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Tv GuideWhen it comes to television—good or bad—Cherry Hill’s
David Bianculli never misses an episode. by Nicole Pensiero
ASK DAviD BiANculli to guess how many television shows he’s watched in his 40
years as a renowned TV critic and you’ll get a wry answer in response.
“Way too many,” he says with a laugh. “Some unforgettable ones—and some I
wish I could forget.”
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Still, Bianculli, a longtime resident of Cherry
Hill, doesn’t regret having to sit through any of
them. After all, watching TV shows—the good,
the bad and the ugly—is what he signed up for all
those years ago when, as a college student, he
convinced an editor at the newspaper he was in-
terning at to let him review a new TV show geared
toward college kids: Saturday Night Live.
While Bianculli only made $5 for that quarter-
page article back in 1975, he was “absolutely
thrilled” to earn anything for his writing, and even
more excited to see his name in print.
“That was a big deal; to actually get paid and
have some clips to show for myself,” he recalls.
“That’s when I realized I could maybe get some-
where with this.”
“This” being his lifelong dream of becoming a
professional TV critic.
Fast forward to late 2014, when Bianculli’s
decades-long love affair with television became
the subject of a six-week-long exhibition at a
Apexart, a Tribeca art gallery in New York City. The
show—Bianculli’s Personal Theory of TV Evolu-
tion—recountedhispersonalconnectionwithtele-
visionasamedium,spanningbacktohischildhood
diary entries (“Today on TV, they took off FUNDAY
FUNNIES. I love that program, and I don’t like it
being taken off,” reads what is possibly Bianculli’s
first piece of actual TV criticism, written when he
was nearly 7 years old.).
The gallery exhibition also featured many
original TV treasures, like a trademark Fred Rogers
cardigan sweater, and Twilight Zone creator Rod
Serling’s Royal 440 typewriter. Some of the items
displayed were Bianculli’s own—including his fa-
ther’soriginal1946RaytheonTV—butotherswere
loaned to him by everyone from Breaking
Bad creator Vince Gilligan to famed docu-
mentarian Ken Burns, a longtime friend.
“Itwasanincredibleexperience,”Bian-
culli says. “It grew into something bigger
than[thegallery]orIcouldhaveimagined.”
And beyond the physical growth of the ex-
hibit—as more and more items were col-
lected for display—Bianculli says it trans-
formed from something “just for fun” to
something “much more contemplative
than I could have imagined.”
“I could see all sort of things from
my life, as it relates to my love of television,
connecting in ways I’d never really
thought about before,” he said. “It was
really something to experience my history
in that context.”
Bianculli’s mad-juggle of a career—
which includes running his web-based
magazine, TVWorthWatching.com, (fea-
turing no less than 35 of his “Best Bets” cri-
tiques weekly) to ongoing appearances on
NationalPublicRadio’sFreshAir;alongtime
stint as a Rowan TV and film history asso-
ciate professor, and his work as a book au-
thor—couldputayoungerpersontoshame.
But,at61,Bianculli’scareerhasneverbeen
busier,ormorerewarding.Andtherehasn’t
been a more exciting time in the history of
television itself either, he says.
“It’s better than it’s ever been. There
are all these networks, and streaming ser-
vices, all trying things to help them break
outandbenoticed.Thatmeansthatthey’re
looking for off-beat, unusual and quality
shows,” Bianculli says. The American TV
viewing public, he says, has benefitted
most from this shift in direction.
From Breaking Bad—which Bianculli
calls “the best show ever,” to Downton
Abbey, Modern Family, Justified, and The
Good Wife—there’s plenty of fantastic stuff
on TV to choose from, he says.
“I sometimes say that you earn your
money as a TV critic by having to watch
the bad shows all the way through,” he
says. “But there’s a lot of great stuff out
there, too.” And by focusing on what Bian-
culli calls “the top 10 percent,” of shows
on TV today, he is able to use his writing
and broadcasting skills to “turn people on
to TV shows they might not discover on
their own.”
“Ifindthatveryrewarding—it’sprobably
the best part of the job,” he continues.
After four decades of critiquing televi-
sion shows, Bianculli says that “most of
the time, I have a pretty good track record”
of pinpointing the winners and clunkers.
There have been times, though, that he’s
been off-the-mark, like when the success
of 1970s hit The Dukes of Hazzard left him
“absolutely astounded.”
