Breaking Up With TV Squad

I love reading entertainment news. I spend a good amount of time online perusing Ain't it Cool News, Deadline, the Los Angeles Times Entertainment blogs, and various news aggregators every day catching up on the latest tidbits coming out of Hollywood. I avoid the celebrity gossip columns about marriages, babies, arrests, and rehab, but if it's another dissection of the ending of "Inception," or a new chapter of the never-ending saga of Carl Icahn and Lionsgate, I'm there. One of my favorite film blogs is Cinematical, that intersperses casting news and festival reports with reviews, commentary, top ten lists, and even links to goofy Youtube parodies. They've got the mix of content just right, and I rarely go a day without checking their feed.

Through Cinematical I found TV Squad, a counterpart blog focused on television shows. The content wasn't as strong, but they were very good about providing their news updates and episode recaps promptly. They also picked up smaller stories about schedule and cast changes that the larger sites would sometimes overlook, and they were a good place to check daily listings. My biggest problem with them up until this spring was that were a little too loose with content that contained recent spoilers, and there were a few times when the site would simply stop updating for reasons unknown. But I was satisfied enough that I would always click the link from Cinematical after I was finished with the movie news to check the nightly TV listings on TV Squad.

Then the big change happened. After a lengthy blackout, TV Squad was redesigned back in May after being merged with the AOL TV blog, Inside TV. The results were utterly horrendous. The new version of TV Squad is clearly patterned after MySpace and other social networking sites, resulting in a page that is a cluttered, user-unfriendly mess. There's too much white space, formatting and font sizing issues have never been fixed, and a huge sidebar that contains a glut of information I've never looked at twice. Articles are often preceded by gigantic, bandwidth-eating graphics, and sometimes broken up by other graphics or embedded videos. The loading time for the site ballooned with all the extra junk and an initial proliferation of bad script caused havoc on RSS feed readers.

One relatively minor, yet supremely aggravating design flaw that really gets me is that in order to get to the comments section located beneath each article, users are forced to scroll past a distracting block of links, cheerfully dubbed "Link Squad." The links are always accompanied by a graphic of a scantily dressed woman - not the same picture each time, but it's always a woman and it's always blatant fanservice. The first few times I ran across it I figured that it was just a particularly obnoxious banner advertisement that had gotten past my adblockers. Not so. To add insult to injury, there are two more blocks of links at the bottom of the page, underneath the comments. Thus navigating the TV Squad site requires an inordinate amount of concentration and reading most of the posts now feels akin to an archeological dig.

The content quality also suffered as a result of the merger. There are more posts, but these are now much shorter and less in-depth. I never visited the old AOL TV blogs, but I can guess that they had a significantly higher percentage or coverage for the most unbearable reality shows and relied on "The Soup" strategy of reposting the best bits from late night talk shows. Recaps and reviews for many shows simply disappeared, including popular network programs like "Law and Order: SVU" and "Criminal Minds." Any variant of "Real Housewives," however, has their full attention. Whatever the site's target readership is, I don't think I'm part of it anymore.

Probably the most telling change is that Cinematical is no longer considered a "partner site," and links to it are no longer on the TV Squad front page. The link to TV Squad on the Cinematical site is still there, which I'll be ignoring from now on. Yep, I've stuck with TV Squad this long hoping that there would be some changes for the better, but after three months and few improvements in functionality or aesthetics, I've had enough. Some of the most pressing technological issues were fixed, but it's not enough. So I'm breaking it off, TV Squad. It was nice while it lasted, but you've changed too much, fallen in with a bad crowd, and you don't treat me right. I'm pulling up roots and moving on to CliqueClack TV or Zap2It or one of the other television blogs that won't give me eyestrain, or bombard me with the latest misfortunes to befall Snooki and The Situation, or sandwich its content between cheesecake shots.

You want me back, go talk to Cinematical.