How do you write a review?

New Yorker TV critic Inkoo Kang explains why you should rewrite (and rewrite) your lede

“I had the titular line in Out of Africa.”

First, a few things I’ve enjoyed this week:

• Writer Mason Currey’s Subtle Maneuvers newsletter is now a regular weekly read for me. This week’s dispatch was all about the poet Philip Larkin’s process. What stood out to me was the fact that Larkin worked as a librarian and sometimes took years to perfect a single poem. I want to scoff at this, because the part of me that was reared on journalism deadlines says this is absurd. But the quality of Larkin’s work humbles me and makes me contemplate time and the expectation that art should arrive to us quickly and fully formed. I have to admit I am a “fast” writer. A solid first draft of a screenplay I can complete in a week with very few structural revisions needed, but this is only the time it takes me in front of the computer. It doesn’t factor in the daily walks and meditation and all the messier parts of writing and research where the idea incubates for weeks or months. Still, sometimes I wish I had the temperament of a slow writer like Larkin (though I suspect some of my block in this area has to do with the immediate need to pay bills). In some cases, what we need is someone else to slow us down, an outsider’s perspective that forces you into a closer read or revision. Which brings me to…

RIP

• On Bluesky, The Reveal’s Scott Tobias reshared a 2019 post from writer/podcaster/everything guy Dave Chen’s site, wherein he published a list of rules for writing reviews from exalted editor/writer Alan Scherstuhl. (He will surely laugh if he sees me describe him as “exalted.”) You might think a bunch of rules for writing would be dry, or, worse yet, even angering—who is this guy to tell me what I can and cannot do? You would be wrong.

I first encountered this list when I was hired by LA Weekly in 2016 for a two-review trial run to see if I could be their new film critic. [No pressure!] Alan, who worked for Voice Media Group, assigned and edited all film and television reviews through the Village Voice offices in New York. My first email interactions with him were basically, “Hey, can you review this movie? Oh, and by the way, here are my rules.” It was a sobering email, and I can tell you those first two reviews (and several others) were dashed with so much red that I cried to my husband that I was not as good a writer as I had thought. Boo-hoo. There’s a school of Letterboxd criticism that tells you a review should be easy, that criticism is merely putting your opinions to page. Alan was there to tell me the good critics wanted more and was there to offer encouragement when I faltered or grew lazy, as one might when watching a glut of new releases.

There’s nothing particularly menacing about Alan’s editing, but he is exacting and expects excellence (and would probably question why I arranged three words beginning with “ex” in a row). But more than excellence, he expected heart, a devotion to the craft of criticism in a time when pull-quote Rotten Tomatoes reviews were already dominating. Reading these rules reminded me that criticism is its own art form and that those who wish to do it professionally must push themselves beyond their tics and clichés without resorting to the snooty snobbery that repelled new readers. It’s no wonder that the critics I prefer reading have all been trained by Alan, and it’s a shame that he’s not writing film criticism anymore himself, because he was a joy to read. I went back in my email and found his rules if you’d like to take a look. (Of note: Once you’ve mastered the craft, some rules are there for breaking. Except for “titular.” You can never, ever use “titular.”)

First, the don'ts:

Do not open with plot summary

Do not write a paragraph of plot summary

Do not write this sentence: "CHARACTER's NAME (ACTOR'S NAME) is an architect suffering from ennui in the years since her professional chef husband CHARACTER'S NAME (ACTOR'S NAME) had to close his dream restaurant and bury their child CHARACTER'S NAME (ACTOR'S NAME, adorable in sad flashbacks to a happier time)"

Do not forget that it is your job to highlight what is important and memorable and unique, whether good or bad, and to dash the rest to the rocks

Do not only characterize performances in parentheses

Do not laundry list, meaning don't give us a paragraph of intro, one on the story, one on the actors, one on the direction, and then one of opinion

Do not just rely on adjectives to characterize a performance or a scene or a feeling. Instead, draw upon every bit of descriptive power within you to capture exactly you are attempting to capture. Summon up the moment itself rather than just how you feel about the moment.

Do not despair that the above is hard.

