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The Joy of Painting
1983 · TV series · documentary · 30 min episodes · 31 seasons
Created by Bob Ross
The Joy of Painting was an American television show hosted by painter Bob Ross that taught its viewers techniques for landscape oil painting. Although Ross could complete a painting in half an hour, the intent of the show was not to teach viewers "speed painting". Rather, he intended for viewers to learn certain techniques within the time that the show was allotted. The show began on January 11, 1983, and lasted until May 17, 1994, a year before Ross' death.
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3 comments on Hacker News
I was going to call this anecdotal evidence based on it never appearing in the top 100 (or so) Nielson rated TV shows for a year, based on the lists for 1984-1995 here[0].
However, it looks like PBS never signed up for Nielson until 2009, so we have limited/no public data on viewership of The Joy of Painting (or Sesame Street, etc for that matter).
http://www.thetvratingsguide.com/2020/02/tvrg-ratings-history-update-20.html
I know about it, but I haven't looked yet. In the large episode group, there are 658 episodes. The YouTube listing doesn't make it easy to search for a particular episode, though, and YouTube's compression is horrible.
I face the same dilemma on Bob Ross' The Joy Of Painting. I would love to download them, and they are on YouTube, but the compression makes them look really bad. Well, that, and I'm not sure how to download a huge number of vids from YouTube like that. :/
Bob drew 3 copies of every painting you see in The Joy of Painting. The first one is a rough one to get the composition right. The second one is the 'proper' one, and the third one is the one you see him do on TV.
The 'proper' one, the second, was used as a reference during the taping of the show, and was off camera but in Bob's eyeline.
As such, there are NO 'happy little accidents'. Every stroke you saw Bob do was intentional and designed to show you more techniques.
As others have said, it was more about the teaching of a skill, than the actual paintings.
Source: I have watched way too many Bob Ross documentaries.