Alan Sepinwall
Alan Sepinwall (born October 19, 1973) is an American television reviewer and writer. He spent 14 years as a columnist with The Star-Ledger in Newark until leaving the newspaper in 2010 to work for the entertainment news website HitFix. He then wrote for Uproxx, where he worked for two years. Since 2018, he has been the chief TV critic for Rolling Stone.[1]
Alan Sepinwall
October 19, 1973
- Television reviewer
- writer
1994–present
- The Star Ledger (1994–2010)
- HitFix (2010–2016)
- Uproxx (2016–2018)
- Rolling Stone (2018–present)
6 ft 3 in (191 cm)
2
Sepinwall began writing about television with reviews of NYPD Blue while attending the University of Pennsylvania, which led to his job at The Star-Ledger. In 2007, immediately after The Sopranos ended, series creator David Chase granted his sole interview to Sepinwall. In 2009, Sepinwall openly urged NBC to renew[2] the action-comedy series Chuck, and NBC Entertainment co-president Ben Silverman sarcastically credited Sepinwall for the show's revival.
Slate.com said Sepinwall "changed the nature of television criticism" and called him the "acknowledged king of the form" with regard to weekly episode recaps and reviews. Sepinwall and television critic Dan Fienberg hosted a podcast at HitFix called Firewall & Iceberg, in which they discussed and reviewed television until October 2015. During his time at Uproxx, Sepinwall hosted a podcast called TV Avalanche with fellow television critic Brian Grubb.
Early life[edit]
Sepinwall grew up in Pine Brook, New Jersey. His father, Jerry, was a psychopharmacologist,[3] and his mother, Harriet, is a former professor of social studies education at the College of St. Elizabeth in Morristown, New Jersey. Sepinwall attended Congregation Agudath Israel of West Essex in Caldwell, New Jersey.[4] He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he began writing television reviews during his sophomore year in 1993. Sepinwall was later critical of his writings from this period, describing it as full of "misspellings, bad grammar and, even worse, observations that make me cringe".[5]
Personal life[edit]
Sepinwall lives in Scotch Plains, New Jersey,[16] with his wife, daughter[4] and son.