I Write Weekly TV Recaps for a Living. When My Boyfriend Asked What I Was Watching, I Froze.
I am thirty four years old and I have worked as a freelance television recapper for the last six years, from a two-bedroom rental on a hill above Wickenden Street on the east side of Providence, Rhode Island. The people who know I do this for a living are a small group, because there is no by-line where I appear most weeks and because the recap is a form that people either read every Monday morning like clockwork or find out about only when they search for the plot of a specific episode. I file for three media sites, most weeks two of them, and I cover a rotating slate of prestige drama, one long-running procedural, and whatever HBO or FX puts in front of me in a given season. My rate ranges from two hundred and fifty dollars for a straight procedural writeup to just over four hundred for a Sunday-night prestige recap with turnaround before eight in the morning. The publisher does not care where I live as long as the piece is up before the second cup of coffee on the coast that matters.
The recap has a shape. It is not written down anywhere the way a stylebook is written down, but it is as internalized in me now as a keyboard shortcut. A cold open of about two hundred words that gives the reader the emotional bottom line before they scroll for what actually happened. A grade in a small box on the right, letter and number both, A minus and eight point one, because half the readership only ever looks at the box. A five to seven paragraph body that walks the episode beat by beat without ever narrating so long that the reader stops. A MVP or a Biggest Wait What paragraph near the end for the character or twist that carried the hour. A close that hangs a hook on the next episode without spoiling anything from the screener I probably watched two nights before the drop. And an SEO headline my editor rewrites without asking, keyword front-loaded and colon separated, because the search engine and not the reader is the audience for the first six words of anything I write for a living. I have run some version of this shape on close to eight hundred recaps over six years, and I could run it in my sleep without a screener in front of me, which is roughly the point.
The way I found out that the shape had been quietly eating the rest of my viewing life was that my boyfriend, whose name is Sam and who teaches ninth-grade geography at a public middle school in Cranston, asked me at Sunday brunch how the new season of a show I had been recapping was going. He asked it the way people ask that kind of question on a Sunday morning with a coffee cup halfway to their mouth. I said it was fine. Then, at our little table by the window at the diner we go to on College Hill, the exchange stalled the way small exchanges stall when the person who has been asked something ordinary discovers that no ordinary sentence is queuing up behind their answer. I did not have the next sentence. I could not even locate the shelf where the next sentence would have been kept. Sam waited a beat, said something friendly about the hash browns, and moved on. I sat with my toast and worked out, slowly, that I had gone weeks without telling anyone I lived with what I actually thought about anything I had spent forty hours a week watching.
When the format steals conversation
What had happened was less mysterious than I first assumed. I had not become a person who did not care about my shows. I have a book club that meets in the back room of a bar on Wickenden every second Thursday, I have a writers’ group on Sunday mornings at a coffee shop on the corner of Benefit, and I subscribe to four TV-adjacent newsletters and keep up with the Slack channels for two others. In every one of those rooms I hold my own without any trouble. What I had noticed, without noticing it happen, was that all of them have an axis. The book club has a book. The writers’ group has pages to workshop. The newsletter has this week’s subject line. The Slack channels have episode threads. The one kind of conversation I could no longer hold up my end of was the kind that Sam had opened at brunch, which is the kind with no book, no episode, no calendar invite, no expected shape at all. It was the muscle for that specific conversation that had gone somewhere while I was busy at the muscle for the letter grade in the box.
I do not think what happened to me is loneliness in the way that word usually gets thrown around. I have Sam. I have a sister in Warwick who calls me on my walk home from the co-op on Saturday afternoons. What I had lost, in a way I could only name in retrospect, was not company. It was the small unstructured layer of a person’s day, the twenty seconds at the mailbox and the two minutes at the produce section and the eight minutes at brunch when the shape of the exchange is not decided in advance. That layer had gone thin without my noticing. The brunch with Sam was the first moment I could not paper over the thinness with a recap-adjacent anecdote about which showrunner had just left which network, and it was the first moment I had to look at what was on the other side of my professional voice.
