A First Look at How Tony Soprano Became Tony Soprano: Watch the New Trailer for The Many Saints of Newark

in Film, Television | June 30th, 2021

When The Sopra­nos drew to a close four­teen years ago, its ambigu­ous yet some­how defin­i­tive final scene hard­ly promised a con­tin­u­a­tion of the New Jer­sey mafia saga. Since then, fans have had to make do with reflec­tions, his­to­ries, and exege­ses, up to and includ­ing re-watch pod­casts host­ed by the actors them­selves. As time has passed the show has only drawn high­er and high­er acclaim, which can’t be said about every prod­uct of the ongo­ing “gold­en age of tele­vi­sion dra­ma” The Sopra­nos got start­ed. A return to the well was per­haps inevitable, and indeed has just been announced: The Many Saints of Newark, a pre­quel film co-writ­ten by David Chase, the cre­ator cred­it­ed with con­tribut­ing to the orig­i­nal series a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of its genius.

Onscreen, The Sopra­nos drew its pow­er from one Sopra­no above all: local mob boss Tony Sopra­no, as por­trayed by James Gan­dolfi­ni in what has been ranked among the great­est screen act­ing achieve­ments of all time. Whether or not Tony sur­vived that final scene, Gan­dolfi­ni died in 2013, and ever since it has been impos­si­ble to imag­ine any oth­er actor por­tray­ing the char­ac­ter — or at least por­tray­ing the char­ac­ter in a mod­ern-day set­ting.

Telling the sto­ry of a Tony Sopra­no in his youth, with a young actor nec­es­sar­i­ly play­ing him, has remained a viable propo­si­tion. Into that role, for the 1960s and 70s-set The Many Saints of Newark, has stepped Gan­dolfini’s real-life son Michael.

For the then-20-year-old Michael Gan­dolfi­ni, tak­ing over his father’s role had to be a daunt­ing prospect, espe­cial­ly since he’d nev­er seen The Sopra­nos before. At least one binge-watch of the series (among oth­er rig­or­ous forms of prepa­ra­tion) lat­er, he deliv­ered the per­for­mance of which you can take a first look in The Many Saints of Newark’s new trail­er above. “As rival gangs try to wrest con­trol from the DiMeo crime fam­i­ly in the race-torn city of Newark,” Con­se­quence Film’s Ben Kaye writes of its sto­ry, the young Antho­ny Sopra­no, a promis­ing but indif­fer­ent stu­dent with an eye on col­lege, “gets swept up in the vio­lence and crime by his uncle Dick­ie Molti­san­ti.” As Sopra­nos fans know full well, “Antho­ny becomes the feared mob head Tony Sopra­no and treats Dickie’s son, Christo­pher, as his pro­tégé.” Evi­dent­ly, an anti­hero of Tony’s stature is made, not born.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopra­nos

Rewatch Every Episode of The Sopra­nos with the Talk­ing Sopra­nos Pod­cast, Host­ed by Michael Impe­ri­oli & Steve Schirri­pa

David Chase Reveals the Philo­soph­i­cal Mean­ing of The Sopra­nos’ Final Scene

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Sopra­no Is “the Great­est Act­ing Achieve­ment Ever Com­mit­ted to the Screen”: A Video Essay

The Nine Minute Sopra­nos

James Gan­dolfi­ni Shows Kinder, Soft­er, Gen­tler Side on Sesame Street (2002)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Anyway (1998)

in Art, Music, Television | June 22nd, 2021

Art is use­less, Oscar Wilde declared. Yet faced with, say, a paint­ing by Kandin­sky, film by Mal­ick, or great work by David Bowie, we may feel it “impos­si­ble to escape the impres­sion,” as Sig­mund Freud wrote, “that peo­ple com­mon­ly use false stan­dards of mea­sure­ment — that they seek pow­er, suc­cess and wealth for them­selves and admire them in oth­ers, and that they under­es­ti­mate what is of true val­ue in life.” How­ev­er ambigu­ous­ly, art can move us beyond the self­ish bound­aries of the ego to con­nect with intan­gi­bles beyond ideas of use and use­less­ness.