Do not put scare quotes around “wacky” or “zany” or other words. That asks the reader to guess what you think the word usually means and then what you intend it to mean this time and whether you’re putting it in someone else’s mouth.

Do not presume that your understanding of/tolerance for wackiness or zaniness or pretension is the universal standard. These words mean little on their own and demand you clearly characterize whatever strikes you as wacky/zany/pretentious rather than trust that tossing the word in there is enough.

Do not be all, “I don’t know, there were some decent action scenes.”

Do not rely on adverbs that merely add emphasis: “very” or “really” or “wonderfully” in front of an adjective characterize that adjective only in degree, not in character, and more than anything else they suggest that the adjective you’ve chosen is inexact and needs some help. “Stunningly” is just “very” with its eyes bugged out; “profoundly” is just “really” with a beard and its voice lowered an octave. Do not use "titular" or "myriad" or "gleefully" or "iconic" or any of those godawful Variety terms like "actioner" or "laugher."

Do not write sentences where the reader could start skimming halfway through and still know what you were going to say.

Do not ignore the real world and the film's social/political context

Even if you’re exercised about that context, do not ignore the formal choices the filmmakers have made-- how is this film shot and edited, and why? Is it effective? If someone reading your review had never heard of the movie, would it be clear from the review that this was, in fact, a movie and not a play or a TV show?

Do not tut down at regular folks who might not ever see the challenging movie you’re savoring.

Do not write, “In a perfect world, [INSERT MOVIE YOU LOVE HERE] would be a huge hit.” You’re not the Commissariat of Enlightened Taste. Argue for what you love -- don’t whine that it’s not as loved as you’d like it to be.

Do not assume that people who do not love what you are championing – or who love what you’re panning – are doing so in bad faith.

Do not forget that some 14 year-old version of you might happen into reading your piece, and that that 14 year-old wants to be invited into the world of culture and ideas, not shamed away from it for not knowing who Jafar Panahi is, so when you mention Jafar Panahi provide some engaging context that might make that 14 year old look Panahi up.

Do not think of your review as just one of the many reviews this film will get, as just a datapoint for the Tomatometer, as just some piece of consumer advice only likely to interest people already engaged with whatever you're reviewing. Instead, think of your review as an event itself, as something that needs to win people over and get them to care.

Do not think that reviewing simply means setting down your subjective opinion. Key to it is to marshal as much objective evidence and memorable detail as you can to a) make your case, b) give readers a feeling of the experience of actually watching this movie, c) participate in the art yourself, as recording what you witnessed is immortalizing the work in another medium, and d) prevent you from spinning your wheels with dull-ass plot summary.

Again: DON’T WRITE PLOT SUMMARIES ANY LONGER THAN A LINE OR TWO. If you would skim it in other people’s reviews, they’re sure as hell gonna skim it in yours.

Do not worry much of what other critics have said except in the rare revisionist piece where you are proving everybody else wrong a month or so later.

Do not forget that Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael panned 2001. Their reviews of it are persuasive.

And here’s a do: Engage with the art, open yourself to the art, process the art, and respond to the art. If you ever sit down to watch something and think "Jesus, I don't want to do this" the same way so many of those sad bastards we all see in the screening rooms seem to, ask me to re-assign because, seriously, there's someone else who *does* want to do it.

And a Word on Profiles and Interviews: I prefer our pieces be about how we "get" someone -- as in offer rare context and insight -- rather than how we "got" someone, as in put some famous person in the paper.

And here’s words I will always cut from reviews so don’t try to sneak them in: titular, palpable, triptych, myriad, “pokes fun at”, groan- or chuckle-worthy, astonishing, stunning, iconic, painterly, veritable, fever dream, gleefully, plethora, laugher, actioner, most uses of “very,” and the very idea of the setting as a character which it just isn’t, ever. (Note the acceptable use of “very” in the preceding line, rather than the usual “very pretty” or “very funny,” where “very” is less a descriptor than it is an admission that the adjective it’s paired with is insufficient.)

