
(And I believe I’ve now hit nostalgia-ception, getting nostalgic for reviews that were themselves a nostalgic look back at an old TV show.)
If you’ve never read these before, I urge you like all heck to check them out … unless, of course, you’ve never seen Cheers. In which case, I urge you like all heck to check that out, then maybe get back around to the AV Club.