That expe­ri­ence of con­nect­ed­ness, what Freud called the “ocean­ic,” stim­u­lat­ed by a work of art can mir­ror the sub­lime feel­ings awak­ened by nature. “A work of art is use­less as a flower is use­less,” Wilde clar­i­fied in a let­ter to a per­plexed read­er. “A flower blooms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by look­ing at it. That is all that is to be said about our rela­tions to flow­ers.” It’s an imper­fect anal­o­gy. The flower serves quite anoth­er pur­pose for the bee, and for the plant.  “All of this is I fear very obscure,” Wilde admits.

The point being, from the point of view of bare sur­vival, art makes no sense. “It’s a loony kind of thing to want to do,” says Bowie him­self, in the inter­view clip above from a 1998 appear­ance on The Char­lie Rose Show. “I think the san­er and ratio­nal approach to life is to sur­vive stead­fast­ly and cre­ate a pro­tec­tive home and cre­ate a warm lov­ing envi­ron­ment for one’s fam­i­ly and get food for them. That’s about it. Any­thing else is extra. All cul­ture is extra…. It’s unnec­es­sary and it’s a sign of the irra­tional part of man. We should just be con­tent with pick­ing nuts.”

Why are we not con­tent with pick­ing nuts? Per­haps most of us are. Per­haps “being an artist,” Bowie won­ders “is a sign of a cer­tain kind of dys­func­tion, of social dys­func­tion­al­ism any­way. It’s an extra­or­di­nary thing to do, to express your­self in such… in such rar­i­fied terms.” It’s a Wildean obser­va­tion, but one Bowie does not make to stig­ma­tize indi­vid­u­als. As Rose remarks, he has “always resist­ed the idea that this cre­ativ­i­ty that you have comes from any form of dys­func­tion or… mad­ness.” Per­haps instead it is the mar­ket that is dys­func­tion­al, Bowie sug­gests in a 1996 inter­view, just above, with Rose and Julian Schn­abel.

Art may serve no prac­ti­cal pur­pose in an ordi­nary sense, but it is not only the prove­nance of sin­gu­lar genius­es. “Once it falls into the hands of the pro­le­tari­at,” says Bowie, “that the abil­i­ty to make art is inher­ent in all of us, that demol­ish­es the idea of art and com­merce, and that’s no good for busi­ness.” Wilde also saw art and com­merce in fun­da­men­tal ten­sion. “Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it use­ful to him,” he wrote. “But this has noth­ing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is acci­den­tal. It is a mis­use,” an arti­fi­cial ele­va­tion and enclo­sure, says Bowie, of expres­sions that belong to every­one.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Bowie’s Book­shelf: A New Essay Col­lec­tion on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

When David Bowie Launched His Own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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British Actor Bob Hoskins Helped Thousands Learn to Read in On the Move, a 1970s “Sesame Street for Adults”

in Education, Television | June 22nd, 2021

British char­ac­ter actor Bob Hoskins has been remem­bered for “play­ing Amer­i­cans bet­ter than Amer­i­cans,” as USA Today wrote when Hoskins passed away in 2014. Char­ac­ters like Who Framed Roger Rab­bit?’s Eddie Valiant, Nixon’s J. Edgar Hoover, and The Cot­ton Club’s Owney Mad­den stand out as some of his best per­for­mances in Hol­ly­wood. But he began his career in British film and tele­vi­sion, play­ing cops and gang­sters. Helen Mir­ren, who starred oppo­site him in his first major role, The Long Good Fri­day, and onstage in The Duchess of Mal­fi, penned a glow­ing trib­ute for The Guardian. “Lon­don,” she wrote, “will miss one of her best and most lov­ing sons, and Britain will miss a man to be proud of.”