Oh, also avoid the writers’ workshop idea that an emotional beat is “earn”ed

Secondly, I met New Yorker television critic Inkoo Kang my first year writing for LA Weekly. At the time, she was freelancing for the Voice (another writer trained by Alan), and I was very fresh in the world of entertainment criticism, having written predominantly profiles and reported features on the social justice beat. It was an honor when Inkoo, whom I greatly admired, reached out to meet up, and, luckily, I think she approved of me. Thus began our years-long correspondence of friendship, which is sometimes snarky and sometimes one or both of us trying to out-downer the other by sharing the most awful news bites we can find. Through all of this, I’ve remained an avid reader of her work, from her time at The Hollywood Reporter to the Washington Post, and now at the New Yorker, where she must spell “reënter” with a diaeresis. She is the kind of writer who often makes me wonder: How did she do that?

Inkoo was kind enough to answer all my questions about what it takes to write a television review for a prestigious publication and how to be high-brow without being hoity-toity.

You studied writing at Smith College, right? Were you expecting to go into criticism as a career?

I studied comparative literature at Smith College, which is I think a fairly traditional program vis-à-vis close reading. You have to get good at a foreign language, learn a little bit about the literature of a foreign country, and I think I took one creative nonfiction class, and I deeply regretted not taking more of those. One of things I found interesting when I got to college, having grown up on reading a lot of newspaper criticism, I thought professors would care a lot more about whether I liked something or not, and that was never the case in any of my classes.

When I was in grad school, I thought I was going to be a professor. I was bored out of my mind, and I had a pop-culture blog, and after I left grad school—which was the second best decision I made in my life outside of marrying my husband—I had an opportunity come through for me where I could be an unpaid intern at a magazine that no longer exits. Someone I knew said their friend was looking for interns and passed along some posts from my blog, and it was like, This is what I think about Paris Hilton, very stupid shit. I did the internship, because after grad school it was a great recession, and I was unemployed for months on end. But I always thought about being a critic, growing up reading reviews. I remember writing to a couple of film critics at the time, saying I really admire your work. I was definitely an avid reader of criticism even if I didn’t know if that was viable as a profession.

What kind of criticism were you reading?

I think I started reading reviews when I got in middle school. I don’t know why, but we mistakenly got a daily LA Times subscription delivered to our house. The first section I always gravitated towards was the calendar section, the arts coverage, but I loved reading the film criticism and gradually the TV criticism. It feels very old-fashioned, being a kid reading movie reviews in print. I’m not that old.

I thought movie reviews were interesting, because they felt very finite. It’s not like TV reviews, where it’s sort of ongoing and dropping in in the middle of a series. There’s something very discrete about movie reviews. Later, I was reading Television Without Pity, and I wasn’t a huge TWoP fan, because I truly did not understand the concept of reading long recaps of episodes that I had just seen. But there were times when I found that really helpful, because I didn’t know what it was to think critically about television at the time. By the end of college, people were really coming around on shows like The Wire, and that was the start of the fifth season, and people were calling it “Dickensian,” and I was like, What does this mean? I want to know what people mean when they say “Dickensian.” The Wire had been this thing that a friend recommended to me, and I didn’t know anyone else who watched it, so it felt like an entrance to a new way of viewing television. It was exciting and tickled a part of my brain that needed tickling.

Why didn’t you pursue teaching?

I knew the professor dream was dead and figured out in grad school very quickly that teaching was not for me. I thought I could be a good professor when I was in college, because I had that ideal intellectual experience that you hope college is, where every day you learn to see the world in a different way or learn about things you never imagined existed. Once I got to grad school and was a TA, I was like, I’m not a great TA. I got my master’s. I didn’t get my PhD. But then I did that unpaid internship for three months, and toward the end of it, my editor told me I was one of the best interns and asked if I wanted to stay on. I got by mostly temping at the time, because I still couldn’t find a job. At a certain point about nine months after I started the internship, I told my then-boyfriend [now-husband], “I think I want to try out this writing thing for five years. Would you be ok if I made no money for five years? And if I fail, I fail, and if it works out, gravy.”

It definitely changed the trajectory of my thinking about criticism. I don’t think I had any semblance at the internship that I was any good at it. I just knew I was having fun. Then one of the pieces I wrote as an intern, Alan [Scherstuhl] at the Village Voice had read and dm’ed me out of the blue to tell me he liked it. My editor then got me a freelance gig at the LA Times, and it snowballed from there. I was like, Ok, if other people think I can do this, maybe I can. It’s so fucking corny, but it’s true. It doesn’t mean I still can’t find it corny.

