YMMV / AV Club

• Anvilicious: The website was purchased by Spanish-language media conglomerate Univision in the mid-2010s. Since then, the Newswire section would like to make very, very sure you're aware of how important diverse cultural viewpoints (like the kind you can find on Univision) are. See Seasonal Rot below.
• Awesome Music: Quite a few of the "A.V. Underground" covers, many of which are done in a totally different style than the originals.
  • From 2012: Calexico covering Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone", creating a totally different tone. The result adds trumpets and acoustic guitar, and has a slower, desolate, but intense country/southern rock feel.
• Critical Dissonance: Practically invoked by the grade system. Their TV show reviews sometimes contrast with the grades and reviews of fans, which is made obvious by their use of a "community grade" (the average of all the grades readers can give) next to the review author's actual grade. Expect an author who's critical of a show to consistently give it bad grades, and fans supplying much higher grades. Scream Queens (2015) and The Simpsons are probably the more obvious examples.
• Funny Moment: This report on a Pokemon porn parody mentions that its lead character is named Dikachu. This wouldn't be a big deal aside from the terrifying make-up and costume... except that Dikachu is also the name of a prominent AV Club commenter, specifically one who runs a parallel "Savage Dik" sex advice column in the comments for the weekly Savage Love articles. The result is one of the best comment threads of all time, plus a bit of Heartwarming Moments that the site's writers and editors pay enough attention to the comments to know how funny it would be as an article.
• Moment of Awesome: While A. A. Dowd is sometimes ridiculed in the comments for his overly strict film reviews, his article "No, I Didn't Call Your Shitty Film A 'Comedic Masterstroke'" is a wonderfully withering takedown of a DVD distributor who quote-mined his review for Nailed for a DVD blurb.
• Seasonal Rot: Starting in 2013 or so, the site lost a lot of its writing talent- most of the film staff left to form The Dissolve, while Emily St. James (who carried a huge burden on the TV side) left for Vox. She was quickly followed by more of the TV writers. Since then, the site's users have complained about a drop in quality on the site, especially a supposed increase in "clickbait" articles under the Great Job, Internet! banner and lately taking a much more blatantly political and judgmental stance in Newswire articles.
  • It went From Bad to Worse in late August 2017 when the entire site was redesigned to match and integrate with the rest of the Gizmodo Media Group family of websites, including replacing the Disqus comment sections with the much-maligned Kinja system, which ended up utterly decimating the comment section community and making the website a lot more confusing to navigate.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks! : At various points over the last ten years but never more so than when they changed the comments system to Kinja.