Mirren’s sen­ti­ments were echoed by British actors every­where. Shane Mead­ows called him “the most gen­er­ous actor I have ever worked with.” Stephen Wool­ley described Hoskins as a work­ing-class hero. “With his tal­ent, Bob gate­crashed the world of celebri­ty, and made all of us ordi­nary peo­ple feel a lit­tle bet­ter about our­selves.” It was a role he was seem­ing­ly born to play, despite his range. Hoskins was “a great actor,” writes Wool­ley, “yet unlike many actors he was first and fore­most a cour­te­ous, sweet and car­ing human being. He could make mon­sters human and wring a smile out of any sit­u­a­tion with­out a whisker of embar­rass­ment.”

Those are the very qual­i­ties that endeared view­ers to Hoskins’ first break­out char­ac­ter, Alf Hunt, a fur­ni­ture removal man who strug­gled with read­ing and writ­ing in On the Move, a kind of “Sesame Street for adults” that ran in 1976 on the BBC. The 10-minute shorts ran on Sun­day after­noons “as part of the BBC’s adult edu­ca­tion remit,” Mark Law­son writes at The Guardian. Hoskins’ per­for­mance brought to life for view­ers “a proud man who has des­per­ate­ly dis­guised his learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties.” It met a seri­ous need among the nation’s pop­u­lace.

“The show attract­ed 17 mil­lion view­ers a week, (way beyond the size of its tar­get audi­ence),” notes a MetaFil­ter user. On the Move “helped make Hoskins famous. It was also respon­si­ble for per­suad­ing 70,000 peo­ple to sign up for adult lit­er­a­cy pro­grammes.” Hoskins trea­sured the let­ters he received from view­ers who decid­ed to change their lives after see­ing the show. They may well have done so because he gave his all to the char­ac­ter, as Law­son writes:

Hand­ed a work­ing-class stereo­type (not for the last time in his career), Hoskins gave Alf a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and poignan­cy far beyond the require­ments of a pub­lic infor­ma­tion short. Apart from its intend­ed audi­ence of adults strug­gling with read­ing and writ­ing, On the Move gained a large sec­ondary fol­low­ing among lit­er­ate view­ers because, even then, Hoskins’ expres­sive face and grow­ly voice made you want to watch and lis­ten.

In each episode, Alf revealed his strug­gles to his friend Bert, played by Don­ald Gee. The show also fea­tured inspir­ing inter­views with adults who had tak­en adult lit­er­a­cy class­es and appear­ances by spe­cial guest stars like Patri­cia Hayes and Mar­tin Shaw (who both appear in the episode at the top). While oth­er famous actors may dis­own ear­ly tele­vi­sion work, Hoskins nev­er did. On the Move “shared the qual­i­ties of his best stuff. Where­as most footage in Before They Were Famous type shows is cal­cu­lat­ed to be bathet­ic or embar­rass­ing,” Hoskins’ ear­li­est work does quite the oppo­site, explain­ing why he “went on to become the star he did.”

On the Move may also have earned Hoskins anoth­er title, one he might have cher­ished as much as any act­ing plau­dit. George Auck­land, who lat­er direct­ed the BBC’s adult edu­ca­tion pro­gram, called him “the best edu­ca­tor Britain has pro­duced” because of his wide reach among adults strug­gling with lit­er­a­cy in 1970s Britain. See an episode of On the Move at the top of the post and hear what com­menters call “the catchi­est theme song ever” just above.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Grow­ing Up Sur­round­ed by Books Has a Last­ing Pos­i­tive Effect on the Brain, Says a New Sci­en­tif­ic Study

