CandyRecapper

Bad Candy is probably the original candy-themed website. I stumbled on it in about 1997, in college, when there were about ten websites in existence and every one of them was shiny and new to me. It was up there with the site that had hundreds of recipes for what you can do with Top Ramen. (Which I printed out and cherished for many years... but that is another story.)

Bad Candy believed in candy experimentation. They would buy and eat things that looked entirely inedible. Tablets that make your milk fizzy and blue. Rock-hard plum chunks bathed in salt. Circus Peanuts. And then they would write hilariously rude and disgusting things about each rudely disgusting product. Sometimes they would dress up like Teletubbies while doing it. Oh, it was wonderful.

And then years passed, during which I forgot that these websites even existed. I hunted up the ramen site again eventually, but I didn't think of the Bad Candy site or discover it too still existed until I saw the horror that was Stripes.

Stripes is what they initially called the holiday-special Hershey's Kiss. I saw them in a grocery store on my way back home on Thanksgiving, and while I tried to explain what I had seen to a disbelieving and horrified friend, inspiration struck: I wanted to create a site that would start to do for candy what Television Without Pity did for television.

TWoP is, of course, the major guiding light behind this site. They recap various TV shows. It's more than a review, and it's more than the short blurbs you can find all over the web that just "recap" the major plot points of a given episode.

What the folks at TWoP do is watch each episode of a given show a couple of times, and then give you the play-by-play - complete with snarky comments about the show, this episode, the actors, often complete with insights into what's really going on behind the scenes and why a real person would never do what that contestant on Top Chef or that character on Gilmore Girls just did. It's like watching the show with your pop-culture-savvy best friend.

Their slogan used to be that they watched TV so you didn't have to, because reading one of their 7-to-27-page recaps was like watching an episode yourself, with that best friend. In fact, I used to get confused about which episodes of House I had seen and which ones I had just read about. I always wanted to write recaps of something, and I was spurred on by a friend who used to show me things that Jacob (a recapper at TWoP) had said and demand that I admit to having written them.

Even if I could pull off one of Jacob's double-digit recaps synthesizing Doctor Who with Gnostic texts, I don't think you'd ever see it here. Eating a piece of candy is necessarily a briefer experience than watching an hourlong drama. But where many sites provide short reviews grading a ton of candies, blog-style, I try to write longer wilder pieces that share more of the experience of eating candy. Sugar high and all.