bill simmons IS bill simmons IN the book of BASKETBALL

also suspect too simmons will at some point in the near future be just a writer and not a media mogul again and wont have employing zach lowe to speak for him, what then simmons appoligists

btw is crazy how many ppl there are writing abt basketball on grantland right now lol

also if youre going to put all the good basketball writing on grantland in the simmons credit side you have to deduct for the shit ton of truly awful prosumer entertainment/pop culture converage

anyway all of that is a lil inside baseball for me i prefer to just appreciate the final product on its own merits and the fact is simmons is in the midst of publishing a months long three part list of which he just gave a sneak peak of the last piece, this is ridiculous, and the list isnt even any good or insightful and seems more about his own solipsistic ideas abt narrative than it is understanding basketball

i should start a grantland thread where i just effusively praise molly lambert constantly

ya i like her, just read the thing where she went to the avn awards

there is so much greatest character actor ever tournament bs on that site tho truly the lowest of the low

For every boom in Hollywood, there must also be a bust. So while those of us who watch TV for fun and profit have spent the past 15 years reveling in a tidal wave of brilliant acting, risk-taking storytelling, and remarkable performances, our friends across the aisle in the multiplex have had a far less festive experience.

hate hate HATE prosumer pretend industry garbage like this too

her work is smart but breezy in a way v v few writers would even attempt, it is wonderful xps

show runner, narrative arc, callback, plz flush yrself down the toilet 99% of ppl who write abt tv

i think i do a good job avoiding tv writing morass by watching only basketball and blackish rn

not a bad way to do it tbh

feel like outside of the av club grantland is prob the worst offender of that style where ppl are pretending to have insider industry knowledge of how the sausage gets made but are really just randos repeating the most basic cliches abt craft and business in oder to make ppl feel like they are backstage, this style is approaching total saturation in tv writing but really its everywhere these days and its awful and completely insubstantial

i like rembert and wes morris a ton, greenwald is kinda useless (he reminds you that you really have to be pretty intellectually unambitious let's say to devote yr life to tv criticism), hyden is abysmal, like i think i'd rather read simmons pop culture writing than hyden. i think i like his sports writers across the board. i'm pretty sure he's not leaving espn also.

eventually one way or another espn will get tired of him employing 50 basketball writers for no reason is how i break it down

that's a pretty solid summary. lambert is good, rembert is good, morris is fantastic. anytime i accidentally like the same thing as hyden i get pretty depressed. on the sports side every zach lowe is balanced by a bill barnwell. grantland cast a wide net and got hits and misses in equal numbers. the fact that i don't give a fuck about movies or tv 95% of the time probably helps me enjoy the site.

xp

/whispers/ rembert is actually kinda bad

eh he's fine, i've never been offended reading rembert is what i'm saying

lot of precious personal writing, bad opinions

, meme-y dorky writer presenting himself as a cool guy stuff

i know thats like every writer int he world but still

oh he doesn't seem cool at all, that's part of why i don't mind him. does he think he's cool?

i think maybe, idk i unfollowed him so now its just a shadow of an impression

i don't know, grantland's basically what they dreamed page 2 would be back in the day and i suspect it's cheaper to get solid regular product from lowe et al than it was to have david halberstam and hunter thompson phone something in every now and then. i mean they spent a ton of time and money developing whitlock's black grantland (still in development). espn has writers that don't generate the hits or have somewhat successful podcasts like lowe or barnwell or keri. they also have so many sports personalities worse than bill simmons.

im sure theres a lot of pressure in that world to show a effortless mastery of the zeitgeist and it just kinda gets on me nerves xp self

i am now googling and rembert went to dartmouth, officially ceded any claim to being cool.

lol as someone who has spent a lot of time in hanover i can attest

i get the impression that rembert thinks simmons is cool so thats def fatal to his possible coolness

rembert can be pretty internet writer, lotta that 'we love _____' or 'why ____ is the worst' tendency. he reps for atlanta hard though so cool by me.

xp any interactions i've seen him have w/ simmons he's always seemed a little nervous. white dude from boston though so understandable.

