About

What is The A.V. Club?

The A.V. Club is the website you’re reading right now, which publishes entertainment news and commentary as part of the Paste Media family. Our staff is composed of editors, critics, and writers who are as obsessed with pop culture as our readers are. We offer incisive analysis of films, TV, live theater, books, and the intersection of technology and culture in the form of reviews, features, interviews, and timely news briefs. For more than 30 years, The A.V. Club has been the insider’s outsiders, providing a perspective on the arts and entertainment that is (to borrow a phrase from a fictionalized version of a real-life critic) “honest and unmerciful” and unbeholden to access or industry interests.

Who is behind The A.V. Club?

Every word on The A.V. Club is written and edited by actual humans, and those humans include:

Editor-in-Chief: Danette Chavez

Senior TV Editor: Erik Adams

Film Editor:Jacob Oller

News Editor: Drew Gillis

Film Critic: Monica Castillo

Staff Writers: Saloni Gajjar, William Hughes, Matt Schimkowitz

News contributors: Jarrod Jones, Dennis Perkins

Curation: Lacy Baugher Milas

What does A.V. stand for?

“Audiovisual.” Back in olden times, a school’s audiovisual or a.v. club would be composed of a bunch of geeks who actually knew how to run the filmstrip and film projectors, and were typically deeply involved in things like audio fidelity and newfangled speakers. We’re proud to carry on the tradition of people immersed in pop culture and entertainment media to a somewhat obsessive degree. 

Do you offer subscriptions or memberships?

We do: Click here to find out more about how you can help support our independent journalism and criticism—and all the neat stuff that comes with a monthly or yearly subscription.

Where is The A.V. Club based?

The A.V. Club staff is currently spread across the continental United States.

Can I submit articles or reviews or ideas to The A.V. Club?

The A.V. Club welcomes freelance pitches from writers of all experience levels. Pitches can be emailed to the relevant section editor (please don’t send us article ideas via social media); the ideal pitch will include a proposed headline and one to two paragraphs outlining the article you’re hoping to write, and why you’re the person to write it. If you’re new to The A.V. Club, we invite you to include links to previous articles you’ve published so we can get a sense of your voice, style, and areas of expertise.

Pitches containing complete drafts will not be responded to; our editors prefer to help freelance writers build their articles from the ground up. Also, bear in mind that we’re a small staff fielding a significant volume of inquiries from not only prospective writers, but also publicists and other industry professionals. Unless the subject of a pitch is particularly newsworthy, urgent, or timely, it may take us a minute to get back to you.        

Well, then, can I come work for you?

We very occasionally have job openings we’re looking to fill. In those instances, we will post the job listing as a news item.

Didn’t you used to be part of The Onion?

We did! The A.V. Club began in the backpages of the satirical newspaper in 1993, and started publishing online alongside The Onion in 1996. Since its earliest days as a weekly newspaper in Madison, WI, The Onion ran reviews. In the mid-’90s, The A.V. Club became its own section of the paper, a publication-within-the-publication dedicated to following pop culture down its various side and back roads. avclub.com was launched as its own, distinct URL in 2005, and our articles covering local, national, and international arts and entertainment continued to appear in The Onion until the end of its original print run in 2013. The A.V. Club was acquired by Paste Media in 2024.

So, was any of the stuff you wrote fake, like The Onion‘s “news”?

No. Not even a little. While the two staffs have overlapped in the past, and many A.V. Clubbers have appeared as the fictional subjects of articles from America’s Finest News Source, The A.V. Club features real news, interviews, reviews, and features.

Help! I can’t comment! What should I do?

If your Disqus account is acting up, try checking their Knowledge Base page. If that fails, browse the Disqus Community page for possible solutions from fellow users. The A.V. Club rarely bans user accounts or blocks IP addresses, except in the case of consistent trolling, abuse of staff or other users, or spam.

Why do you delete comments?

The A.V. Club deeply values its commenting community. It’s a major part of what helped the site stake out a larger place in the pop culture conversation during the 2000s and 2010s, and to this day, the comment section plays host to loyal readers who’ve stuck around through many a site redesign and changes in staff, ownership, and hosting platform. The comments are starting points for longer, deeper discussions in which writers and readers both participate. The A.V. Club name began as a bit of self-deprecation, but we’ve come to take the “club” aspect seriously. It’s your site too.

Up to a point. Here’s the deal: We strive to cover pop culture with intelligence and wit—note: “strive”—and assume that that’s what brought you here in the first place. It’s our obligation to make sure the site reflects that goal, and abusive / offensive / obscene posts just don’t contribute to that. These are the posts we delete, and we reserve the right to define those terms however we see fit.

