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Jonathan Pryce as The High Sparrow, Natalie Dormer as Margaery Tyrell and Hannah Waddingham as Septa Unella in HBO's "Game of Thrones."  Macall B. Polay/HBO

Dispatch, Ep 17: Game of Thrones recap readers, unite!

Molly Wood May 26, 2016
Jonathan Pryce as The High Sparrow, Natalie Dormer as Margaery Tyrell and Hannah Waddingham as Septa Unella in HBO's "Game of Thrones."  Macall B. Polay/HBO

I’ve been a fan of the recap industry for years. I used to “follow” all kinds of shows on my then-favorite recap site, Television Without Pity (pour a little out for TWOP with me, won’t you?).

And now, I’m a proud member of recap nation for another cultural juggernaut: “Game of Thrones.”

In fact, true confession time: I don’t actually watch “Game of Thrones” on TV. Instead, I obsessively read multiple recaps and analysis pieces every week from various parts of the web, including SBNation, Mashable, The Verge, Wired and many others. That’s not even counting all the other outlets that recap the show. There are tons of options for me to stay caught up on GoT, and I’m grateful.

See, I invested about five thousand pages of my life in the “Game of Thrones” books, and I really want to know what’s going to happen next, now that the show has out-paced the actual written material. Luckily for me, there’s an entire recap industry out there that spans not just “Game of Thrones,” but all kinds of other culturally relevant television that you want to be caught up on but don’t necessarily have the time to watch.

So on this week’s episode, I indulged my obsession even farther, and interviewed Matt Ufford, who writes the SBNation recaps, about his weekly show scorecard and the power of TV recaps to bring audiences together in unexpected places. Enjoy! (And hey, go check out the Television Without Pity site again. Doesn’t it seem like it might be poised to make a comeback? Now’s the time, guys — now’s the time.)

Have a listen and please subscribe! You can follow Dispatch more closely by creating a Soundcloud playlist right here. Or, you can also add our feed to your podcast player. In Podcasts on iOS, click the plus sign and paste in this link: — it’s a similar process for almost every other podcatcher app.

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