When Variety recently announced that it was firing its in-house film and drama critics, there was much tut-tutting and garment-rending over the impending demise of professional reviewing in magazines, newspapers and TV stations. The villain, the renders cry, lies, as in The Case of the Slowly Dying Newspapers, with the web, which allows any pajama-clad viewer of bootleg videos to write film reviews, and any blogger who cares about theater to write a review of a play. “I think it’s unfortunate that qualified reviewers are being replaced,” said one movie industry pundit, “but that’s what’s happening.”

I say, “Good. It’s about time.” (And also: “QUALIFIED?”) If there has ever been an excessively influential non-professional profession that caused as much damage as reviewing, I’m not sure I want to know about it. The end of full-time film and drama critics as we know them can only prove to be a boon for artists and audiences alike.
My brain has been simmering this idea for a long while, but it popped out of the pan when I read the latest angry, slanted, political rant by Frank Rich on the New York Times op-ed pages. Rich, as most of you probably know, was the scourge of Broadway for many years, killing mercilessly new comedies, dramas and comedies created by talented show-business professionals with his acid assessments that made up about 85% of what he wrote. Rich’s reviews cost producers millions, weakened an already suffering industry, and put thousands of people out of work. How? Because he was “an expert,” and non-theater people believed him.  Why? Because he was the theater reviewer of The Great New York Times, and that was the system: the major reviewers ruled on whether a play was a gem or crap, and their verdicts were sufficient to discourage potential ticket buyers from plunking down their hard-earned money.

Reading Rich in his new role as a tribune of the Angry Left (he is a talented writer; that is not in doubt), I marveled that anyone would follow his lead regarding entertainment. He is undeniably smart, but comes from a very rarefied educational background (Full Disclosure: the same as mine, in many ways). His politics are on the extreme end of the political spectrum, and he has a grim view of life and human nature. As a theater critic, he was also handicapped by the same maladies that cripple all full-time reviewers: he saw far too many plays, and he had to watch the plays as a critic rather than as an audience member, analyzing rather than enjoying. Yet enough readers would let the opinion of this odd and unpleasant man, jaded and overexposed to a product, watching it from a completely different perspective than any normal person, dissuade them from seeing it and making their own judgments.

Reviewers receive and accept trust that is undeserved, and in fact, irrational. Virtually none of them announce their true biases, though these sometimes become too obvious to miss. New Yorker film reviewer Pauline Kael, in her prime the most influential in the country, unconscionably warped her film critiques according to whether a movie followed her political agendas. John Wayne, to name the most obvious example, couldn’t get a fair review out of Kael no matter how good the film, because she considered his movies to be the spawn of a conservative devil.

Do you like all genres equally—drawing-room comedy, slapstick, gothic horror, slasher, fantasy, foreign language, sci-fi, thriller, mystery, domestic drama, sword-and-sandal epic, satire, romantic comedy, Western, political thriller, film noir, historical epic, classic drama, animation, musical, erotic, family film? Of course not, and neither do any critics I’ve ever read. But rare is the film reviewer who has the integrity to write, “I can’t really be fair to this film because I hate bloody films like this,” or a drama critic who writes, “I really liked this musical, but to be honest, I’m impressed with most musicals because I can’t sing a note.” They don’t, because they are paid to pretend to critique all films or plays the same way, pretending to have the same expertise, even if their gaps in taste and knowledge mean that the results are spoiled by bias or ignorance.

Yes, professional reviewers have always been untrustworthy. There is no training or discipline that makes up for their inherent weaknesses, and yet this faux profession has thrived for more a century, making some art and entertainment successful and lasting while negligently condemning just as worthy (or better) works to failure and obscurity. Every now and then, critics reveal their unreliability, as when roundly-panned films like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Vertigo,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “Touch of Evil” become all-time classics. (Several prominent movie critics famously “re-reviewed” “Bonnie and Clyde” when it became embarrassingly obvious that they had completely botched their first assessment), or when they anoint a real stinker, as in the case of Pauline Kael praising the first, nearly unwatchable re-make of “King Kong,” featuring a man in a gorilla suit. Most of the time, however, their verdicts, biased, ill-informed and warped as they so frequently were,have  determined what plays and movies succeeded, what careers advances, and what kind of entertainment had staying power. It is so wrong, so senseless.

Blogs, and the social media, are changing it all for the better. With easy access to real experts,  audience members who can write and who like what you like and have similar perspectives, the damage that can be done by professional critics is headed to the vanishing point, as, thank goodness, are they.

Soon the public will be able to decide what plays and movies deserve to be seen. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.