The pictures in the folder are from a series of pictures I made that are mostly playing with in-camera special effects and also an homage to what is probably my favorite television show of all time THE OUTER LIMITS.
In fact, this seems like a good time to give you my official TELEVISION SHOW POWER RANKINGS.
These are the greatest 10 Shows of All-Time in order. (Confession, I didn’t really watch television from the end of KNIGHT RIDER until DEXTER. If a show was on then, I haven’t seen it, but it probably wasn’t all that good anyways.)
10 GREATEST SHOWS OF ALL-TIME
1. THE OUTER LIMITS
2. FARGO
3. MR. SHOW
4. DOWNTON ABBEY
5. THE TWILIGHT ZONE
6. STRANGER THINGS
7. THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL
8. GAME OF THRONES
9. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
10. ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK
This list comes from me, therefore, is beyond contestation. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
Shows like THE DAILY SHOW or the COLBERT report were not considered.
By adding these pictures to The Photography 139 Gallery, I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entries to their original glory:
The Outer Limits
Next Sautrday’s walk down memory lane will involve the last Ames Jaycees event I ever attended.
I haven’t seen many/any of a few of those shows (The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, OITNB). But the others on there are pretty fantastic. I’d have those in my top 10, as well, and would replace the ones I haven’t seen with:
Breaking Bad
Either 30 Rock or Parks & Rec
Freaks & Geeks
Twin Peaks
The State
The only show on your list I have seen is Freaks & Geeks.
I will tell you that if you haven’t seen Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, you need to check out that show posthaste. It would fall perfectly into your wheelhouse and it is one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen.
Every single time I see an ad for Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I think that I need to start it immediately. (And I’ve been rewatching Downton, so I see the ads a fair amount!) It looks entirely like a show I’d love – I’ve also never seen Mad Men, but I have always wondered about that, too. I’ve got Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for sure on my short-short list, because I’ve heard such fantastic things about it.
I think you’d really enjoy Breaking Bad. It’s bleak and dark, and maybe the best writing for the entire course of a show that I’ve ever seen. Maybe the slowest, hardest-to-watch episode (“Fly”) is still just one of its best from a writing standpoint. However – I’m sure you’ve had 234 people tell you that you’d like the show, which (if you’re like me) likely has you saying, “Now I’ll never watch it.”
This will sound like a really stupid thing to say to a cancer survivor, but I don’t want to watch Breaking Bad because of the cancer stuff. That has been my major hangup with it.
Nope, doesn’t sound stupid at all – sounds empathetic to this survivor! And I think that’s maybe part of the allure of the show to me – when I was living through the cancer stuff, I was so wrapped up in my own experience. (Part of that was being 16 and 22, I’m sure.) It’s hit me in later years how it affected the people around me, how and why they reacted in different ways, and how sometimes I thought I was doing things to improve things for others that really weren’t. My judgment was clouded; I was too close to the situation.
The show obviously hits on that as a central theme. I think that’s actually easier for me to experience, since it shows me more of the other side that I have started to think about more and more as I got older. I think it would actually be harder as someone who was one of the ones going through the process of one of your loved ones being so sick. (That grammar was atrocious, but I hope it made sense.)