Take The Near Impos­si­ble Lit­er­a­cy Test Louisiana Used to Sup­press the Black Vote (1964)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Igor Stravinsky Appears on American Network TV & Tells Stories About His Unconventional Musical Life (1957)

in Music, Television | June 21st, 2021

One evening in 1957, view­ers all across Amer­i­ca tuned in to see Stravin­sky. The broad­cast was­n’t a per­for­mance of Stravin­sky’s music, although those would con­tin­ue to draw tele­vi­sion audi­ences well into the fol­low­ing decade. It was a con­ver­sa­tion with the man him­self, Igor Fyo­dor­ovich Stravin­sky, who even when he was still alive had become an insti­tu­tion by virtue of his indus­try and inno­va­tion. “For half a cen­tu­ry, Stravin­sky’s musi­cal explo­rations have dom­i­nat­ed mod­ern music,” says the pro­gram’s nar­ra­tor. “His near­ly 100 works — bal­lets, sym­phonies, reli­gious music, even jazz — have often out­raged audi­ences at first hear­ing.”

The famous­ly “riotous” audi­ence reac­tion to the Paris debut of Stravin­sky’s The Rite of Spring had hap­pened 44 years ear­li­er, back when the Russ­ian-born com­pos­er was ris­ing to inter­na­tion­al fame. But by 1957 he’d been an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen for years, and it’s in his Hol­ly­wood home — and on the eve of his 75th birth­day — that NBC’s crew shot this episode of Wis­dom.

Hav­ing debuted just that year, Wis­dom would con­tin­ue to run until 1965, broad­cast­ing long-form inter­views with fig­ures like Mar­cel Duchamp, Pearl S. Buck, Robert Frost, Som­er­set Maugh­am, and Eleanor Roo­sevelt. Here Stravin­sky speaks with his young pro­tégé, the Amer­i­can con­duc­tor Robert Craft, who asks him to remem­ber var­i­ous chap­ters of his long musi­cal life, which includ­ed encoun­ters with the likes of Niko­lai Rim­sky-Kor­sakov, Dylan Thomas, and Pablo Picas­so.

The sto­ry begins with Stravin­sky’s first impro­vi­sa­tions at the piano dur­ing his child­hood in Rus­sia (and his first lessons, taught by a woman of nine­teen: “for me that was an old maid, but of course I was in love with this old maid”). All through­out, we see flash­es of the inven­tion-above-con­ven­tion sen­si­bil­i­ty that made Stravin­sky more a Homo faber, as he liked to say, than a Homo sapi­ens. “Who invent­ed the scale?” he asks, rhetor­i­cal­ly. “Some­body invent­ed the scale. If some­body invent­ed the scale, I can change some­thing in the scale and invent some­thing else.” And why is it, Craft asks, that every new work of yours arous­es protests in the pub­lic? “Each time I have new prob­lems, and this new prob­lem requires a new approach,” Stravin­sky explains, and but for the pub­lic, “the idea of a new approach, of a new prob­lem, does­n’t come to their mind.” So you’re ahead of the pub­lic – includ­ing, implic­it­ly, the Amer­i­can pub­lic view­ing at home? “Inevitably.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Igor Stravin­sky Remem­bers the “Riotous” Pre­miere of His Rite of Spring in 1913: “They Were Very Shocked. They Were Naive and Stu­pid Peo­ple.”

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

Stravinsky’s “Ille­gal” Arrange­ment of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” (1944)

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Hear Igor Stravinsky’s Sym­phonies & Bal­lets in a Com­plete, 32-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch a Never-Aired TV Profile of James Baldwin (1979)

in Literature, Politics, Television | June 14th, 2021

In 1979, just a cou­ple of months into his stint with 20/20, ABC’s fledg­ling tele­vi­sion news mag­a­zine, pro­duc­er and doc­u­men­tar­i­an Joseph Lovett was “beyond thrilled” to be assigned an inter­view with author James Bald­win, whose work he had dis­cov­ered as a teen.

Know­ing that Bald­win liked to break out the bour­bon in the after­noon, Lovett arranged for his crew to arrive ear­ly in the morn­ing to set up light­ing and have break­fast wait­ing before Bald­win awak­ened:

He hadn’t had a drop to drink and he was bril­liant, utter­ly bril­liant. We couldn’t have been hap­pi­er.

