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. From 2018 to 2025, he was the chief TV critic for Rolling Stone.

He now has a newsletter on the platform Ghost called What's Alan Watching?. 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 and education Sepinwall grew up in Pine Brook, New Jersey. His father, Jerry, was a psychopharmacologist, 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. 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".

Career In the 1990s, Sepinwall was a particular fan of the ABC police drama NYPD Blue and wrote reviews of the show on Usenet newsgroups. Those reviews helped lead Sepinwall to begin a career in television journalism at The Star-Ledger in Newark; in 2004, Sepinwall said "without Blue, I wouldn't have the career or the life that I currently do".

The Star-Ledger Sepinwall began working as The Star-Ledger s television columnist in 1996. He is a member of the Television Critics Association. Slate.com writer Josh Levin described Sepinwall's week-to-week, post-episode reviews of The Sopranos as "a new form" that combined episode recaps with analyses of the show's subtexts and hidden meanings. Around 2005, in addition to his newspaper columns, Sepinwall began blogging for The Star-Ledger on the website "All TV".

HitFix and Uproxx After 14 years with The Star-Ledger, Sepinwall left the newspaper in 2010 for a job at the entertainment journalism website HitFix, where he would review as many as 15 television shows each week.

In 2010, Slate.com writer Josh Levin 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. He later wrote that, in hindsight, he regretted appearing on the show due to "the extreme blurring of the line [between reviewer and fan] it caused".

During his appearance in a charity fundraiser on The George Lucas Talk Show, Sepinwall agreed to review The Star Wars Holiday Special, which he had never seen. The review, in which Sepinwall detailed what a complete disaster and bad idea the special was, was later published in Rolling Stone.

On September 15, 2025, Sepinwall was among several high-profile staffers laid off by Rolling Stone.

Interviews Sepinwall has interviewed such television figures as The Wire creator David Simon, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz, and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. He also wrote a book about the Fox teen drama series The O.C. called Stop Being a Hater and Learn to Love The O.C., which was published and released in 2004. In 2007, immediately after The Sopranos ended, series creator David Chase gave Sepinwall the sole interview he granted to any journalist at the end of the show. Sepinwall has been a particularly strong advocate for such shows as Lost, The Shield, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. with his wife, daughter and son.

Published works