Prolific TV critic, radio host, and Rowan professor David Bianculli’s office is a museum of his 50-year-long career. A vintage radio sits on the corner of a desk cluttered with class assignments and notes for upcoming reviews. Shelves are chock-full of VHS tapes, DVDs, and books. Various degrees and awards litter the walls, as well as a giant poster of “Rancid the Devil Horse,” a one-off character from The Ernie Kovacs Show, taken from his own exhibition at the Apexart Gallery: Bianculli’s Personal Theory of TV Evolution. He teases this character in his television of the 40s and 50s course for weeks, only to be revealed as a character who appears briefly in one sketch, making the horse a minute and largely unimportant one-off gag in a much larger show. This kind of attention to detail and knowledge of even the tiniest pieces of TV is typical of Bianculli, a critic with one of the longest careers since TV criticism’s inception.

The length of his career in television reviews allows him to showcase an appreciation of the past 70 years of television that informs all of his reviews. Though he got his start in print media, Bianculli has multiple ways of delivering his reviews, including being a frequent guest host on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and creating TVWorthWatching.com in the late 2000s, a blog that hosted many critics’ opinions on what TV was (as the name suggests) worth watching. He is also the author of four books, including Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously and, most recently, The Platinum Age of Television, with more on the way. He continues to work as a critic, constantly watching and analyzing the newest shows, while also balancing being a full-time professor at Rowan University. However, managing this much of a workload doesn’t come without a cost.

“It’s not a lot of sleep. Not a lot of real life because television takes so much. But, you know, if I’m going to do the job, I want to do it right, the way I define it,” said Bianculli. 

Bianculli knew from a very young age that TV was his passion, and what he wanted to make his career. Even at age seven, he was already writing his first critique in the form of a diary entry: “Today on TV they took off Funday Funnies. I love that program, and I don’t like it being taken off.” He first learned about the concept of TV criticism from reading the TV reviews in his dad’s newspapers at the breakfast table, and made a habit of keeping up with all the latest TV shows.

He graduated from the University of Florida with a double major in journalism and education, and it was during his time there that he wrote his first review for the Gainesville Sun on the premiere of Saturday Night Live. This review was the start of his career as a critic, and he continued to write for the publication at $5 per review throughout his time in college, which helped him to be taken seriously as a critic. 

“I had just gotten in newsrooms myself as a TV critic, even though I was still going through college. Newsrooms back then were just like they are in All The President’s Men. They’re just these amazing places. So I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I also wanted to teach, but when I got out with my master’s, I already had two years’ worth of clips, and then I got an offer to be one full time. And I thought, okay, education can wait,” said Bianculli.

After the Gainesville Sun, Bianculli worked at a variety of publications, including the Sun Sentinel, Philadelphia Inquirer, and New York Post, before settling at New York Daily News, where he worked as a TV critic from 1993 to 2007. He also landed a spot as a frequent guest host and critic for the radio show Fresh Air, often filling in for regular host Terry Gross. In 2007, he started TVWorthWatching, a blog publishing work by some of the most highly regarded TV critics, which published reviews until 2021. He said his desire to create the site was to weed out the good reviews from the bad, which became even harder in the age of the Internet.

“The internet was getting bigger, and it was like there was an awful lot…of snarky writing. And I didn’t want that. I thought if I just do a website that’s about the best television and try to tell people where it is and to get the best writers I knew and have them all write about it, that that made sense,” said Bianculli.

The format of Bianculli’s reviews has shifted over the years, and he now mostly works in radio, but he still thinks of himself as a print writer at heart.

“I’ll always consider myself a print writer. But I haven’t written for newspapers for, God, 15 years…so it’s different, it’s slightly different muscles. When you write for the radio, you try to write more conversationally,” said Bianculli. 

With so much television to sift through, Bianculli can only review so much, so over the years he’s gotten good at identifying what sticks out.

“When I start watching something, I may be multitasking when I’m just trying to see, am I going to pay attention to this? If it stops me from doing what I’m doing, then I restart and just give full attention. If it doesn’t ever do that, I may still review it because I can do all of that, but it’s not going to be the same level of review or given the same level of respect. But I sort of just trust the process after all these decades,” said Bianculli. 

Bianculli is known for his thorough, balanced reviews that introduce his audience to the show he is reviewing. He gives a fair chance, but he still makes his opinions clear. He lets the audience know what TV he is truly impressed by, and what he recommends most. Take his review of episode three of the final season of Succession, the show’s highest-rated episode. A major character dies in this episode, and the way he describes the aftermath is vivid and imaginative.

“Most of the rest of that ‘Succession’ episode is shot with handheld cameras, capturing multiple characters and reactions simultaneously. It feels almost like a documentary about the first stages of grief. And when the rumors of Logan’s demise turn out to be true, ‘Succession’ stuns us all with a sudden death as unsettling and unforgettable as the shower scene in ‘Psycho,’” Bianculli said on Fresh Air. 

It’s this immense love for great TV that makes it all worth it for Bianculli.

“When it comes to criticizing, I’m not in it to make fun of somebody and to be a troll. I’m in it to hopefully point people towards the good stuff. And if it’s not good, I talk about where I think it fell short. But I love the analysis and the enthusiasm of, with so much television out there now, of being able to say, okay, this is really worthwhile,” said Bianculli. 

His passion for television has allowed him to have a career he loves for more than 50 years, and he’s been able to turn this passion into another career as a tenured professor at Rowan University, teaching students both in and out of the radio, television, and film major the history of television, as well as how TV has evolved in his Evolution of Quality TV class. His way of teaching and his clear love for what he’s talking about make it easy for everyone to participate in the discussion, which results in lively classes. These discussions are some of his favorite parts of teaching. 

“I like it when it becomes a dialogue. I am very interested because I’m a critic and a writer. So, I’m interested in how well students can write and how originally they think. So, I’m not asking them in most of my classes to do research. I’m asking them, what do you think of what I just showed you? And why? And what do you think that means?” said Bianculli.

He wants to continue the practice of TV criticism and hopes to pass his knowledge along to his students. He also offered advice to future critics.

“My best advice is to be curious. So start with whatever you already love…If you see a Coen Brothers movie and you absolutely love it, how dare you not go see 10 or 15 other movies by them? That’s how you get your expertise as a critic. And that’s what you need, because you need to be able to say, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen anything like this before.’ You’re able to say, ‘Oh this is like this, or like this, but it’s better than this’…So you need to have seen a lot,” said Bianculli. 

Although he doesn’t see much ahead of him in his career other than to continue doing what he does best, he has had a lifetime of incredible experiences and opportunities, which he rightly recognizes as something truly special. 

“I’ve met people that I’ve adored both before and after I’ve met them, like Mel Brooks. It’s just so much fun. And so I can say yes, I’ve done this with like Carol Burnett or done this, it’s…I feel very lucky. I almost never talk about it because it sounds like name-dropping, but I realize that by following my bliss I was able to be rewarded with things that I would never have believed,” said Bianculli. 

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