Kate, a former recap editor at The Village Voice who is sixty-two now and who does style consulting for two of the sites I write for, was the person who put me on to it. We were on one of our story calls one Wednesday morning about a season two premiere we were both frustrated by, and I told her, in a shorter and slightly more embarrassed version than I am giving here, that I had not been able to answer a normal question about the show at brunch the weekend before. She said she used to have the same problem, especially in the years right after she left the Voice and started working from a spare room in Bristol County, and that her surprisingly practical fix was a text-only chat platform she opened for twenty minutes at a time in the gap between her morning yoga and her first call of the day. She said flatly that it was not therapy and did not pretend to be, and that if what I actually needed was somebody with a license she would say so. For the going-thin piece I had just described to her, though, this was the strange small habit that had worked for her.
Finding shape in strangers’ stories
The first person I matched with was a taxi driver in Reykjavík who was working the last hour of a night shift in the polar dark and wanted to walk me through the economics of replacing the third-gear synchro on his 1998 Land Rover Defender, in Icelandic krónur and at a specific garage on Suðurlandsbraut where his cousin knew the mechanic. I did not have a preexisting opinion on Defender gearboxes. I discovered that I could ask good follow-up questions almost without meaning to, because asking good follow-up questions had once been my job when I was reporting for a small alt-weekly out of college and had somehow gotten shelved for six years underneath the letter grade in the box. He talked for twenty five minutes, then his fare arrived at the airport and he was gone. I sat at my kitchen table with the second half of a very cold cup of tea and noticed that I had just held up my end of a conversation without any shape to it for the first time in what I estimated was almost a year. The reflex had not disappeared. Eight hundred recaps had crowded it out, and one taxi driver in Reykjavík working out gearbox math in an accent I could not quite place had put a piece of it back within reach.
I have kept at it in the small awkward way you keep at anything that starts giving you back something you had not been looking for. On a Wednesday morning between a screener and a story call I matched with an amateur beekeeper in Kraków who wanted to walk me through, hive by hive, why apple blossom honey and the honey from a stand of old oaks on the edge of her cousin’s farm tasted like two different foods. The following week I ended up in a long text exchange with an older watchmaker in Nairobi who had trained in the late nineteen sixties in a small workshop in Zürich and wanted to explain why the apprentice tradition of that particular decade produced a specific kind of hand that you could still recognize on a bench today, if you knew what to look for. Late one Sunday night, after I had filed the recap and closed the laptop and made a second pot of tea and could not sleep, a leather merchant in Marrakech talked me through why the tannery that had been in his family since eighteen eighty-nine has never once written down its softening recipe, and why he thought that was, in the long run, the more honest way. None of them had any idea I wrote TV recaps. Two of them told me things I have not been able to repeat to anybody, because I have no way of finding them again, which turned out to be a piece of the arrangement I could not have anticipated when Kate first mentioned it.
Knotchat pairs you with one other person at a time, in a text conversation that closes when either of you decides it is done, and that plain shape is the whole reason it has been useful to me in a specific narrow way. I would not describe it, to a colleague at a writers’ group on Benefit Street or anywhere else, as a stand-in for the slow work of knowing the same people over years. What it has been, honestly, is a place to keep an ordinary conversational reflex from wasting further while I spend my working hours in the most highly structured version of the same thing. I use it maybe twice a week, in the evening, for about twenty minutes at a time, and most of the conversations are forgettable in a way I have come to appreciate, and the forgettable part is close to the whole point.
Relearning talk over coffee
Sam and I were at the same diner on College Hill about six months after the first brunch, at the same table by the same window, when he asked me again how the show was. I told him that there was a sequence in the fifth episode, set on a rainy platform at the last stop on a subway line I recognized from the location shoot, in which the actor playing the older brother changed his face twice in a way that made me pause my playback twice, and that I had been sitting with the way it landed for most of the week without quite knowing what to do with it. Sam asked me two follow-up questions, both of them the kind of questions somebody who has been listening asks. We talked about the show for close to forty minutes and about our week for another twenty. Near the end of the second coffee he said, without looking up from his hash browns, that I had told him whether I liked it this time. I said I had noticed. He laughed, and asked the waitress if we were still allowed to order the second coffee refill this late in the morning, and we sat there until it was almost lunch.