jonathan abrams, that dude's a great writer

yeah he is good

lol at all u fuckin nba guys

keri is good and lindbergh is excellent about baseball
mcindoe and kbakes are both very good (the former day-to-day, the latter long-form) about hockey

it's cool that simmons has parlayed his boston-bro-90s-pop-culture thing into something larger that includes much better writers. some of the stuff they do (eg second bananas) is painful, but hey it's the web (and lol at 538 in comparison). simmons himself is ridiculous tho

i don't know, grantland's basically what they dreamed page 2 would be back in the day and i suspect it's cheaper to get solid regular product from lowe et al than it was to have david halberstam and hunter thompson phone something in every now and then. i mean they spent a ton of time and money developing whitlock's black grantland (still in development). espn has writers that don't generate the hits or have somewhat successful podcasts like lowe or barnwell or keri. they also have so many sports personalities worse than bill simmons.

― balls, Friday, March 13, 2015 11:14 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean obvs i dont really know, but i suspect this giving media stars their own sites thing may not be the wave, it doesnt seem like ppl read those sites too much, especially 538, also they just feel weird and idiosyncratic like not in a good way in a someones odd idea way, espn can afford to do this cause they make huge money off televising sporting events on tv, but idk if they really have any reason to do it especially if companies who actually have to make money off of their writers arent competing with them to like offer simmons his own site somewhere else

i mean maybe theyre happy to take the loss just to keep big names around to burnish their rep or w/e the point of it is, but seems like some executive some day will just look at it and go you know what nah, cause theres really like not any reason for it to exisit

white dude from boston though so understandable.

― balls, Friday, March 13, 2015 11:20 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ugh i am so tired of this terrible i am a white person who understand racism tic

i was attempting to ignore that but yeah fuck it

~otm~

racism is actually a worldwide phenomenon

white folks in georgia know better

man losing money on something that shouldn't exist but it kinda burnishes a rep and fuckit you make a ton of money elsewhere is basically the history of publishing. like that's the ny post and the nyer.

yeah true idk this is the net tho its crazy

I'm p positive grant lands entire budget (outside simmons pay and his fancy set for the TV show) is basically a rounding error for the worldwide leader

But yeah it's good that he's got a mix of writers some of them are terrible (barnwell Jesus can they get one football writer who doesnt literally put everyone to sleep by the second paragraph) some of them are great (Jonathan Abrams features uniformly incredible, zach Lowe is basically an ilh-er, lambert, Wes Morris is really the only good pop culture guy)

Lagoon correctly diagnosed remberts problems he is a young guy who writes for the Internet the way the Internet writes already, could grow tho

I might be the only person who likes Steven hyden i think he's a solid writer and his affection for basic hard rock and metal is sweet. Also occasionally funny

Did not expect this thread to blow up over night.

bad and good canceling each other out is prob grantland's biggest issue, like in the NBA writing corner for every lowe there's another writer who obsesses over the soap opera aspect of the sport and finds ways to like, heap faux-ebullient pass/agg ironic praise on the nick youngs of the world, shit like that, each topic they cover basically has one good writer and one shitty one

in the good corner like amos barshad does really good profiles, generally, molly lambert is great, greenwald is good when he's reviewing a show like a normal critic (the americans pieces are always dope) and awful when trying to make Big Statements About How We Watch Television, etc. hyden is a harmless dork, rembert browne basically is as well except the fact that he's really into the idea of being an internet writer and also way into hyperbole is grating

simmons is firmly what he is at this point, and his schtick can be super annoying but, uh, a dude like drew magary, of all fuckin people, calling someone out for being schticky and self-referential is fucking hysterical

i think mcgray is right to call out simmons name dropping, i mean the whole point of simmons is that he was an everyman just talkin about sports, he was like not supposed to have access, that was a key element of his schtick, now he braggin abt how he studied at the feet of magic johnson while his understanding of basketball seems to be if anything worse than ever

oh wesley morris is another reason grantland can stay for the moment unless he finds a better offer, genuinely great movie critic

simmons obvs like does not try very hard at the writing anymore, which is understandable w all his other responsibilities, but of course the only reason he gets to do all those other things is because espn wants to keep him around for his writing, its funny

I agree with the reason magary is calling him out more or less, but I can't help but roll my eyes about a writer with an equally awful type of schtick being the one to do the calling out (magary is uncomfortable internety beta-macho rage predicated on the idea that profanity is inherently funny and/or biting, simmons is smarmy insidery sanctimoniousness)