Dear Entertainment Weekly:
I have been a subscriber to your magazine for approximately 15 years, and I am a hair's breadth away from letting my subscription lapse. The reason? In my estimation, simply put, your magazine has suffered an unforgivable degradation of editorial quality over the last several years. While Entertainment Weekly is still the best mainstream mag for consumers of mass entertainment, a destructive combination of snark and bile seems to have infected your pages, leaving me mystified and angry when I put down your magazine. And believe me, the speed at which I put it down increases with each passing week.
The prime offenders:
- Self-congratulatory sections such as Rant of the Week, Ask the Critic and What to Watch
- Non-substantive photo captions that only exist to deliver a (generally weak) gag
- Interviews that turn their subjects into a joke, i.e., Stupid Questions
- Indulgent celebrity columns (Stephen King, I love you, but you need to go away)
Each of these elements is relatively harmless independently, but when evaluated together I cannot help but notice the poisonous effect that they have on your magazine. Yes, the requisite cover stories about musician/starlet/TV show du jour are fine, but it is the more insightful pieces (such as your recent profiles of Ray Harryhausen, Mitch Hedberg and this week's standout article about Bob Dylan) that have always allowed Entertainment Weekly to stand out amongst the crowd of entertainment fluff rags. I find that stories such as these are fewer and far between these days.
I hope you will take this criticism to heart -- understanding that I am not the only longtime reader who feels this way -- and also take a hard look at the direction in which your magazine is currently headed. I still believe that Entertainment Weekly is for people who are serious about entertainment. I only wish your editorial braintrust felt the same way.
Most Sincerely,
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