The value of art can't be listed, measured, graded, or ranked... and we need to stop pretending it can be

This might or might not be the greatest movie of all time. That's up to you to decide.

The New York Times recently released its list of the 100 greatest television shows of the 21st century. In case you haven't read it yet, here's a spoiler: it's pointless, meaningless horse manure. Judging by my social media feed the last couple of days, people seem to have forgotten that. There is a widespread delusion that The New York Times is somehow "in charge" of which shows are important or worth watching. 

Reality check: It isn't. You are. You, the person reading this article now, get to decide which are the greatest TV shows of this century. The ones you watch, the ones you like, the ones that mean something to you—those are the greatest. Never ever lose sight of that. The New York Times doesn't know diddly. They can't. It's unknowable. You can only know which shows you think are the greatest; you don't get to decide for anyone else.

There's a British film magazine called Sight and Sound published by the BFI since 1952. Every ten years, they release a list of the greatest films of all time. In the most recent one from 2022, the winner was Chantal Akerman's deliberately slow and methodical art film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Many disagreed with this choice, and they expressed their anger in various articles and videos. Bizarrely, their wrath was largely aimed at Akerman's film, as if the movie had arrogantly elected itself the greatest of all time. Instead, the haters should have been angry with a stupid system that dupes us into thinking that the Sight and Sound poll is somehow meaningful. It's not. It's just the fancy version of an internet listicle. 

The strange, twisted world of Beatles soundalikes!

These lovely ladies are not The Beatles, as you may have guessed.

I wish I had a great story about becoming a Beatles fan, but in truth, I found the group's music in a clunky, roundabout way. That's the case with most of my lifelong interests. In the late 1980s, when I was in junior high school, my older sister briefly became friends with a somewhat artsy girl whom I will call Willow. That friendship ended acrimoniously, but it lasted just long enough for Willow to dub some cassettes of a few Beatles albums for my sister. And she, in turn, dubbed some copies for me. 

That's how I first heard Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Abbey Road (1969), The Beatles (White Album) (1968), and Rubber Soul (1965): through muddy, third-generation cassettes that I listened to on a portable tape player. I can still remember how I'd listen to "Within You, Without You" and imagine myself as an English secret agent deployed to India, chasing some scoundrel through a public market. There was just something about that track, with its exotic instrumentation and dry, reserved vocals, that ignited my imagination. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 291: "I Woke Up Early the Day I Died - An Ed Wood Jr. Inspired Horror Short Story" (2002)

Kailleaugh Andersson took Ed Wood to a strange place: Scotland.

There's a whole universe out there of Ed Wood-inspired fanart: comics, music, film, plays, etc. And I've reviewed a great deal of that material in this series. But not all of this stuff reaches me on its own. Far from it. Occasionally, readers of this column will hip me to some bit of obscure Woodiana that I might not otherwise have heard of. Recently, for example, the redoubtable Bob Blackburn told me about a short story called "I Woke Up Early the Day I Died" by Scottish author Kailleaugh Andersson that is available on Amazon for the Kindle. The story's two-star rating wasn't promising, but the $0.99 price tag was, so I took the leap of faith.

I could not find out much background information on either the story or its author. Kailleaugh Andersson once maintained a personal website, but this has not been updated in years. His Amazon biography describes him as a prolific horror author whose stories have been published (by the hundreds!) since the 1980s, sometimes in anthologies, other times in magazines or webzines. His wife, Alex Severin, has a number of books available on Amazon and still seems to be active. Maybe Kailleaugh is, too. But is his Ed Wood-inspired story worth your time and your 99 cents? Let's find out!

Podcast Tuesday: "Upstairs, Downstairs" or "Encyclopedia Blues"

Debra Jo Rupp, Marion Ross, and Kurtwood Smith on That '70s Show.

Happy Days (1974-1984) was part of a nostalgia cycle that started in the late 1960s and kept going well into the 1980s, leaving numerous TV shows, movies, stage musicals, and albums in its wake. When Happy Days finally breathed its last in the summer of 1984, you'd think the cycle was truly over, too. Nope. Not even close. Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future (1985) showed that there was plenty of juice left in that particular turnip. Stand by Me (1986) and Dirty Dancing (1987) proved it was no fluke. With The Wonder Years (1988-1993), nostalgia returned to television. By then, the bygone era being wistfully evoked was the late 1960s.

And so it continued. One of the big trends of the 1990s was nostalgia for the 1970s, though the nostalgia for that decade was about half-sincere and half-sarcastic. The pinnacle of this phenomenon was Fox's rambunctious comedy That '70s Show (1998-2006). Much more so than The Wonder Years—which was a thoughtful, occasionally weighty series—That '70s Show was the obvious spiritual successor to Happy Days. Like Happy Days, it followed a group of average Midwestern teenagers through various social, romantic, scholastic, and domestic adventures. Both shows were even set in Wisconsin and both shows existed largely to entertain rather than educate or enlighten.

During its initial run, Happy Days acknowledged its sitcom roots by welcoming classic guest stars like Danny Thomas, Elinor Donahue, Harriet Nelson, and Jane Wyatt. That '70s Show did something very similar by casting Marion Ross from Happy Days as Bernice, the demanding mother of patriarch Red Forman (Kurtwood Smith). In the November 1998 episode "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," Bernice has a longstanding grudge against Red's wife Kitty (Debra Jo Rupp), and it's up to Red and Kitty's son Eric (Topher Grace) to keep the peace. Or try to.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we discuss That '70s Show and Marion Ross' participation therein. We review "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and talk about how our feelings toward That '70s Show have evolved over the years. We invite you to join us.