“I thought so little of it, that I gave it a
two-wordreview:“KineticRednecks,’”Bian-
culli recalls. But, people’s taste in TV has
evolvedoverthepasttwodecades—keeping
up with the increasingly sophisticated pro-
gramming—that he’s still surprised when a
show he predicts for greatness does well.
“It’s really weird, but for the first 20
years, if I really loved a show, it often was
endangered. … They would be the ones
that took a while to catch on, if at all,” he re-
calls. “Now, it’s almost the opposite, and
I’m sort of still caught off-guard when I like a
show immediately and it ends up that a lot
of other people do, too.”
Bianculli’s fascination with television
goes back to his childhood in Florida, where
hegrewupalongsidetheexcitingnewmedi-
um.Theyoungeroftwochildren,hisearliest
TVmemoriesincludeFredRogersperforming
withhispuppets—thiswaspre-Mr.Rogers—
and watching the annual airing of The
Wizard of Oz. By age 6, Bianculli was
keeping a diary that focused primarily on
TV shows he enjoyed. By high school, Bian-
culli and his then-widowed father bonded
in the evenings over the family’s small black
and white TV set.
“It’s going to sound geeky, but it’s a
favorite memory. After dinner, and before
prime time, my dad and I would play
chess and whoever won, got to pick the
shows we’d watch that night,” Bianculli
remembers.
Attendingwhatwasthenanexperimental
high school that had its own TV studio,
Bianculli got his first taste of TV production
in the early 1970s. He was also an avid
writer,contributingtotheschoolnewspaper,
and interested in theater.
“By the time I got out of high school, I
was so excited by journalism, by television
and by the arts,” he recalls. He was a student
at the University of Florida when he decided
to set his sights on a career as a TV critic.
“Since there was no major in that, I took
courses that I thought could help me, like
statistics, so I could understand ratings; and
law, so I could understand FCC regulations,”
he says. “I had the desire to do it, but I didn’t
really know if it would be possible.”
Things started to come together when,
as a senior, Bianculli landed an internship at
the Gainesville Sun, working under the aus-
pices of a journalism professor to put out
the state news pages.
SouthJersey.com VOLUME 12 ISSUE 1 SOUTH JERSEY MAGAZINE 51
Name:
David Bianculli
Known as:
TV Critic
Favorite Show:
Breaking Bad
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2. “It was the greatest internship you
could possibly have,” he says. It was also
where Bianculli landed that first paying
gig as a TV critic. During the internship,
his college offered to pay for Bianculli’s
graduate degree in journalism in exchange
for him teaching an undergraduate writing
class. It was a busy two years as he con-
tinued writing TV reviews for the Gainesville
paper, while teaching and working on his
graduate degree.
“By the time I got the master’s [degree
in 1977,] I had two years’ worth of clips,
which helped me land my first job as a
full-fledged TV critic at the Fort Lauderdale
News,” he said. After three years at that
daily paper, Bianculli moved on to stints
at the Akron Beacon Journal (1980-83),
the Philadelphia Inquirer (1983-87); the
New York Post (1987-93) and finally to its
rival, the New York Daily News (1993-
2007). During his years as a full-time
newspaper TV critic—where he says he
might still be if the world of print journalism
were more stable—Bianculli wrote two
well-received books, 1992’s Teleliteracy:
Taking Television Seriously, and 1997’s
Dictionary of Teleliteracy: Television’s 500
Biggest Hits, Misses, and Events.
In 2009, he took on the subject of one
of the TV shows that made a huge impres-
sion on him as a teenager, the provocative
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which
was cancelled after two memorable seasons.
The resulting book, Dangerously Funny:
The Uncensored Story of The Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour, examined how
the show—with its mix of comedy, social
satire, political irreverence and generation-
spanning musical performances—impacted
television, and how the Smothers Brothers
themselves fared after it was canned.
He’s now at work on a new book that
explores how television has continually
evolved into a “true art form,” as he calls it.
Called The Platinum Age of Television, it
sumsup“wherewearerightnow…beyond
the Golden Age.”
While plenty has changed from the
days when Bianculli would drive to local
TV stations and watch video cassettes of
new shows, to the days when he had 12
analog TVs running simultaneously in his
basement, what’s remained constant is his
love of the small screen.
“One of the reasons I wanted to be a TV
critic was because I figured that everything I
cared about—politics, musical theater, jour-
nalism, documentaries, sitcoms, dramas—
sooner or later, all of it would show up on
TV. And it has.” n
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David Bianculli
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