DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY AND MALIGNANT NARCISSISM: Criminal Minds Star Paget Brewster Tells TV Journalist to ‘Work at a Shelter’ After Mixed Review, Sparking Outrage From Other Critics.
“Criminal Minds” star Paget Brewster lashed out at ScreenRant staffer Shealyn Scott over X on Saturday afternoon for her story lamenting the changes Paramount+ has brought to the long-running procedural drama.
“Hello critic Shealynn Scott,” Brewster wrote in the since-deleted post. “You’re young. You don’t know that bad pics and bad reviews can lead to 350 people losing their jobs. Sell vintage. Work at a shelter. Do something better than what you do now. Because right now you suck.”
Film and TV critics were quick to hit back in the replies. David Rooney, chief film critic at The Hollywood Reporter, wrote in his response to Brewster, “This is a very bad look. An actor on a long-running show attacking a young reviewer who contextualizes her respectful criticisms with obvious knowledge of the material — says way more about u being thin-skinned than it does about her professionalism. ‘Work at a shelter,’ really?!”
I know this is crazy talk, but isn’t the purpose of the critic to judge the product so that consumers can make a more informed decision about what to watch during their leisure time? Or to put it another way:
At The New Criterion, when we hear the name “Woody Allen,” we think first not of his movies but of an anecdote that Hilton Kramer, our founding editor, liked to tell.
Attending a dinner at the old Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street, Hilton was pleased to find himself seated next to an attractive and agreeable young woman. Woody Allen was also in attendance, but he was on the opposite side of the table facing a large window that looked out upon the street. Of course, the window also looked in upon the diners. Allen announced that he could not abide being seen by anonymous passersby and insisted that he change places with the young lady.
Settling into his new chair, he asked whether Hilton ever felt embarrassed when he met socially artists whom he had criticized in print. “No,” Hilton replied, “Why should I? They are the ones who made the bad art; I just described it.” Allen, Hilton recalled, lapsed into gloomy silence. It was only on his way home that Hilton remembered that he had written a highly critical piece on [1976’s] The Front, a PC movie about the Hollywood blacklist in which Allen acted.
That anecdote encapsulates something essential about Hilton’s practice as a critic: his focus was always on the work, not on the personality of the artist. It also encapsulates something essential about the querulous and brittle narcissism of the filmmaker.
—“Cancel culture comstockery,” the New Criterion, April 2020.