Past deletions have prompted charges of censorship. Let’s define some terms: If we attempted to pass a law preventing you from saying something terrible, that would be censorship. If you showed up in our living room attempting to say the same thing, we’d have the right to throw you out. The First Amendment forbids Congress from passing laws that abridge freedom of speech on a national level (for the time being, anyways); it does not in any way apply to our right to delete posts on this site.

We suspect that some of you reading this will take this post as a challenge. Please don’t. We’re here because we can’t stop writing about our obsessions with television, movies, music, books, internet culture, etc. Let’s keep the focus there. There’s a lot more that unites us than divides us, so do we really want to get bogged down in tedious internecine battles over the right to use racial slurs or talk about the attractiveness of our interview subjects?

Speaking of which—not the attractiveness thing, the other thing—let’s lay out some guidelines for how not to get deleted from the comments section. While we reserve the right to delete any comments, these are the things we’re most likely to target:

…flagrant attacks on other commentators, staffers, or interview/review subjects, particularly aggressive, insulting posts with absolutely no other point to make. Unacceptable: “You’re a dick!” Acceptable: “Only a dick would watch Con Air six times in a row!” Better: “You watched Con Air six times?! You should’ve taken IQ tests before and after to see how it affected you.”

…offensive commentary on interview/review subjects, including but not limited to ad hominem thoughts on how they look, how they might smell, and exactly what you’d like to do to them in the sack. Hate on their work all you want, but attacking them for their appearance is childish, and providing detailed commentary on your sexual reaction to them is, well, icky. If you did that at our party at our house, you wouldn’t be invited back.

…racist, homophobic, transphobic, or sexist remarks. Don’t assume that everyone else gets your sarcasm, irony, over-the-top tone, etc. Maybe if we knew you personally, we’d know that your consciously offensive statement is actually a gag, but you aren’t really like that in person. Online, it’s impossible to tell. Attack comments don’t get a free pass just because you “didn’t really mean it.”

…blatant trolling.

…blatant plugs for your own website that don’t relate to the topic at hand.

…spoilers. We don’t go out of our way to kill these, especially for older works, and we absolutely do not guarantee a spoiler-free site; let the reader beware. But depending on your timing, it may be considered inappropriate to give away the end of a film in the comments on a film review, or the end of a TV episode in the recap about it. We’re more likely to target deliberate, malicious spoilers for current or upcoming material than anything else.

One more thing to keep in mind: We can’t be everywhere at once. We’re all working full-time jobs in addition to monitoring the comments. And we prefer to read them to see how people are reacting to our work—and to the art that prompts us to write in the first place—than to punish commenters who step out of line. So we don’t necessarily have time or attention to delete everything that might fit under our guidelines. And comments aren’t moderated here in the sense that someone has to actively approve them before they appear to the public. So just because an offensive comment made it past us doesn’t mean we actively approved of it, and doesn’t mean we won’t delete similar comments in the future. If you don’t get caught speeding, that doesn’t mean the speed limit has been repealed.

Will you review my show/movie/book/video/poetry/pottery?

Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. Please bear in mind that we’re presented with an enormous amount of material every day, so it’s simply impossible to respond to every item that crosses our desks, much less review it. Items for review consideration can be emailed to the relevant section editor or staff writer, but we absolutely cannot guarantee that anything you send us will be covered.

I’m a big fan of someone you interviewed. Can you put me in touch with them, or pass on my idea for a book/show/film?

Sorry, no. It’s rare for us to receive any personal contact information for our interview subjects. In the instances where we do have this information, we do not give it out, nor can we pass on messages, project pitches, etc.

You didn’t answer my frequently asked question.

Really? Sorry. Visit our contact page to send us a message.  

How do I contact you?

Tips

Great Job, Internet! tips: [email protected] 
Suggestions for AVQ&A questions: [email protected]

Publicists

Books publicists: [email protected]
Games publicists: [email protected]
Music publicists: [email protected]

Other

General reader comments: [email protected]

Didn’t you guys put out a book?

We’ve released three books under The A.V. Club banner. The Tenacity Of The Cockroach: Conversations With Entertainment’s Most Enduring Outsiders (2002) collects dozens of our best early interviews with the longtime survivors of the entertainment industry. Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, And 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists (2009) features some of our most popular Inventory lists, plus a variety of new lists that never appeared online. And Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man’s Journey Deep Into The Heart Of Cinematic Failure (2010) collects some of the most popular columns from Nathan’s My Year Of Flops feature, plus a ton of book-only content.