Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords might be your favorite musical comedy act, but are they really the best?^[1] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest might be the best Jack Nicholson film, but if you had to pick one that you’d most like to watch today, would it be the one you choose?

One of my good friends happens to be a former Arts & Entertainment editor at Chimes and semi-regular TV and film critic and commentator. So when we chat, it usually isn’t long before the conversation shifts to favorite TV shows, or movies, or video games, or music.

One of the things we’ve frequently discovered in these discussions is that the things that we like often have little or no connection to the things we find easiest to actually defend as good art, or at least as well constructed in a technical sense. We are hopelessly in love with shows, movies, and songs that we know, we know, are crap—badly written, poorly performed, inconsistent, sappy, overly simplistic. Likewise, there are some things we just don’t enjoy that much, even if we can appreciate the technical or artistic mastery of the craftwork. Bob Dylan is objectively great, I accept that, but I still can’t listen to him for more than 20 minutes straight without going just a little bit crazy. I’m not proud of that, and I wish I could make myself change, but it is what it is.

This evolved into a game we like to play called “Favorite Versus Best.” Pick a category, any category. Select one item in the category as your favorite and another as the one you think is the best in impartial terms, then defend your choices. (You can pick the same thing for both, but it’s less fun that way.)

A general example: “Piano Man” is by no means Billy Joel’s best song. Musically it’s pretty much just the same 16 bars looped over and over for five and a half minutes, with only the octave of Joel’s vocal melody changing. Joel probably wrote a good couple dozen songs (at least) that were “better written,” in the sense that they were more complex, more skillfully crafted, had more to say. But if you went out and asked 100 fans which Billy Joel song they’d be most likely to crank up and sing along with like an idiot on the car radio, is there any doubt “Piano Man” would be the consensus choice?

Here’s one closer to my heart—Favorite Versus Best: Star Trek series. There is no question in my mind that Deep Space Nine is, far and away, the best entry in the series. Best written, best acted, most well developed, most compelling storylines, most consistently good episodes. DS9 recurring guest stars (of which there were many) were, on average, more fleshed out as living, breathing characters with backstories and motivations and complexities than probably half the series regulars on any other Trek. But when it comes to my favorite, well, The Next Generation has to retain at least a share of the lead. How can you pick against Picard and Data? Also, I may or may not have worn my Commander Riker costume to work on Halloween. Two years in a row.

You can play Favorite Versus Best with just about any kind of popular art form, from the well known to the obscure and from the general to the hyper-specific (although it helps if you’re choosing categories narrow enough to evaluate contenders on relatively equal terms, but with enough options to choose from to make it interesting). Beatles albums, Harry Potter books, Nickelodeon cartoons, Legend of Zelda games, New York City museums—all ripe for this kind of light-hearted-but-still-kind-of-serious discussion and debate.

By separating things out to “favorite” and “best” right at the outset, and agreeing to discuss each on their own terms, you can approach something like serious pop culture criticism with a friend without things getting too heated and without disrespecting one another’s tastes. There can be a lot of back and forth about what makes something the best, but favorites (which are less dictated by logic and more so by, well, who knows?) get wide latitude.

Which is good because, while I think evaluating art is a worthwhile endeavor (yes I know all art is subjective, but c’mon, would you really claim all art is equal? That no work of art is better than any other? Of course you wouldn’t), I also think we ought not be ashamed of our tastes—even when the logical portions of our brains tell us that we’ve been led astray. And I think it’s healthy to be able to loosen up a bit and admit to yourself that it’s normal and okay to like something even if it’s many flaws are spectacularly apparent to you as well as everyone else in the universe.

I have bad taste. Not in everything, I think, but in a lot of things. I mean, I genuinely and enthusiastically enjoy James Bond films starring Roger Moore, and with maybe one exception^[2] those are all undeniably, unrelentingly terrible movies.

But that’s kinda the charm. Yes, I have bad taste. But I’m willing to bet you do to. It’s no fun to only appreciate the finer things. Appreciation of the less-than-finer things is where the real fun is at.

Stephen Mulder

Stephen Mulder (’10) is a copywriter, editor, account manager, husband, and member of two semi-professional choirs in West Michigan. He spent the majority of his college days inside the Chimes office, eventually serving as editor, web manager, and delivery-boy-in-chief in 2009–2010. He graduated with a degree in history.