Pio­neer­ing jour­nal­ist Sylvia Chase con­duct­ed the inter­view. The seg­ment also includ­ed stops at Lin­coln Cen­ter for a rehearsal of Baldwin’s play, The Amen Cor­ner, and the Police Ath­let­ic League’s Harlem Cen­ter where Bald­win (and per­haps the cam­era) seems to unnerve a teen reporter, cup­ping his chin at length while answer­ing his ques­tion about a Black writer’s chances:

There nev­er was a chance for a Black writer.  Lis­ten, a writer, Black or white, doesn’t have much of a chance. Right? Nobody wants a writer until he’s dead. But to answer your ques­tion, there’s a greater chance for a Black writer today than there ever has been.

In the Man­hat­tan build­ing Bald­win bought to house a num­ber of his close-knit fam­i­ly, Chase cor­ners his moth­er in the kitchen to ask if she’d had any inkling her son would become such a suc­cess.

“No, I didn’t think that,” Mrs. Bald­win cuts her off. “But I knew he had to write.”

Bald­win speaks frankly about out­ing him­self to the gen­er­al pub­lic with his 1956 nov­el Giovanni’s Room and about what it means to live as a Black man in a nation that has always favored its white cit­i­zens:

The Amer­i­can sense of real­i­ty is dic­tat­ed by what Amer­i­cans are try­ing to avoid. And if you’re try­ing to avoid real­i­ty, how can you face it?

Near­ly 35 years before Black Lives Matter’s for­ma­tion, he tack­les the issue of white fragili­ty by telling Chase, “Look, I don’t mean it to you per­son­al­ly. I don’t even know you. I have noth­ing against you. I don’t know you per­son­al­ly, but I know you his­tor­i­cal­ly. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t swear to the free­dom of all mankind and put me in chains.”

The fin­ished piece is a superb, 60 Min­utes-style pro­file that cov­ers a lot of ground, and yet, 20/20 chose not to air it.

After the show ran Chase’s inter­view with Michael Jack­son, pro­duc­er Lovett inquired as to the delay and was told that no one would be inter­est­ed in a “queer, Black has-been”:

I was stunned, I was absolute­ly stunned, because in my mind James Bald­win was no has-been. He was a clas­sic Amer­i­can writer, trans­lat­ed into every lan­guage in the world, and would live on for­ev­er, and indeed he has. His courage and his elo­quence con­tin­ue to inspire us today.

On June 24, Joseph Lovett will mod­er­ate James Bald­win: Race, Media, and Psy­cho­analy­sis, a free vir­tu­al pan­el dis­cus­sion cen­ter­ing on his 20/20 pro­file of James Bald­win, with psy­cho­an­a­lysts Vic­tor P. Bon­fil­io and Annie Lee Jones, and Baldwin’s niece, author Aisha Kare­fa-Smart. Reg­is­ter here.

H/T to author Sarah Schul­man

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why James Baldwin’s Writ­ing Stays Pow­er­ful: An Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

Watch the Famous James Bald­win-William F. Buck­ley Debate in Full, With Restored Audio (1965)

James Baldwin’s One & Only, Delight­ful­ly-Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book, Lit­tle Man Lit­tle Man: A Sto­ry of Child­hood (1976)

Lis­ten to James Baldwin’s Record Col­lec­tion in a 478-track, 32-Hour Spo­ti­fy Playlist

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #95 Considers Joss Whedon’s The Nevers

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | June 10th, 2021

Mark, Eri­ca, and Bri­an dis­cuss the HBO Max show out Vic­to­ri­an-era super-pow­ered fem­i­nine out­casts, helmed and now aban­doned by the cre­ator of Buffy the Vam­pire Slay­er, Fire­fly, etc. It’s jam packed with steam­punk gad­gets, fisticuffs, social injus­tice, and far too many char­ac­ters and plot threads to keep track of. Giv­en that the sea­son was reduced to a half sea­son in light of the pan­dem­ic, does it still work? Does know­ing the com­plaints about Joss Whe­don affect our con­sump­tion of the show? Is this a faux fem­i­nism where women must under­go tor­ture to gain strength?

