Welcome to WireDads. I am Alex Steed. I will be joined by my co-host Sarah Marshall momentarily.

Before we start, we wanted to offer this super quick note about today's episode of Why Our Dad's

first you should know that if you haven't watched the saw series or the saga as

we're calling saws one through seven you don't need to have done so in order to follow along with our conversation.

At least our first hour is about themes and then we break down all the plots with our very special

guest, New York Times columnist and tremendous photographer,

Jemel Bowie.

So don't feel like you need to be a super fan of Saw or even have delved yourself in order to follow along at least for the

lion's share of this conversation. Second, as I just said, we are joined by our guest, Jamel Bowie.

It was going to be a surprise, but it, you know, it's hard to organize surprises with guests

when you have to schedule on Zoom.

And I wouldn't, by surprise, I mean, it was going to be a surprise for Sarah, but it's hard to coordinate that sort of thing when we're all in different parts of the country.

Found out that Jamel was watching saw independent of knowing he was going to be on the show.

And I sneakily asked if he would be involved

and he enthusiastically said yes.

However, atypical to our usual format, our introduction alone, which is again where we lay out a lot of our themes is 33 minutes long.

It's just between Sarah and me.

I just want to give you the heads up in case you're here for

Jamel and wondering what the hell we're talking about with regard to him

being a special guest. He will show up. You'll know that we're entering

part two, the Jamel part of this episode when you hear the musical interlude. To many

saw is a series that is synonymous with gore but I just want to assure you that we

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