I find your style to be very distinct. I know when I’m reading an Inkoo review. How did you find your style?

This is gonna sound really fucking douchey, but when I was in high school, I remember very distinctly I got an English paper back, and my teacher had written, “You have a very authoritative style,” and I asked her what that meant, and she said, “You basically sound like you know what you’re talking about.” I sort of went along with that. I never really thought about it. The one thing I sort of semi-consciously started doing was thinking about the tone of each review, especially in terms of what I was describing. I insert a lot more lightness if the thing I’m reviewing is lighter, or vice versa if it’s more serious. Sometimes I’ll even get more pompous in tone if it requires. My style is really just whatever subconscious process goes on in your brain after reading ten years of reviews and picking out things that you like and don’t like and going with your gut and trying to have fun.

What are the elements of a great piece of criticism?

As a writer, I love reading great writing. Stephanie Zacharek, at least half the time I disagree with her, but I love reading her, because she’s a beautiful prose stylist and can make a good argument for her opinions. A lot of it boils down to how viscerally I am able to imagine what they’re talking about, and are they making arguments that feel coherent to me, and am I learning anything new? A film or television review, I want to be able to see a thing I’ve already watched in a new framework. That’s exciting to me. There’s a lot of criticism out there that can feel pull quote-influenced, a bunch of adjectives. That’s not interesting reading to me, unless you’re coming up with some really magical adjectives. How well are you actually able to convey the thing you’re writing about and also provide your own stamp of a perspective? The reason why people read reviews, I think, is they want to be able to look at something from another point of view, otherwise you just have your own perspective and you’re satisfied with that. I think conveying that idiosyncratic POV is important.

Why are the magical adjectives less enticing? What do you mean by “making an argument”?

When it comes to the adjectives, I mean, who cares? What everybody wants is for you to show them the math of how you got to the conclusion. If you thought really highly of a particular performance or piece of dialogue, what are the factors that led you to the conclusion you came to? When people say argument, you can take that literally and in the direction of This thing is problematic—and sometimes those are valuable pieces of criticism. But in a general way, every review is an argument. If you’re not out there championing your point of view and justifying the review in the process, what are we doing here? What’s the point?

You read and talk a lot about film criticism, so why did you gravitate towards TV criticism?

I always wanted to be a TV critic. It’s a medium I love on a visceral level more than film. Part of it is I grew up working class, and movies were often not financially accessible to me. That changed at some point, because my mom bought a video store from a friend in Sylmar, and then I had crazy access to movies I never had before. But in general, the price for a movie ticket was an inconceivable amount of money to me when TV was always there. Because my random internship opportunity was a movie thing, and everyone related to the internship was a movie person, I did that. I was always trying to see how I could make that transition, though. Luckily, I tried to get into the TV-reviewing business as TV was becoming a much more respected medium, so there was a larger social change that was supporting my desire to transition, and I think because there was a social change, TV-reviewing budget allocations changed quite a bit. There were more opportunities in that vein.

I did review movies for The Wrap for a couple of years, and I also did my freelance LA Times review gigs for a year, and those were just blurbs, but even if you’re writing a blurb, you’re watching the same length of movie. I got burned out doing that. Movies are so short, relatively speaking, but it felt increasingly like I was watching the same movie over and over again, like I was watching the same formula when I was on the weekly grind of covering new releases.

How do you approach a review if you’ve already written about a prior season? Do you feel like those reviews are in conversation with each other?

