Welcome to Fandomaniacal.com, a new online community created to appreciate and discuss the very best that television has to offer.  My name is Kasia, your resident host, webmistress and TV junkie.  So, where to start …

I got involved with TV fandom online in 1999, when I started watching the first season of Survivor.  Yes, this was back in the day when reality television was an exciting new genre just busting onto the scene, rather than the black hole where intellect disappears that is has overwhelmingly become today.  A friend of mine directed me to a website (because this was before the big blog boom) called SurvivorSucks.com, which was run by the entity which exists today as the PlanetSocksInteractive.com collective.  It was a bunch of people who loved Survivor and wouldn’t miss an episode, but also loved making fun of the “media whores”, regular people who were selling out their privacy for a shot at the big time.

It wasn’t long before I was posting on the forum all the time, writing song parodies about the contestants.  I even wrote a “parody concept album” with Pink Floyd’s The Wall as the basis for the entire Season 2 run.  I’ve long since fallen out of love with Survivor, but what I retained was how enjoyable it was to share a community with other intelligent, articulate people and engage in legitimate discourse about popular culture and its message.

I have always been a fan of serial television.  I watched the original 90210 when I was in 8th grade (it’s sad that I have to specify that, but not surprising).  I have done Law & Order, originally with my mom, since the beginning.  Mom and I also did Murder One, The X-Files and The Outer Limits.  My brother and I watched Felicity together before I moved out.  I used to discuss Felicity in newsgroups when I was in college.  Remember those?

Things escalated in the fall of 2001, when FOX premiered 24.  I became obsessed with the show, engaging in a viewing experience more intense than anything I had ever experienced before, and at the time was doing website development as a hobby.  I had a friend named Matt in Ottawa who was watching it with me and every week, we would meet online after it aired on the west coast to discuss the show.  We both loved the character Tony Almeida, and had a long-standing inside joke about creating a website called AlmeidaIsGod.com.  By winter 2003, when 24 was in its 3rd season, Matt had convinced me we should turn our inside joke into a reality and AlmeidaIsGod.com was born.

For the next 6 years, AIG was my little haven where I could write about 24 like someone who had recently graduated with a degree in English Lit would tend to write about it.  There was Fan Art.  There was Fan Poetry.  Eventually, I started a message forum for the site, and a few other like-minded individuals came out of the woodwork.  The message forum evolved as well, and while things sometimes got personal, some incredibly intense debates also emerged.  The level of passion that I had, and that the other members had, for the fictional characters of television and their fates often amazed me.  The “Other TV Shows” sub-forum was also quite active, and we approached the subject matter of shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Damages and Dexter with the same fervour.

AIG had its ups and downs!  Tony died, and I went off the deep end.  Then he was resurrected and the site exploded a tiny bit.  We received a little bit of recognition from more well-known bloggers and some cast/crew.  But eventually all good things must come to an end, and 24 was no exception.  The series ended this spring, Tony Almeida having been left out of the show’s final season.  And though I was sad to see it go, it was also time to move on.

Fandomaniacal.com is a project I have been planning for about 6 months, and is the logical extension of my work on AlmeidaIsGod.com.  Just because 24 is over, my love for critical analysis and discourse on popular culture has only grown.  I hope to assemble a community of fandom freaks from around the globe, including my friends from AlmeidaIsGod.com, to share their ideas and interpretations of TV’s new golden age, where some of the most cutting edge material is going serial.

It’s not that there aren’t already hundreds of amazing sites out there with insightful, relevant commentary.  I just wanted to carve out my own little piece of cyberspace to get in on the action.  And I want you to join me!  If it’s on TV and you love it, please consider submitting an article and becoming a contributor!