bill simmons IS bill simmons IN the book of BASKETBALL

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)

the actual column in question is goofy but not really that bad, he just sounds like someone who's really excited that he's gotten to talk about basketball with a bunch of pros. the argument he's advancing (that pros may be willing to put up with stuff that drives fan viewers nuts) is actually interesting.

nothing simmons does these days is actually that bad aside from the writing being meh or legit bad with relative frequency, like it is what it is and expecting it to be otherwise is like that arrested development scene where michael opens a bag that reads DEAD DOVE on it as if he won't find the dead dove in there. the idea that it could offend a person'a sense of writerly ethics, in the world of sportswriting, is laughable and mind-boggling - unless you're drew magary and you have a column due and a preexisting hard-on for really laying the hammer down on macho cornballs tangential to the sports world while having turned into, uh, a (faux, which is almost worse) macho cornball tangential to the sports world

lollll while on the subject, chuck barkley on the BS report is a thing no one should listen to

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

― lag∞n

yeah i remember him talking about kornheiser telling him at some point that the writing just goes and he's not gonna want to do it anymore and he's mentioned this a few times. i think now it's definitely more a thing that drives traffic to his site and that facilitates him doing the other things he wants to do. whereas twelve fifteen years ago he was cranking out ten thousand words five days a week cuz he had that weird narcissism and hunger that makes one a writer. it's rare as hell that he writes something now that doesn't slot into one of his gimmicky formats (this trade value column rolling out like grr martin is the ne plus ultra of this), usually a mailbag which is just him responding to emails. that kyrie column could've just been yknow a column about kyrie irving as well as how former players/legends see things that fans and nonplayer analysts aren't going to pick up and that can create that divide in perceptions and then when pt 3 came out he could just link to it for irving's paragraph but dude's weird narcissism wouldn't allow it, the same way he thinks his trade machine machinations mean anything or his past years of trade value columns in anyway function as a valuable metric. the podcast w/ lowe he made a prediction and then lowe was responding and simmons just started blurting out 'THAT'S RIGHT IT'S THE RETURN OF CLAIRVOYANT BILL' like he was dom deluise turning into captain chaos in the cannonball run. i think he writes about basketball cuz he loves it most and it's the thing he knows anything about and he writes about football cuz he loves it and it's the hugest sport so it drives traffic but otherwise he's moved on. i think the red sox have actually won a world series since the last time he wrote about baseball which is funny since that red sox book kinda made his name.

nothing simmons does these days is actually that bad aside from the writing being meh or legit bad with relative frequency, like it is what it is and expecting it to be otherwise is like that arrested development scene where michael opens a bag that reads DEAD DOVE on it as if he won't find the dead dove in there.

― slothroprhymes, Saturday, March 14, 2015 10:33 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The look on batemans face as he looks away and mutters "I don't know what I expected" is burned into my brain

I'm looking forward to him recycling the boxing column he writes for every major fight.

writers unclear on the concept "fictional"

http://i.imgur.com/x6CWz2w.png

new trade value column is peak "everything ppl hate about simmons," as well as some decent commentary

yes there are springsteen AND liam neesons refs

i had to skip past most of the steph/harden/westb part, so long and pointless