Air-Borne

Constructor: RoslinsVP

What a struggle! I had a really hard time with this puzzle, but mostly not in a good way. I think there's a lot of extra difficulty for those unfamiliar with some of the spanner clue references, as I was.

I finished the crossword, read the blurb, looked at the crossword again, looked at the blurb again. There's no theme here, right? There are four words that span the entire grid and intersect in a pleasant way, and each one has something to do with the constructor's favorite TV shows. But by "something to do with" I mean the barest of references, like saying VOICEACTOR is a reference to "Avatar: The Last Airbender". It's clear the grid was seeded with four spanners, but apart from that there's nothing tying it together.

So with that in mind, I think the fill is low quality for a themeless. Some of the answers had me literally scratching my head, "I guess RTE is an abbreviation for route..." For others I just ignored the clue and relied on the crosses, like ORTO stacked on top of WELT: "El ___ lado (the other side, in Seville)" and "World, in German". Zero information gained. And that's just one corner, I haven't even talked about SHU, EBON, or NARY.

As for the spanners, I'm familiar with half of the show references in this grid. Unfortunately for me, the two I'm unfamiliar with are the two intersecting in the upper-left corner with the trickiest clues. Originally I slotted NEWSCASTER for 12A: "Greg Davies' role on Channel 4"; I had a ton of blanks in the upper-half of the grid and I desperately needed something to go on. In retrospect it was a pretty lucky guess, overlapping with ASTER in the upper-right corner and allowing me to finish that side out. I wasn't so lucky on the left side.

The upper-left corner destroyed me. I didn't know HAGIA from "Instanbul's HAGIA Sophia Grand Mosque", so I didn't have any free letters. I also slotted ICANT instead of IWONT for "You're asking too much of me!" and IKR instead of SRS for "i'm not joking, fr fr." I don't regret my choices here, I feel like both ICANT and IKR are totally viable substitutes for the given clues. Just the luck of the draw, I guess. I might've fared better if I had alternated between acrosses and downs, doing a first pass with acrosses definitely led me astray. Eventually I gave up and hinted both 12A and 3D, revealing my mistakes and finishing out the grid.

It's a bummer to have to hint the focal point of a grid like this, but hey, I tried. Watching my partner immediately plonk GOSSIPGIRL on her attempt made me feel alone in my pain.

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