TWoP's bloat problem

As recently as last season I would routinely read Television Without Pity's weekly recaps and at least some of the discussion forum postings about Veronica Mars. I've mostly stopped. The problem is that everything about the show has become bloated. The VM forums have more posts than those for any other show by a wide margin (Gilmore Girls is a distant second, and no other show even comes close). When 10-plus pages of comments materialize during the first hour the show airs, and the total grows to 627 posts on 42 pages by the following Sunday, it's a daunting prospect to even start reading. Not much can be done about this posting volume, of course.

But the recaps now suffer the same kind of bloat. I've always enjoyed Couch Baron's take on things, but I'm no longer reading the recaps. The one for "Welcome Wagon" runs to 17 pages. It's just too much (site management seems to sense this, recently adding links to each page in addition to the existing "next page" link). You could almost transcribe the episode in 17 pages. The level of detail in these recaps is just excessive. And it takes CB much too long to generate his lengthy recaps. It's now Sunday afternoon and there still is no recap for the episode that aired on Tuesday. It took him six days to post the "Welcome Wagon" recap. I don't know about others, but my interest in reading a recap declines in proportion to how long I have to wait for it. Three days is about right. By the night before the show airs, I'm really not up for reading a 17-page synopsis of the previous week's episode. But I would eat up a 9-10 page recap that appeared on Friday.

I'm a fan of Couch Baron, but also of Strunk and White, who memorably remind us that "vigorous writing is concise."