Tara Ariano, alias Wing Chun, is the much-unloved dominatrix of Television Without Pity and, formerly, other sites like Hissyfit. We’ve never met. But, as supreme ruler of the worst kind of jumped-up high-school gang (always swift to interpret vague posting guidelines in favour of preferred members), and equally adroit with the cutting remark, Ariano and her husband, David T. Cole (“Glark”), epitomized the Wrong People’s Internets. Hissyfit’s maxim “You’re entitled to our opinion” was rather selective in its interpretation of who was included in “our.” There were always opinions that could get you banned from the site, get your post deleted, or elicit a warning (viz “Watch it, joeclark”).
Things were made even worse by the highly public married couple’s Web-development atrocities, which broke up (admittedly overlong) “recaps” of TV episodes into as many frame- and table-based pages as possible – all the better to maximize (i.e., dishonestly inflate) page views.
“We” took these miscreants to task several times on the old NUblog (first; second) and in the old archives. Their career was based on a dichotomy, if not outright hypocrisy: They enjoyed the relative low cost and livability of Toronto while their entire enterprise centred around U.S. “pop culture.”
Who can forget Ariano’s Hissyfit posting in which she described her frustration that Rogers Cable could not install a cable converter fast enough that would give her access to an L.A. feed of Dawson’s Creek fractionally earlier than the Canadian simulcast? (Well, everyone forgets it now, because, in further evidence that these are quite the Wrong People, archives were simply deleted.) Wing Chun and Glark are a special kind of American sellout, Canadians by accident of birth only.
An epoch of Television Without Pity ended when the two sold the whole thing to Bravo. Not the Canadian one, of course, the “real” one, owned by NBC. You would have to assume the purchase price was in the low seven digits. Finally, the master and paymaster become one.
Ariano and Cole stand at the top of the hitlist of a certain kind of Toronto parasite, a constant griper about the city who nonetheless keeps living here. The reasons why are never discussed, but they have to cancel out the reasons for leaving, otherwise the parasites would have left already. (Or, in the case of another entry on that list, there is no acknowledgement they just couldn’t hack it in New York. Or that something like an arrest record or a decades-long history of drug use and possession disqualify one from entry.) But in another welcome case of hypocrisy reduction, it is now confirmed that the sellouts are finally getting the fuck out of here on June 15.
I won’t miss them and they won’t miss me. No matter what else happens, mid-June is going to be a happy time for actually proud and responsible Canadians. And so I invite you to follow the One Less Hater Countdown. Sixteen days to go!