thatwasdeep.com

What It Is

That Was Deep! is a personal English-language pop-culture criticism blog with the tagline “Where pop culture and criticism go for a dip.” Based on the crawled content, the site appears to be hosted within the WordPress.com ecosystem. The author describes having a PhD background in comparative literature and writes about topics such as television, sci-fi, comics, video games, and “gay stuff.” It feels more like a personal space for cultural essays than a commercial media outlet or news site.

Core Features

The site is centered on long-form written criticism. Example posts include an analysis of queer love, class, and royal identity in the relationship between Wille and Simon in Netflix’s Young Royals, as well as a reassessment of HBO’s The Comeback and Lisa Kudrow’s performance. The writing blends literary criticism with personal experience, often moving from film and television into broader questions of identity, social traditions, modernity, and emotional memory. The site also includes typical WordPress features such as categories, archives, comments, email/social sharing, and subscriptions.

Pricing

No paywall, membership plan, advertising package, or donation entry point is visible in the main content, so reading appears to be free. The subscription function is closer to WordPress.com’s follow/update feature than to a paid content product.

Pros and Cons

The main strength is its clear authorial perspective and analysis that goes deeper than ordinary film and TV reviews, especially for readers interested in queer narratives, Western TV series, and literary intertextuality. The drawbacks are also clear: updates are very sparse, with the archive showing only a small number of posts across multiple years; the site is highly personal in positioning and lacks stable columns, a robust search/discovery structure, or an editorial rhythm; for Chinese readers, the long English essays and cultural context may raise the barrier to entry.

Who It’s For

Best suited for film and television researchers, readers in cultural studies or literature, audiences interested in LGBTQ+ representation on screen, and people who enjoy personal, in-depth film and TV criticism. It is not suitable for users looking for new-show news, ratings databases, streaming resources, or Chinese-language explanations.

Access from China

Because the site relies on WordPress.com, access stability from mainland China may be affected by the local network environment. Slow loading and limitations around subscription or comment components may occur, so it is best classified as “partially restricted.”