Here are a few arti­cles we con­sid­ered:

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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The Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery: A New Site Presents 403 Paintings from The Joy of Painting Series

in Art, Data, Technology, Television | June 7th, 2021

“We don’t make mis­takes. We have hap­py acci­dents,” the late Bob Ross soothed fans paint­ing along at home, while brush­ing an alarm­ing amount of black onto one of his sig­na­ture nature scenes.

His mel­low on-cam­era demeanor and flow­ing, wet-on-wet oil paint­ing style were per­fect­ly cal­i­brat­ed to help tight­ly-wound view­ers relax into a right-brained groove.

The cre­ators of the Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery take a more left brained approach.

Hav­ing col­lect­ed data on Ross’ ever­green series, The Joy of Paint­ing, they ana­lyzed it for fre­quen­cy of col­or use over the show’s 403 episodes, as well as the num­ber of col­ors applied to each can­vas.

For those keep­ing score, after black and white, alizarin crim­son was the col­or Ross favored most, and 1/4 of the paint­ings made on air boast 12 col­ors.

The data could be slight­ly skewed by the con­tri­bu­tions of occa­sion­al guest artists such as Ross’ for­mer instruc­tor, John Thamm, who once coun­seled Ross to “paint bush­es and trees and leave por­trait paint­ing to some­one else.” Thamm availed him­self of a sin­gle col­or — Van Dyke Brown — to demon­strate the wipe out tech­nique. His con­tri­bu­tion is one of the few human like­ness­es that got paint­ed over the show’s 11-year pub­lic tele­vi­sion run.

The Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery has sev­er­al options for view­ing the data.

Mouse over a grid of grey rec­tan­gles to see the 403 art­works pre­sent­ed in chrono­log­i­cal order, along with titles and episode num­bers.

(This has all the mak­ings of a thump­ing good mem­o­ry game, à la Con­cen­tra­tion… flip all the rec­tan­gles, study them, then see if you can nav­i­gate back to all the cab­ins or mead­ows.)

A bar graph, sim­i­lar­ly com­posed of rec­tan­gles, reveals the col­ors that went into each paint­ing.

Anoth­er chart ana­lyzes Ross’ use of col­or over time, as he moved away from Burnt Umber and eased up on Pftha­lo Green.

 

Indi­an Red was accord­ed but a sin­gle use, in sea­son 22’s first episode, “Autumn Images.” (“Let’s sparkle this up. We’re gonna have fall col­ors. Let’s get crazy.”)

For art lovers crav­ing a more tra­di­tion­al gallery expe­ri­ence, site cre­ator Con­nor Roth­schild has installed a vir­tu­al bench fac­ing a frame capa­ble of dis­play­ing all the paint­ings in ran­dom or chrono­log­i­cal order, with dig­i­tal swatch­es rep­re­sent­ing the paints that went into them and YouTube links to the episodes that pro­duced them.

And for those who’d rather gaze at data sci­ence, the code is avail­able on GitHub.

Explore the Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery here. Scroll down to take advan­tage of all the options.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

The Joy of Paint­ing with Bob Ross & Banksy: Watch Banksy Paint a Mur­al on the Jail That Once Housed Oscar Wilde

Expe­ri­ence the Bob Ross Expe­ri­ence: A New Muse­um Open in the TV Painter’s For­mer Stu­dio Home

