Episode 34: Top 10 Times I've Ranked Things

"Who I am is in these episodes/so don't you tell me that it's just a show."

                                                           -AJR, "Netflix Trip"

   Those who know me well know I'm a huge geek, and naturally that means that a lot of my time is spent watching certain tv shows and movies and playing video games. The list of shows I've seen in full is dauntingly huge, especially when you consider that there are some very long shows on there, such as Smallville, Supernatural, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 

   I've always liked making lists. I'm not completely sure what it is; maybe it's the fact that it relaxes me, gives me something simple to do, or I just like the organized nature of it. With all the entertainment I take in, I'm constantly making lists of shows and the like. Taking a trip through the notepad app on my phone will take you on an adventure through lists of tv shows, president facts, movies, and more. But it's not easy to do.

Ranking things is hard

   Time and again I've tried to make my official list of my top ten shows. I've even made lists for specific genres of shows. Often times, I decide that ten is simply too small a number to encompass all the shows I want to include, and the list climbs to twenty, thirty, sometimes even fifty. 

    It's hard to make the decision to put one thing above another when you love both. It's hard to rank objectively when you love the show(s) so much that there's no way to fully prevent your bias from slipping into the ranking. I've thought about giving up and abandoning the notion that I should have official rankings of the shows I like, but that doesn't feel right to me. It feels like it's a thing I need to do. But I end up doing it so much because I'll finish a list then I feel like I made some mistakes and/or need to start over and rank a new way.

WatchMojo, Sean Chandler, Chills

   These are three YouTube channels I like to watch. WatchMojo is a major content house that pumps out daily top ten+ lists about pretty much anything. 

  Sean Chandler does rankings too but it's all pretty much geek culture stuff. He's a smaller YouTuber but he's pretty cool.

  Chills is a YouTuber who has a very weird and instantly recognizable voice (that I do a spot-on impression of). He does list videos of scary stuff, which mostly consists of footage of spooky sightings (many are probably fake). I don't watch him as much as I used to, but his channel is a good place to go when I'm looking to feel spooked. Don't watch him at night though.

   I like the list format of these channels and I like to see their opinions of how things rank and shake out, and to see if I agree with their rankings, or maybe see if they can even change my mind.

About that lyric at the beginning

   That song is specifically about the US version of The Office, and how the AJR brothers grew up with that show and how they remember major moments of their lives happening around certain seasons of The Office. I love The Office too, but if I wrote a song about a show I grew up watching, it would probably end up having to be about SpongeBob.

  There are several shows that to me are "don't you tell me that it's just a show". I once told my sister that BoJack Horseman changed my life. I was only somewhat kidding. That show hit me in ways no other show really has, and I still remember the chills running through my body and my inability to take my eyes off the screen at the end of The View From Halfway Down.

    Yes, I am just going to talk about BoJack now. On the surface, it looks like just another silly adult cartoon. You see that the main character is a humanoid talking horse and you assume that the show is just about "heehee funny horse-man says bad words". I mean, it is that, but it's also so, so much more. There is quirky comedy featuring animal-people in a world that also contains regular people, but there also dark and meaningful themes that run throughout. It deals with addiction, betrayal, redemption, relationship issues, and many other heavy topics. So yeah, don't tell me that BoJack Horseman is just a show.

Anyway, I got the title for this episode from a Drew Gooden video where he also talks about top ten lists. Go watch that video of his (called "Top 10 Top 10 Lists") and his other videos.

See you next week!