So Long, Farewell

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

After five years, the time has come to say goodbye. Let’s bitch it out one last time…

Well, friends, it’s been a slice. After a lot of hand-wringing and difficult conversations, I’ve decided that the time has come to stop updating bitchstolemyremote. 

When TVAngie and I began this blog five plus years ago, we were fresh-eyed (possibly naive) graduate students interested in “bringing back the proverbial water cooler”. We aspired to create a space where people could come together to discuss their (alright our) favourite television shows. We had grown tired of keeping our opinions to ourselves and we wanted to know how others felt about our favourite shows. In truth, I think we really hoped that the blog would serve as a hub where people would come together and have lots of great conversation. While that never really happened, we did pick up some loyal readers along the way, especially around particular series, particularly Canadian TV shows* (People feel seriously underserved by coverage of Canadian shows! To this day, TVAngie’s posts on Being Erica and my reviews of Lost Girl remain the most popular content we’ve ever produced). In the process of maintaining a not-so-popular television review blog, we had the pleasure of writing about some the best (Breaking Bad! Ringer!) and worst (Helix! Ringer!) TV on the tube.

Over time we managed to convince a few crazy individuals to join us on our journey. I’m fairly certain a few people thought I had multiple personalities; the truth is that we eventually accrued a variety of great writers who pitched in to make bitchstolemyremote a great destination for TV reviews. Sometimes they signed up for a single show, sometimes a sporadic feature. Some only wrote for a short time, while others wrote for us for years at a time. None of them were paid, aside from the occasional gift card. The blog has been a labour of free love for its entire run, so hopefully that gives you an idea of how dedicated and awesome these conributors were. Without them bitchstolemyremote would have shuttered its electronic doors a loooong time ago. So a big thank you to TVAngie, yellowwait, couchpotato, thedude, harrisonfanatic, fictura and brenna clarke grey for their contributions.

And finally, a big thank you to you: the readers who stuck with us. Through sporadic coverage, reviews of shows you didn’t care for, and late posts due to technical difficulties (of which there were a lot), I thank you for your dedication, your interest and your contributions. The comments that we did receive were quite often very insightful and informed; the blog was better for them. It’s super cliché and a little bit hokey, but I did try and keep this train going as long as I did because it felt like there were people out there looking forward to the next review (I still remember wanting to give up on Spartacus: War of the Damned until a reader demanded to know where the coverage for the final episodes was and only recently I received a very kind email lamenting the end of our Homeland posts, which I haven’t covered in years).

I don’t plan on going away completely. I plan to keep inundating your Facebook feed if you’re a member of our group (Bstolemyremote) and I keep the Twitter handle (@bstolemyremote) active between rants about Canadian elections and mocking Terminator: Genisys. So if you are a regular reader, but haven’t hooked up with us on social media, I encourage you to continue the relationship there (or SnapChat – we’ll all end up there eventually, right?).

Maybe this isn’t the end and the blog will come back in some other form in the future. For now, however, it’s time to say goodbye. Thanks for reading and being a part of this strange, anonymous family for the last five years. It’s been a pleasure and an honour. Have a safe and happy holidays!

cinephilactic / Joe