It's totally okay to be mean to Anne Hathaway

Before you yell — or not yell, I can never really tell how people feel about Ms. Hathaway — I want to stress that this message comes from her own father. Obviously you shouldn't be mean to her, because even if you didn't like her turn in Love and Other Drugs, that's no reason to be bitchy. But if you happened to be a recapper for what would become seminal TV website Television Without Pity and you were rather critical of the young Hathaway's performance on the mostly forgotten Get Real, don't worry too much. Because her father is actually a saint and is kind of oddly in your corner. A super summarized clip from the blog of said recapper, Pamela Ribon:

Well, not everybody loved the recaps. One person in particular wasn’t a fan. I got an email from someone calling himself an “insider” to the show, who started by reminding me that I was just a girl sitting on a futon in Austin, TX, and that I had no idea how hard it was to make an episode of television. That I couldn’t comprehend how difficult the process was, from just getting a show on the air to casting people with chemistry to finding a writing staff to budgeting and marketing to ratings — that I was being unfairly harsh and a little naive. He asked me to give the show another chance and perhaps back off just a bit...

Just after the cancellation was announced, I got an email from my insider, letting me know that he was going to send me copies of the final two unaired episodes, just so I could have a full set of recaps. I found that to be very nice. He asked me not to say how or where I got them when I posted them, and that he was doing it in appreciation of the relationship we’d formed over the time I’d been recapping the show. He also warned me that they weren’t very good.

The episodes arrived, I recapped them, and I sent a final thank you email to my insider. He wrote back, saying not to worry about all the kids on the show... And the young, talented, beautiful Anne Hathaway was off to Vassar, but had several promising offers to mull over while she worked on her studies.

“And off the record,” my insider concluded, “I’m her father.”

I know, I know: tl;dr. (Second time in as many days!) The gist is that Ribon — one of my internet-writer idols, so click on over to her site and give her traffic — developed a relationship with a reader who was also an insider on the show. Said reader didn't exactly like Ribon's ribbing of Hathaway, but eventually got close enough that he sent her the two unaired episodes to recap. And then told her he was Hathaway's dad. Yikes.

So there you go: reasonable criticism (Get Real was not good), even with a healthy dose of snark, won't get you kicked of the Hathaway family Christmas card list.