Normally, I don’t write more than once about a show, but I discovered recently I was in the middle of writing my third piece about The Morning Show somehow, a show I never liked. If you’re writing a season 1 review of a show, then it has a lot of similarities with a film review—you’re introducing a lot of things, and people are coming to it clean. If you’re writing a season 2 or season 3 review, it’s much harder, and you’re talking to people who are already watching, so it’s a smaller built-in audience. At that point, you generally write as though you’re talking to people who are already watching, while my editors work very hard to make sure people who aren’t watching can still read it and get something out of it. Is it still legible to people who haven’t watched the show? That’s a thing you have to keep in mind when you’re writing about something in the middle of a series run. I I think one really great advantage I’ve had at the New Yorker is that I can do a review at any point in a series run. I will probably get the numbers wrong, but when Emily Nussbaum reviewed It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it was for like the seventh or ninth season, so I’ve been loving the freedom of being able to give the reader a sense of the show as what it is and also at the same time how it’s changed over the years. But I think that most of the reviews I do are still the TV equivalent of new releases. I think a show has to start some kind of a conversation or become a cultural phenomenon to warrant a subsequent season 2 or 3 review.

How are you deciding what to write about?

A lot of my job is actually curatorial. A critic watches more than 95 percent of the population, and there are times when I’m like, Here’s this great TV show I don’t think people are talking about enough. That’s a big part of it, and another part is knowing there’s a big show coming out, and it’s going to be a talker I need to cover. The last 20 percent of my job is more of a wildcard, looking at stuff that I’m interested in and teasing out why I feel a certain way about a show, or trying to provide a new perspective if something is really maligned in a way I think is unfair, or overly praised, maybe providing an alternate perspective.

It feels like you have a lot of power in your position at the New Yorker to be able to push conversation about a show that wouldn’t otherwise get that kind of serious coverage. Do you feel that responsibility or power?

That sounds very ivory tower, and I understand where you’re coming from, but the other part of my brain is like, Well who the fuck reads TV reviews? Of the last three jobs I’ve had, which are all TV critic positions, I think being able to choose has really been present in all these places, but that’s not a privilege every critic has. At The Hollywood Reporter, I would cover as many scripted shows as possible. The stuff I thought should get more attention, probably did end up getting attention, because you’re covering everything. At the New Yorker, a lot of the work is sorting through the weeds.

What’s your first step in writing a review?

I wish I could say I start with an outline, which is the advice I would surely give to anyone, but I usually just have a vague list of things I want to get to or things I think are particularly of note and spend the next half hour to three hours thinking of a good lede. I remember in my creative nonfiction class that you should have a really interesting opening sentence to pull the writer in, which is standard writing advice, but then I’m always surprised how often people don’t do that. People have truly endless choices in what to read on the internet, so I think trying to bring in the reader’s attention through that lede is most important, and I also think that if anyone is going to read any part of your review, it’s going to be the lede. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that first paragraph is as good as I can make it, so people can continue to tune in for the rest of it.

Eventually, the rest of it sort of comes to me. A lot of it is a formula—you have your introductory paragraph, your preface or argument, and you set the scene in terms of what the show is, and you go through the parts you think are relevant. I very rarely detour from that formula, because it’s a formula that works, but a lot of it is just figuring out how to get the reader to stay with you, and hopefully by the time you plant that hook in and describe what the show is and in what direction you’re approaching it, you’ve gotten the reader invested.

What’s the best lede you’ve ever written?

That’s an impossible question. I have a bad memory. I will say that if it is a reassurance to anyone, I’ve never had so many of my ledes needing to be rewritten since I got to the New Yorker. It’s the thing I spend the most time on. Sometimes it’s because there’s a dumb part of my trying to be too literary, and they’re like, Let’s get to the point or You haven’t set enough of the table to for someone to want to eat from it. But I think I’m just very partial, especially lately, to starting off a review with a description of a scene that I think is a good encapsulation of what the show is about. Sometimes I get a little too lost in the weeds for the taste of my editors. If anyone is reading this looking for tips on how to get better at writing reviews, having a description of a scene was a thing I was taught by Alan Scherstuhl, one of the best editors I’ve ever had, and I’m routinely shocked by how often people don’t do that. [Alan again!] It feels like a waste to me, because I think the reviewer using a scene in order to close read it and talk about why it’s important gives you so much insight into where you are coming from and how you are reading that scene. When critics have done that, there’s usually some piece of analysis that I’ve missed watching that scene myself.

How do you feel about rules like not using “I” in a review?

