Are online TV fans representative?

That's the question asked of a couple of writers and showrunners in an BlogCritics entry (Oh, just to be on the safe side: If you watch Bones and haven't caught up with the end of last season, the entry does contain a huge spoiler).

Samples:

Alan Poul, executive producer and director of Swingtown and Six Feet Under, sees the benefit to even negative reactions.

"It's hard to get anything made. It's just as hard to make something that's mediocre or bad as it is to make something good," Poul pointed out. "You can't do your job well unless you invest, you attach, you bond to the material. Therefore everything you make is your baby. So when somebody attacks your baby, you go into maternal protection mode."

"My first reaction is: 'those bastards, how dare they?' Then I try to be open minded and look for the person's point of view ... before I trash it," he joked before getting serious.

Bones creator Hart Hanson also looks at negative comments as a sign of fan passion, something his show, sitting somewhere "between a cult hit and a real hit," needs to survive.

He even tells his actors not to look at message boards. "They're really mean about every one of our actors. The ones who have an axe to grind will write and the ones who love them won't. Our Internet presence is fairly negative. But we don't care about that, because they're all watching."