LISTLESS: An Introduction
oh great another substack
Remember the VH1 show The List? I guess it was only on from 1999 to 2000, but it’s occupied a good deal of my brain space since then, as do most short-lived VH1 and MTV shows from this time period. My inclination is to list a bunch of those other shows here. I’m not going to, but the idea that I’m fighting it is kind of my point.
The List was a bunch of random celebrities sitting in cool chairs discussing some music topic. They’d each produce a mini-list on the subject, then argue and argue, eventually collaborating on a sort-of-agreed-upon longer list, all of which appeared on the screen in slick Y2K graphics. Then the audience would vote and whittle it down again, to an ultimate top three.
My sister and I have been doing some version of this show, making hyper-specific, mostly media-based lists in our heads, in notebooks and on scrap paper, in our phones and computers, for years. We don’t rank the entries, though. We never “do” anything with the lists, either, besides share them with each other. I see it as a mind-clearing exercise, almost like an exorcism, a purging.
I’m sure there’s some psychological component; hell, we both have OCD pretty bad, so that’s gotta be something, right? But everyone does some version of this, I think. Making playlists, using Letterboxd, that sort of thing. It’s a way to organize.
Anyway, we’ve decided to lean into this, to merge our lists, and to share them with anyone who will listen. Maybe it’s a distraction from any sort of real, worthwhile writing, or maybe it’s more like that exorcism I mentioned, something to clear the way so we can like, make actual art. Maybe this will be art. Who knows! Either way, we want to sift through the possibilities and empty our brains of the junk, all while fostering the vague sense of accountability that comes with sharing a Google doc.
Who we are:
Molly Capobianco is a screenwriter and former Buzzfeed listicle-maker (see? she made a career out of it) with a Media Studies degree who has been keeping a backlog of too-niche ideas that didn’t work for the brand; I’m Emily Costa, a writer and English adjunct who is sort of semi-professionally “not existing in the present moment” via fiction and cnf.
What we’ll do:
We’ll pick a topic, brainstorm to come up with our own mini-lists, deep-dive into some dumb shit, then combine everything into a newsletter, which we thought (at first) might look like an ordered list. We were wrong. We’ll probably be wrong a lot.
Possible topics will be things like:
Underrated Teen Heartthrobs (our first newsletter, coming soon)
Music Videos Set in Movie Theaters
Little Brothers in Film
Movies Featuring Video Stores
Scariest Non-Horror Movies
Come list(less) with us :)