I think it’s okay to say “I” in reviews. It’s a really humanizing thing. I’m not a critic who likes to write about herself most of the time, because that’s not what the review is for, but I think it’s totally fine to acknowledge that you’re the individual watching a show in a specific place and time, amid a particular experience or circumstances, and obviously all those things will have an impact on the conclusion you come to in your review. I think acknowledging all those things is totally fine, and, if anything, you come away with a more honest assessment. Of course, this can lead to self-indulgence.

How long does it take you to write a review?

It really depends. If I had to, I can write a review in two hours, a standard 800-word review, but that is no longer my job, thankfully. These days, the first draft takes somewhere between six to eight hours. Also my reviews have been longer. I was never a person who felt like I had to do much reworking from their first draft, because it was the best I could make that version of it. But now I’m at a publication that takes pride in the editorial process, and I love that editorial process, so it is probably the case that after it is written, I with my editor will probably take another two or three days revising that document. That is now a thing that I love doing, going through every single word and making sure it’s the word I want to use and constantly looking at each descriptor to see if it can be improved in some way. A lot of the times, the eleventh-hour changes we had, my editor will be like, No that’s too much. I think that I’ve become more and more of a perfectionist as I’ve gotten older. I really like the perfecting process, and it’s an enormous privilege to be able to spend that time on one review, but I feel like one of the hardest things to get to after a certain amount of time as a working writer—at least in my experience—is learning new things about writing, especially when you’re working a very formula-heavy medium. A B+ review of something I could do very easily with very little effort, because I can rely on the tools and tricks I’ve accrued over the years, but it’s very rare now to feel like I’m still learning something about writing. One of the best things about working at the New Yorker is feeling like I’m still learning. Ah! Corny.

What do you think you’re learning?

I think one of the things I’m learning most from my editors is how to be more elegant and more smoothed out in my prose. I have a tendency to write very densely, and sometimes when I’ve read my work in the past, everything is packed together so tight, it almost feels overworked, and it’s hard to flex that editing muscle, because it’s so dense and hardened. I’m trying to write prose that has a little more room to breathe. Another corny thought, but you know that I have resumed piano lessons in the last three years, and usually I’m not a person who’s out there looking for commonalities between music and writing, but I have noticed that with both my writing and playing that both of the interventions I’ve received are people asking me to insert these spaces where the listener or the reader has a little bit of room to gasp for breath, and that’s something I’m currently working on.

With regard to word choice, it’s a thing I’ve been doing since college, with each adjective or noun—I know this sounds like a recipe for bad writing—but I still look things up in the thesaurus to see if there is a word that is one-percent closer to the thing I’m trying to get to. Sometimes you go overboard and have to pull back on the floridity, and a lot of it is hitting the balance between readability and creative phrasing. And tone is so important. I feel like a thing I have to work on personally, because I am rather sharp-tongued is trying to figure out how to be truthful while still being fair, knowing there is another person on the other side of this who’s spent the last two, three years of their lives creating this thing. But I need to be honest about my viewing experience and try to impart something productive to the reader. Even if I’m praising something, I need to praise it proportionally to how I feel.

What do people not understand about your job?

There are so many things that people don’t understand about criticism. I feel like there are all these conspiracy theories about companies paying off critics. Recently, the line between reviewer and influencer has become grayer, and I think that may be part of it, and there are people willingly playing into the hype machine. But so many people who want to become critics do so, because they have this inordinately high sense of their own opinions—and I’m speaking about myself as well. A friend of mine works for Disney and floated a theory to me about why Marvel films are better reviewed [than DC films], and I was just like, Have you met no critic? We’re all very self-serious people. We have literally chosen to be in a field so we can dole out our unsolicited opinions to the world and spend hours doing that. Your average critic is probably not being paid.

The other thing I hate is this notion that critics are frustrated artists and that critics are just haters, because they’re jealous of the people who make the movies or TV shows. I’m not saying jealousy isn’t a very strong current running through critic circles. But I have never really wanted to go be a screenwriter or go be a director. It’s such a juvenile idea to think that critics are critics, because they just want to go in and hate stuff. Critics watch more than 98-percent of the population. They’re not going in wanting to have a bad time. No one goes into film criticism because they hate movies. Same with TV obviously. I wish critics were called something else. People see the word “critic” and think complainer. I am a complainer, personally. But I’m a fair complainer.