A weird, forgotten chapter of 'Simpsons' history has been rediscovered

The Simpsons consult a family therapist in this forgotten 1989 cartoon.

By the time cartoonist Matt Groening unleased The Simpsons on an unwitting world in 1987—it debuted as a segment on Fox's live-action sketch comedy The Tracey Ullman Show—the era of the theatrical animated short was long over. Movie audiences of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s were accustomed to getting cartoons before features, and studios like Disney, MGM, and Warner Bros. famously produced them by the hundreds. Characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Tom & Jerry thrived in this medium for decades. This was an era we now call the Golden Age of Animation.

But animation was commonplace on television by the 1960s. Ex-MGM animators Joseph Hanna and William Barbera proved that cheap, made-for-TV 'toons could be successful, and other producers followed suit. People who wanted to see cartoons could do so at home whenever they wanted, so movie studios phased out their animated shorts over the course of that turbulent decade. From the 1970s on, theatrical cartoons were parceled out only as occasional treats, usually in conjunction with children's films. That's the way it still is today. If you see a Pixar feature, for example, you expect a short cartoon first. But you won't get one with most live-action movies.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Summit Podcast vs. 'Trip from Lesbos' (1967)

This week, we try to determine if Ed Wood wrote a forgotten 1967 pulp novel.

Ed Wood wrote a hell of a lot of pulp novels in the 1960s and '70s, most of which can be categorized as "erotic" literature. These books were written for an audience of dirty old men and inexperienced boys. But Eddie didn't write absolutely every dirty book on the market. He definitely had some competition in his chosen profession. And since he didn't always sign his own name to these tomes, his modern-day fans sometimes have to do some guesswork to determine whether Eddie did or did not write a particular novel.

This week, on The Ed Wood Summit Podcast, I'm part of a panel of experts—along with Rob Huffman, James Pontolillo, and W. Paul Apel—who have gathered to discuss a fairly obscure little novel known as Trip from Lesbos or Flight from Lesbos published by Pad Library (one of Ed's known employers) in 1967. It tells the story of a young lesbian named Jean and what happens to her when she moves to Hollywood, reconnects with an old friend, and makes some new ones. This book has some hallmarks of Eddie's writing of the period, including an angora sweater, but does that mean it's his work? Let's discuss it.

If you're interested in reading this book yourself, it's available from Triple X Books for a mere $2. How can you go wrong?

My thoughts on 'MST3K: The RiffTrax Experiments (2026): Sting of Death'

Crow T. Robot, Mike Nelson, and Tom Servo are back, baby!

For a show with a relatively simple premise—a human and two robots watch old, "bad" movies and make fun of them—Mystery Science Theater 3000 has a remarkably complicated broadcast history, perhaps the most convoluted since SCTV. Let's see now. (Deep breath.)

It's baaaaaack!

After beginning as a local show in Minneapolis in 1988, MST3K moved to a national cable network first known as The Comedy Channel and then Comedy Central for seven seasons (1989-1996) before being canceled. It then ran three more seasons (1997-1999) on The Sci-Fi Channel, was canceled again, then lay dormant until a two-season Netflix revival (2017-2018) nearly two decades later. When Netflix was no longer interested in continuing, series creator Joel Hodgson tried to produce and distribute the show independently for one additional season (2022) before running out of money. And now, thanks to a very successful crowdfunding campaign, the series has re-re-re-re-relaunched in 2026 as MST3K: The RiffTrax Experiments.

Along the way, like any long-running sketch comedy show, MST3K has seen numerous writers and performers come and go. Hodgson himself left the show during its fifth season on Comedy Central. Some of the show's alumni have appeared in very MST3K-like spinoffs of their own, including Cinematic Titanic and The Mads are Back. The longest-lasting and most prolific of these, by far, has been RiffTrax, featuring the same lineup as the Sci-Fi Channel version of the show: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett. RiffTrax launched in 2006 and has steadily produced new material ever since, including numerous episodes that have been shown in movie theaters via Fathom Events. So these guys have been working together fairly steadily in the decades since the Sci-Fi era of the show ended.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 290: Rene Bond (1950-1996): A Dossier

Rene Bond got a healthy amount of press coverage.

One thing I have accidentally learned in writing this column for over a decade is that America's newspapers have a surprisingly spicy, risque past. Strippers, burlesque houses, and pornographic films were openly advertised in otherwise-ordinary, wholesome daily papers across the country. These were the exact same publications where you'd read Ann Landers or catch up on the latest sports scores. They just treated "adult" advertisers like any other sponsors.

In the 1960s and '70s, fairly bold ads for X-rated movies would habitually run alongside ads for every other kind of movie on the market. It is not impossible, for example, that you could have seen Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat (1972) being promoted next to Disney's Napoleon and Samantha (1972). This is not an exaggeration. This kind of juxtaposition happened nearly every week for years. I constantly come across this stuff in my research. It's why we have newspaper clippings related to Ed Wood's adult films. If they played at an actual movie theater, we probably have ads for them.

This week, I am turning my attention to adult film actress Rene Bond (1950-1996), who starred in Ed Wood's Necromania (1971) and appeared in several more films either written or co-written by Eddie: The Class Reunion (1972), The Cocktail Hostesses (1973), Fugitive Girls (1974), and The Snow Bunnies (1972). She also appeared in the disputed Wood film Bloomer Girl (1972). That's six movies total, more than Tor Johnson, Paul Marco, or Criswell ever did with Ed. Though she occasionally used aliases (including Lilly Lovetree, Lotta Rocks, and Rosemary Camelot), Rene also worked under her own name and was definitely not shy about publicity. So I decided to see what America's newspapers had to say about her.