Today is my last day with AOL, having served AOL TV and TV Squad in various capacities since November 1, 2005, and I've enjoyed every day of it.

What's been the most interesting thing about my time here, when Keith McDuffee hired me to blog for TV Squad right after it and the rest of Weblogs, Inc. (Engadget, TUAW, Joystiq, etc.) were bought by AOL, has been how the coverage of TV has changed in a relatively short period of time.

Think back to 2005. It doesn't seem like that long ago, right? Most media websites had matured to the point where their designs were slick, professional and well-done. Blogs were starting to become the prevalent form of communication on the web. Heck, sites like Television Without Pity had already been around for a half-decade by that point, giving us funny recaps of our favorite shows and letting us sound off on message boards.

But besides TWoP, the old TV Squad and a scattered few others, there wasn't much out there in terms of giving fans really in-depth critical coverage of the shows they love.

Now? It's all over the place, and most of it is of high quality.

What sites like the old TVS, Alan Sepinwall's original What's Alan Watching blog and TWoP did was make it OK for TV fans to geek about about their chosen form of entertainment the same way that film buffs, music fans and fine art appreciators have been able to geek out about their favorite pastime for decades. If you wanted to obsess over the minute details of any show ranging from 'The Shield' to 'ER' to, yes, 'American Idol,' you could do so on these sites. You can debate the merits of each plot, each new character, each turn of events, and pick it apart like movie fans pick apart 'Star Wars' or opera fans pick apart a performance of 'Rigoletto.'

But there was something in it for the person writing the recap, and it wasn't just to get a byline. I remember reading Josh Levin's Slate article about show recapping when it came out in February, and coming away a bit disappointed with it. Not only for egotistical reasons -- he didn't mention TV Squad or AOL at all, even though we had been doing recapping well before most of the sites he lauded had started doing it -- but because he didn't quite capture the spirit in which these recaps were started and why they continue.

The example I'll use is the first show I ever recapped for this site: 'Gilmore Girls.' I didn't start recapping 'Gilmore Girls' because it was assigned to me, or because it sorely needed a critical boost; by that time I had read enough stories about Lauren Graham getting screwed out of Emmy nominations to last me a lifetime. No, I started blogging the show because I enjoyed watching it and wanted to discuss it with people who also enjoyed it. It didn't hurt to also have that "I love the show even though I'm a guy" hook that people were probably curious about.

Yes, as Levin cited in the article, you didn't recap a show week after week unless you liked it, but it was more than just that. We were fans who so enjoyed the show we wanted to talk about it with other fans. The ironic thing, though, is that led to the people who wrote about these shows to become even more highly critical of them, due to raised standards. Some people think I hate 'The Office,' for instance, when nothing could be farther from the truth; I've loved the show from day one and remember it's highest points. So when some of the mediocre episodes from the last few seasons come along, I communicate that disappointment via my recaps.

(Of course, a show can also wear you down to a nub to the point where you disown it at a certain point, as 'Glee' did with me this season.)

Nowadays, when you can find instant assessments of episodes in 140-character form on Twitter, people chime in on a show's Facebook page and every site that writes about TV -- including many newspaper sites -- recap at least some shows, it's very easy for someone to stick with the one or two voices they agree with and stay there. The number of recaps to read becomes overwhelming at a certain point, sort of like the list of reviews for a particular movie you can read off of Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb. So, you go to the voices you trust. But if that voice, for instance, dismissed 'Happy Endings' when it premiered and never came back, you wouldn't have been able to see the show improve by the time its first season was over.

So, where is all this going? Well, the recap isn't going away, of course, and there's going to be a lot of instantaneous assessment amongst fans via social media. But I also can see the good old-fashioned TV reviews -- where a critic like Mo Ryan or James Poniewozik or Matt Roush drops in on a show periodically and makes their assessment -- making a comeback. You can already see it in what Mo's done here for the last year, and even on recap-heavy sites like The AV Club, where their "Other Shows" category is chock full of reviews of shows they don't review on a weekly basis.

Why is all this necessary? Because when you're using your smartphone or tablet and using an app like the one AOL TV just released yesterday, you want all this information to be available when you click the title of your show on the listings grid. How cool would it be to see a listing of recaps, reviews, tweets, Facebook posts, and other bits about your show, right as you go to program it into your DVR? That future is here, and the more content that's there to feed that monster, the better.

You'll see my byline here and there over the summer; I still love TV and love getting paid to write about it. But my five-and-a-half year ride here is about to end. Thanks to everyone, from writers to editors to colleagues to readers, who was along for the ride with me. It's time to get on a new ride, one that's going to go a whole hell of a lot faster than the old one.

(P.S. I put that scene from the 'Goodbye Michael' episode of 'The Office' at the top of this post because the show debuted only a few months before I started here. So I kind of feel the same way Steve Carell felt before he left the show. Only I'll be making a whole lot less money than he will.)

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