Bob Ross’ Christ­mas Spe­cial: Cel­e­brate, Relax, Nod Off

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain: The Peri­od­i­cal Cica­da, a free vir­tu­al vari­ety show hon­or­ing the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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When Was the Pinnacle of Saturday Night Live? A YouTuber Watches One Episode from Each Season & Reports Back

in Television | June 4th, 2021

How do we eval­u­ate a show like Sat­ur­day Night Live? And to what, exact­ly, can it be com­pared? Before its “lack­lus­ter” debut on Octo­ber 11,1975, noth­ing quite like it exist­ed on tele­vi­sion, and since that debut, every­thing resem­bling SNL exists because of SNL. The show has launched a few dozen careers, but it has also been a ver­i­ta­ble com­e­dy grave­yard. Co-founders Lorne Michaels and Dick Eber­sol both quit at dif­fer­ent times, both after beg­ging NBC to move to pre-record­ed con­tent because SNL’s pro­duc­tion sched­ule is so gru­el­ing. Whether or not its for­mu­la works dur­ing any giv­en episode, it’s tru­ly unlike any oth­er show on tele­vi­sion.

Giv­en its unique, and in recent decades, social­ly vaunt­ed, place in pop­u­lar cul­ture, we gen­er­al­ly judge Sat­ur­day Night Live by com­par­ing it to itself — or to ear­li­er iter­a­tions of itself, when it was fun­ner, edgi­er, less for­mu­la­ic, pan­der­ing, or what­ev­er the cur­rent crit­i­cism hap­pens to be. Is this a fair stan­dard? Are expec­ta­tions for the show’s polit­i­cal rel­e­vance or com­ic con­sis­ten­cy too high? The lack of any seri­ous com­pe­ti­tion for the time slot means that SNL exists in a league of its own. The stan­dards we apply to it are nec­es­sar­i­ly sub­jec­tive, and sub­ject to change giv­en chang­ing social cli­mate and the show’s increas­ing top­i­cal­i­ty.

“So much of what Sat­ur­day Night Live want­ed to be, or what I want­ed it to be when it began, was cool,” says Eber­sol. Try stay­ing cool for 45 years. So why do we still care? Maybe because every­one born in the last few decades has nos­tal­gic mem­o­ries of a gold­en age of SNL that just hap­pened to coin­cide with their ado­les­cence. But nos­tal­gia, says YouTu­ber Drew Good­en above, “is a drug that caus­es us to mis­con­strue our mem­o­ries.” We want Sat­ur­day Night Live to be “good again,” by which we mean fun­ny in ways it was. But mea­sur­ing its good­ness inde­pen­dent­ly of mem­o­ry proves dif­fi­cult.

Rather than assum­ing, as so many view­ers do, that the show peaked in the past (say the ear­ly 80s) and has steeply declined since then, Good­en hypoth­e­sizes that an accu­rate graph of its qual­i­ty might just as well look like a jagged line full of peaks and val­leys over the decades. Sat­ur­day Night Live, that is to say, has always been con­sis­tent­ly full of great moments and ter­ri­ble ones — with­in the same sea­son and often the same episode. It’s in the very nature of live TV that some ideas work and oth­ers don’t on the day, and the sketch­es and char­ac­ters we remem­ber from our youth may not hold up well ten, twen­ty, thir­ty, even forty years lat­er.

Good­en decid­ed to with­hold judg­ment on the over­all qual­i­ty curve of Sat­ur­day Night Live, his favorite show, before putting in the time and effort to watch at least one episode from every year in its run. See how the show comes out in his esti­ma­tion after the exper­i­ment. He may not change anyone’s mind about the best, and worst, sea­sons, episodes, cast mem­bers, and hosts. But he does demon­strate an admirable will­ing­ness to dig into SNL’s his­to­ry and give years of com­e­dy pos­i­tive­ly anti­quat­ed by 21st cen­tu­ry stan­dards a fair shake.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Sat­ur­day Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in Octo­ber, 1975

Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live: Behind-the Scenes Videos Reveal How the Icon­ic Com­e­dy Show Gets Made

Clas­sic Punk Rock Sketch­es from Sat­ur­day Night Live, Cour­tesy of Fred Armisen

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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