alternately titled: I’m over the concept of guilty pleasures. Watch what you want to watch, babe!

Here’s the pizza scale, more or less.

It’s more of a vibes thing than a rubric.

1 it’s bad or unwatchable. i should get a completion award for finishing it in the first place
2 technically watchable. once. (or it broke my heart and I’m not forgiving it…Twenty-Five Twenty-One 👀 )
3 entertaining but i wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it again. might have tropes i don’t like.
4 i liked it! it gave me good feelings. i would watch it again and also recommend it to you.
5 i loved it and i don’t care if you didn’t. it made me feel things! i would love to watch it again.

The story behind the pizza scale.

#1 - Art is so damn personal.

You don’t owe anyone an explanation for why you enjoy something. You don’t need to feel guilty about liking something. And shame on anyone who judges you for what you like.

#2 - Sometimes I like “bad” art.

Which movie have I seen more than once—She’s the Man or Schindler’s List? (hint: the 🍅 meter score is 44%). Sometimes I’m just looking for entertainment, you know. (Also, I’m sorry, but I’ll always be fond of Paul Blart: Mall Cop because it made my family laugh SO hard one movie night).

#3 - The potato chip analogy.

I know this ages me, but Twilight was very popular when I reluctantly read the series. I couldn’t put them down. I’d read better books, but…I understood the appeal. I told a friend it’s like eating a bag of potato chips. There’s not a lot of nutrient density to satisfy your hunger, but they’re tasty. It’s easy to keep reaching in the bag, or keep turning the pages.

#4 - Enter the pizza rating.

There wasn’t a potato chip emoji, so I turned to pizzas. Pizza tastes good! And there’s no shame in that. The pizza rating tells you what critics can’t…how art made me feel.

And the 5-star scale, of course.

She’s a classic and you’ve seen her before. This is an assessment of quality. It’s supposed to be more objective, but few things are. My grandfather used to be a film critic, and he gave Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory a bad review. My mom, the target audience as a kid at the time, thought he was horribly wrong. (It has a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, so history is on her side.)

Shoutout to John Green for my favorite application of the 5-star rating system in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed. As he writes in the book, “The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans, it exists for data aggregation systems.” This might explain why there are 3-star shows I really enjoy and 3-star shows I’ll never watch again.