But don’t worry: Bob Ross didn’t kill a man in Reno in 1966 or run a dog-fighting ring. Can’t we have any good men? Indeed, the documentary has all the true-crime hallmarks: sinister underscoring, cryptic foreshadowing (“I’ve been wanting to get this story out for all these years,” the painter’s son, Steve Ross, says), traumatized-looking talking heads. Jesus Christ, what did Bob Ross do?, you may wonder. In 2015, the entirety of “The Joy of Painting” streamed on Twitch, a year after FiveThirtyEight analyzed each of the series’ episodes and calculated, among other facts that just feel good to know, that fifty-six per cent of Ross’s televised paintings feature a deciduous tree.Īdmirers of Ross’s saintly image may feel alarmed by the title of a new Netflix documentary premièring today: “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed.” The trailer, with its noirish overtones, doesn’t help matters, nor does the fact that the director, Joshua Rofé, made a previous docuseries about Lorena Bobbitt. He died in 1995, of lymphoma, but his afterlife has been busy: immortalized in the lo-fi-eighties limbo of our collective memory, he’s become an Internet meme, a satirical touchstone (“ Family Guy,” “ Deadpool”), and a whispery god of A.S.M.R. Rogers, another low-key pastor in the church of public television, Ross came off as wise, warm, and a little too pure for this world.
“We don’t make mistakes-we have happy accidents,” he’d say, nudging us toward our better selves. Of course, the main draw, whether you were painting along at home or not, was Ross himself: that alfalfa-sprout helmet of hair, that gentle sea breeze of a voice, that Buddha-like calm. Toward the end of many episodes of his PBS series, “The Joy of Painting,” Ross would take a palette knife and slash a tree trunk into the foreground-a potentially ruinous move that he would call a “bravery test”-only to create a newborn birch that snapped the whole postcard panorama to life. You couldn’t watch Leonardo da Vinci paint the “Mona Lisa” on television, but you could watch this peculiar man with an Afro paint a shimmering lake framed by snowcapped mountains and “happy little trees” in less than thirty minutes. At some point in my childhood, I believed that Bob Ross was the greatest painter who had ever lived.
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